Summary: Vegas was their story, theirs to keep and theirs to tell. So, what happened in Vegas? No one, except for the two of them, would know. And they would like to keep it that way.
Disclaimer: I own neither What Happens In Vegas nor Harry Potter. If I did, it would have turned out very differently. So much more differently.
Warning: Boy x Boy pairing. If that's not what you like, hit the back button. If not, enjoy!
Written for: When Movies and Fanfiction Collide
What Happened In Vegas
From what James knew, his little brother and the snake had only dated briefly, once, in Hogwarts, before breaking up and going to opposite corners of the globe, their respective partners or friends in tow. Meaning that he had not really spoke to Rose in three years, seeing as she had followed that blonde, slimy snake to… Alaska? Or was it Singapore? He wasn't too sure.
So, when he saw Rose during the wedding reception, sitting alone in one of the corner tables, he made a beeline for her. The first question out of his mouth was "How did they end up engaged?"
She looked up at him from the drink she was nursing and replied, mildly, "Hello to you too."
Lily sidled into the seat next to Rose then, handing her another drink. James stared at her, even as she ignored him and turned to Rose, whining about Albus not telling her anything. Rose snorted.
"That slimy little snake wouldn't tell me anything either," she said dryly, downing the second glass in one go.
James was confused. "Mouth shut about what?"
"How they got engaged," the two of them chorused.
He was surprised. "You don't know?"
"Well, Albus got dumped, and he was so down in the dumps that I booked him a trip to Vegas to cheer him up," Lily started.
"And Scorpius was just so overworked that I thought that he really needed a vacation, and Vegas was the most viable choice," Rose continued.
"And then they came back, engaged, and how were we supposed to know that they had went at the same time?" Lily finished, sulkily. "And they refuse to tell us how it happened."
"What happened in Vegas?"
The two of them stared flatly at him. James amended his question. "What do you think happened in Vegas?"
Rose's version of what happened had went something like this:
When she looked up from her spreadsheets to see Scorpius, overworked and worn out, showing up at her flat and face-planting into her couch, she decided that she had had enough of this. Her friend needed a vacation, and she was going to get him one, regardless of his opinion on it. He would thank her for it when he came back well-rested.
So, she opened her laptop and booked the first flight out of the country, which just so happened to be a flight to Vegas that would take off in three hours. She had to do this the muggle way – if not, Scorpius would be flooded by the reporters from the wizarding community, and she cannot have that, it was supposed to be a vacation.
By the time Scorpius woke up, she had everything packed neatly and simply hauled him to the airport via a cab, reassuring that she had settled any problems that might arise with his boss (she had called her up to tell her in no uncertain terms that her employee is going to go on vacation for a week and since he had really earned it, should she interrupt this vacation, she would be dealing with the wrath of a Granger-Weasley for the rest of her life), before sending him off.
As she patted her own back, for a job well done, she sat back and waited for him to return. Sure enough, when Scorpius came back, the first thing he did was to hug her and tell her that she was the best friend ever and that he was sorry he had ever doubted her ability to get things done.
The thing was, though, that he had an extra ring on his ring finger, and he never once brought it up. And, whenever she asked, he just goes a little dreamy-eyed before steering the conversation topic onto something else.
And, it was only when she was out on a shopping trip with Lily a few days later that she had come to realise that Albus had been on a trip to Las Vegas during the same time period, and had ended up back in London with a ring, too.
Really, though, she only realised that they were actually engaged when the two of them showed up on one of the Saturday dinners together (when James was away), and broke the news to Mr. and Mrs. Potter. Of course, her father simply fainted on the spot.
When he woke up to realise that this was not a dream, he went red-faced and tried to interrogate Scorpius on his intentions.
As a result, Scorpius had been kipping on her couch for the past few weeks, leading up to the wedding, trying his best to avoid her father. Really, truly ironical if she thought about it this way, now that she was talking about it.
But no, she doesn't know what happened in Vegas.
From Lily's side, it started when Albus got dumped – again.
As he was trying to bury his sorrow with food, making everyone him (mainly her) around feel miserable in the process (he ate so much, and he never seemed to grow horizontally, it wasn't fair!), Lily decided that enough was enough.
She put her foot down when he cleared his plate of the seventh serving of food that evening, and started asking around for a good place to go to escape people at. Of course, she got suggestions like Alaska, the Sahara desert, the poles, but while she was puzzling over it, it struck her that the best way to escape people would be to go to somewhere where there is a lot of people, and lose yourself into the crowd. So she got the ticket to Las Vegas (because New York was too cliché) and enlisted her mother to help her pack for Albus.
When he came back, he was just completely in a daze, and he had ignored her. Just went straight to his room, dumped his stuff on the floor beside his bed, and continued to stare blissfully out of the window, unaware of his sister being creeped out as she tried to get his attention.
He then proceeded to ignore her every attempt to get him to spill about Vegas.
Then, of course, she met Rose, but she hadn't thought much of that encounter, honestly.
She had not been present for the reveal, but she had the misfortune of being the one who everyone, especially uncle Ron, seemed to believe had the answer to how this engagement had even happened, no matter the fact that she truly had no idea they were engaged until she was ambushed by all the adults and the question, "What, in the name of Salazar, happened in Vegas?"
When it came down to it, though, she had absolutely no idea what happened in Vegas.
So they went to talk to Albus, who was kind of drunk at this point of time and practically hanging off Scorpius. The two of them had, unsurprisingly, retreated to a corner, which meant that it actually took time to locate them.
Albus said, "Well…. I reached there, found the room… then opened the room door after a while to this amazingly handsome stranger who was glowering at me and at life and at everything…"
"I didn't glower," Scorpius protested. "I only glared at the concierge for a bit, because I was tired and –"
"Uh huh, then, they were completely awesome and then gave us this awesome great big room in the top floors, it was a press-preside…dental suit –"
"Presidential suite."
"As an apology, yes, then we went to get some drinks and when I woke up, ta da!" he waved around, gesturing at wildly at nothing and almost falling over his feet. Scorpius caught him and smiled apologetically at them.
"I think that he has had enough to drink, so, perhaps, I shall remove him from this party, alright?"
In the end, no one found out what happened. Albus was drunk enough that it was hard to figure out if what he said was true. Even if it was true, all that they got to know was how the two of them ran into each other in Vegas. The rest?
And, well, this, this was what actually happened in Vegas:
Scorpius, entirely disgruntled at the fact that he had to take a vacation from his pretty comfortable life, was even more upset when he had to take a plane – a metal death trap – to some place with entirely too many people. Then the car went the wrong way and it took way too long to get to the right hotel, almost all the hotel staff seemed to want to flirt with him and he was just so tired, all he wanted was to find a bed and face-plant on it and go to sleep.
Therefore, when he opened the door to see his ex-boyfriend (the only person he had dated, period) staring back at him, he threw in the towel and really contemplated just spending everything he had left to take the next plane back, Rose and her complaints be damned.
Except, Albus was not about to give up the chance to get an upgrade – he had read the terms and conditions, after all, and he knew the clause where it said that a mistake in room assignment could get you an upgrade. So, he dragged Scorpius down with him to lodge a complaint regardless of how much Scorpius had been complaining.
He didn't actually expect them to upgrade both him and Scorpius to a presidential suite, though, although he was pretty sure he could thank Scorpius for that. With the way he was just glowering at everything as though he hated everything, even he would have yielded.
Together with the upgrade came a bunch of free coupons, and, well, Albus reasoned that since all this was free, why not just get smashed together?
The next morning, when Scorpius woke up being cuddled by an octopus, with the worst hangover he had ever had, his plan had been to extricate himself and stumble over to the bathroom. Then he realised that he wasn't exactly clean, his clothes were strewn all over the place, and his lower back was making it hard for him to straighten without wincing.
And, of course, there was the matter of the ring that had not been there before, on the hand that was wrapped, rather possessively, around him. The heirloom that ensured that once it was put on, it cannot be taken off until death.
Given the ways things had been going, he probably shouldn't have been surprised that that was around when Albus woke up.
The two of them spent half of the day being a little awkward around each other, after Albus realised that he couldn't remove the engagement ring that had somehow ended up on him. Eventually, though, he was the one to break the tension by planting a big one on Scorpius and declaring that since they were permanently engaged now, he might as well make the most of it, and he wouldn't stand for making the rest of their lives miserable by hovering around each other.
After which, they spent the rest of their time either going out to use up the rest of the coupon, or simply staying in bed (the bed they broke multiple times. Sometimes, Scorpius wonders how muggles survive without magic).
Over the course of their stay in Vegas, they learnt quite a bit about each other. Like, Albus never knew that Scorpius could really dance, slipping onto the dancefloor at the clubs and then going along to the beat, until Albus had to drag him off the dancefloor and back to the hotel so he wouldn't embarrass himself. And, Scorpius couldn't believe just how peculiar Albus was about the way they ate food until they went out for lunch and Albus rearranged everything on the plate according to their place on the food pyramid, before starting out from the left to the right. It applied to every meal they had.
Then there was how Scorpius always had a nightlight, because he hated the shadows and the dark, and how Albus couldn't play Quidditch, because he was scared of heights. How Scorpius spends some of his times contemplating all the different ways to die, not because he wanted to die, but because he was curious about how someone could die, and how, sometimes, when Albus falls asleep, he would wake up in a completely different world, where he was someone else entirely, living out an entire lifetime only to die in that world and wake up again just to realise that it was just a dream.
It slipped out, sometime during their last day together in Vegas, that Scorpius had not dated anyone after Albus because it felt wrong, and that Albus couldn't stay with anyone more than three weeks because they just didn't click the same way.
But Vegas was their story, theirs to keep and theirs to tell.
So, what happened in Vegas?
No one, except for the two of them, would know.
Review, please? Let me know what you thought about this story!