Alicia couldn't remember the right spell to curl her hair. She hadn't used it in forever because it was tricky to get right with long hair. The one she had just tried made her look like she'd been electrocuted and it had taken three further spells to get her hair back to normal.
Once again her heart ached for her friends. Katie knew all the best hair spells and Angelina knew how to do the prettiest make-up ones. They should be there helping her get ready for her first date with George. Just like the three of them had gotten ready for the Yule Ball together. They'd spent over an hour that night giggling and experimenting with new spells.
Alicia shook her head to clear her thoughts. She couldn't possibly be sad now. She was about to go on an actual date with George. This could be the beginning of the rest of her life. That thought made her palms start sweating.
She had to calm down. It was still just two people getting coffee in a local café. She didn't need to go bonkers with her hair and make-up.
In the end she settled for keeping her hair down and natural and wearing the least make-up she thought she could get away with. She picked a pretty yellow sun-dress since it was a warm day outside. She was just trying to find the right pair of shoes when someone knocked on the door. Surprised, she ran to the door and pressed her eye to the peephole.
George was fifteen minutes early. What was that supposed to mean?
Alicia took a deep breath then opened the door. He stood there wearing a pair of grey trousers and a plain navy coloured t-shirt. A little dressed down for a date. Or maybe Alicia was too dressed up. Bugger it. She should've known the yellow sun-dress was too much.
"Hi," he said.
Alicia swallowed her anxiety and smiled. "Hi. Sorry, I'm almost ready. You're early though."
"I know. I just couldn't wait any longer. I've been pacing around downstairs for the last twenty minutes."
What was that supposed to mean? Was he as nervous as she was? Or was he excited and eager? Something else entirely?
"Oh, okay. Well, I'll just grab some shoes and my handbag and we can go."
"Wait. Can I come inside? We need to talk."
Easily the worst four word phrase in the English language.
"What's going on? Is something wrong?"
"Yeah, I guess you could say that."
Alicia's heart sank. She stepped back and George entered her flat. She closed the door behind him and fought a sudden urge to vomit. The signals he was sending were all wrong now that she thought about it. He hadn't smiled at her once and he was barely making eye contact
"Here, we can sit down on the sofa," she offered.
"I think I'll just stand for a bit if that's all right."
Alicia nodded and took a seat as he paced back and forth in front of the television. He looked restless, like he wanted to make a quick escape or something. Deep down, she knew. Nothing else could have made him look so troubled.
"George, what happened?"
He stopped pacing and turned to her. "Warrington came to see me on Sunday. He found out about us and he came into the Diagon Alley shop. He told me, Alicia, right there in my own shop in front of Fred."
Alicia jumped to her feet, wanting to grab hold of him, but the coffee table was between them. "There's a lot you have to understand, all right. There's so much you need to know."
"I only came to find out two things from you," George said, resuming his pacing. "Why you thought having a kid with a Slytherin was a good idea in the first place and why you kept it from me?"
"Because I figured you would react like this. You're angry at me."
"You just let me assume his father was some random Frenchman."
Alicia sat back down and clutched a cushion to her chest pitifully. "I couldn't tell you on Saturday. It was too much to handle in one go. I was going to tell you today, I promise."
"In a public café so I couldn't get too upset while we were surrounded by people?"
The thought had crossed her mind briefly, but ultimately she didn't want to have this conversation in public either. "That wasn't my intention at all. So which one are you? Upset or angry?"
George turned to her and she found his normally warm eyes were as cold as steel. This was bad all right. "I've felt every possibly emotion over the last couple of days. Now I'm mostly tired and fucking confused. Whichever way I looked at it, the whole thing made no sense. Why would you even have sex with someone from Slytherin in the first place?"
"You can't ask me a question like that."
"I just did."
"I don't know the answer!" Alicia admittedly sharply, her cheeks warming. "There's no point questioning my past decisions now anyway."
George shook his head. "No. You need to help me understand what's going on here. I don't know what I've just walked into the middle of. Please tell me you were drunk or something at least."
Alicia clutched her cushion for dear life. "I wasn't drunk," she answered softly.
"So you had a sober one night stand with Warrington then?"
When her voice came out this time it was barely above a whisper. "Not exactly."
"What do you mean?"
"We were in a relationship. We lived together for a few years."
George just stared at her. She had no way of knowing what was going through his mind. Either way, it was time to tell the entire story and see how he reacted once he knew everything.
"Listen, you need to stop judging me based on what you think happened."
"Then tell me, please. Tell me everything and put me out of my misery over here." George crossed his arms and eyed her expectantly. "I just don't want any of the gross details. I could do without the mental image of you shagging a Slytherin."
Alicia took a deep breath. "Christopher had already been living and working in France on and off for a few years when I ran in to him at a work function. His family has a villa in the Burgundy region and he used to let the French Ministry hold their annual ball there. I'd been in France myself for about eight months and I was getting homesick when I got invited to the Rose Ball with my boss.
"Chris and I didn't seek each other out or anything like that. We just ended up sitting next to each other that night because we were both Hogwarts graduates. And for me it was nice to hear an English accent and see a relatively familiar face."
Alicia remembered that night well even though she knew better than to give George any details. She hadn't known it at the time, but the night of the Rose Ball had been a crucial turning point in her life. George probably didn't need to know how much she had fancied Chris the moment she saw him, or how they had danced and he had whispered sordid secrets in her ear about the other guests.
She wasn't proud of it, but she'd ended up very willingly spending the night with him. Yeah, George definitely didn't need to hear that part.
"The next time we ran into each other he asked me out to dinner and I said yes," she continued, skipping over a few minor details like her spiteful act of vandalism and Chris's mild stalking. "I don't know why, okay. Things were just different over there away from Hogwarts and the aftermath of the war. We might as well have been on another planet."
"Once a Slytherin, always a Slytherin," George said defiantly. "You should have remembered that at least."
"Let me finish my story," Alicia said. "We kept seeing each other for a few months but I wouldn't say it was really serious. Then one day I bollocksed up my birth control potion and I took it too late. That part was entirely my fault. Christopher had nothing to do with it."
"Why would you think raising a child with him would be a good idea though?"
"I didn't care whether he stuck around or not. I just knew I wanted to keep my baby and I told Christopher he was totally off the hook if he wanted to walk away."
George's eyebrows shot up. "You actually gave him the chance to walk away scot-free and he still stayed?"
"Yeah, he did the right thing by us. Hard for you to believe?" Alicia asked, not expecting an answer in return. "It only gets more unbelievable from here. His mother showed up at the villa out of the blue one day and found out I was pregnant. It wasn't pretty; she threatened to cut him off if he chose to be with me. A half-blood ally of Dumbledore and Harry wasn't someone she wanted for her precious son. Again, Chris chose me and that same night he was being escorted from the villa by Magical Law Enforcement. He immediately lost all access to the family vault in Gringotts and also the one in Paris."
Alicia could see a flicker of something in George's eye now. Astonishment? Suspicion maybe? Admittedly, it was a pretty fantastic story. No Slytherin in their right mind would give up their family fortune for a half-blood with a bun in the oven. Christopher Warrington wasn't your average Slytherin though.
"What Mrs Warrington didn't know was that her son had been secreting money away in a Muggle bank account for the last year. Christopher had long suspected his mother was going to run the family business into the ground one day so he started putting money aside as a back-up plan."
"Then it wasn't much of a sacrifice for him since he was still rich anyway," George said, a hint of triumph in his voice.
"It wasn't that much money. Well, it was more than I've ever had at one time," she admitted. "Still, the real problem was that he had no way of making more money. All the people he'd been doing business with up till then began cutting ties with him. His vindictive bitch of a mother had got him blacklisted, you see. She effectively stopped him from being able to make a proper living within the wizarding community. Chris ended up coming to live with me in my tiny Paris flat because he had no other option."
George nodded slowly. "So that explains the Muggle gear he was wearing."
"That's right. It was my idea that he start doing business with Muggles. He hated the idea at first, of course. Inevitably, he realised he had no other choice, so I gave him a crash course on the Muggle world."
Alicia fought to keep the smile off her face as she remembered those days. They had been some of the best of her life. Every day after work she would come home and teach Chris about Muggles. Most nights ended with them laughing on the floor. They watched popular movies and TV shows and went to sporting events. They even went to the Louvre together to see the Mona Lisa. She saw a side of him that no one else would ever have the chance to see and she had fallen a little bit in love with him then.
George was staring at her expectantly so she continued. "He taught himself about the Muggle economy since I'm not good with that stuff. It turned out he had a knack for it all. He made a few smart stock market investments and the rest is history. By the time Jake was six months old, he had turned about fifteen thousand euros into almost seventy thousand. I don't know for sure, but he's probably worth close to a million pounds by now."
"You sound almost proud of him," George said. It came out as an accusation, rather than a simple statement.
Alicia gave a little shrug. "I was. Maybe I still am a bit. He's really smart, George. You wouldn't have known because you left school early but he finished third in the year. He was the only non-Ravenclaw student in the top five. He got six Os on his NEWTs," she added, then realised too late that she shouldn't have said that.
Predictably, George's eyes narrowed and his body language became even more guarded. "If that's important to you then why are you bothering with me? I have zero NEWTs in case you've forgotten."
Alicia threw her cushion aside and jumped to her feet. "What do you want me to say, George? I'm proud of what you've achieved as well. This isn't some sort of competition."
"I want you to tell me why you dated the son of a Death Eater!"
George's sudden anger startled her, maybe it even frightened her a little. She didn't sit back down though. She stood face to face with him, the coffee table the only thing stopping them standing nose to nose. "I know about his father. I knew back at school like everyone else. But I bet I know a lot that you don't. For instance, Christopher hated his father."
"That doesn't mean he never went to any Death Eater gatherings."
"He never went near them. He told me so himself."
"And you believed him? Just like that?"
"Yes! I'm not an idiot. I'd have known if I was living with a Death Eater. Chris hated Voldemort as well. He was too smart to get caught up in all of that. Mr Warrington gave away a lot of the family's money to Voldemort's cause and basically ignored Chris for his entire childhood. Why would that make him want to be a Death Eater?"
"Okay, so you can stand there and tell me with one hundred percent certainty that Warrington wasn't at the Battle of Hogwarts wearing a Death Eater mask with all the others?"
Alicia nodded firmly. "Yes, I can. Christopher wasn't even in the country when it happened. His father wasn't there either. He died of a massive heart attack while we were still at school. No one from his immediate family was there that night. I can promise you that."
"Regardless, he's still a Slytherin. The whole house is evil to the core."
Alicia threw her hands up, defeated. "What am I supposed to do about that? We're not in school anymore, George. All of this house rivalry stuff is fucking bollocks. We're adults living in the real world now. We're not segregated and made to compete with each other anymore. Everybody needs to get over this Gryffindor versus Slytherin stuff. Why should it matter to us now?"
Alicia paused, her chest heaving. She had run through that speech a hundred times in her head. She'd given herself a similar one all those years ago at the Rose Ball. She wasn't naïve – she had expected backlash from people back home once they found out about her relationship with Chris. Her argument probably wasn't going to work on everyone, but she had to try. Unfortunately, judging by the look on George's face, she had used her speech on the wrong person. His eyes had been cold and emotionless before, now they were ablaze.
"What does it matter?" he repeated loudly. "For starters, it matters a lot to me and my family. I've lost count of how many Slytherins have tried to kill us over the years. It might be true that not all Slytherins are Death Eaters but pretty much every Death Eater who went to Hogwarts was in Slytherin. Have you ever heard of a Hufflepuff Death Eater?"
Things were going much worse than Alicia had anticipated. George was angrier than she had ever seen him and it was all aimed at her right now. She was already on the verge of tears and George wasn't finished yet.
"Do you want to see something?" He lifted his shirt and Alicia slapped her hand over her mouth. "That's right. This is the scar I got during the Battle. For all I know it was a Slytherin who gave it to me. Do you understand why this is a big deal to me?"
Tears began to roll down Alicia's cheeks. The scar wasn't little at all. It curved in an upwards arc from near his belly button to the bottom of his ribcage. She could tell that something wasn't right with it. It looked too fresh and pink and puckered to be an old injury.
"It'll never heal properly," George said, answering her unasked question. He dropped his shirt and his voice softened. "The Healers who treated me at St Mungo's think the blade was cursed somehow. Everyone made sure the details of the injury never got leaked to the Prophet so no one knows about the extent of the scar. I didn't show it to you to make you cry, Alicia. I just need you to see my side of this."
"I'm so sorry," she said, wiping her eyes awkwardly. "All that stuff I said about Warrington was so you would understand what it was like back then. Right now I hate him. I hate him so much it feels like there's a pulsating ball of lava lodged under my sternum. I want to kill him for showing up at your shop like that. He's a rude, arrogant arsehole who doesn't deserve anyone's love. But Jake does love him. I can't change that."
"Then he's always going to be a part of your life somehow, isn't he?" George realised.
"Please tell me you're okay with that." She went around the coffee table to stand right in front of him. "Please tell me something I did years ago won't ruin my chances with you today. I'll make my declaration right here and now: I want to be with you more than anything."
"Even though I don't have any NEWTs or anywhere near a million Galleons?" George asked. Alicia nodded fervently and he wiped an errant tear from her cheek. "I'm going to need a bit of time to process all of this. If I can't get past this Warrington stuff then I don't want either of us to waste our time. You understand that, right?"
Alicia wanted to say no. Instead, she forced herself to nod stiffly. "How long will you need though?"
"I don't know for sure. Probably only a day or two. I'll come and see you when I know what I want to do."
George kissed her on the forehead. To Alicia the kiss felt like a crappy consolation prize and farewell gesture all rolled into one. She wasn't very optimistic that she was going to get her happily ever after with George after all. Christopher had seen to that.
"You should probably still pretend that we haven't seen each other," George advised. "Fred promised he wouldn't tell anyone else as long as I kept him in the loop from now on."
"Fine," Alicia agreed half-heartedly. What exactly was the point of hiding a non-existent relationship from everyone?
"I'll come see you soon. Just promise me that I know everything now." George smiled faintly for the first time that day. "My poor heart and I can't handle any more surprises."
Those sodding letters. Alicia hesitated. Did that even count? The situation was sorted now so probably not.
"That's all of it," she said.
They walked together to the door and Alicia let him out. He turned back like he wanted to say something else but thought better of it.
"Bye, George."
He gave her a small smile in reply then disappeared down the hall. Alicia closed the door and went straight into her bathroom to look in the mirror. She looked awful; her makeup was smeared everywhere. All she felt like doing was crying so she stripped off and stood under the warm spray of her shower till she ran out of tears.
Then, she pulled herself together. She had decided what she needed to do. She would leave Jake with her parents for a while longer.
Alicia had decided she was going to see Christopher.
A/N: As much as I love them, I couldn't make it too easy for Alicia and George to get together. Where would be the the fun in that? Next chapter: Alicia and Christopher have their confrontation and things get...feisty.
