disclaimer: Everything belongs to the lovely J.K. Rowling.
notes: Written for Sheri, my lovely giver-of-prompts late at night when I was supposed to be studying for a Biology quiz. If I fail, we all know why - I never claimed to be responsible.
On their rivalry, Rose Weasley and Scorpius Malfoy can be sure to agree on one thing and one thing only, that no explanation exists other than the one that says it was written in their genes.
Something terrible must have happened between a Weasley and Malfoy at some point or another, and neither one letting it go, it is likely they passed on their burden of hatred all the way down to a girl and boy standing opposite one another on Platform 9 and ¾, minutes before the last boarding call.
The boy takes in the storm of red hair, the prim school robes, the smear of freckles across her face, and the brick-like book tucked under her arm, while the girl takes in his arrogant posture, his narrowed grey eyes, the pale skin, and the (undoubtedly expensive) dragon-hide shoes.
For a split second, neither speaks.
And then suddenly, in unison, blurted forth like a spell –
"My father told me about you!"
Both scowl.
"I said it first," Rose says, her nose scrunching up in distaste, the way it often does when she senses a challenge.
"As if." Scorpius scoffs. "Or are all Weasleys this scatter-brained?"
"That depends on whether all Malfoys are this foul."
Scorpius narrows his eyes further. "Looks like my father was right about you."
"And looks like mine was right about you."
"I'd say it was a pleasure meeting you, Weasley," he starts, upper lip curled in, "but we both know that'd be a lie."
Shooting her one last glare, he disappears into the train before she gets to have the last word.
There's a word for this feeling. Spontaneous combustion.
And that's when Rose realizes that despite how little she might have liked him before, she actually loathes Scorpius Malfoy, heart and soul.
Her dad almost has a heart attack of joy when she owls him the next day.
After all, it's hereditary.
Once the opening feast is over, the Sorting hat thinks back on two very determined children.
"Gryffindor," one says with her teeth clenched, her hands folded together so tightly in her lap they've gone as white as a ghost's.
"Slytherin," says the other. His fingers grip the edge of the stool though he is otherwise impassive, a piece of unmoveable stone. His mind, however, shouts it just as loudly as the girl's. He thinks of his parents, and she thinks of hers.
In the end, it obliges their wishes.
But it is times like these that make the hat wonder whether it's a mistake to let eleven-year-olds have any say in their sorting at all.
Someone sets fire to his curtains, tears his sheets to shreds, and carves the word coward onto the backboard.
He stands there with his arms hanging limply at his sides, suddenly aware that he can't remember for the life of him how to cast a quenching spell and the curtains just keep burning away, pieces of ratty cloth flapping back and forth, the flames hot on his face, and the word coward is dancing and he just doesn't understand and he remembers newspaper clippings of his father and his grandfather behind bars that his mother snatches away from his hands and –
"Aguamenti."
Scorpius Malfoy whips his head around.
The boy – his face is swallowed up by a pair of luminous green eyes – shrugs apologetically. "My brother, James, he does this kind of thing for kicks all the time at home, so I'm kind of a self-qualified expert on casting water spells."
Scorpius slumps against the singed bedframe, defeated. "You're Albus Potter."
"And you're Scorpius Malfoy."
Scorpius isn't so sure he wants to be Scorpius Malfoy anymore.
"Not Draco Malfoy, though," Albus says, his voice quiet.
"No."
Rose Weasley decides she's sick and tired of hearing her mother's name everywhere she goes.
"Your mother used to spend all her time in here," says Madam Pince. Rose can tell it's meant to be cross, but even then she sounds annoyingly nostalgic. "Vandalized half of these books."
She lowers her spectacles to get a batter look. "Gandiforth the Gallant and the Eighteenth Maiden? Hardly the type of book I'd be expecting the daughter of Hermione Grainger to be reading. In fact, I'm not even sure this…shenanigans," she waves her hand around in the air, "…can be considered a book."
"It's a comic book," Rose says defensively, her cheeks burning. "Actually, I was borrowing it…for Albus."
"Ah. Well then, boys will be boys." Madam Pince scribbles down her approval. "As for yourself, might I suggest An Anthology of Eighteenth Century Charms?"
She slams a dusty tome the size of Rose's head onto the counter.
"Brilliant idea." Rose wipes her sweaty palms on her tights, quick to agree. She decides not to mention that her mother got her the same book – only in a newer edition, of course – for her birthday last summer, and that she still hasn't finished reading it but pretended she had to please her mother. It was fairly easy to fake most of the details with the help of James' eidetic memory, and her stomach flip-flops with a renewed sense of guilt.
Rose spends the evening attempting another go at it, curled up in a chair by the common room's fireplace. James finds her there a couple of hours later with ink smeared across her cheek and her head still buried in the first chapter.
"Ah, Rosie," he says with a smirk, his hair still damp from Quidditch practice, "You're not still going at that ol' thing, are you?"
"Shut up, James."
"By the way, you still owe me three chocolate frogs. For helping you with that stuff last summer, yeah?"
"If you don't quit pestering me right now, all you're going to get is a face full of hexes."
He runs up the stairs. "By the way," he yells over his shoulder, the door slamming shut behind him. "Spoiler alert: there isn't an eighteenth maiden!"
Rose curses under her breath and swears that she's going to poison James' three remaining chocolate frogs. But during classes the next day, when the professors make a special point of stopping by her desk to regale her with stories of her mother's success and a confidence of how Rose will surely top it off, she forgets it with a sense of aching queasiness.
Life would be so much easier if her mum hadn't decided to be such a show-off.
They get paired up as partners during Potions class.
Somehow bugged by seeing him walk into class side by side with Albus – they're practically inseparable nowadays, and Rose can hardly get a hold of him without Scorpius interfering somehow – Rose seethes as she cuts up her roots in silence, tossing them into the hissing cauldron.
Scorpius seems fine with the silent treatment. He walks back to their station with a set of vials and beakers, and he sets them down on the table before tossing in a couple of bat wings.
That catches Rose's attention. Knife still in hand, she turns to face him, her voice low and threatening. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Following the instructions," he snaps, tossing in more bat wings. "In case you haven't noticed, Weasley, the assignment's to be done in pairs."
Rose slams the blade down. It buries itself into the table's edge and she lifts up her cutting board, tilting it against the rim of the cauldron. The diced roots slide into the mixture, but she manages to keep her eyes planted on Scorpius' face all the while. "The bat wings don't go in until after the roots, Malfoy."
"No," Scorpius says. He adds in more bat wings for good measure. "They go in before. It says right here in the textbook."
"I've memorized the instructions so well I could recite them backwards and upside down," Rose hisses. She yanks the knife out of the table and begins cutting up more roots, using it to emphasize her sentence. "They. Go. After."
"Will you two just shut up already?" Albus says. "Haven't either of you been listening? We're supposed to omit the bat wings. Combined with the roots, they're too reactive and without the proper environment they could cause the solution to – Oh, shit."
He eyes their cauldron rather glumly, setting down his own knife. "Scorpius. You've added in the bat wings already, haven't you?"
"So what if I have?"
As if on cue, the cauldron explodes, fragments of iron and gunk flying everywhere. It earns the two of them two weeks of detention due to misconduct, and as a result, the professor learns that Rose Weasley and Scorpius Malfoy ought never to be paired up again.
Spontaneous combustion.
He was born to fly. He can feel it in his bones.
So when Mulciber tells him he didn't make the team, he's stunned momentarily into silence knowing that was the best demonstration he'd ever given, before anger washes over him in a tidal wave.
"You can't bribe your way onto the team," Mulciber sneers. "Times have changed."
Scorpius feels cold on the inside.
"So that's what it is," he says hollowly. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Albus sliding off of his broom onto the ground, the silent observer, his green Quidditch robes a shade deeper than the turf.
Scorpius swallows.
"I'm not my father."
"Yeah?" Mulciber laughs at that. "Maybe you should look into the mirror."
The day before her Astronomy exam, she doesn't sleep.
She stays up to watch the stars, to remember their Latin names, to study the alignments of the planets, their orbital angles, their moons, and when she finally shuts her textbook, supper has come and gone.
Just as well, Rose thinks during another round of Detention. She's lost her appetite anyway. Astronomy always makes her lose her appetite, and she'll be lucky if she passes the course with an Acceptable, though a voice in the back of her head mocks her by saying that Hermione Grainger would never have settled for a mere Acceptable.
She scrubs harder at the trophy case, her fingernails raking its surface.
Scorpius doesn't look up, but he winces reflexively when he hears the scratch. "Got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, Weasley?"
There's no reply.
He shoots her a quick sideways glance and she's just kneeling there, but when he looks again she seems to be swaying slightly, back and forth, and then the cloth drops from her hands and her knee knocks over the bucket of cleaner and it runs it rivulets all over the floor and she's lying in a puddle of it, unconscious as it seeps into her hair and her robes.
"Weasley." He drops his cloth and runs over, shaking her shoulders, feeling instinctively for his wand, which because of detention, happens conveniently not to be there. "Weasley! Merlin, Rose!"
Scorpius tries not to think of the blue liquid dampening his robes or how heavy she is or how it might even look carrying an unconscious girl in his arms, and moving one arm underneath her head and the other underneath the crook of her knees, he lifts with a heave and carries her to the Infirmary, collapsing sourly into a chair once Rose is deposited into a cot.
"No food, no sleep," Madam Pomfrey clucks, her tone disapproving. "Looks like Miss Weasley's been overworking herself."
Albus shows up a couple of minutes later. "It's that damned Astronomy exam," he says rather regretfully. "Rose'll go nuts when she figures out she missed it."
"She's nuts already."
"By the way," says Albus, "slight change in management. I'm Team Captain of the Quidditch team now, and there's a spot open for Chaser with your name on it. You're in, yeah?"
Scorpius keeps his eyes planted on the windowsill, slathered in a pearly sheen of fresh paint.
"I don't want your pity, Potter."
"Don't be daft," Albus says. "This isn't pity, Scorpius. This is justice."
Rose Weasley regains consciousness three hours later.
"What do you think you are, Weasley, a machine?"
Slowly, she peels her eyes open.
Scorpius Malfoy is sitting by her bedside, and he has a copy of Gandiforth the Gallant and the Eighteenth Maiden in hand. "They're personally holding me responsible as your detention partner," he says. "It's not as if I want to be here."
"What about the exam?" She bolts upright suddenly, pushing the covers back, swinging her feet over the side of the cot. Her eyes dart around wildly, and he watches, face stoic, as the realization sinks in slowly, deflating her. Rose's face crumples. "No. I can't have missed it. No."
"You missed one exam," he says. "Why the fuck does it matter?"
She turns on him, her eyes alight and blazing with wet fire. "It matters when you have to prove to the world that you're just as great as your mother. I wouldn't expect you to understand."
Scorpius bursts into laughter.
Because he does. And he understands better than anyone.
"You're not your mother, Rose Weasley." He stands up to leave and tucks the rolled-up comic beneath his arm. "So why are you trying to prove that you are?"
He gets a message from her owl as they're boarding the train.
It says:
Spoiler alert: there is no eighteenth maiden.
Rose
When he looks up, he catches a glimpse of scarlet hair, and there she is, standing opposite him on the platform, ready to board the train. He takes in the chaotic array of her robes, the lack of a book in her arm, and it registers. She takes in his relaxed posture, the slightly amused expression, and it registers.
And Scorpius thinks, maybe hate isn't hereditary after all.
And Rose thinks, maybe it's just the excuse they use because they never had any better explanation.
And they both think, maybe hate has always been the recessive gene with no place in a dominant world.
So maybe it's time for it to go.