October 2nd-3rd, 2009: Fifth Year

Mai received the letter at breakfast on October the second, less than a week before her birthday. The owl landed gracefully between the platters of eggs and waffles, depositing the letter next to her plate and waiting with solemn expectation, like the well-bred creature he was. She raised one eyebrow and stared at him coldly, but he didn't leave. Giving up, she opened it with carefully concealed dread. The salutation read "Darling," which never heralded anything good.

A strange, almost amused kind of horror mounted within her at litany of phrases like "terrible tragedy," and "your cousin Theodore", and of course the very important one, "no children." Her father's glee was practically palpable, radiating up from the paper. Yes, of course, her cousin Theodore dead, with no children. So tragic.

Down at the bottom was a small postscript, informing her that her presence at the funeral would be most beneficial to helping her "process her grief." She didn't think it was grief she was feeling, not for a man she had never met for longer than it took to bob a curtsey and attempt a smile, but it was always so hard for her to tell what she was feeling, when all her face ever did was turn to stone. Yes, she supposed, the funeral would help her process her grief, and at the end of the process, she would look like such a dutiful Nott.

"What do you have there?" Ty Lee asked, and Mai would have happily hexed her into oblivion when Azula turned her attention on them.

"Family news," she said, letting her words be truthful, if not honest. "One of my cousins is dead. My parents want me to attend the funeral."

"Are you going to go?" Ty Lee's hands made an automatic reach for the letter, but she stopped them.

Mai shrugged. She folded the letter and put it in her pocket. "I do love spending my Saturdays in graveyards."

"Thrilling," Azula cut in, her voice letting them know she thought it was anything but.

Strangely enough, it was thrilling. She was a Pureblood heiress now, which for all of her machinations and pretenses, was something Azula would never be. And Mai couldn't care less about it, except for how furious it was going to make Azula when she found out. She just wished she knew whether it was spite or terror gnawing at her insides.

o0O0o

"He's a fine Nott, your father." The woman in the pew next to her nodded approvingly at him as he gave a perfectly appropriate eulogy for a man he barely ever spoke to in life.

"Hmm," Mai responded, utterly bored.

"And you my dear, show every sign of growing into a fine Nott yourself." the woman continued as Mai tried to place her. "It's a shame your father couldn't have found himself a proper English witch to marry, you know, but better than marrying some jumped up halfblood. Please don't take this the wrong way, my dear. You are every inch a proper English witch yourself, don't you worry."

No, Mai didn't think she was taking any of this the wrong way at all.

Mai turned her expression of intense disinterest on the prayer book in her lap as the woman continued. "Though I suppose you're father's little jaunt abroad was for the best. After all, kept him out of that mess with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Kept his nose clean, didn't he? Not like some people I could mention." She glanced significantly at the Malfoy family, three pews behind them and on the other side of the aisle.

Mai sighed heavily.

"Oh, I do not envy you my dear," the woman told her, patting her hand sympathetically. "Trying to find a husband in times like these. We had so much trouble with my Leonette..." She trailed off with a sigh.

Oh so that's who the woman was. Mai remembered Leonette. She had been a Slytherin Beater until she graduated two years ago. Privately, Mai thought Mrs. Wilkes's difficulties getting her daughter married off probably had more to do with Leonette Wilkes than with the calamitous state of British Pureblood society. She didn't mention it though. More and more, she found herself wondering if she was really human, or if somewhere along the way, she had transfigured herself into a mirror that was only capable of showing other people what they wanted to see. "Oh yes," Mai replied without feeling. "Frightful state of affairs."

o0O0o

The Potions lab was deserted on that late Saturday afternoon, which was the way Mai preferred it. There was nothing quite like being alone with a simmering cauldron to soothe her frayed nerves, and there, in the privacy of the empty dungeon, she could admit they were indeed most frayed.

And if she wasn't really supposed to be there brewing without a teacher's supervision, well, it was amazing what Mai could get away with by looking at whoever caught her as if they were too stupid for words for thinking she wasn't allowed.

Waving her wand over her cauldron, she watched as the white light flared and crackled through the liquid inside and then dimmed. After the wand light had died away, and the potion changed to a dark, dusky purple, Mai snuffed the flame under the cauldron and left it to cool as she gathered bottles, a ladle, and a funnel. A faint cool smell wafted up from the potion, and Mai breathed it in.

"What's this?"

Mai looked up. The knot between Mai's shoulder blades, which had begun to loosen as she brewed, tightened back up. "Hello, Professor."

Professor Slughorn favored her with a genial look. "I don't remember giving you permission to use the lab today, my girl."

Mai shrugged elegantly in reply.

"Oh well, I suppose I can give a little leniency to one of my best students, especially since..." He examined her potion, and she wondered if he had been about to mention her dearly departed cousin. "Migraine ease. A little extra O.W.L. practice?"

She shook her head. "It's for a friend." A quick thermometer spell told her the potion was ready to be bottled, so she put the funnel into the first bottle and ladled the purple liquid into it. Hands steady, she repeated the process until she had a line of bottles full and the cauldron was empty.

"Oh yes." The smile he bestowed upon her exuded an altogether too familiar and complacent pride, as if he felt he understood her and that they had so much in common. "You really have chosen exemplary friends, my girl, truly exemplary." When she didn't respond, he rested a hand on her shoulder, and she had to force herself not to stiffen under it. "That young Azula Lestrange especially. Shame about her heritage of course, but the efforts she has made to rise above it are truly remarkable, pity her brother isn't-"

"What's wrong with Zuko?" she snapped. She had been asking this question for years, and no one could give her a satisfactory answer. No one even really tried.

"He..." Slughorn hesitated. "Well he-"

"I want you to be very careful," Mai cut him off, almost trembling with the acute awareness of just how... inappropriate she was being to talk to a professor this way, how arrogant and high handed. "Before you insult my future husband."

Her Head of House stared at her, stricken. His mouth opened, and an uncharitable person might have said he gaped, but he closed it again without saying anything.

Mai shivered, but as the shiver ran through her body, it changed and gathered energy, until it had metamorphosed into a rumbling in her ears like a breaking storm. "You like Azula because she makes you feel important," she told him coldly. "So you let yourself overlook everything she does that scares you, or sickens you, or hurts you, but you know what? She makes you feel important on purpose, because she can use you. Nobody is important to Azula except Azula."

"Mai!" he gasped.

But Mai was too far gone to care. "She doesn't care about anyone."

Slughorn looked away from her, and down at the bottles of potions she had made. "You added too much water mint, and not enough eel's blood. It won't be as effective."

"The person I'm making it for is smell sensitive. If she can't even swallow it, it won't have any effect at all." She closed her eyes and willed herself to stop shaking. She wanted to yell at him, to demand to know why he wasn't taking points or throwing her in detention, or something for the way she had spoken to him. The air hummed with the force of Slughorn Not Doing Anything, of him Not Listening and Pretending It Hadn't Happened. A spark of pure, clean, disturbing, ugly, hatred flared up within her and then fizzled away.

"I'm sure you know best, Miss Nott," he told her, as if he were sure of nothing of the kind, and Mai heard the words for what they were, the withdrawing of his regard, the revocation of his favor.

He had chosen Azula over her.

And it really hadn't been that bad.

She corked the bottles and packed them into her bag before holding her head high and sweeping out of the classroom with every ounce of dignity her parents had ever fought to imbue her with.

It took most of the long walk out of the dungeons, the quiet broken only by the click click click of her own shoes against the stone for her to realize what she had said. As she emerged into the sunlight streaming down through high castle windows, she staggered into an alcove and doubled over, her head falling into her hands. Oh, she realized. She should probably say something to Zuko about that "future husband" thing.

o0O0o

It was an ambush more than an embrace, really, but Zuko, to his credit, took it in stride. "How was the funeral?"

"There was a dead person in a coffin." Mai pulled her arms back and wrapped her hand around his. "I need to talk to you."

He let her pull him into an unused classroom, and gazed at her expectantly as she shut the door behind them and locked it with a flick of her wand.

Now that she was there, now that she was facing him, all of the words she had planned rushed up into her throat at once and choked each other off trying to tumble out of her mouth first. "I don't know what to say," she admitted.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and when she started nodding quickly, too quickly, more like a tremble than a nod, he pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her until her breath evened out and the shaking she hadn't even known she was doing began to subside.

"I'm okay," she whispered and stepped back, anything but. "I'm okay."

Zuko nodded and sank into one of the desks.

Mai smoothed her face when she was nervous the way some people smoothed their clothes. She knew once she started, the words would just come, and it would just flow, and Zuko would listen, and it would all be over with one way or the other, but she couldn't quite... "I told Slughorn we were getting married."

"What?" Zuko shook his head like he couldn't believe what he had heard.

"I told Slughorn we were getting married," she said, her voice stronger the second time. Then she waited for the words to pour out. When they didn't come, she swallowed. Oh, she thought. I am going to have to do this the hard way.

"I um, Mai, uh," Zuko gave up. "Mai?"

"I want to marry you." And Mai realized something. It was the reason why almost as soon as Zuko let go of her she had started to shake again. She had no idea what he was going to say, and she... She had no idea what he was going to say.

"You don't have to," Zuko mumbled. "Just because you said that to Slughorn doesn't mean you have to marry me."

"I want to marry you," she said again, feeling like all of the air had been ripped from her lungs. He had his face turned away from her, so that the only eye she could see was the scarred one, the one set constantly into a narrow glower, the one that told her nothing about what he was thinking and feeling, nothing at all. "I love you."

He turned his face to her so she could see his other eye. All at once she didn't want to. It was wide and round as dinner plates, with white showing all around the edges. "We're fifteen!"

All of a sudden, her legs just went weak, too weak to keep her upright. She collapsed into the desk next to him so fast it bounced and banged back down to the floor. Maybe the impact jarred something loose, or maybe she was so wrung out and exhausted she couldn't stop it, but the next thing she knew, tears were rolling down her face, mixing with her mascara into black streaks down her face.

Zuko toppled out of his chair and halfway into Mai's lap, sending them both tumbling to the dusty floor with the force of his need to get to her and comfort her. A tiny stubbornly hopeful part of her thrilled at that, but it probably didn't mean anything, certainly not that he loved her or anything like that. He just hated it when people were upset. He pushed himself out of her lap and reached out to hug her, but she held herself stiff, and he let his arms fall. "Um Mai?" he whispered unsteadily. "I, uh, it's not that I don't want to marry you, I just wasn't really expecting it to um, come up yet, you know I was kind of expecting a couple of years..." He trailed off. "I love you."

Mai tried to force her voice to become calm and her eyes to dry, but when she spoke, it just came out as a faint croak. "You don't have to."

"I really don't know how to make myself stop, so I guess I kind of do," he stammered. "Have to, I mean." This time when he grabbed her and pulled her close, she let him. Without meaning to, her arms snaked out to wrap around him too, and all she wanted to do was bury her face in his hair. There was a special place, where his hair met his neck, that always smelled like his skin and his hair, and all of his smells combined, and if she could have, she would have wrapped herself up in that smell like a blanket for the rest of her life, safe. "I love you," he whispered.

o0O0o

By the time Mai woke up, the classroom was bathed in moonlight. Zuko's head was resting on his shoulder, his steady slumbering breaths almost soundless next to her ear. She picked up his hand, which had been lying on the floor between them, and rubbed the knuckles gently, then, feeling foolish, she dropped it.

Zuko's eyes fluttered open, the darkness and the blue haze of night leaching the gold out of them. "Mai!"

Mai closed her eyes. The memories from that afternoon rushed back to her, and her face flushed with mortification. "You don't have to marry me," she told him coldly. "I'm not going to start crying if you say no."

Even in the moonlight, she could see him go pale, and then turn bright red. "I didn't say yes because you were crying."

"Then why did you?" Even in her own ears, her voice sounded harsh, accusatory. Defensive.

Zuko didn't answer, at least not with words. He put his arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head.

"My cousin who died was Theodore Nott," she said, looking straight ahead. When Zuko didn't say anything, she explained, "The head of the family. He didn't have any children, so my father inherited. I'm now heiress to the House of Nott."

"Oh," he whispered.

"My parents are probably moving into the manor already." She tried to sound matter-of-fact, like she didn't care that she was probably never going to see her bedroom again. That shouldn't be what was bothering her. It shouldn't be. "So if you marry me, you are marrying that."

"Okay." He didn't sound okay.

"You're going to have to take my name. You're going to have to act like..." She shivered. She tried to picture him, walking just so, talking just so, poised and perfect in all the ways that had been drummed into her since before she could speak. It didn't seem like the same person. For one horrible moment, she thought she was about to start crying again. "Like us. Like a Pureblood aristocrat."

"I'm a halfblood," he pointed out. "I don't think it's going to matter how I act. I'm still a halfblood."

And the son of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his top Death Eater. She didn't know which one her parents would think was worse. "It still matters," she choked out. "Believe me."

He nodded. His hand found her hand, and his fingers intertwined themselves with hers. She held tight. "So what do I have to do?"

"I guess I have to teach you," she murmured. "I don't know where to start." She stood up, the sharp sound of her dress shoes ringing against the stone floor seeming somehow remote, separate from the room around them. She strode over to the empty area of floor between the desks and the podium, an idea striking her. "You need to know how to dance."

"Mai, are you asking me to dance?" At her nod, he grabbed onto one of the desks and hauled himself to his feet. He dashed over to her, and held out a hand.

"I guess I am." Before she took his hand in hers and wrapped her other arm around his waist, she popped her wand out of her wrist holster and cast a music spell. A waltz started playing, tinny and sharp, like something from a music box. "I already asked you to marry me."

"I, uh, hope you know I don't have any idea how to dance." His hand in hers was clammy and stiff.

"The first rule is don't step on my feet," she told him.

He looked down at their feet. "Yeah, I kind of figured that out already."

"Then you are a very clever little boy," she said without inflection. "The second rule is this is a waltz, so it goes one, two, three, one, two, three, and you kind of dance around in a little circle."

She pulled him through the steps, and he let her, and she couldn't figure out how on earth she was still talking, because the world had narrowed down to his hands, in hers and on her shoulder, and her arm around his waist.

"I'll lead when we dance together, because I am the Nott heiress, and you are my spouse, but most of the other people you dance with, you'll be expected to lead. Before we're married though, if you have to dance, you will follow, because you are a halfblood, and you're illegitimate, and the Lestranges don't claim you."

Mai noted absently that she must have it really bad, because even his dear in the headlights look was kind of cute. "How will I know? I mean do I go up and ask?"

"No!" Mai just knew he would try such a thing, really. "There are charts. I think I might still have a copy."

He shot her a look of pure terror, as if he had only just realized what he was really getting into.

"We can't get married right now anyway," she told him, hoping she sounded reassuring. "We're not seventeen yet."

"Oh God," he said shakily. "We're engaged." And then, "I need to get you a ring."

There was no way he could afford to get her a ring. She rolled her eyes. "I'll get the ring. I will pick out a suitable family heirloom from an ancestor of mine who hasn't done something despicable." Zuko tried to speak, but she plowed on. "Unless you want to go up to Harry Potter himself and say, 'Hi, I'm You-Know-Who's Azkaban baby with Bellatrix Lestrange. You might have heard of them. May I look through the Black family heirlooms, which are probably full of all kinds of dark magic relics to see if I can find an engagement ring for my fiancée, who oh, by the way is the cousin of a couple of Death Eaters herself?'" When Zuko stared back, shocked into openmouthed silence, Mai said, "If you are planning on doing that, I'd like to watch."

His unscarred eye bugged out as he made a funny kind of choking noise. Then, the choking turned into a cough, and then into a hysterical giggle. He broke away from her, almost falling over, and some of the dust that had rubbed off from the floor to his robe billowed up into the air at the sudden movement. He sneezed and sneezed as he laughed, and Mai couldn't help herself, she started laughing too. They stood there in the abandoned classroom, covered in dust, and suddenly, she was painfully aware of the fact that she was still dressed for a funeral, in her black dust covered dress robes, and her hair had come partway undone, and she had streaks of mascara running down her face. Zuko had on his too short, threadbare school robes, and battered Muggle trainers, and his hair was sticking up from their nap. And they were planning a wedding.

Slowly, slowly, Zuko swallowed down the giggles and put his hand on her shoulder, taking her other hand. She put her arm around his waist and pressed her face into his shoulder and tried to hold it together.

"When we're done, we could go down to the kitchens, share one of those fruit tarts you like, make a night of it. I mean, it's already hours after curfew, might as well." He bit his bottom lip and gave her the kind of smile that looked like it was trying very hard to be a grin, but didn't quite know how. "You can teach me stuffy Purebred manners."

"And then sneak back to the dorms at three in the morning?" she asked, her voice muffled.

"Yeah."

She picked her head up off his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. "I'd like that."

"And we can get married the summer between sixth and seventh year, after my birthday," he breathed. "Something to look forward to."

Mai didn't answer him with words. She just wrapped her arms around him and held on tight.