Title: Just A Silly Tradition (1/1)
Author: DMitchell1985
Beta: Silvarbelle
Summary: Cadence Tucket knows there is nothing to the ridiculous practice of kissing one's significant other on New Year's Eve, but as with everything, there might be an exception to her rule.
Rating: PG - a very light PG at that for a mention of someone's hand up someone else's shirt. -snerk- Oh, there's also a minor mention of slash (Sirius/James) at the end and canon het (James/Lily) for any who are squicked by those.
Genre: General
Disclaimer: I own no canon details of the Harry Potter series.
Author's Notes: Yes, there are a couple of Original Female Characters. No, they are not trying to seduce anyone we know.
There aren't any huge spoilers for the series present. This is with the exception of Slughorn and his treatment of certain students, but it's not as detailed as it could be with student names and so forth.
Thanks to my lovely, Belle!
Marauder's era/Book Five fiction!
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The New Year's Kiss has been exchanged by lust-drunk couples, who have been just that - filthy drunk, for as long as Cadence Tucket can recall. She knows every nuance of the widely-accepted "knowledge" surrounding the hallowed superstition as surely as she knows that porcupine quills must be added only after a cauldron has been removed from an open flame while brewing a Boil Cure Potion.
Although Cadence has witnessed many a tittering pair, young and utterly decrepit - to her adolescent eyes, desperately clutch one another as one insignificant gong of household clocks the world over simultaneously lay the old year to rest to welcome the new one, she knows the truth about this so-called magical moment. It's a fraud, plain and simple. There's no getting around this truth she has come to realize, and she wholly wishes that everyone else would see it, too.
So much so, that the act of walking amongst the empty-headed babblings of an unthinkable number of overly hopeful female students, who all seem to disregard the fact that plenty of young ladies, like themselves, have shared "forever" kisses to disappointing results, has caused her to randomly burst out into frequent huffs of irritation and acidic remarks as New Year's Eve drew near. Not even her best of friends are spared snide retorts to their inquiries about whom she plans to smooch at the stroke of midnight, which has led to tense walks across the Ravenclaw common room every time she returns from a meal or an afternoon class.
It came as no surprize to Cadence that she was currently sharing a pinched silence with Angelica Pascal, her supposed best friend, while they stiffly shuffled across a courtyard towards the castle to endure their dreaded Potions lesson with Professor Slughorn. Given that the last conversation concerning the coming holiday they had shared in Herbology had included several choice names and quite a few phrases that would have lost their House numerous points if they were heard by a teacher, it is the best Cadence had any right to hope would happen between them.
She decided to venture an olive branch anyway. What truly was the point in remaining upset over such an inane tradition?
"It's not that I hate you or anything," she began, cautiously. "It's just that everyone is going on about this Sunday as if it is the most important moment in their lives. We have O.W.L.s coming up this year, and the only thing anyone can think about is which boy they want to kiss. It's ridiculous!"
"It's not," came Angelica's even reply.
"It is! The whole lot of you should hear the way you sound prattling on about it." Cadence scrunched up her face and batted her eyelashes in the most sickening manner she could think of as she gripped her schoolbooks to her chest.
"Oh! I just can't wait for Jimmy to kiss me! We're so in love! We're going to be together forever!"
Cadence laughed at her remarkably accurate impression of Marie Mayfield and grinned happily at the bemused snort it received in reply from Angelica.
"That's exactly how they all sound, you know."
"Some of them, maybe. I wouldn't behave that way if Louis paid me a hundred Galleons to do so." Angelica glared at Cadence out the corner of her eye, daring her to say different.
Clearly getting the hint, Cadence refrained from pointing out all of the girlish pouting and Perfect Kissing Practice that had routinely become part of Angelica's nightly sleeping preparations before going to bed every night for the past two weeks. Instead, she busied herself with an often replayed musing that would have her betting Galleons Angelica probably dreamt about cuddling up to the pathetic excuse of a boyfriend her friend had the nerve to call her "lover," as though it made their relationship seem more exotic and mature.
She decided to attempt a different tactic.
Stepping around a group of Slytherins that had congregated on the stairs leading into one the castle's many open passages to stare and point at a battered copy of some Quidditch rumor rag or another, Cadence took a breath and started again.
"I've seen tons of Muggles in the neighborhood I live in kiss one another on New Year's Eve, only to break up the next day or six months later. I'm not saying that it's not nice to have someone around, but to base an entire future's worth of a relationship on a silly old superstition doesn't make any sense to me. You can see that, right?"
"I guess," Angelica grumbled, as she veered around a slow-moving Gryffindor group who were laughing uproariously at something a tall boy with long black hair had said. She had not heard every word of the conversation, but the few she had managed to catch over Cadence's explanation, coupled with the disgusted look on the face of only girl in the group told her that it had been either obscene, disgusting, or both. Knowing Sirius Black, it was probably both.
Angelica gave the group one last reproving look over her shoulder and sniffed her annoyance at the way James Potter and Lily Evans always seemed to have their arms about one another's waists these days.
Cadence noticed her friend's disdainful regard and prodded her in the side to make her turn a corner that would lead them to the entrance hall.
". . .not only that, they all make this big fuss about "soul mates," too," Cadence finished.
Coming back to herself, and the conversation she had already been involved in before spotting the motley collection of friends she had never known personally, Angelica gave a half-hearted shrug. "I don't know. It's still just sort of magical to me. And the girls. You'd know what we were talking about if you had a lover, too."
Cadence snorted contemptuously, but did not manage to do more than that ere their conversation was interrupted yet again.
"What's just sort of magical to you?" Sirius Black had pulled level with the pair and thrown his arms across both girls' necks companionably, as though they were old friends.
Cadence shrugged Sirius' arm off, only to receive a thoroughly amused look in return.
"What's just sort of magical to you?" he repeated, his regard firmly planted on Angelica's profile.
Angelica glanced over at Cadence, who was giving her best stony expression to the jovial interloper, before responding.
"The New Year's Eve Kiss. You get to seal who you're going to be with forever with one shared kiss at the stroke of midnight. It's awfully romantic, don't you think?"
Sirius laughed in his throat. "Sure I do. Now why don't the two of us practice for the big event?" He wiggled his eyebrows in a comically suggestive manner.
Angelica shoved Sirius' arm away and scowled at him in one motion. "I will have you know, Sirius Black, that I am already spoken for. I suggest that you go find someone else to slobber on at midnight."
With this, she offered her elbow to Cadence so that they could make their exit together.
Cadence's expression changed to one of incredulity. "You actually buy into that junk?"
The comment was aimed at Sirius, but Lily spoke up first. "Of course he doesn't. He's simply out to get a free kiss from anyone who'll give it to him."
Sirius opened his mouth to argue, but Lily spoke over his dying protests to defend himself.
"But I do," she gazed up at James lovingly, though Cadence would have considered it to be more of a simper than anything else.
"I heard you before. What you were saying about the Muggles and the Kiss. I once asked Madame Puddifoot about the tradition and why people carry on with it. She told me that it does in fact work if you kiss the person you are meant to be with, i and /i are of wizarding blood. It's supposed to be some sort of old magic that bonds couples together. At least that's what she told me between sighs and every other cup of tea she poured."
Lily squeezed James' hand and her grin widened. "And, she's right, you know." Her focus shifted back to Cadence after a moment that felt more than a tad awkward for everyone not involved in an obvious soul connection.
Remus Lupin coughed discreetly when Peter Pettigrew stared at a wall in embarrassment, and the air lightened minutely.
Cadence felt a familiar rush of fluid shoot from her stomach to her throat upon taking in the scene. It was bad enough that she had to hear this nonsense in her own common room and dormitory, and she could see no reason why she had to endure it in the school hallways as well, especially before Potions. The lesson would be bad enough to sit through with Slughorn's boastings and the constant preening he subjected his favorites to. The last thing Cadence needed was to have yet another mental image of sappy love birds cooing to one another in wistful voices and fancying themselves to be spectacularly romantic.
"Yeah, I'm sure. Come on, Angelica," was all that she said in response as she urged her friend down the stairs to the dungeons two at a time.
She clearly heard the sound of charmed laughter in their wake, and Cadence knew that she was right. Lily Evans and James Potter would be history before the year was out.
-
Sirius rolled over in the moth-eaten sheets of his childhood bed and watched the wizarding photograph in his hand. He recalled the time when this bed had been relegated to a dusty corner in the attic one summer when he was fifteen, and had been caught with his hand up a Muggleborn's shirt in the family's formal dinning room. He had never heard his mother use such language in front of him. Not since the time he had accidentally on purpose set her favorite dress robes on fire at the age of ten years. He'd done it to punish her for slapping him across the face after he suggested that they invite the children in their Muggle neighborhood over for dinner one night.
He had begun to recall countless conversations and events that had long been forgotten to the passing of time and a lifetime sucked away by Azkaban as he squandered endless hours at number 12.
He had even thought back to a conversation between two Ravenclaws he had invited himself into back in his seventh year. One had been insisting to the other that New Year's kisses were a pointless affair, while the other half-listened and went on about how it was all so "magical." He had not been able to stop himself from laughing then, and laughing now, as a result of simply observing the pair. How could anyone take one gesture so seriously, and hold a lengthy conversation about it to boot?
Though he knew of the tradition and had put it into great practice, he had long ago come to be of the opinion that whether it was true or not, a kiss was still a kiss, and it should be enjoyed for what it was. After all, how could it be true? He had never failed to reserve his midnight exchange for James, up until the time he started dating Lily Evans, in whatever secreted location chosen for the year, and where exactly had it gotten him? Absolutely nowhere.
The superstition had not kept Sirius with the one he had loved, or at least the one he always thought he did. But there they were, Lily and James. James and Lily. They had shared the same moment that he and James had for years, which ultimately availed nothing for their relationship except the occasional uneasy silence, but that same exchange somehow sealed what was to be for James and Lily.
Lily had become a Potter, and Sirius a best man.
A jealous part of Sirius still ate at him, even though he knew that things happened as they were intended to. Why else would he lie alone, yet would feel comforted by the knowledge of his godson who was so much like his parents? If things were not as they should be, was not it possible that he would be the one dead instead of Lily and have never met the godson he loved so?
He mused that that would more than likely be the case, and that perhaps old Madame Puddifoot knew what she was talking about.
A clock chimed midnight somewhere in the house, and Sirius could hear Buckbeak shifting his feathers about in his sleep. He gazed at the photograph in his grip once more that showed James as a young man toasting some celebration or another with a bottle of butterbeer and lopsided grin upon his face.
Sirius hesitated for a moment before silently placing a kiss on the photograph and setting it back in the drawer of the nightstand that sat beside him.
He rolled over onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, his eyes unseeing. This was how it was meant to be. Sirius had his godson, and Lily and James were together – forever.
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The End