(There is a note about the story after this chapter with warnings etc etc)
This story is a transformative work and thus I don't own the characters or Hogwarts etc etc
Regulus sat in his usual seat in the back of the classroom near the window. The seat next to him was empty, as he had glared the guts out of anyone who dared come near him often enough by now that they all had the message. Class was hard enough to get through without some...person...in his face with all of their magic and their emotions and other filthy things all over the place.
He needed the wide window of empty sky and that blissfully empty seat so that he could concentrate on his work. He had just laid out his parchment, his inkwell and his new favourite quill, the one that made just the right kind of sound against the surface of the parchment when she entered the room; a mess of hair and magic everywhere.
Regulus knew he lived a sheltered life; he had to with his temperament. But he had a feeling that this...girl...was rather unique in her chaos; this near feral creature who had mysteriously showed up to be sorted on the first of September that year with absolutely no explanation and shocking even the ever 'above everything and thus constantly amused' Albus Dumbledore (who she didn't even deem worthy of a conversation, he'd heard).
Whoever she was, she was always alway always a mess. Even when she wasn't, her uniform was just…off. Her skirt looked like she'd gone back to the 1930's just to acquire it; her ties were clearly made of high quality silk, but again looked like they were old; they were slightly wider than those everyone else wore, and she had a habit of tucking them into the lower buttons on her shirt instead of simply using a sticking charm like civilised people, and her shirts…well they looked like they had been made for an eleven year old boy, but again there was always something wrong with them, like repairs done with the wrong colour thread or buttons that had been replaced by others that didn't match. There were tortoise shell buttons next to dainty pearl buttons next to wooden buttons...seemingly all colours of the rainbow.
Today she stumbled in with the buttons of her blouse done up wrong, the gaping holes brazenly displaying the forest green lace of her brassiere. Her hippogriff's nest of hair was an even bigger mess than usual; and one sock, the right one, with thick red and gold stripes marking her as a barbaric Gryffindor was stretched out of shape and sat bunched sadly at the top of her boot in a mockery of the other, which was striped with the colours of the Peverell clan, and happily sat snugly where it belonged, pulled up over her knee and hugging her shapely thigh.
She didn't even bother trying to pull the sock up as she bustled over and sat in his chair, ignoring his most poisonous glare as she apologised to the Professor for her late entrance, or rather intrusion.
As it was Binns, she needn't have bothered.
Salazar how he loathed her. He couldn't help the silver edged shiver of fear that trailed up his spine as her thigh brushed his hand that was hidden, clenching the seat of his chair to resist hexing her as she sat with her legs wide open and rifled through her bag, which was sitting on the floor between her feet. It was the leg that had the horrible sock, and she had to hike up her preposterously long skirt so that she could see her bag; thus it was her skin--hairless and satin soft except for a scar on her thigh with the telltale golden sheen of a well healed dragon fire burn--that had touched him. He swallowed nervously, closing his eyes and then opening them, then resolutely staring out the window as he suppressed the impulse to cause a scene by yanking it away and casting a cleansing spell, or even worse, scrambling out over their desks and bolting out of the door like he truly wished to.
It was still there. She was still there.
Salazar! Weren't women's thighs supposed to be sensitive to touch? Why would she want to be sitting there carelessly rubbing it all over some stranger? He swallowed thickly.
Finally she found whatever she was looking for and straightened, her thigh moving away from him again and disappearing back under the pleated wool of her skirts; though his hand still burned with her touch, as did the humiliation at the knowledge of the tightness in his pants due to the responsiveness she never failed to bring out in him.
He should hate her; and yet she made him burn with want. The buttons made his fingers twitch with the urge to fix them, undoing them all before he buttoned them back up one at a time. He wanted to tenderly draw the sock up her leg and linger on her skin; imagined kissing her knee before he drew the fabric over it.
She smelled like amortentia, a curious combination of rose, cinnamon, orange and coconut; her magic felt like an ocean storm. He wanted to lick her skin to see if he could taste the brine of the sea.
She was everything he was supposed to hate, the gap in her overlarge front teeth an imperfection that she never failed to show off when she bared her teeth at her tormentors, and then used them to bite her bottom lip when her eyes fell on to him and she inevitably behaved like an imp just to see him try not to react.
She never treated him the same as the others, though he should be the worst. He was a Black. He was born to hate her; raised to trample her under his boot, and yet...
It was this fact that made him madder than anything else. He had no idea why she would single him out, or why she thought she had the right to act so familiarly; to assume he was somehow safe, or somehow different than those who surrounded him like a guard; those who had decided he was theirs, and politics being what it was, he had no inclination to reveal to them the truth.
She seemed to notice, all of a sudden who she was sitting next to and paused; her thick eyebrows crossing a little as she swept her brown eyes over him for a moment, before she reached into her bag and pulled a small wooden cube from her pocket. The six sides were made up of nine smaller squares each, and each side was a block of colour, one colour per side. She moved a few different parts, making a mess of the thing before she smiled with satisfaction and placed it on his chair next to his hand, and then turned away, looking towards the front and taking notes with her strange quill with its brass nib.
It was only a matter of minutes before his mind had gone from being overwhelmed by having her in all of his senses to being entirely focussed on the wooden cube. What was it? Some sort of strange artifact? An instrument of some description?
Eventually he hissed with frustration and picked it up, keeping it below his desk to keep it hidden. He tried moving the bezels to and fro, and realised one was meant to bring it back to order; and he twisted the object back and forth in his hands, turning it over and twisting as he tried to restore order. He had made significant leeway before he realised he should be working, but when he placed the square back on his chair and picked up his quill, he found he was much better able to follow the professor's lesson. Certainly enough to know that Binns knew next to nothing about the goblin wars he was so obsessed with.
He found his fingers going back to the cube every once in a while to check it was still there, and to trace his fingers over the shape and the smoothness of the polished wood.
He expected Peverell to gloat or snatch the cube back at the end of the lesson, but she simply threw her books in her bag in the same manner that she took them out and rushed out of the classroom just like she usually did, not even looking back. Regulus took a deep breath and snuck the object into his pocket before he packed up his own things.
this story is a funny one. I came up with the premise one night by thinking of a scene that comes later of Michelle from Spider-Man Homecoming drawing a picture of Voldemort and showing him with her litttle pout thing she does in detention with peter Parker.
What followed was a scattered little story with no discernible end goal which scratches an itch I have in moments when I'm feeling overstimulated and wrung out from living autistic in a world that is not built for us.
As such, both Regulus and Hermione have symptoms? Characteristics? Of how I personally experience autism, which means that Regulus doesn't really have the usual traits that happen with boys. I think it's best to leave that to boys with autism and I'll just write what I want and what I need to basically.
This story also somehow filled a brief or goal I had for another story (which I'll start posting one of these days. I have so many woo'/ it's ridiculous) about what a time travel fix it would look like from outside of the bubble. This fic is only from Regulus' POV which makes it a bit snatchy and with a very limited knowledge of what is going on for the viewer. What do they call that again? Anyway, what that means is that the events of the story aren't very clear and I'm doing it on purpose. Sorry.
As for warnings there is underage sex in this story and also a sexual assault a few chapters in which I'all warn you about when we get closer.
That's if for now I think, other than strong language?
Anyway I hope you like this story. If you don't...well I wrote it for me anyway.