The First Time
It was the kind of day that didn't make you want to be alive, Rose Weasley thought with a grimace as she stared out the window of Professor Smith's classroom.
The day was cold, and ice was sticking to the window panes so thick that you could barely see out of them. And yet, even through all of the snow, you could still see owls flying around the school on the way to their roost to deliver letters to their masters.
It could be considered animal abuse, as beastly cold as the day was, to let the owls trudge on their journeys. It was the sort of thing that you could start a club about, kind of like her mother's invention, S.P.E.W., or spew, as her dad and Uncle Harry liked to call it. It would be called P.E.T.O. People for the Ethical Treatment of Owls, Rose thought with a grin.
"Ms. Weasley, would you mind telling us what is so amusing?" Professor Smith's sharp voice startled Rose away from her thoughts.
"No, Professor, sorry," Rose mumbled, embarrassed. She could see many people smirking and willed her ears not to turn red.
It didn't matter really; Professor Smith never liked her, so it didn't surprise her much that he had said something to her about looking out the window. Her other teachers really didn't mind as much when her mind went astray, she was generally well liked by the staff. But for some reason, Professor Smith didn't care for her as much as his colleagues. The feelings were mutual, though, so Rose didn't lose much sleep over it.
"As I was saying, class," Professor Smith started again on his lecture about the telephone wiring in London after giving her a sharp look. Rose decided it would be best to take notes for the rest of the period than to get yelled at again for not paying attention.
At least she had a break next, she was starting to get distracted easily, too much time in a classroom made her do that sometimes.
Rose was a dreamy sort of girl. Of course, she didn't go around daydreaming all the time, as some dreamers did, but she wasn't exactly a practical person. She had always loved the muggle fairy tales her mother had told her as a child, and until the age of six she thought that they were all true. She believed people easily, too easily at times, and didn't always look at things at a reasonable angle.
Not that she wasn't hardworking, in fact the opposite was true. Once she was dedicated to something, she became slightly obsessed and wouldn't stop until the project was what she would deem as perfect.
But she was the sort of person that believed more in ideas, theories, and fantasies rather than cold hard facts.
Rose sighed to herself as she wrote down the rest of Professor Smith's lecture down. If the watch that she wore faithfully for two years was correct, they only had five more minutes to go.
Rose found herself wondering again why she was taking this course anyway. Staying with Grandma and Grandpa Granger had taught she and her brother more than they needed to know about muggles, and the fact was that she already knew everything that he was teaching them.
It was probably because she couldn't decide what she wanted to be when she grew up. The only thing that she knew for sure was that she wanted to be different than the rest of her family, which was not an easy feat considering the fact that half of the people around the magical community were related to her.
Of course, the head of the Griffindor house had told her to try and take a bit of everything to see where she fit best.
As far as Rose could tell, it wasn't working.
"Class is dismissed. Your homework is an eight inch essay on telephone wires. Let's hope all of us were listening," Professor Smith crowed, and magically opened his door when he let out the class.
"Stupid old bat. I can't believe it. Eight inches! Eight! Antiope is so lucky that she isn't taking Muggle Studies this year," Rose's best friend, Caroline Longbottom, proclaimed vehemently, which surprised Rose. Caroline, the perfect Hufflepuff, was rarely loud, or angry, about anything.
"What am I lucky about?" Antiope Zabini, Caroline and Rose's other best friend came up next to them.
Antiope was the complete opposite of Caroline, a true Slytherin at heart. She was a sultry beauty with a fierce temper and a cunning mind.
Together they made the trio of the sixth year, including every house except Ravenclaw, but who wants those stupid smart girls anyway? They were generally well liked, but a few girls here and there that were jealous of them spread rumors. Very rarely, though, were these rumors believed (even though more than a couple of them about Antiope were probably true).
"Pretty much everything," Caroline sighed.
"I know," Antiope smiled. "I am, aren't I?"
"I swear, you have the biggest head..." Caroline started and Antiope laughed.
"So, Weasley, who were you daydreaming about today in class? Was it your imaginary boyfriend?" Scorpius Malfoy jeered at Rose, stopping in front of her with his usual group of friends, who were chortling loudly behind him. They all followed Scorpius' lead on everything, whether who to make fun of next, or which bathroom to use.
Rose's ears turned a bit pink. She had a boyfriend from Durmstrang that she had traded letters with a few years ago, and Scorpius and his friends had heard her speaking to Antiope and Caroline about him, and they were convinced that he was fake.
He wasn't, of course, his name had been Viktor and evidently his father and her mother had a bit of a fling, but whenever any of the girls had tried to convince Scorpius and Co. otherwise, they hadn't listened.
"Go away, Malfoy," Antiope rolled her eyes. Antiope and Scorpius and gone out from the end of fourth year to the beginning of fifth, about four months, but evidently she was "way, way over him" and had began to get just as annoyed with him as Rose and Caroline were.
Scorpius and his friends went off chortling with each other, patting Scorpius on the back in congratulations, and just generally acting like a pack of idiots.
"How did you ever date him?" Rose wondered out loud to her friend, to which Antiope had just shrugged.
"He is absolutely heavenly, and we would be absolutely perfect for each other, you have to admit that," Antiope replied with a wicked grin that made her even more beautiful than she already was.
"I thought you were over him," Caroline said with raised eyebrows. She often had a way of picking up hidden messages in people's words, and she had evidently heard something alarming in Antiope's words.
"I am, but think about it. The king and queen of Slytherin..." Antiope looked dreamily off into the distance.
"Oh please, you aren't the queen of anything."
"Not yet, but one day Prince William will be mine! All I need is a little luck, and some magic. Watch out Queen Elizabeth!"
Rose laughed at her friend. "Only if I get Prince Harry."
"It's a date," Antiope promised. "Now, I've got to get to class, Rose is the lucky one know. She has free period."
"So sue me for being lucky."
"Ah, the luck of the Irish," Caroline called back to Rose as she and Antiope walked to class together. It had been a running joke between the three of them that Rose's family was Irish because they all had the Weasley red hair.
"Shut up, Caroline. You know very well that I'm not Irish!" At that Caroline laughed again.
Rose continued smiling. She loved her friends, they were almost like family to her. Even though she and Antiope often butted heads, they had never had a fight large enough to tear them apart.
Rose looked out the window once again and still couldn't believe that she was insane enough to actually go out there and face the winter weather, but she was. Rose entered a door pretending to be a wall and raced up to the Common Room as fast as she could to get her scarf and mittens, which she had forgotten in her rush to get to breakfast, and had looked in the mirror one last time. When she was positive that she couldn't get much better, she rushed down the stairs once again and took a deep breath before stepping outside.
It was extremely cold, but this was the reason that she was even going outside; the fact that no sane person would. She breathed out to see her breath turn into smoke and laughed when she saw the spectacle under the tree.
There, a boy was doing a headstand, his eyes scrunched up in concentration. He looked very silly indeed, and his face was as red as a cherry tomato. "Scorpius, may I ask why your doing that?"
"It looked like a good way to get warm," the blonde boy replied flopping over and laid down in the snow. "Plus I wanted to see how long I could do it before I passed out."
"No one would find you if you passed out here, not for a while anyway. They would just think that you were skipping class again." It was true, Scorpius did skip class sometimes, but he always had an excuse thanks to Uncle George's "sweets that make you ill". It was a wonder that he could smuggle them into the school, and get away with them. All the teachers knew the signs, but since that had no proof (Uncle George still was able to hide all of Weasley Wizard's Wheezes products undetectable by the staff of Hogwarts), they couldn't give him detention.
"You would find me, so I wasn't too worried."
"Maybe I wasn't going to come, you don't know that." They both knew Rose would have come, so the comment fell flat in between them.
"I want to know what took you so long to get out here." It amazed Rose how Scorpius could get outside more quickly than she could. He always did, no matter how fast Rose run, and she had just given up trying. That kind of speed had to be genetic or something.
"Long!?" she cried indigently, "It did not take me a long time. I ran up and down the secret compartments that we found last year. I swear to God that you found some kind of potion that made you have super speed or something."
"Nope, I just don't spend all my time chatting," Scorpius replied.
"I do not spend all my time chatting! You have far more friends than I do."
"I wouldn't call them friends." Scorpius disliked the people that he hung out with immensely, it was just that no one else would give him a chance, so he was stuck with them.
"And you very well know that Viktor was not imaginary! I don't know why you continue to make fun of me about that."
"Oh yes! Dear Vicky!" Scorpius' voice was suddenly raised an octave, and he was about to go on when Rose interrupted him.
"Don't call him that!" Rose had to resist the urge to punch him. Just because Viktor had a strange sounding voice (a fact that she had realized from the moment that she met him) didn't mean that it was okay to make fun of him...
"God I remember the day he sent you a howler for breaking it off with him. For me, of course." They were alone at that time too, in a secluded corridor when Rose's owl Artemis dropped off the howler, which she hadn't opened, a mistake that she swore never to make again. For weeks she had to lie that the howler was from her aunt and not from a boy in Bulgaria.
"Shut up." Rose couldn't help smiling. She took off the mitten on her hand and reached out to brush his overlong ash blonde hair out of his eyes when he took her hand in his.
"I was so jealous. I could barely think straight that holiday, I was so sure that you two were off shagging that I could barely eat Christmas dinner. My parents probably thought that I had gone insane," he whispered.
Their story was like any other, Rose guessed when she thought about it, a teacher had put them together as partners to create a spell of their own. They had disliked each other, but as they got to know each other better they slowly but surely fell in love, or something close to it.
"Well, we weren't, don't worry about it."
Scorpius looked into her eyes, suddenly serious, and for a moment she lost all train of thought. His eyes were all sorts of different shades of green that she couldn't count all the colors. "I love you," he said simply, letting the words fall from his lips as if they were as natural as breathing.
Rose felt her eyes widen. That was the first time that he had ever said that to her, even though they had been secretly dating for a year.
Sometimes Rose wished that they could have made their relationship public, but she knew that was out of the question.
Scorpius began to look worried so she knew she was taking too long to say something. She could barely believe that he had said it; those three little words could change everything she knew. But he had said them, and there was no turning back.
"I love you, too."
With those words being said, Scorpius began to kiss her fiercely.
He suddenly pulled back and said, "I've been wanting to say that for ages. I've felt like this for a very long time. I'm so glad that you feel the same way.
"How could you not know that I feel exactly the same way?" Rose asked, before occupying her lips on more important matters than talking.