It was a week later when Gwen finally built up the courage to pound on the door to the Head Boys' dorm, knowing full well that Scorpius and Rose were out practicing with the rest of the Slytherin and Gryffindor quidditch teams, respectively. A bleary eyed Fred opened the door only after the fourth round of knocking. He blinked a few times, slowly, then scratched the back of his head. "Am I dreaming?" he mumbled.
"I have a plan," Gwen blurted out. She was breathing way too fast, like she'd run there from the Great Hall or something.
Fred raked his eyes over her - disheveled hair, heaving chest, robes in disarray - and cleared his throat. "Sorry?" He tore his eyes from her and leaned against the door frame, forearm supporting most of his upper body weight. "What're you talkin' about, love?"
"A way that we can be together." The words tumbled from her mouth so quickly, he was sure he hadn't heard her right. "Without upsetting the whole of British Nobility." Now he was sure he had to be dreaming. Her eyes searched his, waiting for him to say something. When he didn't, she could swear she felt her heart stop, only to then double its previous speed. "Well? Aren't you going to ask what it is?"
He blinked again. "If you're joking, Avery, this is a whole new level of cruel I never thought you could reach."
"What?" she snapped, breathlessly. "No, of course not. How could you think I would do something like that? Fred, I-"
His lips were on hers before she knew what was happening. His arm wrapped around her waist, he held her close and poured over a year of pent up feelings into a kiss that lasted mere seconds before she came to her senses and broke it. He kept his eyes closed, afraid to find anything negative on her face. "Well, that certainly felt real..." he half-joked under his breath. "Think you could pinch me, just to be sure?"
She laughed quietly, and pinched his cheek until he smiled. "We can't keep doing that, though." He opened his eyes, and she flinched at the pain in them. "Not yet." His brow furrowed. "I- Scorpius and I are still engaged, technically." She swept her thumb across his lips when he scowled at her. "I don't want to betray his trust. But, he doesn't love me, not like that - and I have a plan, because I happen to know who he does love. At least, I think I do... No, I'm sure of it. I know him well enough to know what I saw." She nodded, having re-convinced herself, but Fred was still left in the dark.
"Uh... okay? Merlin, I'm starting to think this is a dream again, because you're not making any sense."
She took a deep breath, sorting through her thoughts. "Okay. Right. Sit with me, yeah?" He nodded warily, and let her lead him to the couch in the Head's common room. "If I ran away with you, or even broke it off with Scorpius - it just couldn't work. I'd be deserting my claim to the throne - my family would never let that happen; and on top of that, I'd be hurting Scorpius, leaving him to look a fool, having been betrayed by his former fiance and supposed life-long best friend. It'd be a huge scandal, and on top of that, we probably wouldn't even get away with it! I mean, Scorpius might be reasonable, but the Malfoys as a whole - especially his grandparents - they wouldn't stand for it! They'd hunt us down, quite likely strip my family of their titles..." She paused, remembering that Fred already knew what that was like. She bit her lip. His eyes had hardened.
"Go on."
After a few more deep breaths, Gwen continued. "But if Scorpius Malfoy, Crown Prince of Wizarding Britain, were the one to break it off... Well, they couldn't punish me for that, could they? And Scorpius couldn't be in trouble, either - he's their only heir, they'd have to go along with it."
"Okay..." Fred stretched out the word dubiously. "But why would he do that? He agreed to marry you for a reason. You're the best choice for the crown, as much as I hate to admit it. You'd make a great queen, Avery."
She frowned - why was he still calling her by her last name? She shook it off, though, determined to see this through. "Because he's in love with someone else." Fred lifted his eyebrows at her. "And we're going to make him see how important that is."
"You look good in green." Scorpius sauntered up to Rose with his signature smirk on his face. Her ears were like quickly-ripening tomatoes.
"If you say that one more time..." she growled. She was going to kill Wood for this. It was bad enough that he bet on their first game against Slytherin; the fact that he lost it was worse; the fact that he dragged the entire team into the ordeal was downright unforgivable.
"You'll what?" he teased, eyes sparkling.
"I-" she paused. They'd been sharing a living space for two months, and this was the first conversation they'd had that lasted more than two sentences. It was also the first time he'd looked at her like that in at least a year. Unsure of what that twinge in her chest could mean, and unwilling to ponder it further, she bit the inside of her lip. "I'll hex you into next week."
"I'd love to see you try," he laughed, leaning his shoulder against the wall.
Rose tugged at the hem of her dress, which was emerald green and made of fabric she was sure had been bewitched to cling to her like a second skin while feeling like it wasn't even there at all. Why Wood had this thing on hand, she wasn't sure she wanted to know. Her eyes flicked over Scorpius's face one last time, intending to shoot back some equally teasing remark, but the way he smiled made her stomach twist. What was with him? She shook her head, and turned to walk away.
She got a mere two steps away when he caught her by the wrist. She stared at the place where his fingers clung to her, too stunned to say anything at first - but within seconds, she snapped out of it, and snatched her arm away. "What do you think you're doing?"
His eyebrows tugged together in the middle. "Did I say something wrong? Where are you going?"
She blinked at him, searching his face. "Are you drunk?"
"Maybe a little," he mumbled. "So? It's a party."
She shook her head, and took a deep breath. "Well, that explains that," she sighed, mostly to herself. When she started to step away again, he followed, so she huffed and sat down. While it wasn't an ideal spot, she wouldn't hear the end of it if she left the party, and it was obvious Scorpius wasn't giving up. "What do you want from me, Malfoy?"
Polished shoes shuffled across her vision. "I thought...we could be friends again."
She barely heard him. For a second, she thought (hoped?) that she'd heard wrong. Her eyes remained stubbornly focused on his shoes; his face had proven to be dangerous territory. "We were never friends." The sentence didn't come out as harshly as she'd hoped.
His silver eyes stayed transfixed on her face. "I thought we were."
"No, we weren't," Rose hissed. "We were enemies, and then rivals - with a friend in common, sure, but rivals nonetheless - and then we were..." A lump dared to settle in her throat. "Merlin, I need a drink," she muttered, and looked away, content to leave the conversation at that.
Still, he wouldn't walk away. Instead, he floated a firewhiskey over to her. When that wasn't enough to get her to look at him, he knelt down in front of her - or tried to. He teetered a bit too much, and ended up falling on his arse; yet he didn't seem to care. He just sat there, on the floor of the Slytherin common room, staring at Rose Granger-Weasley and waiting for her to meet his eyes - or at least take the drink.
She finally did the latter, at least. They sat in silence for a while, while Rose downed her drink (the faces she pulled were for another reason entirely, but she'd blame it on the firewhiskey), and Scorpius tried not to show how torturous the wait was. Somewhere in the background, there was what sounded like a small explosion, then a round of cheers. Finally, she spoke, and he had to lean in to hear her over all the noise. "We were something - something that was only almost anything at all - and then we were nothing." He flinched. "You tried to kiss me, and then you left, and it was over before anything even began. You disappeared. You wouldn't respond to any of my letters- I was worried sick, you know that? I thought something had happened, only then I found out you'd been writing Albus all summer. And then school started back up, and you were engaged. Engaged. And you wouldn-"
"I never got any letters," he interrupted, reaction time a bit delayed. She faltered.
"You- what?" she breathed. After a couple seconds of eye contact, during which silver eyes swam with far too much for her to decipher let alone handle, Rose shook her head. "No- you know what? That doesn't matter. It doesn't, because you still said nothing. All summer, nothing. All last year, nothing. You ignored me. Acted like I didn't exist, and-"
"-You ignored me, too-"
"-you're still engaged!" Because the party was so rowdy, her shouting only drew a few looks. Still, that was a few too many. "Bloody betrothed." He lifted his hand to take hers, but thought better of it when her eyes finally shot to his, and he wasn't present enough to see past the anger in them. "So, no, Malfoy, we can't go back to being friends, because we never were, and we can't go back to-" She choked. For Merlin's sake, she choked. Why were her eyes stinging? "So we can start over, enemies or friends-of-friends, or we can stay nothing but bloody co-Heads, but that's it. Okay, Malfoy? That's it. Because it's too late. It's too late, and I bloody hate you." It sounded like a lie, even to her ears. That settled it; she needed to get out of there.
She dropped her cup on the floor and speed-walked out of the room, Wood be damned.
Scorpius remained slumped over in front of that empty chair until Albus came to 'drag his sorry arse to bed,' which mostly meant snapping his fingers in front of his face until some semblance of consciousness reentered the blond's eyes, then helping him to the approximate location of the Heads' Dorm's secret entrance.
For the next few weeks, Malfoy did his best to antagonize Rose. If they couldn't be friends, he was determined to rekindle their friendly rivalry. He did notice that Fred and Gwen seemed to encourage his behavior (the latter with far more subtlety), but he was so preoccupied that he couldn't be bothered to care why. They were helping him in his goal, and that was good enough for him.
Rose, on the other hand, was becoming more anxious by the day. She hardly slept anymore, thanks to upcoming N.E.W.T.s, Wood cracking down on Quidditch practices, Head Girl duties, and most of all, the fact that the others somehow always managed to team her and Malfoy together. He'd become insufferable, and though he hadn't brought up their mildly inebriated conversation, she had this nagging feeling that he was going to hold her rants over her head. It was enough to keep her tossing and turning throughout the night, even without admitting the way her chest and stomach seemed to betray her every time he managed to catch her off guard with that infuriating smirk, or those stupid glinting eyes.
Even if they hadn't mentioned the incident in the year since, it didn't mean they'd put it out of their minds. Scorpius sat in the Great Hall looking over a letter from his mother, but his mind was back in the potions classroom. Having been in the owlery earlier that day, he thought nothing of the scent of hay and cocoa that drifted into his nose. He chalked the ocean scent up to his imagination; after all, he'd just read the same sentence five times over because he couldn't get that memory out of his head. No, he was far too preoccupied to notice what went on around him right before he reached for his drink.
Rose, on the other hand, recognized it immediately. Relieved to be able to eat dinner in peace, she'd been perfectly content to focus on anything but the prior potions incident. Specifically, she'd been working on her transfiguration essay; a task which had absolutely nothing to do with Malfoy. So, when the smell of grass and parchment and fire wafted into her nostrils, she knew exactly what it was. She stood before she'd fully processed the information, eyes searching the crowd until she saw it: amortentia. Not a large dose, but still, just enough for a single spiral of steam to escape the pearly liquid as it was poured into a glass across the Hall. Through the crowd, she couldn't tell who'd slipped it in - they were gone too quickly - but she was just in time to see whose cup it was. Scorpius's fingertips barely brushed the goblet before it floated out of his hand. While Rose sprinted across the Great Hall, he blinked at it in bewilderment.
He reached to catch it, but was cut off by Granger-Weasley's shout of "Don't drink that!"
Scorpius blinked at her, twice. "Why ever not?"
She slid to a stop and waved Headmaster Longbottom over. She moved her wand so the drink elevated a bit further off, well in view of the Headmaster. "Someone," she gasped out, then took a deep breath to steady herself before continuing, "has poisoned it. Well, sort of." As Longbottom came into hearing range, she looked between them. "Someone's just tried to slip Malfoy a love potion. Amortentia, too - strongest one there is..." she said the last bit quietly, knowing they all knew that already. For the rest of the conversation (brief as it was) Rose was in a daze. She let Headmaster Longbottom take over, knowing he could handle it, and wandered back across the Hall.
She's been on edge before, but now? She didn't want to wonder who could be trying to slip Malfoy amortentia. She didn't want to think about how she'd known it, either. In fact, at that point, she didn't want to do much of anything within her own head - it was becoming a dangerous place. Rather, she wanted to get her mind off it, off all of it. She needed to release some tension, and at least try to forget about Scorpius Malfoy and the way his lips brushed hers one summer's day, what seemed like a lifetime ago...
She picked up her things, told her friends she needed to wash up, and left - only pausing to whisper in a certain blond boy's ear.
When Scorpius went looking for her later, Albus told her she'd gone to take a bath. He figured she'd be in the bathroom she shared with Gwen, but she was nowhere to be found, and from the looks of their dorm, Rose hadn't been there since lunch. Perhaps she was avoiding the Head's Dorm? He frowned at the thought, but kept moving. He had to find her; he told himself that it was simply to thank her.
Next on the list was the prefects' bathroom on the fifth floor; he remembered that she liked the windows in there. With a mumbled password and a few steps, he'd found what he was looking for - but immediately regret it. Muffled moans froze Scorpius in his tracks. He should have turned back then, but he didn't, because what if it wasn't her? What if this was just bad timing, and some prefects were getting into trouble? He had to know, didn't he? He had to have hope, didn't he? He didn't pause to think about that too much, not quite ready to examine just what he might have been hoping for.
Around the corner, in the communal showers, he saw them. Rose Granger-Weasley with her red curls, darkened by the water, splayed out over her freckle-spattered breasts. Rose Granger-Weasley with her eyes closed and her bottom lip caught between her teeth, her chest heaving. Rose Granger-Weasley with one leg hooked over the shoulder over a man almost as pale and almost as blond as himself; and Lorcan Scamander, with the lower half of his face buried between her legs.
Scorpius wasn't sure what happened in his chest just then, but he was certain it wasn't something hearts were supposed to do.
When he burst through the door to Gwen and Rose's room, his mind was simultaneously blank and swimming with far too much for him to process. She looked up from her homework with barely enough time to realize who had walked in, before his lips crashed into hers. "Scor-" Gwen tried to pull back to ask what was wrong, but the way his face twisted stopped her.
She'd never seen him like this before. He kissed her harder than he ever had, and somewhere in there, she could swear she heard his voice break among a hoarsely whispered "I need you." In a moment of weakness, a moment of confusion, a moment of concern - most of all, a moment full of her impossible need to please everyone she loved - Gwendoline Avery took this half-broken man into her arms.
On the other side of the wall, Fred Weasley lie awake. He heard her called his name throughout the night; the wrong name, Scorpius's name. A large part of Fred wanted to leave, to run out and never see her face again. Yet the whole time, he found himself rooted to the spot. Even when Malfoy stumbled through the door in the darkness, Fred didn't move; he wasn't sure he even blinked.
When daytime came, once again, none of them would look at each other.
As always, however, that didn't (couldn't) last.
A/N: Sorry to anyone who read this the first time I uploaded it. I finished the chapter, but somehow deleted it... I was so drunk at the time that I got frustrated and wrote a really lame summary of events, then posted it while half-asleep (and still drunk).
Anyway, I hope you enjoy! I think there's only one more chapter left, and I'm hoping to have it posted by Wednesday night.
Concrit is always welcome. :)
