Lydia and Freddie huddled in their winter cloaks in the cloister. Lydia was jiggling up and down; Freddie kept shuffling his feet. Lydia stared out across the courtyard. She wondered how it was possible that wherever they stood, the wind seemed to be worse than where they had been standing before. The clouds were so heavy, even the covering of snow across the courtyard looked grey. The brightest thing they could see was a frosted cobweb at the top of an arch.
"How long's that quidditch practice going to take in this weather?" Lydia grumbled.
Freddie drew back a step and stared at her. "Yeah, ask me 'cos I'm suddenly an expert on sports! Anyway, you're the one who can see the future."
"Shh!" Lydia hissed, looking around them.
"No one's stupid enough to be out in this cold," Freddie reassured her. "Or, no one else, I should say."
"We'll give Soph five more minutes," Lydia suggested, pulling up her robe sleeve to check her watch.
They shivered in silence.
"You spent a lot of time with Ambrose again this Christmas," Lydia observed. "What were you doing?"
"Talking," said Freddie, not looking at her.
"About me?" Lydia probed.
"No," said Freddie.
"Really?"
"There are other subjects, you know."
Lydia stuck out her tongue at him. "So, what did you talk about?"
"Things."
"What sort of things?"
"Boy's things."
"What, like how to be really annoying?" Lydia snapped.
Freddie looked upwards and to one side. He bit his lip in thought as he did so.
"Yeah," he said after a moment. "That was about ninety percent of it."
"Tell," Lydia commanded.
"It was just random stuff and stories and… stuff," Freddie shrugged.
"You're hiding something, Fortescue," she poked him in the chest. "Don't make me tickle it out of you!"
Freddie sighed. "He's just interested in how the three of us get on together. I think he wants to know you've got friends around you, people you can rely on."
"And?" Lydia continued the interrogation.
"And what?" Freddie parried.
"You spent too much time together for just that. There was more, wasn't there?" Lydia accused.
"Well, there were details," Freddie blocked.
"Tell," Lydia commanded again. "I'm beginning to think a merciless tickling would be a great way to warm up."
Freddie turned away and shrugged. He hopped from foot to foot, not from the cold alone.
"What?" Lydia pushed.
Freddie became as still as the stonework which surrounded them. He whispered, "He asked me if I was in love with you."
Lydia became still, too. "But… do you even like girls?"
Freddie frowned. "I spend all my time with girls. You and Sophie are girls, aren't you?"
"Yes, but… I mean," Lydia stumbled over her words. "What did you say to him?"
"I'm not gay, you know. Just 'cos everyone says I am…" Freddie was not angry, nor even surprised. Lydia felt he sounded disappointed in her.
"If I was gay," he continued, "I'd fancy boys."
Lydia thought for a moment. "You like Teddy, though."
"Everybody likes Teddy! You like Teddy."
"Well, yeah. And I fancy him… a bit," Lydia pointed out.
"Well, I just like him. I like when we hang out together. I like when he seems to like me. I don't want to snog him, though. I don't look when he's getting changed in the dorm or anything like that. You would, I bet."
Lydia felt herself blush. "No!"
They stood in silence and started to shuffle again to keep from freezing.
"So, what did you say?" Lydia asked after some time.
"When?" Freddie countered. He sounded put out.
"When… you were talking to Uncle Ambrose… about me."
"I told him I love you, of course."
Lydia's insides squirmed.
"But I said I wasn't 'in love' with you."
Lydia felt empty.
"Look, I don't want to snog you," he explained, turning to look at her, "or stuff like that. But I don't want to snog anyone. Not yet, anyway. I've never looked at someone and felt that way."
Lydia said nothing.
"Ambrose said that was OK. He said people find their way when they're ready. That happens at different ages for different people. He said there's no need to rush it."
He looked Lydia in the eye. "He made me feel better about it," he grinned. "And you made me feel worse."
"Freddie, I'm really…" she began.
Freddie laughed. "I'm teasing you. You're amazing, Lydz. Maybe one day you'll want to snog me. Maybe I'll let you."
They smiled.
"'Sup, kids?" Sophie's voice came from along the cloister.
They turned to see her striding towards them, her quidditch robes swirling around her.
"Well, someone looks pleased with her bad self!" Freddie called.
"Aidan said I was the star of the team!" Sophie enthused.
"Well, we knew that! Since Tom retired to focus on his exams there's no competition," Freddie assured her.
Sophie flung her arms around Freddie, her robes swinging forwards to envelop him.
"Ooh, you're all warm and steamy," Freddie purred.
"Sorry, not sorry," Sophie told him.
"No need to be sorry! It's lovely – we're absolutely frozen. We've been waiting for some git who's about fifty hours late."
Sophie stepped back and gave his arm a playful punch.
"Ow, ow, ow!" Freddie feigned injury. "Broken ribs! Punctured lungs!"
Lydia chipped in, "It was your arm, Freddie."
"Ow! Hurty arm death! It runs in the family. You could have killed me."
"It's always a tempting option. But can we take the violence inside now?" Lydia suggested.
They turned to go. Freddie leaned in close to Sophie and said, in a loud stage whisper, "She's so masterful."
For a while Lydia found her mind going back to what Freddie had said. She kept wondering why it was that Freddie was not 'in love' with her. What was missing in her that a boy she felt so close to could not find it in himself to fall in love with her. But, in the end, she realised that was the wrong way to look at the situation. What mattered was that Freddie loved her as a friend. He was not ready to fall in love with anyone. And when he was… Then she realised she had no idea what she wanted to happen. She had forgotten to think about how she wanted him to feel about her, or how she wanted to feel about him, or how she expected to feel about anyone else.
She decided it was all too difficult. There were plenty of other things to think about. After all, love did not care about anyone's plans – it happened when it happened. Uncle Ambrose, of all people, put it simply as 'the heart wants what the heart wants'. For now, there was homework to be done, magic to be practised, and exams to prepare for. Most importantly there was fun to be had with friends.
She found out that Sophie knew about Freddie's… unresolved attitudes towards girls and boys. It put Lydia on edge somehow to find that Sophie not only knew but had found it easy to come to terms with the fact. She wondered how many other people knew and what they thought about it, but there was no way she was going to risk leaking what might be Freddie's secret. Anyway, she had decided to let the subject drop and to trust that time would resolve the issue.
Lydia was enjoying her schoolwork. Ancient Runes with Professor Rankin was, somehow, a subject she seemed to slip into. Professor Rankin, or Hugo as he invited the students to call him in class, was a little eccentric. It was a small class, so the informal approach worked. Hugo had a neatly trimmed beard with waxed mustachios fixed in a stiff, horizontal line. He wore a variety of oddly-shaped spectacles, often more than one pair at a time. He dressed very smartly in a style which would not have looked out of place in Victorian times. He walked with what should have been a cane, but which looked more like a stout stick. While he was studious and academic, he was also as cheery as a Christmas elf.
Lydia had the knack of being able to work with a new alphabet after a few runs through all the characters. In their first year of studying runes, all the texts they worked on turned out to be in English or Latin. Lydia had never studied Latin. She found, to her surprise, it was easy to understand what the sentences they transcribed meant. This was despite the order of the words sometimes being quite different to the English translation. Oddy was taking Ancient Runes as well. They were not surprised to discover that he knew Latin. He also knew several varieties of runes and other scripts. Though their temperaments were very different, Professor Rankin and Oddy got along splendidly.
Sophie found Runes less easy than Lydia but was still in the upper half of the class. Sadly, it did nothing for Freddie. The runes were no more than marks on a page to him. He could work through them laboriously looking them up one at a time, as most of the class did at the start. Freddie never seemed to progress beyond that stage. He liked Hugo and the professor tried as much as he could to help him, but Freddie lacked an aptitude with runes. He was better with hieroglyphs, but not enough for it to make a difference. After two terms of struggling, Freddie gave up Ancient Runes at Easter.
Lydia's out-of-hours work with Draco had moved on from manipulating objects to manipulating living things. They had shied away from working on people's minds, but Lydia had discovered an ease in dealing with animals. Animals were willing to let Lydia take over their bodies and share their minds. In return Lydia vowed to herself to treat them with respect when she did so. She started by calling animals to her without making a sound. She would stand outside and will a bird to come sit on her arm, and it would. She did this with a raven and then moved into its mind. Sharing the space with the raven (ravens were intelligent and aware, she found) she could take over its senses and its movements. Without completely leaving her own body, she could fly the raven's body and see through its eyes. She could be a raven.
She tried this with a number of creatures, and learned a great deal about them as she did. Dogs really were full of love for those they considered their pack. But they experienced the world in a different way from the human way. Their sense of smell gave them an ability which was almost like looking back in time. The way a smell faded and matured could tell you a lot about how long ago something had happened. She wondered how cats saw the world, but Xander hissed horribly when she looked at him with that thought in her mind. She promised never to do the same to him as she had done to the raven and the dog.
The other thing she and Draco discovered was that her knowledge of biology and anatomy made her an exceptional healer. Those years of being a bookish science nerd were starting to pay off. To prove the point, Draco cut his thumb. Lydia returned it to its normal, uncut state in a second. That was a very useful ability to have. Draco could not see how to test this particular ability much further. They considered a trip to St. Mungo's hospital. Draco decided the danger of her abilities being noticed, and the wrong people being alerted, was too great.
The next logical step was to move on to manipulating the human mind. That is where serious ethical questions started to arise. Beyond trying some basic Legilimency on Draco, they decided to go no further, for now. As it happened, Draco was a very good Occlumens. He had inherited this from his parents. The ability to close his mind had served him well in their time under Voldemort. Lydia had no problem telling what Draco was thinking nor whether he was telling the truth or not. She complimented Draco on his bravery in letting her try. There were two things she had felt when she accidentally slipped into Draco's mind for a second. They were his remorse for his former bad deeds and the redeeming love for his wife, Astoria, and their little boy, Scorpius.
Back in the normal curriculum of the school, Lydia continued to do exceptionally well in her coursework and end of year exams. Sophie's bright mind and diligent hard work ensured she also did well in her studies. In quidditch, she was the star player and Gryffindor went on to win the Quidditch Cup again. Freddie did well in his schoolwork, thanks to the girls' continual encouragement and occasional nagging. He was good at Charms, Herbology, Magical Creatures, Potions and Divination. He was doing fine in Defence Against the Dark Arts and average in Transfiguration. He would gladly have dropped Astronomy and History of Magic as he had with Ancient Runes, had it been allowed. He was surprised to get average marks in Astronomy and History in his year-end tests.
After spending Easter with the Fortescues, the three would outwardly have been happy to spend the summer there as well. In privacy of their own hearts, they were excited to be going back to the Old Rectory together, though. Lydia caught herself wondering about living there with Freddie once they had left school. She reminded herself that she had dropped that subject until further notice.
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