Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
A/N: This is for Ela (waltzingvelocity). You are positively lovely, a fantastic writer, and an amazing friend. I hope it doesn't disappoint!
I've put a link up on my profile to a Youtube playlist with all of the songs I've used throughout, if any of you are curious.
i. it's summer, say goodbye
(July, 2013)
Molly and Lucy both knew that technically the first day of summer was the 21st of June. That was the solstice, the day Earth's upper hemisphere spun closest to the sun. They knew that; Molly had a solar chart in her room with Earth's orbit mapped on it, Lucy read about elliptical paths and planetary mass and gravitational pull until her dad brought home a book about wand cores and she got distracted.
But even though they knew better scientifically, both girls claimed that summer actually started earlier, in late May, when the air felt sticky and heavy with unshed rain and the stars looked hazy behind the curtain of Massachusetts humidity. It began just before their primary school released them to the wilds of empty days and their friends signed up for day camps and sleep-away camps and riding lessons. Summer came when Lucy and Molly's mother tucked them in beneath light cotton sheets and told them a story.
It was the same one every year, but Lucy and Molly never wanted her to change it. The words felt like hard candy as they gathered on Audrey's tongue; they were familiar and sweet and nostalgic. To the girls they promised a safe path from the past to the future.
Audrey always began, "Before you were born, there was a war. It happened in the United Kingdom, where your father is from, and it hurt a lot of people."
When she was very little, Molly hid her face in her pillow for this part. Lucy never did. She stared at her mother and watched the way her mouth formed the words; they fell flat from her lips—if her father had been telling the story, the words would have fallen up.
"Your father's family fought against Voldemort...the...the man who started it all." She always hesitated like that, over "the man". Lucy didn't realise until later that her mother was being generous, calling him a man. "Your uncle George's twin brother, Fred, died in the war. Your uncle Harry defeated Voldemort."
At three and four and five, Molly had asked questions. She had wondered why her daddy hadn't been the one to win it all. She had begged Audrey for details, for descriptions of the bad guys and the good guys; she had wanted to know what spells they had used and how long everything had lasted. Lucy had stayed silent. She hadn't wanted details. She hated remembering that people could hurt.
"I wasn't there," Audrey eventually continued. "I was still at school, here in the States. We heard about the War, but it never came to America. I wanted to help, though, so after I graduated from school I went to England and volunteered with their Ministry of Magic to assist the families that had been affected.
"I met your father at a function for the survivors of the War. He was standing by the punch bowl and he looked hopelessly awkward, so I went up to him and said hello. I don't think he'd have said anything to me if your aunt Ginny hadn't come over and forced him to talk." Their mother always smiled at the memory but it made Molly angry and Lucy sad—their father was among their top five favourite people in the world and they didn't like that he had been a coward once. Molly thought that as a Gryffindor he ought to have been braver, and Lucy felt like a traitor but she always wished that he hadn't given her his genes.
"He worked for the Ministry, just like he does now, but back then he was working to help reorganise the government after the War. If he had stayed in that department, he wouldn't have been able to come with me when I had to help with your grandma and grandpa, just after you were born, Lucy. But he transferred and followed us here and we haven't left."
That was a lie though: Molly and Lucy knew that their dad left almost every day, even on weekends. He still worked too much. It was lucky that he had managed to get an International Apparation licence, or else he'd probably have had to quit his job. Or he'd have quit their family. Molly didn't think he was that big of a coward. Lucy thought he might have been.
"We both agreed that we wanted you to grow up with your cousins and go to your father's old school. But we couldn't bear the thought of sending you away during the school year when you're so young, and I couldn't afford to homeschool you. Because it's summer," and maybe this part of the story was what confused their conception of the seasons, "you'll Floo to your grandma and grandpa's in England as soon as school lets out. Dad'll stop by to see you once a week and I will see you in September." And then she dropped a kiss on Molly's fiery curls and Lucy's short blonde mess and told them, "I'll miss you."
But the summer that Molly was eleven and Lucy was nine, Audrey didn't end the story that way. Instead, she said, "This year, Moll, you'll be going to Hogwarts at the end of the summer. I'll come up at the end of August to see you off, and then you'll be home again for Christmas. It'll be here before you know it."
Molly had stopped showing her fear, but her teeth bit into her lower lip and Lucy knew that she didn't think she was ready for Hogwarts. Lucy thought Molly was, though. She had to go to Hogwarts soon, or else all of her friends from school would realise there was something different about them. Molly's magic had slid from her control too many times.
Sometimes Lucy wished that the magic gene had skipped her; she wouldn't have minded being a Muggle. Her friends were nice, she could stay with them. They used multi-coloured crayons to fill in zebras in colouring books and Maddie actually believed that there was a man in the moon.
But Lucy knew that she wasn't a Muggle. She could make the bubbles in her bath impermeable and sometimes she shrunk her dad's socks so he'd take longer to leave in the morning. She couldn't do anything else, not yet, but she knew that she would be following Molly to that strange place from her aunts' and uncles' stories. She'd see why Vic and Dom and Louis always whispered together at dinner, and she'd get a striped tie and pretend like she had grown up in the United Kingdom, rather than America. She'd pretend like the story her mother told them every summer was a part of her own past, rather than a barely recognisable and distant piece of history.
Because she was magic, Lucy wished she was two years older; she wished that she could go to Hogwarts with Molly. She was nervous about being alone.
:::
Well, this is a pleasant surprise.
"What is?"
Another Weasley.
"There're a lot of us."
Well, at least you are easy to place.
"Aren't we all?"
No. But you're a GRYFFINDOR.
ii. bored with insanity
(July, 2014)
Lorcan and Lysander's parents told them that nargles had led them to each other. The twins thought that this was possibly true, but only because their parents both believed in nargles. Luna and Rolf might have followed those invisible (unreal) creatures toward the legendary hollow in the cliff face where they ran head-on into each other because their eyes were busy searching for figments of their imaginations. Luna told the boys that at first she didn't think she loved their father; she thought that something had infested her brain and made her think that she liked him when in actual fact she thought that Rolf Scamander was a bit of a stuck-up lunatic.
"Eventually though," she always sighed, smoothing Lysander's hair and wiping chocolate from Lorcan's chin, "he managed to convince me that I was not infected and that I did actually love him."
"Do you still?" Lysander always asked, even though their dad sat right there at the table in their oversized tent and so obviously she would tell them that she did.
But she never just said it. She always left off cleaning up the supper dishes and skipped to her husband's side, leaning her pale blonde head against his dark one and pressing a kiss to his unshaven cheek before she smiled at her sons. "Of course I do."
Lysander always smiled back and Lorcan always scowled. He wished his parents were a little unhappy, or that his twin was a little more discerning. It was difficult, being the only realist in a family of dreamers. But at least Lysander didn't believe in nargles. If his brother had been that much of an idiot Lorcan would have been forced to go live with his godfather and Merlin knew that Neville had more than enough children running over his house.
Sometimes Lorcan wished he could have moved in with Neville anyway. His family never stopped travelling, searching for some new species or some ancient (read: unreal) creature, and Lorcan had left pieces of himself—clothing, Quidditch figurines, books—across six continents. Only one thing had accompanied Lorcan to each new campsite: the small notebook his aunt Ginny (faux-aunt but those are the best kinds) had given him for his fifth birthday. He had begun a count-down on its pages at age five and a half, and he was just about to scratch the last tally-mark into the paper.
He left his and Lysander's tent one morning in July to find his parents standing over a violet campfire. His mother stared at an empty skillet and his father had his back to the campsite. He turned just as Lorcan was picking up his shoes to check for scorpions or other venomous (and existent) nasties. Rolf held two thick envelopes in his right hand, and he smiled at his son, but the smile was strained.
"This arrived for you by owl this morning." Rolf held out one of the envelopes and Lorcan dropped his shoes.
He ignored the sad look his parents exchanged as he took the letter from his father. He read the address with the sort of reverence he usually reserved for steak pies and real beds, running one dirty finger over the label:
Lorcan Scamander
Second Cot, Smallest Tent, Sonoran Desert
Arizona, United States of America
He was going to Hogwarts.
:::
You are eager, aren't you?
"Just tell me where I belong."
Could be in Slytherin, with that attitude.
"With the snakes? Thank you, no."
Definitely not a Ravenclaw.
"And not a Hufflepuff, either."
If you think so. That makes it GRYFFINDOR.
iii. somebody should stop time
(July, 2015)
Lucy clambered over the stone wall that lined the Burrow's back property and landed shakily on the hill that fell immediately behind it. She took a few hurried steps down the slope before veering left, ducking beneath the leafy branches of a tree leaning out of the hillside, and scrambling up the trunk until she sat comfortably on a broad branch, her freckled legs dangling on either side of the limb. She reached into the bag that hung over her shoulder and pulled out the thick book she kept there; it fell open to a page a little past the middle, where she had placed a folded slip of parchment to keep her place.
She'd started Little Women just before coming over to her grandparents', and her mother had tried to convince her to leave it home. "You won't have time for reading over there, Luce. You'll be too busy with your cousins and practising Quidditch and getting ready for school to even think about books!"
Lucy had considered throwing a full-blown tantrum, but instead she had repacked her trunk and slipped the book beneath her jumpers and jeans at the very bottom. Her mum believed her when she said her trunk was extra heavy because she needed winter clothes this year.
James, Albus, and Lily had come over the first night Lucy'd been at the Burrow, and she had slipped away from them after dinner, finding her tree just as she had left it the year before. The torch she always kept in her trunk barely functioned with the magic buzzing around her, but it was working just well enough for her to read late into the night, and she got back to the house as the Potters were being bundled off into the fire by their parents.
"Where'd you run off to?" James asked, as Harry tried unsuccessfully to hand him some Floo Powder.
"Nowhere," Lucy replied. "I was just wandering."
James shrugged and then glanced up at his father, an exasperated expression on his face. "Honestly, Dad, I'm going." He turned to grin at Lucy. "Two months and we'll be at Hogwarts, hey, Lu?"
She sighed. "Yeah. We will be."
"It'll be brill, won't it?"
She sounded even less enthusiastic. "Yeah. It will."
"Okay, okay, Dad." James finally took the green powder from his father and disappeared in the fire.
"See you next week, Lucy?" Harry grinned at her and she nodded, forcing a smile back. Then the room was empty, aside from Lucy and Molly.
"Where were you really?" Molly had asked.
Lucy glanced at her older sister and thought about the story their mother used to tell them at the beginning of summer. Audrey hadn't told it in the two years since Molly started at Hogwarts; she thought that Lucy must have had it memorised. Lucy hadn't protested, but sometimes she missed lying beside her sister in their beds, hearing the familiar words in the empty air of their room. Sometimes she just missed Molly. Not this girl, not the one who cursed like the boys and cast spells even though she wasn't supposed to and had eaten seven earthworms and then kissed Fred on a dare. She missed the sister who doubted herself.
"Nowhere," Lucy had told her sister, that first night at the Burrow. "I'm going to bed."
She had felt Molly's grey eyes on her back as she slipped up the stairs to her bedroom, the one at the very top of the house that had once belonged to their uncle Ron.
And here she was, a month later, rereading Little Women for the third time because she couldn't get any other Muggle novels. She twisted the ring on her index finger with her thumb and looked at it. Her friend Seth had given it to her for her eleventh birthday. It was a mood ring, he'd said, because his mum had suggested it, saying it was "retro" and therefore "cool", and also because he never could tell what Lucy was feeling. It was supposed to change colours, but on Lucy's finger it was always black. It still was. She didn't stop wearing it though. She hoped someday it might turn red one day, for excited, or orange, for daring.
She looked away from the disappointing ring and through the branches and leaves around her at the darkening sky. There was a shape moving in the expanse of inky blue: an owl, winging its way toward the Burrow. She felt sick.
It was the end of July. Hogwarts letters arrived at the end of July.
The last remnants of her childhood blew off, disappearing in the wake of an owl's flight.
:::
Well, this is interesting.
"Can we please just get this over with? Stick me in Hufflepuff, if you want to."
But you say that you want to go home.
"That's not really an option, is it? Just put me somewhere, please."
But you're not homesick. You just don't want to be here.
"Put me somewhere. Please."
Not Slytherin, not Gryffindor, couldn't be Hufflepuff. You'll be okay in RAVENCLAW.
iv. we're not meant to have self-control
(May, 2020)
Lorcan was rather fond of parties. He was especially fond of Gryffindor parties—he was of the entirely unbiased opinion that Gryffindor House threw the best ones in the school, perhaps even the entire country. He had had five years of experience at Hogwarts, and technically sixteen years of experience total (although most of his life experience had nothing to do with partying) so he considered himself an expert in the matter.
He knew only one other expert, and she was leaving Hogwarts soon for the real world. Whatever the fuck that meant. Lorcan thought that she would probably just marry rich and continue leaving a wreckage of hearts behind her. But Dominique Weasley would never admit to such a devious scheme.
She was swaying on a table by the fire, her arms flung out like skeletal wings, her eyes closed and her cheeks glowing. She was older and she was dangerous and she was a Weasley, but she was also fun and gorgeously blonde and Merlin, so fucking deadly. If Lorcan had taken the time to make a bucket list, snogging Dominique Weasley would have been the first thing on it.
She might have been drunk enough that night. More importantly, she might have been desperate enough—rumour had it she had caught her usual fuck buddy William Smith on the Quidditch pitch with Georgiana Nott, and they had not been riding broomsticks. So there was a chance—a slim one—that she would let him touch her.
He crossed the room, winding his way through the sweaty bodies of his housemates, until he reached the Dominique's stage. He stood below her and looked up, and from this angle her jean-clad legs looked like they went on the way the Eiffel Tower went on, all in a hellish haze of lust.
"Scamander!" She smiled at him and his heart pounded. "Get up here!"
He placed suddenly sweaty palms against the table and pushed down, his forearms straining to bear his weight. She laughed and grabbed at his wrist, pulled him close, closer, and pressed her hips against his. "Scamander," she hummed and he could have sworn that the last sixteen years had hurtled purposefully toward this one moment.
"Come away with me," he whispered against the diamond in her earlobe.
"Okay." She took his hand and jumped from the table, somehow landing steadily among the dancing crowd beneath them. He followed more slowly and she tugged him forward, toward the portrait hole.
"Dom? Where're we going?"
"Away, like you said."
She stopped just outside the entranceway and pressed him against the wall, her lips sloppily searching against his. It took his drink-addled brain a moment to catch up, and then he was kissing her back; the stones were rough against his shoulder blades, Dominique was soft against his front.
The voices came down the corridor suddenly, bouncing around the walls like horrible, vivid, razor-winged moths.
"Dominique!" That was Potter. James. Why the fuck was James Potter not in his bed in the fourth year dormitories, like all under-fifth year Gryffindors were supposed to be? Why the fuck was he screaming his cousin's name when his cousin was clearly indisposed?
Dominique groaned into Lorcan's mouth and pulled away, brushing strands of sweat-sticky hair from her eyes. She turned to face the shouting imbecile and Lorcan slowly turned his head, too, so he could fully appreciate the disintegration of his perfect night.
It wasn't just James Potter. Albus was there, too, the third year Slytherin staring at Lorcan and Dominique with eyes that were far too wide; his hand was halfway to covering Lily's eyes, like he had been trying to shield her from the display. Hugo had his eyes squeezed shut, a blush reddening his face. And Roxanne and Rose were there, even though they should have definitely been tucked into the third year Gryffindor dormitories hours ago, and Molly and Fred, whom he thought he'd seen at the party only a little bit ago. The only one missing was Louis, and Lorcan was ninety-nine percent sure he'd seen Dom's brother ghost off with Viv earlier.
And Lucy.
"Where's Luce?" Dom asked, making a valiant effort not to slur her cousin's name.
"That's what we're wondering," Rose's eyes hadn't even jerked towards Lorcan, and he's impressed at how calm she seemed. She'd always struck him as the prude in the Wealsey/Potter clan.
"You haven't seen her?" Molly asked.
"No," Dom shook her head and reached out to steady herself against the wall, but her hand landed and fastened on Lorcan's shoulder instead. She didn't move it.
"Shit," Molly's voice sounded hard.
"Why? Isn't she in Ravenclaw?"
"No," Hugo said. "I just went to find her because I wanted help with something for Charms and she wasn't there. No one had seen her for a while and," he lowered his voice, like Lorcan couldn't hear everything he said if he stopped shouting, "James can't find her on...you know."
Lily was glaring at him accusingly, like he should have defected to the common room as soon as the Great and Terrible Ginger Army interrupted his very promising snog-fest with Dom.
He probably should have. Dom had let go of him and was stepping unsteadily toward her cousins.
"Fuck," she said. "Fuck, let's go find her."
Lorcan wanted to point out that Dom wasn't really going to be much help finding anyone, and that her cousins should probably just leave her to him and go find Lucy on their own, but then Dom whirled and ordered, "Scamander, get your useless arse inside and find Louis."
"But.." Find Louis? Was she joking? Louis was with Vivian Parkinson, the Ravenclaw who should have been a Slytherin, whose curses had once forced Lysander to spend an entire week in the hospital wing, getting a very vital part of his body back in working order. "He's with Viv," Lorcan attempted desperately.
"He could be with fucking Voldemort and you would still be going to get him." Dominique suddenly sounded a lot more sober, and much angrier. Lorcan nodded and mumbled the password to a scandalized-looking Fat Lady. He found Louis in a corner on the opposite side of the common room, snogging Vivian so fiercely that Lorcan was afraid that when he separated them the anti-suck-factor would cause an imbalance in the pressures of the room and send Gryffindor Tower exploding off into space.
"Louis," he tugged at the older boy's T-shirt. Nothing. "Louis," he nearly shouted.
"Fuck off, Scamander," Vivian turned to glare at him, her eyes terrifying.
"Louis, Dom wants you."
"Your sister can wait, Weasley," Vivian informed her conquest. To his credit, Louis dodged her swooping lips so they fastened on his neck and he was free to look up at Lorcan. Despite his nonchalance about public snogging when it came to himself and Dom, Lorcan was starting to feel uncomfortable.
"Why?" Louis asked suspiciously.
"Something about Lucy."
Louis abruptly pulled away from Viv, taking her by the waist and pushing her up so she had to either stand or land on her arse. She chose the former, placing her hands on her hips and glaring from Lorcan to Louis and back again. "What the—" she began, but Louis interrupted her.
"She's missing again? Fuck." And then he pushed past Lorcan and was out of the portrait hole in under a minute. Lorcan turned to look at Vivian. Her long-lashed eyes were daggers.
"Look," Lorcan held up his hands, "I was just about to shag Dominique when the Freckled Brigade barged in. Don't get pissed at me."
Vivian looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. "They're insane." She sounded fond. Lorcan felt differently.
"That is the truth."
"See you, Scamander," and Viv wound her way through the crowd to the portrait hole, disappearing back to Ravenclaw.
Lorcan punched the wall. Fucking Lucy Weasley was such a bloody cock-blocker.
v. lost and leaving
(May, 2020)
She had always gotten lost; it was her quirk, the way Molly always chose "dare" in truth or dare and Lily kept secrets and Louis fell in love every second. It was not dangerous or disturbed or anything, she had done it at home in Massachusetts, disappearing into the woods for hours—once she even spent a night outdoors and came home the next morning to find her parents patiently waiting for her by the front door—and at her grandparents' and at the Potter's, when she stayed there for Christmas holidays. But during first year she seriously screwed up, and made it so that "Lucy's lost" was synonymous with "Panic!" in her family.
That first time, she hadn't been at Hogwarts long enough to understand the way the Castle changed its layout at will, to experience the wild swing of a staircase or the twist of an unknown corner in a corridor. But she had been at Hogwarts long enough to understand that she had a serious defect. It had started with the Sorting Hat (well, it had started before the Sorting Hat, of course, but he/it had cemented it in her consciousness). Lucy Weasley did not belong.
This was not an emotion driven by teenage angst (she had only been eleven). It wasn't born from lack of effort—she chatted with her housemates (until they all went off on long, boring tangents about something or other they'd read in this horribly dry tome), ate meals with her cousins, went to Quidditch matches wearing blue and bronze scarves and mittens and even a headband her aunt Fleur had sent her. But she wasn't happy. And so third week of her first year she disappeared.
Lucy had just meant to wander off, to find somewhere to sit alone with The Magician's Nephew, whichshe had snagged off the shelves in her aunt Hermione's house the night before leaving for Hogwarts. She hadn't really intended to become so lost that she couldn't find her way out of Hogwarts's stone corridors. She hadn't intended to break down into sobs in front of a painting of an old Duke. The painting had no idea how to handle the heaving mess of blonde hair who had just collapsed across the hall from him.
"Eh," he began. It didn't seem a particularly promising start, but at least he had said something. "Eh," he repeated, louder, when she didn't respond. "Excuse me?"
"What?" Her voice echoed high in the corridor. He hadn't seen any students in at least three months, and he cursed whatever god it was that had sent this banshee child.
"Do you need something?" His voice was stiff.
"Oh, no, I'm perfectly fine, thank you." She didn't sound perfectly fine, and while he had never been trained in the intricacies of human voices, he thought she sounded rather like Violet did when he asked her whether she thought Sir Cadogan had gotten saner. He thought that tone was known as sarcasm.
"Are you sure? Because I could send for someone. What's your name?"
"Lucy Weasley," she told him. "And I'm fine, really."
"Okay." The Duke watched her cry for a few more minutes and then he could feel the lines in his paint cracking from all the emotion in the air. He hurried out of his frame and into one a few corridors over, where he begged the witches there to: "Find Lucy Weasley's friends and tell them she's in the West Corridor over the Dungeons crying."
And that's where it all began. Molly and Fred and James and Dom and Louis came running through the castle, pushing other students out of the way in their need to find Lucy, and when they found her, tear-streaked and red-faced, they each vowed to never let her go missing again.
Lucy had not been happy. She blacklisted the Duke and made occasional escapes to distant corners of the castle, but her sister or one of her cousins always found her just after an hour. She spent her first four years at Hogwarts feeling hounded by numerous red-headed Weasleys, and the night that her family interrupted Lorcan and Dominique she had finally found her way to the passage to Hogsmeade. She curled in a corner booth of the Three Broomsticks with a worn copy of A Tale of Two Cities and she was sipping a Butterbeer and falling in love with Sydney Carton and feeling an unusual web of peace around her when an army of dusty, sweaty teenagers burst through the door.
She looked up and muttered, "Fuck," but was smiling by the time Molly collapsed beside her and rested her head on her shoulder.
"You need to stop doing this," Molly told her. "I can't keep worrying about you whenever I'm not with you."
"I'm fine," Lucy said, tapping a finger against the cover of the book. "Just reading."
"Can't you do that in Ravenclaw Tower?" James asked. "Or the library, so we don't need to freak out when you're not on the map?"
"What do you think is going to happen to me?" Lucy sighed. "When you can't find me, what do you think is going on?"
Her family exchanged a line of glances, Al to Lily to Molly to James to Roxy to Hugo to Dom to Fred to Louis, and back down, and finally Al confessed, his voice small, "We're afraid you'll leave us."
Lucy raised her eyebrows and closed her book, slipping it into her bag. "What, like run away? Where would I go?"
Dom grabbed at Louis's wrist when he said, "More like, disappear."
Lucy's eyes widened. "I would never, ever, leave for good."
"You promise?" Louis asked. Lucy nodded, and suddenly all of them were holding out spit-spattered hands.
"Shake on it," Molly ordered. "You won't ever disappear on us. Not for real."
Lucy spat in her hand, but she didn't reach for Al's yet. "Only if you promise me something," she said.
Dom sighed. "What?"
"Sometimes I need to be alone. Let me be."
There was the chain of glances again, but Louis finally nodded. "Okay." He thrust his hand toward Lucy and she shook it tightly, moving from cousin to cousin to sister to cousin until the promises had been made.
"I'll go back in a little while," she told them. "I just want to finish this section, all right?"
"I'll stay," Albus volunteered, and Lucy shook her head.
"No, Al. I will come back on my own. It's fine."
"Okay, okay," and they left her the way they came, a mass of red hair and freckled skin and overlapping limbs, out the door.
vi. it's just a little bit mysterious
(September, 2021)
Lorcan Scamander had never spent much time in the library. It wasn't that he had anything against it, necessarily, just that he had never seen much point in going to it. He did well enough in his classes without all that revising nonsense. Or he had, until Lysander had turned into a bastard and refused to help him with his NEWT courses. And so on the fifth day of his seventh year, when by all rights he ought to have been preparing for the end-of-first-week party in Gryffindor common room, he was sitting at a table in the far corner of the library, surrounded by stacks and stacks of textbooks, about ready to kill himself.
Okay, so that may have been a bit dramatic. But, here he was, one of five people buried this deep in the stacks, and he was not happy about having to spend quality time with textbooks.
Quality time. He snorted at the thought. He wasn't actually spending much time at all reading. He had collected them from the shelves and then, deciding that he deserved a break, he had drafted out his plans for the following weekend's post-Quidditch-match party. Then he had opened one book, read a sentence, written the sentence down (because if he had learned one thing from spending time with Lysander, it was that every good student took notes), and then dropped his forehead to the book, hoping for some magical transference of knowledge from the pages to his brain. After five minutes he decided that wasn't working and lifted his head.
He read the one line copied out on his paper: "The study of Transfiguration is one of the most difficult in the whole of the magical world."
"No, shit," he complained to his parchment.
"What?"
He glanced over his shoulder and saw a vaguely familiar freckled girl sitting two tables over from him. She only had one book in front of her, a thick text lying open, and she was looking at him through hazy blue eyes. The sight of her brought the taste of Firewhiskey forcefully to his tongue and he finally placed her: Lucy Weasley; blonde; Ravenclaw; sixth year (he was ninety percent sure); and award-winning cock-blocker (one-hundred-seventy percent positive).
"Sorry?" he said. Just because the girl had destroyed what would undoubtedly have been the best night of his life a year and a half before didn't mean that he needed to be rude to her.
"You just said, 'No, shit'," Lucy pointed out. "You weren't talking to me?"
It also didn't mean that he needed to be terribly polite. "No, shit, Weasley."
She shrugged her jagged shoulders up under her ears and returned to her book. He stared at her. She fiddled with her hair while she read, winding a blonde curl around her index finger, until it rubbed against a ring—it looked like a black circle surrounded by tarnished metal. "What's that?" he asked.
"What?" she asked.
"That ring," he said. "What is it?"
She held her hand to her chest for a moment, pale against the red of her jumper, and then extended it towards him so he could see that it was exactly what it looked like. A black ring surrounded by tarnished silver. "Does it mean something?"
"It's a Muggle thing. It's supposed to change colours, but it's never worked." She glanced around them; they were talking across the space of two empty tables and the other few people around them were shooting them affronted glares. "Any other questions?"
"Nope." Although he really did want to know why she was wearing a Muggle ring. And also, why that ring was supposed to change colours and why she had never Charmed it to fix it. But from the expression on her face, he didn't think she'd be too amenable to any more questions. So he turned back to his Transfiguration textbook and tried to focus.
Luckily, a few minutes later, another distraction arrived. This one came in the form of a Slytherin sixth year, Samson Parkinson, who was a year advanced at Potions and had once told Lorcan to "Fuck off" during a lesson and hadn't even gotten reprimanded for it.
Samson didn't glance at Lorcan, though. He strode past his table and collapsed at Lucy's. Lorcan stopped breathing so he could hear.
"Weasley," Samson said. Lorcan tensed. What if the bloke was upset at Lucy for something; what if he attacked her in the middle of the library?
"Parkinson," Lucy responded. She didn't sound nervous. Lorcan wished he could crane his neck around to look at her, but he didn't want to be too obvious.
"You know everyone's looking for you again? James just came running down to the dungeon to grab Al and Lily, even though Al's supposed to be training for Quidditch and Lily was helping Eliot out with some stupid prank they've got planned."
"So?" Lucy sounded annoyed now, although Lorcan didn't really see what was annoying about her family looking for her. It just meant she was loved.
"So, all of Slytherin House is currently pretty pissed at you. I'm not telling you this as a threat or anything. I'm just saying, if you could go tell your cousins that you were in the library and that they need to stop freaking out every time they can't find you, that'd be great."
"I've told them," Lucy muttered. "They don't listen, Sam." Lorcan heard movement and he imagined Lucy standing.
"Or, actually," Samson responded softly, "looks like Potter's found you."
"Shit," Lucy fell back into her chair. Lorcan stared as a furious James wound his way between the shelves, his hands in his pockets and his hazel eyes pissed. Samson hurried past Lorcan's table, nodding to James as he made for the exit. Potter didn't respond.
He stopped in front of Lucy's table and this time Lorcan gave into his need to turn around; after all, everyone else in the library was staring at the two cousins, Lucy sitting and looking up at James, her eyes calm although Lorcan noticed that she was playing with the ring on her index finger. From the set of James's shoulders, Lorcan thought he was probably ready to spit fire.
"You promised, Lucy." He sounded weary.
"What?"
"That you'd come to Hogsmeade with me and Rose and Roxy to get Lily's birthday gift. Where've you been?"
"Oh, shit. James, I forgot, I swear I didn't mean to." Lorcan had never seen any of the Weasleys unarmed the way Lucy seemed just then, and he narrowed his eyes, trying to figure her out. She was too erratic for him.
"Sure, Luce. Just like you 'forgot' that you were meant to be helping Roxy with Charms last week and that you were going to take Hugo to Hogsmeade last weekend and that your parents' anniversary was last Saturday. You know what?" He squared his shoulders and Lorcan could feel an electric charge in the air. "You've got a serious problem, Lucy. You act like you don't belong here, like you're waiting for something better, like we all mean nothing to you. And maybe you don't and maybe we don't mean a thing but Merlin, you're still family. Are you just too selfish to see what that means?"
That, Lorcan thought, seemed a bit harsh. He couldn't see Lucy's face; James hid her from his line of sight, but her intake of breath was enough to tell Lorcan that her cousin's words had hurt her.
"Stop looking at me like that." James turned and began to move toward the exit, and then faced her and spat, "Your parents really fucked up when they sent you to Muggle school. You never really left, did you? Still reading Muggle books and dreaming of a Muggle life, aren't you?"
He didn't expect an answer. And that was good, because Lucy was in no state to provide one. She had her head down, her fingers dug into her scalp beneath all that blonde. She looked hurt and broken.
Lorcan sent a tripping hex after James, but the bastard barely stumbled. It wasn't that Lorcan cared anything for Lucy Weasley, it was just...no one should ever have been able to make anyone feel as small as James had made her feel.
After a few minutes of stunned silence in the library, broken only by Lucy's sharp breaths, Lorcan stood, leaving his books and note(s) behind him. He needed to find Rose or Hugo. They'd be able to help him.
vii. seventeen possibilities, one reality
(October, 2021)
Lucy had given James a week. Not because she felt he deserved one, but because she was too afraid of facing him. He had been a bastard—nearly the entire school agreed with her there, including the entire population of Slytherin and Ravenclaw—but he had also been honest. Lucy was scared of other truths he might release, more scalding honesty.
So she gave him a week, and then she approached him in the Great Hall at breakfast, partially so there would be witnesses if he decided to curse her, and partially so that the whole school would know how their fight (hopefully) ended, and therefore would (hopefully) stop gossiping about her.
She sat down at the Gryffindor table across from him. He looked at her until she finally said, "You were right."
"I was mean."
"Well, yeah. You were. But you were also right. I am selfish and I haven't been there for you or for anyone else, really. I'm sorry. I will try to do better."
James nodded. "Okay."
"Okay."
Lucy stood and turned to leave the Great Hall, but from somewhere down the Gryffindor table someone shouted, "Merlin, Potter. Apologise!"
"I was getting there, Scamander," James shot back. Lucy hesitated and looked over her shoulder at her cousin. "I'm sorry for what I said, Lu."
Lucy shrugged. "It's over." She hadn't forgotten, it was unlikely she'd really forgive, but she could say she'd let it go. She left the Great Hall before meddlesome Lorcan Scamander could interfere again, or before one of her other cousins decided to jump into the discussion. As far as she was concerned, it was finished.
Although she'd told James that she would change, she didn't do much differently over the next few weeks. She still spent most of her time alone, with books, but she did find herself in the library more often than not. She also made sure to bother one or two of her cousins for at least an hour every night.
One morning in early October, Lucy came into the library to find her usual table occupied; Lorcan Scamander was bent over a Defence textbook. Lucy shook her head as she passed him; considering the amount of time Lorcan had spent in the library since the start of school, she would have expected him to have top marks in his classes, but Sam had told her that he was mostly hopeless at Potions still. She wasn't sure what he did with the stacks of textbooks that surrounded him daily, but she was fairly certain he wasn't reading them.
She went to the one bookshelf in the whole library that held Muggle novels and tugged Her Fearful Symmetry from its place. She found a seat at a different table, shot one last glare at Lorcan for good measure, and opened the book.
It fell to a page near the middle, where someone had shoved a slip of paper deep against the spine. She tugged at the paper and smoothed it on the table, surprised to see that there was writing there. The handwriting was unfamiliar, slim and slanted, undoubtedly a boy's. She narrowed her eyes to read the one line: I'm not the man you think I am.
The wording was familiar. As she mouthed the words, she felt the beginnings of a rhythm beneath the movement of her lips, like she ought to be singing them. She leaned out of her chair and rummaged in her bag, searching for the iPod she had spent all of second year Charming to work in the magical world. Her hand finally slid against its plastic case. She pulled it out and untangled the earphones, spinning the dial so the songs whirled past on the screen.
Of course. The Smiths. Sticking her earphones in her ears she pressed on "Pretty Girls Make Graves" and read the slip of paper as the lyrics burst into her ears. I'm not the man you think I am.
Who else at Hogwarts would have been familiar with The Smiths? A Muggle-born, clearly. But then, who other than a Muggle-born would have been reading Her Fearful Symmetry?
Lucy flipped in the book and was surprised to see that another slip of paper was taped to the centre of the page. It had the same handwriting on it, and she read: L—I'm not the man you think I am.
Another page. Another piece of paper. Lucy—I'm not the man you think I am.
Again. Lucy—I'm not the man you think I am. –Lorcan
Lucy glanced over at Scamander to see him staring into his book in apparent concentration; the first time she'd actually seen him concentrate in the library. She scowled. "Hey," she hissed across the emptiness between them.
He glanced up and attempted an innocent blink, but she had spent summers with Lily and Louis—she didn't fall for false innocence.
"What the hell is this?" She shook Her Fearful Symmetry so sharply that paper fell like confetti from between the pages, scattering the table with one line from a Muggle song, repeated over and over and over.
"What, Weasley?" Lorcan stood, swinging his bag over his shoulder, and approached her table. He leaned over the slips of paper, like he needed to see them, and then he lifted his gaze to hers and she saw blue and seriousness and he said, "I am not the man you think I am."
And then he left.
Lucy stared after him. As far as mysterious went, Lorcan had it down. Or maybe it was batshit crazy.
She looked at the paper and then at the book. The real question was, how had he known that she was going to read this book next? It wasn't as if her progression through the novels Hogwarts kept followed any pattern. She got up and moved toward the shelves, pulled War and Peace off, because if he had truly wanted to ensure that she saw the note, he'd have to have put them in every single Muggle novel.
War and Peace opened to somewhere near the end. Lucy read: Lucy Weasley—I'm not the man you think I am. –Lorcan Scamander
Batshit crazy. Definitely.
She replaced War and Peace and banished all but one of the quotes with a wave of her wand. She slipped the remaining one into her pocket and reached for Her Fearful Symmetry. She took it back to Ravenclaw Tower and climbed into her four-poster, tugging shut the curtains and trying to focus long enough to read. But her mind kept wandering back to the note. Or more accurately, to the why of the note.
Maybe Scamander wanted her to know him. It wouldn't have been that strange, she supposed. Everyone wants to be known, really known, by someone, at some point in their lives.
She tugged a notebook from beneath her pillow and a quill from beneath her duvet and brushed the sharpened point over her cheek as she considered Scamander's writing. I'm not the man you think I am.
Who did she even think he was, though? He had made a pretty fierce assumption, in guessing that she even thought about him at all, let alone that she had formed some sort of vague and incorrect impression of his person in her mind.
But she must have. Because the thought of Lorcan Scamander made her tongue feel heavy, made an unpleasant feeling squirm in her gut and a bitterness swarm her taste-buds. So, Lorcan Scamander.
She scratched out his name at the top of a blank page in her notebook and then wrote: Lorcan Scamander is:
-A Gryffindor
-A man-whore
-Revising (or attempting to) for the first time in his life
-A partier
-A twin
-An eavesdropper
She really didn't think about him that much, or she didn't think that much about him, whichever. She thought he was attractive, of course, but the messiness of his blond hair and the blueness of his eyes and the angle of his chin and the fit of his jeans didn't really factor into what she thought of him. They were just facts.
Lucy tore the page out of her notebook and considered for a moment how to get it to Lorcan. It would have been easy enough to get into Gryffindor and hand it to him herself, or to give it to Rose to give to him, but both of those options seemed unoriginal, and Lorcan had been creative in getting his note(s) to her.
The next morning at breakfast, she slipped behind Lorcan at the Gryffindor table and very carefully Charmed the list into the pocket of his loose-hanging robes. He glanced back at her when she brushed past him to whisper something into Rose's ear, but he didn't seem aware that she'd responded to his note.
They didn't interact for several days, and then Lucy opened Her Fearful Symmetry in her bed one night and another paper fell out. This time: Does it mean that you don't love me anymore?
She blinked. Merlin, the boy was insufferable. When had she ever implied that she loved him? When had she ever implied that she loved anyone, for that matter? The words were lyrics, of course they were. The Beatles, she thought.
She could have ignored him. She knew that was an option, and a good one. But for some reason she really wanted to respond to him. She felt like something was happening, something in a life that had been an exhausting repetition of being lost and getting found. And so she pulled her iPod out and scrolled through the songs until she settled upon a response. If I needed someone to love / You're the one that I'd be thinking of.
Lies were okay, she thought. In this realm of notes and secrets and silences, lies were probably better than truths. And so she folded the paper into a paper crane and sent Lorcan a lie from The Beatles.
viii. find a way, go away
(November, 2021)
Lorcan thought about Lucy's response for a while. He wasn't sure whether she was making fun of him, or whether she meant it, or whether she just thought that they could get to know each other better. He finally decided that she wanted to get to know him, and so on Friday morning he dropped a furl of waterproof paper into her coffee cup. It swum in the dark liquid until she fished it out with her fork, glared at him from across the Great Hall, and mouthed, We can go wherever we please as she read from the paper. She slipped it into her pocket and didn't look at him again for the rest of breakfast.
But she hadn't incinerated it so he considered it a success, overall.
He was sitting in Gryffindor common room that night, trying and failing to read a chapter for Transfiguration, when the portrait hole opened and Lucy climbed through, her skinny jean clad legs appearing first, then the green of her jumper and the point of her chin and the blue of her eyes and the shiny blonde of her hair and Lorcan felt curious as to why he'd never really noticed all of the pretty that made up Lucy Weasley.
He expected her to cross the room to the fire, where James was sitting with Rose and a few others, arguing about Quidditch. Instead, she walked straight toward him.
"Ready?" She was smirking; she looked devilish.
"For what?" Lorcan closed his book.
She pulled out the slip of paper from that morning and let it spiral into his lap. He glanced down at it. "To go wherever we please?"
"Yes. Unless you're in the habit of making empty promises."
"No." He dropped the book on the floor and stood up. "Where should we go?"
"I was thinking Hogsmeade, unless you've got somewhere else in mind?"
"How?" he asked. He had been expecting her to say North Tower or maybe the Forbidden Forest, but she just raised her pale eyebrows at him and headed toward the portrait hole. After a moment, he followed.
She was already halfway to the corner at the far end of the corridor, and he hurried to catch up to her. Without looking at him, she asked, "Haven't you ever snuck out before?"
"I've never really needed to escape."
"Bullshit," she replied. She stopped. They were standing in front of the statue of the one-eyed witch, and she tugged out her wand. "Everyone needs to escape, sometimes." She tapped against the statue and said, "Dissendium."
The statue opened and Lucy climbed inside, "Follow in a second," she told him, and the last thing he saw was the bright white of her smile before she disappeared.
He hopped down the slide a few seconds later, and landed at the bottom. "You're lucky I trust you; otherwise I'd be running for my life right about now," he told her as she held out a hand to help him to his feet.
"Yeah, yeah, because clearly I'm the mastermind behind some kidnapping group." She started walking down the dark tunnel and only stopped when she didn't hear his footsteps behind her. "Coming?"
"Where, exactly, are you taking me?"
"Hogsmeade," she said slowly. "Like I said."
"But how do you know...I mean, where on earth did you find out about this?"
Lucy shrugged. "I've got my sources. Come on, Lorcan. It's a long walk, and I'm cold."
If he had been a nicer person, he might have offered her his sweatshirt. But he wasn't, and so he just followed her as quickly as he could, squinting into the dark corners for basilisks or giant spiders or death eaters—you never knew what sort of thing might find its way into the world beneath the earth.
They finally came out into the dusty cellar of some building, and Lucy muttered, "Honeydukes," when he looked around in confusion.
She snuck them up through the shop and out into the starlit street, where Lorcan breathed regularly for the first time since she'd appeared in Gryffindor. "That is the most uncomfortable walk I've ever taken."
"It wasn't a walk, Lorcan. We were going somewhere."
"So, what, walks don't have destinations?"
"Nope. Walks are aimless; journeys have destinations."
"So this is a journey?" She had started off down the street again, and Lorcan lengthened his stride to catch up.
"Unless you'd like to go off into the hills." She nodded up the street, toward where the Shrieking Shack stood in all its dilapidated tragedy, toward the mountain paths that had featured in the stories that made up both of their childhoods.
"No, journeys are good."
"Okay, then." She took a right into the Three Broomsticks. They stood by the bar and ordered two Butterbeers, which Lorcan insisted on paying for, and then slid into a booth in the far corner.
"Do you just come here whenever you're bored at school?"
"Sometimes." Lucy sipped at her drink. "It's nice to be somewhere different. Other times, I just don't want to deal with family drama." She shook her head. "Of course, that always ends up causing more drama. I really should know better."
Lorcan remembered James's anger and the interruption to his and Dom's snogging sesh nearly two years before. "Yeah, you should."
She rolled her eyes. "So, do you just spend all your time at Hogwarts? What d'you do?'
"I go to classes and hang out with people and take wagers on Quidditch matches. Like any sane person."
"Oh, right. Like spending seven years tucked away in a castle is sane."
He shrugged. "I never really had a place before Hogwarts. I travelled around the world with my parents, and so I never settled anywhere. It's nice to stay still for a while."
"Merlin, that sounds heavenly."
"What? Travelling?" It was like she hadn't even listened to a word he said after that.
"Yeah. Getting to know the world in such an intimate way, never needing to find a place, to belong. I must be such a relief."
"It wasn't," he told her, tightening his grip on the Butterbeer bottle. "It was mostly disappointing. We were looking for all these creatures my parents think exist, but after I turned five and realised that I'd never actually seen a nargle, I understood that they were absolutely mad. It took Lysander longer—too long—to come to the same conclusion." He didn't know why he was sharing all of this with her. She hadn't done anything to deserve his secrets. And maybe that was why. She hadn't really made any sign that she wanted to know him, and so he'd decided that she was going to know him. Or maybe the soft blue of her eyes in the dim light of the bar made him want to talk. Or maybe he just wanted her to see that she had it all wrong. "It was just lonely, Lucy. It seemed like there was no one, no one in the whole world, who I could connect with. I absolutely hated it."
Her eyes hadn't left his. "And then you came to Hogwarts," she prompted.
"And then I came to Hogwarts, and I found people who didn't even know about nargles, people who dreamed for nothing more than perfect marks or Quidditch wins or lots and lots of sex," her mouth quirked in a half-smile and he half-smiled back, "and it was so much easier to live here. I was so much happier."
"Are you still?" she asked. He blinked. He hadn't anticipated that question.
"Sure. I mean, what would have changed from then until now?"
"You could be bored. Bored with people who only dream about the present, who don't wish for impossibilities and shit like that."
He shrugged. "I still don't see the point in wishing for something impossible. I'm not bored."
She raised an eyebrow. "Okay."
They fell silent as they sipped their drinks, and Lorcan led the way back to Hogwarts, glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was still there, because she was so quiet that she might have vanished into the night without him noticing. But she stayed with him until they reached the corner where she took a right for Ravenclaw.
He said, "Later, Weasley."
"See you, Scamander." Like a promise.
ix. look, it's not that hard
(December, 2021)
Lucy smiled at Lorcan when she passed him in the corridors. She nodded and said, "Hey," when she sat with James or Rose or any of the other Gryffindors who occasionally claimed her at mealtimes. But she didn't say anything, and she didn't pass him any notes. She noticed that he almost always had the earbuds from his iPod in his ears, and that his friends occasionally shouted to him to "Turn the fucking thing off," but that he often didn't listen to them.
Lily had told her that Lorcan had come up to her back in September and said that Rose had told him that she was the person to see about Muggle technology. Lily did have sources—Lucy was nearly positive they were illegal—for getting Muggle devices, from mobile phones to electric shavers. But it was Lucy who had sorted out the complex charms to make iPods and mp3s work in the magical world. She had passed the spells to her cousins, and for a while only members of the Weasley/Potter clan had had iPods.
Lucy wasn't sure what Lorcan had said to Lily to get her to help him get an iPod and to teach him how to enhance it, but whatever it was, it must have been convincing, because Lorcan's iPod was fancier than Lucy's, and it must have held at least five times the songs. She wasn't sure why he had bothered Lily for one, but she did wonder what he was listening to all the time. Obviously he had The Smiths and The Beatles, but they didn't have enough songs to keep him occupied twenty-four hours a day. (Well, okay, maybe he didn't spend every second with headphones in his ears. But it was close enough.)
She wasn't sure whether she wanted to know because of her obsession with Muggle music or because she couldn't seem to keep her mind off of him; ever since that night in Hogsmeade, she'd found her mind wandering to what he'd said and how serious and honest he'd looked. She thought about the light in his eyes when he talked about Hogwarts and the twist of his lips when he mentioned his family, about the way his hands had looked as they tightened on his bottle of Butterbeer. She thought about the devastating way he walked, like he had places to be but also like he was seeing the world around him, seeing the cobblestones and the lit windows and the way mist furled around the lampposts, and like all of that seeing and knowledge and purpose settled into his stride. And the way he kept checking over his shoulder, to make sure she was still there, and how he smiled when he saw that she was. Her mind kept running over all of that, and she had never felt so...attached to anyone before, she'd never thought about anyone else so much.
She had no idea where to go next. Or even if it would go anywhere next. So she acknowledged him but she didn't acknowledge that they'd spent any time together.
The second week in December, several weeks after their journey to Hogsmeade, Lucy had pulled Skylight Confessions from the shelves of Muggle books in the library and flipped to the first page to find a note tucked into the spine. She tugged the slip of parchment from the book and smoothed it on the table. Take these broken wings and learn to fly. Meet me on the Quidditch pitch at midnight.
"Oh, fuck."
She couldn't have really ignored it. Well, she could have, but Lorcan was sitting several tables over; she'd seen him when she came into the library, and he'd noticed that she'd gotten his note. She could have just gone over and told him, "No," no questions asked, no opportunity for argument.
But then there was this very small part of her that wanted to know him. And that part was shockingly significant and also apparently willing to make an arse of the whole of her. And so Lucy bit her lip and tucked the note in her bag, flipped to the front of the book and ignored the feel of Lorcan's eyes on her back.
She met him on the Quidditch pitch, and he looked mildly surprised. "I didn't think you'd come."
She sighed. "I weighed my options, but I wasn't getting any sleep anyway, so I figured I might as well come out here and die." He smirked; she could see it in the lights from their wands. "Also, I really like that song. So I couldn't just ignore it."
"It's positively brilliant." Lorcan like this, Lorcan enthusiastic and anti-cynical, was rare and it was lovely. "I just love The Beatles. I don't know how I lived my whole life without Muggle music."
"It's something I wonder about the wizarding world every day. Like, how the fuck does everyone respond to when the sun comes out after it's been raining? They can't sing 'Here Comes the Sun', so what can they do?"
"Exactly. There're so many emotions we don't even know how to voice, without that sort of music."
"It's a wonder that wizards even got anywhere in the world, without knowing about The Beatles," Lucy responded, and Lorcan nodded before changing the subject.
"So you know why we're out here, don't you?"
"Unfortunately."
He continued on like he hadn't heard her, "Because I heard from someone—possibly Lily, but please don't kill her—that you've never learned how to fly. That you 'hate it.'" Lucy shifted from her right foot to her left. "Now, I do not pretend to be any sort of flying master. I do, however, have a decent understanding of the concept of flight, and I am quite a capable flier, and therefore, Lucy Weasley, tonight I am going to teach you how to fly."
"But I do not want to learn how to fly," she told him, because it had to be said, even if it would change nothing.
"That, my dear, is complete and utter bullshit. Everyone wants to fly, some people are just too afraid. And because I know that you are a brave Gryffindor at heart, you're going to learn." He leaned down and picked up two broomsticks from the darkness of the grass beneath them. "I borrowed Lysander's broom, because it's better than the school ones and will probably not buck you off."
"Probably?"
"Remember, Luce. Gryffindor at heart." Lorcan handed her one of the broomsticks and demonstrated the first lesson from their first year flying course, which Lucy had made herself sick to get out of. He commanded, "Come on, Lucy, put it down, hold out your hand like this, and say, 'Up'."
She rolled her eyes, dropped the broom unceremoniously to the ground, and demanded, "Up." It didn't move.
"See, it doesn't want me to learn to fly, either. Want to just go on a walk in the Forest?"
"Honestly, you'll brave the bloodthirsty centaurs at midnight, but you won't get on a fucking broomstick?" He sounded upset, and Lucy felt suddenly guilty. It was stupid, because he should have known better, and anyway, it was his fault that they were both out here on the coldest night in December. His fault that their fingers were purple in gloves and their breaths were meeting and crystallizing in the air. His fault that two broomsticks lay among the frost-coated grass. His. But she felt guilty.
"I'm sorry, Lorcan. I just don't understand why this is important to you."
"Because," the word was white in the night, "it's one of the best feelings in the world. I would have thought that you would love it, that you would live for it—it is the ultimate escape. Once you learn how to fly, once you feel the air all around you, once you run your hand through rainclouds and feel snow before it touches the ground—once you've got all that—you can never be tied down again. You can always get away."
The way he described it, it sounded better than heaven. But Lucy had seen too many Quidditch matches, too many arguments over flying between her cousins and her sister, too many bruises and far too many broken bones to be swayed that easily. "Why do you like it so much, then? I thought you liked being settled."
"Well, I'm mostly in it for the pickup Quidditch matches. But, you know, there's more to it than that."
He was trying so hard. Lucy sighed. "Fine." She held out her gloved hand again, said, "Up," and then the broomstick wavered its way up against her palm.
"Hey, good job!" Lorcan sounded almost as surprised as she felt.
"Thank you, sir. Is that all for tonight?"
"Oh, no. I've got you out here, I'm not letting you go until you've gotten off the ground."
"What if I come falling back down?"
"Have a little faith, Weasley." He mounted his broom and demonstrated the proper way to kick off from the ground, so she wouldn't go sliding off the front or the back end of her borrowed broomstick as soon as her toes cleared the grass.
She followed his example, her trainers heavy, her toes stretching stretching until the broomstick was so far from the ground that her toes couldn't touch anymore, and she was floating, her feet inches from the grass, and Lorcan was just a dark shape looping around in the air above her.
She gripped the handle tightly; she felt sweat bloom against her palms and the wood, and she wondered whether Lysander would notice the sweat streaks when Lorcan returned his broomstick. And then Lorcan shouted, "That's not flying, Luce, that's floating. It's easier to keep your balance if you're actually moving."
She leaned forward slightly and lifted the handle a little, and she was jerking up, up, up, and then she hovered opposite Lorcan. He grinned at her. "See? Not that hard."
"Not like that was actually flying."
"You're in the air, right?" She nodded. "You're moving, right?" She shrugged. "You were moving," he told her. "because you got from down there to up here. And therefore you are flying, Lucy Weasley. You are flying."
And then, finally, she smiled at him.
It wasn't over, of course. He kept her out there in the freezing air for another hour, and she fell off once, but he caught her before she hit the ground and the fall—she'd never expected the feeling of falling to be so appealing, but the way the air pushed against her and rushed around her and the complete lack of control she had, well, it wasn't unpleasant. And so she got back on her broomstick and by the end of the hour Lorcan told her, "You're doing good, kid."
"I am, aren't I?"
She'd never known she wanted to fly, but Merlin, now she did.