A/N: Hi friends! With all the talk that this site may be going down for good (though people have been saying that for a million years at this point, so who knows), I thought I should let y'all know this story is also posted on AO3 under the username Lunam0th, and on wattpad under the username _lunam0th. Thanks for reading!

23 September 1994

My Dearest Poppy,

I do hope you find yourself well and are settling back into your studies. It feels as though it was yesterday when I saw you off on the Hogwarts Express for the very first time. I've never been more proud as I was the day I received your owl telling us you were sorted into Slytherin.

I ran into that delightful man Marcus Flint while shopping in Diagon Alley over the weekend. you know he's interning at the Ministry? In the Department of Magical Transportation! He spoke of you so fondly, and is very much looking forward to seeing you again at the Ball. I promised you would save him a dance.

I've put several dresses on hold for you at Gladwilla's Gownery in Hogsmeade, do be sure to stop in during the first trip so they may be properly tailored. After that little growth spurt of yours, I doubt the measurements they have on file for you are anywhere near correct.

Do write soon.

Best,

Mother

Poppy reread the letter from her mother several times, lingering on her mother's subscription.

Best.

Best?

The woman couldn't even write love? Sincerely? Cheers? She had to go with best?

Poppy pulled a sheet of parchment from her bag, smoothing it out atop her History of Magic textbook, the worn carvings of couples initials, graduation years, and all manner of magical graffiti gouged into the wooden tops of the library tables making it particularly challenging to write directly onto parchment.

24 September 1994

Mother,

I would rather attempt a dance with the whomping willow than with that half-troll Marcus Flint

Poppy scratched a line through her words, trying again.

I'm rather shocked to hear Marcus Flint was able to gain employment at the Ministry, considering he doesn't know how to read

And again.

I thought you wanted pretty grandchildren

And again.

Hell no

Poppy tore off the top of her parchment and wadded it into a ball.

24 September 1994

Mother,

My studies are going well. I am on track to finish 7th year Astronomy and History of Magic via self-study by the end of the year, which will leave me additional time to focus on Charms come next year, as well as my other remaining subjects.

I will be sure to stop by Gladwilla's while in Hogsmeade to have my measurements retaken. You have such refined taste in gowns, I'm sure the selections you have made will be divine.

Best,

Poppy

Her mother had horrid taste in dresses. Not for herself, of course. Amelia always looked the picture of elegance in simple black gowns with elaborate jewels and baubles, but for Poppy, her tastes left much to be desired. Colors that would look beautiful on her mother's golden complexion, but washed the life from Poppy's fair skin, cuts that did nothing for her figure, itchy, uncomfortable fabric that clung and bunched awkwardly instead of floating and flowing with her through the steps of a waltz.

Her mother also had terrible taste in men. Marcus Flint? Really? The man was a troll, not just in looks, but in temperment. Surely, there had to be one decent pureblood bloke. He didn't even need to be good looking. For all Poppy cared, he could look like a troll if he was at least partially decent.

Roger Davies was decent, sweet, even. Ever since their duel, he'd taken the seat to her left that Adrian usually occupied in both Defense Against the Dark Arts and in Herbology. Their conversations tended to revolve around N.E.W.T.s prep and the shared grievances of taking the full Hogwarts class load, but sometimes would devolve into the flirtatious banter of two people attempting to prove their intellectual superiority over one another. Roger Davies was polite, well spoken, and handsome. He'd make a fine date to the ball.

Upon making it to the library. Poppy did what some would consider invasive, but she considered necessary research. She spent the first hour of her morning pouring through the Davies familial archives, just to ensure her contingency plan was, in fact, 'suitable.' She looked up the Weasleys as well, which proved to be much more scandalous than the Davies. By purist standards, at least. Draco would have a fit if he learned he's related to them through the Blacks. Not exactly a family reunion anyone would want to attend, even if the drama would be divine.

George was decent, too. He'd been much warmer to her since their accidental bath together, if one considered pranking her at every opportunity an expression of warmth. Nothing as malicious as blowing off her eyebrows, thank Merlin, but little things. Charming her hair ribbon red, or her textbooks to erupt with bouquets of poppies anytime she'd open them, or demonstrating his newfound mastery of mimicry charms on her ink bottles. He'd delight in the swirls of smoke that would spill across their table when Poppy would dip her quill into the mimic, then present the actual bottle with a flourish of long, elegant fingers.

He did, however, confess to Flitwick that he'd mastered it with Poppy's help after the tiny Professor praised George's unauthorized use of the charm during lecture. When presented with no less than a dozen bottles of ink strewn across her desk, Poppy had smashed her hands over them. A cloud of smoke accompanied the loud smack of her palms, nearly startling Flitwick off his stack of books. What should have earned them both detention instead led to a gasp of joy, a demand for demonstration, and, miraculously, five points for their respective houses.

He was handsome, too. In another reality, where he and his whole ginger family were a bunch of prats, Amelia would have fawned over him. She would have made cheeky comments over glasses of champagne to George's mother about red hair running in their family as well, and oh, wouldn't it just be so fun to see if Poppy had that gene hiding somewhere in her DNA? Or boasted to his father about the lovely little estate in the Scottish countryside that would make such a wonderful starter home for Poppy and George come graduation.

Poppy grimaced at the thought, trying to picture what a pureblood purist Weasley would even look like. Significantly less smiley. Less expressive, entirely. Less lively. Less fun. Less…George.

She glanced back at her parchment, tempted by the thought of shredding it, of not replying at all. The letter made it into her bag, instead. When it came to letters from Amelia, it was best to just get them over with, but that went with most things when it came to her mother. It was better not to give her the chance to consider throwing a fit, rather than taking on the herculean task of damage control once she had.

It wasn't how she'd wanted to start her Saturday, or any day, really. Poppy had planned to spend the day catching up on her History of Magic self-study so she wouldn't have to think about it for a few weeks. That wasn't exactly how she wanted to spend her Saturday, either, but if she wanted any chance of redeeming the E she'd received on her Charms O.W.L. by N.E.W.T.s time, she needed the space open in her schedule next year. Yet, all she'd managed was bloodline research. That, and completely ruining her mood by reading her mother's letter. The Ball was still 98 days away, and her mother had already begun her attempts to fulfill her promise of "or I will find one for you."

Poppy looked down at her History of Magic textbook. There wasn't a version of her in any reality that could make it through a paragraph that day, let alone several chapters. She pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment and set it on top, sketching the outline of a chart.

644 days.

"Coming to the library, Freddie?"

Incoherent grumbles came from behind Fred's bed curtains. They shifted slightly before stilling once more, the grumbles quickly replaced by soft, rhythmic breathing.

"Oh Freddie," George sung. He grabbed the pillow off his bed and crept around the room, pausing next to Fred's bunk. "Time to start the dayyyy." George ripped back the curtains, only to be met with Fred's wand inches from his face.

"Hit me with that pillow and I'll blast you. There are two of us. No one will miss you. "

George slowly lowered the pillow, Fred doing the same with his wand.

"Fine. I'll go research aging potions alone. But don't expect me to share!"

Fred closed his eyes, mumbling something George was sure would have been rather unflattering if it had been at all coherent.

"Git."

Fred's eyes snapped back open just as George smashed the pillow across his face, the jet of water from the tip of his wand narrowly missing George as he ducked out of the way.

"No one will miss you, George!" Fred called as George fled the room, only pausing to grab his bag before slipping out the door.

The Great Hall was nearly empty when George arrived. It was still early in the morning, and Gryffindor was a house of late sleepers. The Ravenclaw table looked to be the most awake of the four, with several groups of students in twos and threes chatting idly as they finished pieces of toast and cups of tea. Hufflepuff, however, looked to be the sleepiest, with only four bleary-eyed witches and wizards, all looking as if they would dive face-first into their porridge at any moment.

If the Great Hall was empty, the library was abandoned. It was eerily silent, even more than normal. No rustle of parchment or shifting of chairs, not a panicked gasp or agonized groan to be heard. There was, however, a Poppy to be found, settled at a table in the back next to a window near the reference section. The school robes she wore during the week had been replaced with a worn Holyhead Harpies jumper and a yellow ribbon tied around her ponytail. Her brow was furrowed as she scratched down notes on a piece of parchment, stopping every so often to trace down the page, scratch out a line, or add an annotation.

George looped through shelves and worked through rows of books until he came out behind her, leaning slowly over her shoulder to peek at what she was working on. It was a list of some kind, or a series of lists, written in violet ink. The margins were littered with quick calculations, and at the bottom was a strange sort of calendar. A time table between that day and graduation, he realized.

"Looking forward to graduation?" he whispered a few inches from her ear.

Poppy startled, immediately flipping her parchment. "Could you not bloody do that?" she hissed, turning her head slowly until she met his eye.

Her eyes were black. Or, almost black. Black the way coffee was black. Glossy, dark and solid until light pierced through and revealed hidden warmth. George could just make out the delineation between her pupil and dark iris before she turned her head back toward the table. She folded her parchment and tucked it into her bag, pulling out a fresh sheet and smoothing it out on top of her book.

"What do you want?" she snapped, capping her bottle of ink and tucking it away, producing another in its place.

"Someone's touchy this morning." George slung his bag onto the floor, taking the seat adjacent from Poppy.

She didn't reply, instead opening her textbook and tucking her parchment along one of the pages. Her finger trailed down the dense block of text, pausing every so often as she jotted down keywords or important dates.

"What are you still doing in History of Magic?" George tried. He pulled his potions book from his bag and set it on the table, but his focus remained on her.

"Going twelve for twelve," she mumbled, "Would go thirteen for thirteen, but there hasn't been enough interest in Alchemy for them to open up any sessions in years."

"That's impossible-"

"-It's not," Poppy set down her quill, lifting her head to meet George's eye, "Your own brother did it."

"Yeah, but Percy's a nerd!" George countered.

Poppy shrugged, going back to her rapid note-taking. "Guess I am as well."

Of course she was a nerd. She was top of their class. A prefect. The perfect daughter of a prestigious pureblood family. George Weasley had an unyielding, unfathomable crush on a giant nerd.

He'd seen her notes in class, written in her perfect, mechanical handwriting, with a different color of ink for each class. Where one even acquires twelve separate shades of ink, George couldn't be sure, but he'd seen them. In the lessons they'd had together over the years, at least. Especially in the ones he'd cheat off her.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" Poppy switched her parchment to the other side of the book, resuming her search of the text with a long, black fingernail.

"Studying."

Poppy froze for a moment, her nail pausing midway through the paragraph she'd been scanning. "Didn't know you knew how to do that."

"I am exceptionally studious-" his words cut off as Poppy snorted. "I will have you know, Miss Selwyn, that I achieved an O on my Charms O.W.L.!"

Poppy's head snapped up from her notes, her brows furrowed. "You got an O?!"

"Yeah, 'course. Didn't you?"

Poppy looked back down to her notes, the tip of her quill pressed just a little harder into the parchment. "No. I didn't. Studied for months."

"Well there's your problem," George chimed, "Charms isn't about studying. It's about doing."

"I'll do y-" Poppy snapped her mouth shut, going just a bit pink.

"You'll do what now?" George teased. Or tried to, at least, his heart leaping into his throat at her double entendre.

"Shut it," she murmured.

George leaned across the table until his lips were level with her ear. "We can go back to my room. Or yours, if you'd-"

"-I said shut it, Weasley!"

"You said it, not me." George leaned away from her, settling back in his chair.

Poppy had never been particularly warm to him, but she'd also rarely been as cold as she was that morning. Especially not recently. She'd be snippy, sure, but it was usually playful, or sarcastic, at the very least, but that morning was different. She seemed…upset.

"Are you alright?" George asked quietly, eyes focused on the small, vertical line between her furrowed brows. "An E on your Charms O.W.L. is amazing, especially if you got eleven others-"

"-What do you want?"

To see you happy. To see you smile. For you to relax and not worry so much about some bloody exam you still did better on than half the bloody school. To take you home to meet my parents and then kick Fred out of our room so you and I can-

"Nothing!"

Poppy's dark eyes flicked up from her notes to meet his, holding his gaze in that piercing, unrelenting way she always seemed to whenever she'd had enough of his antics.

"If you must know, I came here to research aging potions." George picked up his old potions textbook, wiggling it back and forth as she continued to glare. "...But since you're here, can I borrow your Transfiguration notes from yesterday? I missed class."

Poppy sighed, reaching into her bag and pulling out a set of notes written in crimson ink. "Lesson was so peaceful without you," she tossed at him.

"Aw, missed you too, love-"

"-I'm sure," she leaned across the table, running her nail along the annotations in the margins of her notes, "these are the highlights of the lesson. Copy the whole thing if you want, but these are the key to what will be on the exam."

George picked up the parchment, scanning over her neat handwriting. "How do you figure?"

"Every professor has a formula," she replied nonchalantly, "that's McGonnagal's."

"Oh…Thanks."

Poppy nodded, resuming her note-taking.

George pulled a sheet of parchment and a quill from his bag before dipping into her inkwell. "What were you working on before?"

"Not your business," she murmured, flipping the page in her book. Compared to her Transfiguration notes, her History of Magic notes were sparse. More dense than his had ever been, considering George had never taken notes in History of Magic, but still sparse on the Poppy scale.

George looked back to her Transfiguration notes, immediately getting lost at the level of detail. It was beyond what even their textbook covered, with neat sketches of rabbits, teacups, and other items they must have been working on in class that day. He switched to the annotations, which were much more concise, giving context to the dense information in the body. He began copying them down, glancing back and forth between her notes and his until he caught sight of a doodle in the left margin near the bottom of the page. It was clearly a drawing of Adrian, sporting a pair of rabbit ears and a set of whiskers. Next to it was an arrow to the drawing, paired with the word "you." He smiled, tracing over it with two fingers.

"You're a good artist."

Poppy looked up at him, her cheeks going pink when she saw what he was looking at. "Oh…Thanks."

That was good. That was good. She was…defrosting. Coming back to life. She'd been a new kind of lively in the last few weeks, catching his eye in the Great Hall and smiling at him, lending him a quill in defense, one she never asked to have back, even making the occasional pithy comment to him behind her hand in charms, ones she usually saved for Adrian. Maybe she was just tired, and needed some time to wake up.

"Excited for the tournament?"

"...Yeah," Poppy replied, her tone finally softening just a bit, "think it should be interesting."

"Who do you think gets in?"

Poppy shrugged, "Reckon it will be you or Fred if you can get past the age restriction."

George's head snapped up to look at her. "Are you taking the piss?"

Poppy shook her head, sketching out the timeline of some ancient and most certainly boring historical event. "No. You two are clever, and quick thinkers. And you're comfortable performing in front of a crowd. That's got to be more vital to the competition than anything else, I figure."

"Oh," George replied, unable to think of anything else to say, or anything other than the fact Poppy Selwyn, head of their class, had just called him clever.

"Angelina would do well, I think. She's tough. Cedric, too. I don't think a lot of people realize how brilliant he is with him being a Hufflepuff and all," she mused, paying no mind to George or his lack of answer. "Haven't really heard about anyone else entering."

"...Yeah, Angelina would do great," he finally replied.

"I miss Quidditch, though," she added after a few minutes of silence, "They have the whole bloody campus, don't know why they had to grow some crazy forest on the pitch."

"Won't have to deal with Gryffindor crushing Slytherin this year."

Poppy rolled her eyes. "Guess not…I was looking forward to watching your lot get revenge on Hufflepuff for last year's match, though."

"Yeah? More than watching your own team?"

"Our team sucks-" Poppy snapped her head up, jabbing the end of her quill in George's direction, "-If you tell anyone I said that, I'll hex you into oblivion."

"Noted," George laughed, holding up both his hands in surrender.

"Especially Adrian. Poor kid has to miss his sixth year, and will still be stuck with a bunch of idiots who bought their way onto the team for his last season."

George's stomach twisted uncomfortably again at the mention of Adrian. He glanced back at the doodle of him in her notes, finding it much less endearing than he had earlier. "Are you and Adrian…"

"Are Adrian and I what?"

"Y'know…together?"

Poppy looked up at him again, narrowing her eyes. "How is that your business?"

"Bloody hell, woman! I'm just making conversation!"

Poppy looked back at her notes, chewing the inside of her cheek. "Adrian and I...It's not like that between us. Not really."

"Ah…Leaves you open to all sorts of blokes to whisk you away for the first Hogsmeade weekend," George offered, attempting to keep his relief out of his voice.

Poppy snorted softly, setting aside her History notes for the ink to dry. She closed her book before pulling out another scroll of parchment, this time written in purple ink. Divination, George quickly realized as Poppy pulled out a deck of Tarot cards and shuffled them.

"Who do you want to go with?" George prodded playfully, "C'mon, you can tell ol' Georgie!"

"No one."

"No one?"

Poppy chewed the inside of her cheek as she laid out three dards and cross-referenced her notes. "I have to go get my measurements retaken at Gladwilla's. Would you want to spend the day watching some bird you fancy getting wrapped up in a magical tape measure? Then pretend to like the ugliest gowns you've ever seen someone try on in your entire life?"

Yes. If it were you, yes. "Alright, point taken."

Poppy laughed, jotting down some sort of conclusion from her card reading on a clean sheet of parchment before stacking them back into the deck.

"What's the fitting for?"

"Noth-" Poppy cut herself off, her head snapping up to meet his eye, "A party. At my house. New Year's ball."

Her eyes roamed his face, searching for…something. George wiped a hand over his mouth and chin, praying to any god that was listening that he hadn't been sitting around with some remnants of breakfast on his face the entire time he'd been talking to her.

"Oh? Looking forward to it?"

"Not in the slightest," Poppy sighed. She propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin against her palm. "Maybe if I can find a proper date, it will be more…entertaining than last year."

"Oh?" George leaned closer, hoping to glean any information from her about what, exactly, Poppy Selwyn wanted in a man. "What's a 'proper date' for these types of events?"

"Oh, I don't know," her eyes drifted up and to the side, catching the sun from the window until they shined the color of burnt sugar, "someone tall. And handsome. Someone who can drink and dance and make fun of all the pureblood nonsense with me all night." Her eyes floated back down to his once more. "Know where I can find someone like that?"

Yes. Me. George leaned across the table, drawing a card from her deck. "Looks like you'll bring…" he spun the card toward himself, reading the name across the bottom, "...a fool."

Poppy bit her bottom lip. It slid through her teeth as a smile lit up her face.

"And…" George drew another card, attempting a steadying breath as his heart began to gallop in his chest, "...the lovers. You'll fall in love with the fool you bring to this ball. And then…" George picked another card, pausing to look at the image. A castle burned as lightning struck it, several people tumbling from its windows. "...You'll burn your house down. Together."

"Sounds about right," Poppy laughed, plucking the card from his hand and laying it out with the others. She dipped her quill in her ink, scratching down notes about George's impromptu fortune telling session into her Divination work.

"Or maybe it's the fool who falls in love with you," George murmured, his eyes going wide as the words hit his ears. He hadn't meant to say them aloud, not with the tinge of longing that made it into his voice.

Poppy, to his relief, smiled as she caught his eye again. "Well he'd have to be a fool, then. Wouldn't he?"