So I haven't written Rose/Scorpius for a very long time... very very long... over two years, actually :P. Mainly because I've been trying to run around and do different characters, different scenarios. But I was going through some quotes and I read a quote by L. and I suddenly knew what I wanted to write. This ISN'T part of my prompt-challenge that I've set myself, but it IS one of my favourite pairings, and I've decided to set it after Hogwarts because I never do stories after Hogwarts, but in some ways they have so much more potential and ability to be creative.

My Rose and my Scorpius here are kind of different to how I would normally write them, but I wanted to capture that feeling of recklessness and of wanting to do something rash, of being young and with all these possibilities in front of you and falling in love for the first time, knowing that you're meant to be with somebody... so you could call this an experiment, because I'm so used to writing teenagers that writing about people older than that is a bit beyond my comfort-zone, in a good way.

Also, haha, I totally jumped back onto the fluff-wagon.

Enjoy!

"I told you. You don't love someone because of their looks or their clothes or their car. You love them because they sing a song only your heart can understand."

― L.J. Smith

He remembers his nanny Delilah telling him about love, forcing him to listen even though he'd much rather be outside pretending to be an Auror. She was an old woman, with gray hair that curled so crazily around her head it made her look slightly mad, and with false teeth that she enjoyed popping out of her mouth to scare him when he wouldn't do as he was told.

"One day you'll meet somebody," she would intone, her voice scratchy sounding in the way older peoples' voices are, as though she had lived through many struggles and experienced many experiences - so much so that even her voice was tired. "One day you'll meet somebody and you'll do anything to be with them, Scorpius. You'll fall in love and you'll realise that it's the hardest and most simultaneously satisfying and unsatisfying thing in the world, and being with them will hurt you but being without them hurts more. Everything you do will remind you of them - there's no escape. You might turn your lip up at me now, but one day you'll be remembering my words and understanding them."

He had blinked up at her, confused and marginally annoyed. She had sounded crazy even then, years before she had been been lost in her own mind and diagnosed insane by the Healers at St. Mungo's. A lot of the time, when words tumbled out of her mouth, they made sense to only her - and today (at least in Scorpius's opinion) was one of those days when she made even less sense than usual.

"How do you know?" he had asked scornfully.

"We all meet somebody, boy," she called him 'boy' when he was being what she deemed particularly stupid. "But some of us don't realise it until it's too late."

There was a sad twinkle in her rheumy blue eyes, seeing something that he couldn't see. Scorpius really couldn't have cared less; he didn't care much for the batty old reflections that Delilah regularly inflicted upon him - he wanted to go outside in the sun and lose himself in his own imaginary world where he was the hero and the world would bow to him. He forgot the conversation, buried it in the back of his mind in favour of simpler, more ordinary things - because, really, who can ask a child to think of soul-mates and true love and regret when they'd rather enjoy themselves in the moment?

xXx

It's not until he's twenty-two and running around with dragons in Romania that he remembers that conversation, and it's really only by chance that he does. If he had chosen to walk down a different winding path to the little clutter of houses hosting the sanctuary volunteers, he would never have recalled the memory. Perhaps it would have stayed buried in the back of his mind forever, untapped and unneeded.

But that would have been a different life, and a different ending. As it so happens, the path Scorpius chose was the right path at the right time, and if he ever thinks back on it he wonders how it was that he managed to do that right, considering that he's mucked up so many other things in his young life.

He's seen her before. Of course he has. They went to Hogwarts together, they were in the same classes together, they graduated together - heck, they even trained as Aurors together for a year before he dropped out. So when he sees her walking up the winding, hilly path as he walks down it, he barely gives it a second thought.

"Scorpius?" she huffs at him, rather unattractively as she nears. Her cheeks are flushed pink from the exertion of the long walk, and her hair is stuck to her head, damp with sweat.

He gives her an amused smile. "What brings you here?"

Rose pauses in her hike, inhaling the air with a mixture of relief for a break and the simple need to vacuum more air into her aching lungs. "How on earth... do... you manage... every day?"

"Practice."

She nods vigorously, letting out sharp breath. "Huh, yeah. I didn't know you worked here."

"Only as a volunteer, and only for the past six months. Kind of didn't know what to do with my life, so Mother thought I ought to at least get some mountain air while I thought about it," Scorpius explains, running a hand through his hair. She's not changed much since he last saw her; still the fluffy red curls tied into a tight ponytail, and the multiple freckles scattered across her face and arms. It's a little different, he muses, seeing her here with the rolling grassy hills and occasional staggered mountains. She stands out more than she ever did at Hogwarts, where she slotted in with the numerous other Weasleys running around the school.

"Sounds like a good idea," Rose comments, detaching a damp curl from her face with a disgusted look. "I'm just here visiting Uncle Charlie for a bit - break from Auror training and all that. He asked me to help out, but I've got no clue what I should do - I mean, helping out with dragons is kind of like a specialised subject, isn't it?"

"More or less, but you don't have to know a lot to volunteer. All they ask is you're aware of the risks and you do a two-week training course; Charlie told me on my first day here that I'd learn pretty fast what not to do anyway," he grimaces, remembering Charlie introducing him to other volunteers and full-time workers, several of whom told him they had lost arms and legs, or been severely burned. Had there not been magic to heal them, some might have died.

A breeze wafts past them, and Rose sniffs slightly at the burning smell. "Guess I'll get used to that. Any accidents you've had?"

He laughs. "Yeah, nearly had my had taken off the other day by one of the orphan baby dragons. And they had to regrow a couple toes that I lost; although that was actually dropping something heavy and sharp on my foot. So that one was my fault."

Rose nods thoughtfully, her gaze drifting on upwards as she takes in the path that Scorpius has just walked down. It narrows as it gets to the top of the hill, covered by overgrown grass, scuffed dirt and scattered stones. As though steeling herself, she raises her eyebrows at him. "So, how long d'you reckon it'll take to get to the orphan sanctuary?"

Scorpius glances back contemplatively. "Takes me about forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour if the weather's not good. But I'm used to it... so maybe an hour and a half? Less?"

"Well, I'm going to be fit at the end of this," she concludes as she begins her march upwards, brow furrowed in thought as she surges past him in what he can only describe as a pointless burst of energy that will run out far before she reaches the top of the hill. Oh well, experience is the best, if the cruelest, teacher, he thinks to himself as the wanders down the path.

As his boots clump against the dirt path and send small stones rolling further down the hill, his mind dwells on the bright curls escaping Rose's ponytail. Crazy curls, bungee-jumping from her head in an attempt to escape. It reminds him strangely of his nanny Delilah and her crazy grey curls, sticking out in all directions.

Scorpius pauses in his trek down as a memory floats into his mind. Delilah telling him about love (he had always hated her lectures on that, even more than he hated her ones on hygiene).We all meet somebody, boy. He feels a small twinge of regret at not having been a little kinder to her, but then the moment passes and he's back to his usual self - somewhat reckless and prone to doing anything but reflecting.

"Crazy lady," he mutters to himself as he clambers on downwards.

xXx

He sees a lot of Rose over the next few weeks. She's always there, running around the cafeteria in the village, trekking up and down the winding path (it does become easier with practice, she tells him), screeching when she's bitten by an angry/hungry baby dragon. He gets used to her melodrama, her lazy reaction to his sharp comments. She even has a slightly maniacal laugh that used to drive him up the wall, but bit by bit he begins to find even that tolerable - even fitting to her everywhere-at-once personality. It's strange how he never realised before how little he knew about her; how little he realised that her personality flowed beside his, dragging him along in the current, pushing and pulling and tumbling in a way that was both scary and delightful.

She's as much of a daredevil as he is, and he remembers vividly the time she grabbed his hand and hauled him to the edge of one of the taller mountains around. They're so far above everything else that the cluster of houses they call 'home' is the size of a few scattered pebbles on the ground. And she continues to pull his hand until their feet are a mere few inches away from thin air, from no ground beneath them to support their weight.

"Let's jump," Rose announces suddenly, her eyes gleaming. Even Scorpius balks at this, peering down into the ground thousands of feet below them.

"You're crazy," he murmurs. It's not a reprimand - more like a mixture of awe and acceptance; she's always been somewhat crazy, and he's never minded. "We'll kill ourselves."

She snorts, gesturing at the pale grey sky and the sun trying to peep out from behind the blanket of grey. "We're wizards, Scorpius, not Muggles."

"Doesn't mean we won't die. Magic doesn't keep us from breaking our necks and dying," a chill wind blows the hair back from where it has been flopping into his face. His eyes sting at the harshness of it.

"Of course it will. Don't be such a pussy; we've got magic, let's use it," she doesn't give him much chance to protest, tugging him ever closer to the edge. Now there wasn't even an inch between him and the edge. She casts him a daring look, daring him to back away now.

Scorpius may have been more sensible in some respects than Rose was, but he's never backed down from a challenge. He's as fiery as she is, as reckless as she is, in his own way. And so he laughs, and her hand tightens around his, and they jump.

Free-falling is exhilarating. Rose's hand grips his even more tightly than before as they plummet downwards. She lets out a scream as they fall ever closer. Perhaps it's one of the most stupid things he's done, but hey, she's right. They've got magic. They're young and reckless and why not use what they've got to enjoy it?

She manages to cast a spell to prevent them from smashing their faces into the ground a mere few feet before they hit it. His lungs are aching from the rushing wind, and her cheeks are whipped pink by the fall. The spell releases them gently onto the rough, wiry grass and they flop onto it ungracefully.

Rose's eyes meet his, and she starts laughing that crazy laugh.

xXx

It's a slow process, but Scorpius reaches the point where he's so used to her presence in this life he leads in Romania that he can hardly imagine a time when she wasn't there. He's used to her morning face - with her curls tangled and in all directions, her eyes glassy in that not-yet-fully-awake way. He's used to chasing after her up hilly paths, feet stumbling as they hit stones and tree roots that zigzag under and over the various dirt paths. He hates her sometimes because words fly out of her mouth without reason, hurting him, hurting others. She yells at him sometimes for being rash (and he yells at her for being a hypocrite) and criticises him for being ignorant. Her words, when she chooses to make them so, hurt more than dragon's teeth in many ways. Scorpius hates that she can hurt him more than anybody else he's ever met, and sometimes all he wants to do is scream at her (sometimes he does).

But as painful as being with her in her tempestuous moods can be, he loves how she can bring out sides of him that he never knew he had. He can scream at her one minute and then she'll make him laugh the next. She'll tell him stories of rabbits disappearing down holes that lead to other worlds, of princesses with glass slippers (Muggle stories her mother told her when she was a little girl), and if it had been anybody else he would have been bored out of his mind. Yet with her all Scorpius wants to do is listen, because she makes them fascinating to him and he feels as though he could listen to her voice forever. Rose makes his moods just as changeable as hers, and he finds it eerie how easily his own emotions are affected by what she does and how she feels.

He reaches the point where he climbs that familiar hill path one morning, sees a cloud shaped peculiarly like a gnome, and finds himself thinking that he wishes Rose were there to see it. He reaches the point of feeling strangely lost when he goes to bed one night after saying goodbye to her - her break is over and she's going back to continue her Auror training - and feels a wave of desolation break over him.

You'll fall in love and you'll realise that it's the hardest and most simultaneously satisfying and unsatisfying thing in the world, and being with them will hurt you but being without them hurts more.

Delilah's voice echoes back to him as he lies awake at night, visions of red curls and round brown eyes flashing through his mind. He's always thought Delilah a somewhat bitter old woman, as well as insane, yet Scorpius finds that her words finally have meaning for him. Surrounded by dragons and hills and scars and burns, Scorpius realises that being around Rose hurts him, hurts him when she snarls insults, yet being without her hurts in an aching, lonely, missing-piece kind of way. It hurts in a way that's far worse than her insults, and maybe that's why Scorpius understands finally that love isn't always as picture-perfect as it is in the old fairy stories that Rose tells him. And despite that, he'd much rather live with it than without.

xXx

She's walking down a road in London, on her way back from the Ministry. She glances at her reflection in one of the shop windows as she walks past, eyeing herself critically. Perhaps it's time she get that haircut she's been putting off for so long, she thinks idly.

It's somewhat bothersome, looking at her reflection. She does it frequently, almost subconsciously and sometimes she laughs when she catches other people doing it too. Yet recently she's not been as satisfied with the striding figure that gleams back at her, transparent as it marches across mannequins and handbags and bicycles in the shops' displays.

She's beginning to feel as though there's something missing. She knows what it is - Rose isn't stupid - but it puzzles her as to why it feels like it's missing. As her heels click-clack against the pavement, her mind is trying to unravel the answer.

Rose knows that it's Scorpius that's missing, that she misses his pale blond hair and his annoying habit of chewing his fingernails. She misses waking up in the mornings and knowing that he's going to be around, that she'll have somebody to shout at and to laugh with. In many ways, it makes a lot of sense, but what doesn't make sense, she muses, is why now. They've known each other for so long, but why does she only have these feelings now?

A car horn honks at her and she quickly picks up her pace as she trots across the zebra-crossing and safely onto the other side of the road. She makes an apologetic face at the driver - although he doesn't seem to see it - before she rounds the corner.

There's a tap on her shoulder, and Rose's eyebrows furrow in vexation as she turns around to see who's dared interrupt her thoughts.

"Scorpius?"

"I had a nanny, once, when I was little," he says hurriedly, randomly. Her eyebrows begin to rise rather than furrow. "And she used to tell me lots of different stories, stories about her life, about my parents' lives, about famous heroes. She used to really like telling me stories about love - I hated them."

Her heart is beating faster than normal. Rose knows him, she knows where he's going with this, knows why his own face is looking slightly flushed and why his eyes won't quite meet hers - no matter how hard she tries.

"She said that everybody meets someone in their life. Somebody that they love. And I used to think that she was daft for telling me, because why would I care about what she was saying? I wanted her to stop hassling me, to stop telling him moral stories about what you ought to do in life...," he pauses as a man bumps into him, giving him an angry look for standing in the middle of the pavement. The two of them sidle away from the centre, Rose pulling his arm to get him to move. "... anyway... I was thinking about what she said... and I remembered something else... that she'd always say at the end of one of her stories about love. She'd always say that everybody meets someone... but that some of us don't realise it until it's too late."

Rose smiles, because she knows exactly what to say. It's as though there's a movie script in front of her, telling her the right thing, the perfect words. But because life isn't a movie, and love isn't about saying the perfect words, she doesn't say them. She doesn't need to. His heart understands what she wants to say, just as hers understood his when he first began his speech.

She reaches up and kisses him, her perfect words dying in her throat as he smiles against her lips.

It's not too late.