I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
When the water filled every hole.
And thousands upon thousands made an ocean,
Making islands where no island should go.
-Death Cab For Cutie-

It can happen to anyone they say, a look across the room, maybe an extra second lingering around the dance floor, but you always think you'll be that exception. Maybe you've had it before, or maybe you've watched it happen to all of your friends and you just can't imagine it happening to you.

And then it does, and it scares the living shit out of you.

Because there's one hell of a difference between wanting something, needing something and getting something.

Once a month it was written in the Prefect manual that stated there must be a meeting with both the HeadGirl and the HeadBoy present. So, following procedure 24 prefects sat in one of the empty classrooms on the third floor. The window was sealed shut, to prevent the violent storm that kept trying to make its way inside the castle. Rain pounded against the windows, shuddering the window joints, but it was barely audible over the sound of all the students.

Some where still in their uniforms from earlier in the day, but a few had changed into muggle clothes. Rose sat at the end of the table, next to the only empty chair at the long sturdy table. Her auburn hair was down and wavy from the humidity and her feet were kicked up and resting on the edge of the table.

She listened to the conversations that were happening around her, her head resting on her arm. Her brown eyes were trained on the door, but the sound of her watch clicking in her ear brought her to the present.

"…Where the hell is Malfoy?" Rose said under her breath, checking her watch. She shifted and addressed the room loudly. "Listen, Oy! Has anyone in here seen Malfoy today?"

All the prefects paused their conversations and in unison shook their heads.

She frowned, "It's not like him to not show up…"

"I read in the Prophet this morning that his grandfather died." Olive Thomas said, with a shrug adjusting her Ravenclaw tie.

"Oh…Well then I suppose we will start…" Rose said, shrugging and pushing herself to stand up. "All of you have sent in your schedules for the term. Malfoy went through and edited the line up for Quidditch, extra circulars and all that. So I'm about to pass them back. If you have any problems see me after…Fifth years, I will give you a new schedule every month. The goal is inter-house cooperation so a reason I won't take for changing shifts is because you simply don't like someone."

She passed out the schedules, and looked at Olive Thomas's raised hand. "Yeah?"

"Are we doing a ball this year?"

"We're going to vote on that in a minute." Rose smiled at her, "If we do, you want to be in charge of it, don't you?"

Olive nodded.

"Okay, before we get there, we have to decide on how many Hogsmeade trips for this term. Let me remind you, the more trips, the more times you have patrol."

Edward Roberts raised his hand and asked, "What's it between?"

"We can have between 4 and 7." Rose answered shuffling the folder in front of her. "So, by a show of hands, who wants 4?" She waited and counted the hands, "5?" Rose repeated the process, "6?...Okay so clearly 6 wins by a landslide…" She scribbled that down on her parchment.

"Okay now, I'm letting you guys know that it is tradition for you guys to throw a party for Malfoy and I at before the end of the school year. This is on all of you. I'm not supposed to know anything about it, but I'm also supposed to tell you about it…" She laughed anxiously, shaking her head. "Yeah, I realize how ridiculous this is…Now…um…" Rose scrunched up her face. "Shit…what else was there?"

"I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to swear." Lily Potter smirked, from halfway down the table.

"Oh sod off Lily." Rose glowered at her, with a small grin. "…I was supposed to go over something else…"

"The ball?" Lily suggested.

"That's not it… but yes! Lets vote on that." Rose mused, "Who wants it?...Nearly unanimous…Okay, well then Olive has volunteered to run it. So by the next meeting, I want each house to think of a theme, and er... then we'll vote on it next time and discuss it…I swear there was something else…Oh whatever. If I think of it, I'll send you all an owl. Alright?...Now get on out of here."

Rose sat back down, her face was flushed with nerves, but she tried to hide it by looking down. She heard her cousin sit down next to her and snickered.

"Yes, Lily?"

"You could not be any redder." Lily cackled, nudging her. "You wouldn't look anyone in the eye the whole time."

Rose shook her head, "I wasn't supposed to do it alone…I hope he's alright. If he's not…I'm going to kill him."

"Isn't that against the Hufflepuff code of ethics?"

"Just because I'm a Hufflepuff doesn't mean I'm not capable of murder. It just means I'm going to feel really bad about it..."

"Keep telling yourself that Rosie."

"Merlin, I hate when you guys call me that." Groaning, she dragged her hands over her face and closed her eyes.

"Well, it's been seventeen years. You might want to get used to it."

Rose had said anyone could come and talk to her after the meeting finished, but she would rather they wouldn't. And she was hoping that if she just shut her eyes then no one would approach her. It was one thing if Malfoy had been there to pick up the slack, but it had just been her and it was terrifying. It was one thing to play Quidditch for years and get Captain, it was quite another to be a Prefect and then become HeadGirl. There was so much pressure to be in charge, and know what she was doing at all times. It wasn't something she particularly wanted. She was honored to get the position, but actually doing the job was something else.

Nothing a few deep breaths couldn't fix, but still not something she particularly enjoyed.

When Rose Weasley opened her eyes, everyone had left and it was just her. Lily had even left. It was just one, scrawny seventeen-year-old girl left, in a big empty room. She stood up and let out a long breath, her hands hooking through the loops on her trousers. Lightly, her feet tapped on the floor, before she began to pace the span of the room. Rose tried to let the nervous energy work it's way out of her so she wouldn't spend the rest of the evening analyzing her own performance. It took some time, but eventually it worked.

Grabbing the pieces of parchment, she placed it in her bag and slung it over her shoulder.

While she went down the empty corridor, a bright smile worked onto her face, and a she even did a little dance. She had done it. Yes, she had stumbled and sworn in front of a bunch of students, which she probably shouldn't have done. But hey, at least they listened to her and at least she had gotten through it. And all by herself at that! The only thing that was still bothering her was Malfoy.

Where the hell was he?

She'd been relieved when she got onto the train and saw him sitting in the Heads compartment. There were a lot of choices for HeadBoy and it could even be a guy that hadn't been a Prefect to start, which didn't help her anxiety about the selection process. But when she saw it was him, she relaxed. Scorpius Malfoy may not have been the most talkative or the most likable, but he was dependable. That was the only thing about him she knew was a fact.

Now she was slightly concerned.

If he did have a family emergency, wouldn't he have informed a teacher or left her a note so they knew he was alright? Something wasn't sitting right with her and she wondered distantly if she should go to the Headmaster. Someone had to know.

Stepping into her common room, Rose was surprised to see the fire dying out. She's put it out before she left for the meeting two hours ago. There was no reason that it should still be going unless someone else had been using it.

Rose went up the staircase to Scorpius's room, she'd never gone up there before, but it seemed weird that the night he missed their first meeting, the fire in the common room was lit. Maybe she was wrong and there was no correlation, but she didn't see any harm in finding out.

"Hey, Malfoy? Are you-?" She said, knocking and stepping through his opened door. Her sentence died when she saw him sitting on the edge of his bed. His face was ashen in the darkness of his room and there was blood on his hands and face. Rose gasped and stepped towards him. "Merlin."

He twitched at the sound of her face. "...Weasley? What are you doing in here?"

"You weren't at the meeting." She stated shyly, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," He said stiffly.

Rose said incredulously, "You're bleeding... Is your nose broken?"

"Weasley, just go."

"See, you could pull that if you showed up to the meeting, but you didn't. So stop being difficult. Put your hands down so I can fix your nose and I'll leave." She thought he was going to yell at her, or throw her out, but his hands slowly dropped from his face, and he let out a bitter sigh.

Looking closer, she saw a black bruise on his left cheekbone that swept across his face to his nose. Rose stooped and took out her wand; careful not to touch him anywhere else, she pointed the tip of her wand to his nose. Whispering the spell, Scorpius's nose cracked and he grunted in pain, his teeth digging into his bottom lip. Rose went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, splashed some water on it and went back to him.

"Weasley, you don't have to-"

"You have blood all over your face." She said, handing him to towel.

He snatched it and swiped but only smeared the blood around.

"No…No…Damnit," Rose's slender hand reached forward and took the towel. She then cleaned off his face and cringed at how soaked his olive towel was. Her hand clamped down on his nose to stop the bleeding, her brown eyes set on the task.

His grey eyes were staring upwards at her face, looking at how her face was pinched together in determination, her auburn hair nearly falling into her eyes. Scorpius's entire face stung and he winced a few times, but held the expletives, that were burning on his tongue, back. He sat hunched forward; his shoulder's tensed, worrying when her resolve would break. He wasn't an idiot, she was going to eventually ask him how he attained his injuries and he wouldn't tell her. It wasn't any of her business. Just because they were on decent terms didn't mean she had any right to any information. In all honesty he didn't know why she was doing this to begin with. Sure she was kind person, but wasn't the sight of him enough for her to leave?

He watched her, and was highly aware of how close she was to him and how she was doing everything in her power to give him space while still take care of his wounds. He'd always found her beautiful, but it was a fact he blatantly ignored. Now in the shadows of his dorm room, he noticed things he'd rather not; like her long eyelashes and the dimples in her cheeks. Things he had no business knowing.

Albus was a friend of his, one of the only two friends he had, and being friends with him brought Rose to his attention much sooner than he normally would have. She wasn't loud like her cousins; James and Fred, and she wasn't curvy like her cousin Dominique, as snotty as her brother as opinionated as her cousin Lucy. Rose Weasley didn't stand out in a school full of her relatives, but once he saw her it was hard not to see her. Her hair wasn't that bright, it was a mixture of red and brown, and it wasn't frizzy or wild like most of her relatives. She had a thin, but athletic build and only a handful of inches shorter than him.

Scorpius gulped, his jaw constricting. "You don't have to keep doing that. I can do it."

Rose nodded, rolling her lips back tightly. "Okay…Do you need anything else?"

He shook his head, his eyes dropping from her face. "No."

"Okay," She gently grabbed his sleeve and brought his hand to his nose. "Keep applying pressure, and put some ice on that black eye to keep the swelling down."

"I know what to do." He said simply.

Rose scowled, "I'll see you tomorrow then."

She didn't wait for him to respond. It would have been pointless. If she knew one thing about Scorpius, it was that he didn't waste his time with idle chitchat. He got to the point and said very little beyond that. This wasn't a problem for her in the past. There had never been a time before when she didn't need to just talk to him for a handful of moments. But she had a feeling interrogating him about why he was so beaten up would take more than just a few sentences.

How could he look like that if he had just attended a funeral? Surely no one there would hurt him. He was a Slytherin, and smartest in their class, he didn't play Quidditch, but his nearly spotless detention record did a lot to redeem the Malfoy name. Sure he could be a right prick if he wanted to be, but other than that she couldn't imagine him doing anything to provoke someone into hitting him, especially hard enough to break his nose and enough times to give him a black eye to boot.

It troubled her, and really got under her skin. She shouldn't care at all. He was alive, and now that he was back he wouldn't miss any of their meetings or fall behind in any of his duties again. There wasn't a single reason for her to care. She'd done her job and she wasn't his friend, this wasn't her problem.

Rose changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, flossed, brushed her hair, washed her face and eventually slid into bed. She tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable, but no matter what position she was in, completely unable to do so.

There was a soft knock on her bedroom door, Rose furrowed her eyebrows and went to answer it. When she opened the door, Rose's eyebrows shot up when she saw Scorpius standing there, his skin ghostly pale.

"You're not going to tell anyone, right?"

Rose blinked and rubbed her eyes, "Um…I wasn't planning on it."

"Okay."

Gulping, she pulled her tank top down to cover her lower stomach. "I figured it was your business."

Scorpius didn't know what he was doing. After she said she'd keep this to herself, he should have left. But he was tired and his brain wasn't working properly. It was like an engine, it normally worked smoothly, but now it was confused and kept kicking into different gears making it difficult for him to act properly.

"I'm sorry about your grandfather." She mumbled, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorframe.

His eyes widened in fear, his neck pulsing. "How did you know it was him?"

"…I guess it was in the prophet." She said, tilting her head and looking at him strangely.

"How could it have been?!" Scorpius said, aghast.

"I didn't see it." She said unsurely, "One of the prefects told me he died."

He shut his eyes, his fists uncoiling. Scorpius said, "My grandfather isn't dead. My grandmother is."

"Oh...Well either the Daily Prophet miswrote it or Olive didn't remember correctly then…Either way, I'm sorry for your loss." Rose said, sympathy beaming in her eyes.

Scorpius nodded absentmindedly. "Thanks."

Rose reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. She meant it as a simple gesture of consoling and comfort, not a big deal. It wasn't until her hand went to his shoulder that she realized it wasn't the right thing to do. Not because it was a bad, or even inappropriate, but because she'd never directly touched him for just the purpose of touching him.

She was going to pull back. Her face filled with apprehension and regret, and she waited for him to walk away or strike out at her. But when she looked into his bloodshot eyes, she didn't see that. In fact, he seemed to be trembling, like he might cry.

"You're not okay, are you?"

Scorpius swallowed hard, and had the lie ready and prepared. He even shifted his weight to walk away, but he couldn't force himself to move. The pressure of her hand on his shoulder, so light and loose was bringing out everything he'd buried only an hour earlier.

Rose put her other hand on his other shoulder and said in a soft tone. "You don't have to hold it in."

"I'm not holding anything in." He spat, though his voice betrayed him.

"Do you want to come in?"

It was completely silent, but internally she was screaming. Why did she say that?! She'd never invited a guy to her room, ev-er. Why the HELL did she just do that?! Scorpius wasn't going to do anything dishonorable, but the fact that she thought saying that was a good idea was mad. She had to be still half-dead from attempting to fall asleep; there was no other explanation that fit.

And to both of their utter confusion, her hands left his shoulders and he followed her into her room.

"Did I wake you?" He asked, his eyes noticing the askew black sheets.

Rose shook her head. "Nah. I couldn't sleep."

"Why?" He asked curiously.

She sat down on her bed and blushed, "I was worried about you."

"You shouldn't be."

"I know." Rose laughed, hair dropping into her make-up less face. She pushed her hair back and shrugged. "I can't help it."

He put his hands in his pockets, and eyed her suspiciously. "Why were you worried about me?"

"Because you have a black eye, and a broken nose after going to a funeral and not telling anyone where you were."

"I didn't realize I had to check in." He said icily.

Rose let out an aggravated sigh. "You don't, you dolt. You've never even been late to anything. You think I wouldn't notice you not being at the first meeting of the school year?"

Scorpius frowned. "I see your point."

"Also, I work with you. You don't think I would have seen your black eye?"

"Would you have pestered me about its origins?"

Rose scowled, "No. Because, although I'm curious, I understand that we are not friends, and you would probably rather eat live crabs than talk to me."

"I've never said that."

They looked at each other, first contemplatively then it expanded. She leaned her hands against the edge of the bed.

"Tell me this, are you okay?"

"I said I was fine."

Rose rolled her eyes. "But you lied."

Scorpius's eyes trailed around the room, turmoil ripped inside of him, breaking him a part. The events from only a few hours earlier swelled inside of him. He tried to bury it down, down so far he wouldn't think about it ever again just like a lot of childhood family memories. But he was exhausted, and the will to do so took more than he had.

He began to shake, not violently or enough for anyone to notice if they weren't looking directly at him. His problem was, Rose was looking directly at him and at one point it was like she was looking right through him.

Before he knew it, his tight reign on self-control had slipped through his fingers and her arms were around him. She was tall enough to rest her head on his shoulder, her bare arms circled around him. He couldn't be in his right mind, because his arms went around her and he hugged her back.

"You're going to be okay." She whispered, feeling tears slip down his face and fall onto her shoulder. "You're going to be fine."