Chapter 6

Old Scars

Rose groaned and tried to get up, but there was something extremely heavy on top of her. She blinked and waited for hear vision to clear while she checked to make sure she didn't have any broken bones. She remembered it very vaguely, but she was sure Scorpius had broken their fall with a hasty cushioning charm just before they hit the pavement.

The weight on her shifted and she realized with some shock that it was Scorpius that was on top of her. She also quite vividly remembered him shielding her from the blast. That realization seemed to cause funny reactions in her stomach, but Scorpius groaning and moving was enough distraction to forget about it. He pulled himself up with one elbow and rubbed his head, cringing and pulling a piece of wood from his hair. He finally looked down and smiled sheepishly at Rose.

"I look quite the fool right now, don't I?"

Rose stared up at him, still slightly disoriented by the fall. "What?"

"I acted all high and mighty and everything and got us blown up." He placed his other arm on the other side of Rose, not even making the slightest attempt to get off of her. She looked at him and shook her head, feeling a little more than slightly befuddled.

"What—I don't—"

He laughed quietly and stared into her eyes. "Yeah, I'm just rambling, don't mind me."

"I can't not mind, you idiot, you're on top of me."

She was pretty sure she meant to say that in her head, but the effect it got was remotely entertaining nonetheless.

Scorpius's eyes widened infinitesimally and he breathed through his mouth, like he hadn't expected her to react like that. She hadn't expected her to react like that. She probably had a concussion or something.

"Yeah," Scorpius breathed and Rose suddenly felt conscious of their position. "My bad."

But he still remained where he was and she started to wonder if he'd maybe injured his back since it was directly in contact with the explosion. Before she could ask him that though—

"What the fuck?"

Scorpius looked up and Rose had to stifle a groan. Of course her brother chose that exact moment to come visit her. Her mum must have told him what had happened. Rose closed her eyes and suddenly there was no weight on top of her. She opened her eyes and squinted at the street light shining right in her face. Hugo's head shadowed it an instant later, as he bent down and looked at her.

"Help me up," she said and he pulled her to her feet. She stumbled slightly at the sharp prick of gravel against her soles and she winced as her back cracked. She turned and saw that Scorpius was standing to the side and examining his body for any injuries.

"How's your back?" she asked him, moving toward him even as Hugo's grasp on her hand tightened.

Scorpius grimaced at her and said, "I'm not sure yet. I can feel it like someone scraped sandpaper all along my back, but I can't be sure until I check."

Rose nodded. "Let's go."

"Where to?"

This time Hugo had spoken and she glanced at their hands where he was still holding hers. He noticed and let go. She looked up at him and said, "My apartment. Hopefully the damage is only external."

"Damage?" and then Hugo's eyes widened. "You didn't try to force your way in, did you?"

She smacked her lips and he ran a hand down his face. "Rosie," he groaned. "Were you not listening at all when dad was telling you about the wards?"

"I was, but I was desperate and Scorpius said—"

"Are we back to that now?"

Rose looked up sharply because of the sour tone of Hugo's voice. Her suspicions were confirmed when she saw the way Hugo's jaw was set and his eyes had turned hard. She sighed.

"Let's go check on the damage first. People are going to wonder about the noise. We may have to take care of that—"

"You really don't listen, do you," Hugo snapped and Rose frowned at him.

"What—"

"It's noiseless," Scorpius explained from behind, as he cradled his left arm to his chest. When she stared at him, he repeated, "It's noiseless. So nobody would have heard."

"But, it was such a big explosion—"

"It was just a blast of hot air and bright light, nothing remotely dangerous. Unless, of course, your apartment is on the fifth floor and overlooks the street," he finished with a shrug of his shoulder.

"I'm more interested in knowing how and why you know that," Hugo cut in, now scowling at Scorpius and assuming a defensive stance in front of Rose.

"Hugh, stop it. You know how he knows, so stop being a prat and go check what's happened to my house."

She shoved his arm when it didn't look like he would move and he finally strode off with a 'Don't call me Hugh.' Scorpius walked up to Rose with raised eyebrows. "Looks like his dislike for me hasn't changed much either."

"Why would it?" she retorted, examining his arm. The skin of his upper arm was torn and bleeding. He was looking around, probably for his wand, and Rose lifted her hand where she still clutched hers and pointed it at his wound.

"Let me," she murmured when he began to pull away. "Sanare."

The blood immediately began to retreat back into his body and his skin began to heal shut. It was a spell she had never actually used, but was glad to see that it worked well. It was a complicated spell that healed an injury by reversing the effect of time on it to a point where it was at its physical best. Scorpius looked at Rose with an indescribable expression on his face as he flexed his arm.

"What?" she asked softly and he shook his head.

"Where'd you learn how to cast a proper healing spell?"

When Rose raised her eyebrows at the obvious question, Scorpius said 'Ah' and nodded. "Albus. Of course."

"Oi! Are you two coming, or what?!"

The duo jumped at the loudness of Hugo's voice and Rose glared up at him when she saw that he had cast a Sonorus to be heard.

"Bloody idiot," she grumbled as she made toward the elevator. Scorpius grabbed her elbow to stop her and she looked back at him curiously.

"I'm sorry I triggered the wards," he said sincerely and a shadow passed across his face. It was gone before Rose could catch it, though, and he smiled tightly, nodding at her and moving toward the elevator, picking his wand off the ground along the way. She pinched her lower lip and wondered what that was all about.

They made their way to the fifth floor in silence and by the time they stepped out and turned the corner to her apartment, Hugo was already fixing the door back on its hinges.

"You might want to clean that up." He pointed at the dark smears surrounding the door and Rose made a face.

"Did everything look alright inside?"

Hugo sighed and shook his head, an irritated look on his face. She frowned.

"There are three layers to the wards," Scorpius said near her ear, making her jump. He continued without seeming to notice. "The first layer is the outermost one. The one that repelled my attempt to break through it. That's the one imbued with the offensive spells. The second and middle layer is the one that's the actual barrier separating the outside and the inside. And the third and innermost layer is the one that—"

"—protects the inside of the house from damage as it's imbued with defensive spells," Rose completed as she nodded and sighed.

Scorpius gave her a strange look and said in a musing sort of voice, "You knew that already, though."

In her frustration and preoccupied state of mind, she had forgotten about what her father had told her about the wards when she had first moved out, especially since she'd never faced a problem like having no place else to sleep before. She felt Scorpius's eyes on her and turned to him with a questioning look. He looked away, but not before she'd spotted the expression on his face. It looked something almost like… disappointment.

When he started to make toward the door, she grabbed him by the arm and stared at him until he was forced to ask her, "What?"

"Why'd you look at me like that?"

"Look at you like what?"

"Like you were… I don't know, disappointed or something," she said, waving her hand.

He gave her a brooding look and said so softly, she almost missed it, "I didn't think five years was enough for someone's core personality to change. I was just shocked, is all."

So he really did notice how she had failed to recall what her father had said about the wards. She swallowed, suddenly feeling very drained. She pushed past him and ignored Hugo's stare boring into her.

"Tergeo," she snapped and the smears on the walls slowly disappeared. She then stepped toward the door and was immediately pulled back by Hugo.

"Rose, if you're doing this on purpose, it's not funny," he hissed and she stared at the flickering barrier in front of her, realising the protective spells were still active even though the offensive layer would take some time to repair and restore itself.

"Shite," she said, jerking her arm away from Hugo's vice-like grip. What the hell was wrong with her? It seemed like ever since Scorpius had returned, she had been so preoccupied and distracted that she had even forgotten her keys and even the way her wards worked.

"Rosie," Hugo started but Rose took a step forward and cut him off with a sharp, "Not now, Hugo."

She raised her palm and prayed that what she was about to do would work.

"Wha— Rose—what the hell is she doing?"

Hugo had probably held Scorpius back, but she didn't want to turn to make sure. He'd have to deal with her brother until she finished.

"Please work," she whispered, as she placed her palm against the shimmering surface of the ward and gently pressed forward. She exhaled through her mouth as her hand passed through the shield with little to no resistance. She swallowed. Now came the more difficult part.

"Accio keys." She spoke clearly, picturing the bunch of keys in the lower left drawer beside her bed and making the same motion with her hand as she would with her wand. She had never consciously performed wandless magic before and therefore didn't know whether or not it would work.

It was a daunting few seconds, until she finally heard the faint jingling of her keys as they zoomed 'round the corner and straight into her hand. She caught them effortlessly and heard both Hugo and Scorpius exhale audibly behind her. She carefully drew her hand back and let out a breath that she hadn't realized she was holding. She watched as the wards flickered and dimmed, indicating that they had been disabled successfully.

"That was unnecessarily difficult," she muttered, as she heard Hugo come up behind her.

"I don't know whether to hit you or hug you," he said in a tired voice, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and kissing the side of her head.

"I definitely deserve a good whack," Rose agreed, as she stepped into her apartment with a sigh of relief. Hugo immediately made a beeline for her favorite sofa and flopped down on it. Rose turned around and waved her wand at Scorpius.

"Take off your shirt."

His reaction was probably the closest Rose had, and would, ever get to seeing Scorpius dumbfounded. His eyes went round and he looked thoroughly bewildered for a moment, his mouth falling open, before Rose rolled her eyes and said, "So I can take a look at your back, you dolt."

Scorpius snapped his mouth shut and rearranged his face, although his cheeks were now tinged pink. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hugo do the same. She shook her head slightly, although it was hard to keep the smile off her face.

Scorpius turned around and pulled his shirt off in one fluid motion and her heart thumped unnecessarily hard at the sight of his naked back. It wasn't like she'd never seen a man's back before, what with all the males in her family. Plus, she'd had her fair share of boyfriends and casual lovers, although she would never admit that to anyone. She wasn't exactly proud of her rebellious days.

Rose focused on the task at hand and was startled at the number of gashes on his back. She had thought that although the explosion seemed quite violent, her shield charm had protected Scorpius from any serious injury. Upon further inspection though, it looked like more than half the wounds on his back were healed scars from long before and only a countable few were from that night.

She barely touched one of his deeper and nastier looking scars and he bodily flinched away from her. When he looked over his shoulder at her to ask if something was wrong, she noticed that he was unusually pale. She decided that if he wanted to pretend like the scars didn't exist, she would respect that.

She Summoned her First Aid kit from the cupboard beside the couch and opened it up to fetch a bottle of antiseptic. Although it had worked earlier, she wasn't quite confident with her proficiency when it came to healing spells and she didn't want to take any unnecessary risks; so she placed small wads of cotton on the most recent wounds after cleaning them and reached for the gauze to keep the cotton in place.

When she reached around Scorpius to wrap the gauze around him, he completely froze, as though he didn't want to move in case she grazed against him by accident. She found that reaction highly unnerving, considering how physically close he had been with her in the past few days.

"Rose," Hugo said from just behind her and she yelped in surprise, flushing when he raised an eyebrow at her. He stretched out his hand and she stared at it.

"Let me do it," he said in a choked sort of voice and she nodded dumbly, placing the gauze in his outstretched palm. Hugo stepped up behind Scorpius and she watched as the blond instantly relaxed, as though he was glad that Rose was no longer the one tending to him. She didn't understand the way her chest tightened, or the feeling of mild betrayal, or how, when he looked at her, he had the same brooding look in his eyes and then immediately looked away.

Like he didn't want her near him.

She shook her head and mumbling something about changing her clothes, hurried out of the room. She didn't understand it. He flirted with her and teased her and invaded her personal space and yet he had the audacity to look like he'd rather have Hugo – who thoroughly disliked him – tending to his wounds than her, the person he had got those wounds from protecting, in the first place.

It made no sense. He made no sense. Even from as long as she could remember, Scorpius Malfoy had always been the boy who taunted and teased, jeered and mocked, smirked and sneered, and basically did whatever he could to get under her skin. He seemed to enjoy making her furious enough to whisk her wand out and shove it in his face; the way his eyes would shine like he was enjoying every moment of it, or the way he would laugh lightly like he was having the time of his life, or the way he would look at her with a piercing gaze like there was nowhere else he would rather be.

But when she would get upset and run away crying, he always seemed to look the most distressed and disappointed, like she had been the one to make fun of him and not the other way around. She had always thought it was because Albus always gave him a good talking to whenever he made Rose cry, or because Scorpius found it unappealing when she cried instead of getting all flustered and trying to hex his ears off.

Sometimes when she would pass him in the hallway, she'd feel his gaze on her and she'd look up to glare at him, but he'd shoot her a dazzling smile before turning to laugh at something one of the girls who always flocked him, said, and completely ignore her like she wasn't even there. He confused her endlessly, and every time she began to settle for one version of him – the teasing, careless, devil may care attitude-having boy who lived to tug on her twin tails and yell tomato-head as she blushed furiously, he would throw her off by suddenly doing something completely contradictory to everything he said or did.

She was never able to understand what the bloody hell went on in his head, and it seemed that almost a decade later, she still couldn't understand him, even though they were both much more mature and much more capable of comprehending human behavior than before. It was like he lived to confuse her and no matter what she did, Scorpius Malfoy was one unexplained mystery she simply couldn't understand head or tail of. Every time she thought she was getting close, he would do something completely inexplicable and throw her for a loop, sending her spiraling on another endless cycle.

She sighed; pulling the hoodie she'd taken from Hugo's room earlier that day over her tights and stepped into her most comfortable pair of slip-on shoes. She undid her hair from its braid and let it fall down her shoulders in all its wild, fiery glory. She carefully made her way back to the sitting room, relieved to see that Hugo had finished dressing Scorpius's wounds and that the two were sitting on the same couch without Hugo trying to hex Scorpius's limbs off.

"Let's go," she said and the two males looked up at her.

"Go where?" Hugo asked, standing up and eyeing her hoodie. "Hey! That's my Chudley Cannons sweatshirt! I've been looking for it all over the place!"

"It's mine now," Rose said, sticking her tongue out at her brother. Hugo frowned at her and caught her tongue, making her push away from him.

"Eargh! Hugo, that's disgusting!"

"You're telling me," he said, making a face and wiping his hand on the hoodie. "I'm the one who had to touch it."

"I didn't ask you to," she said, dodging out of his reach even as he tried to catch her and wipe his fingers.

"C'mere," he said, grabbing her and rubbing his hands all over the front of the hoodie.

"Hugo, stop it," she shrieked, smacking his hands away. She tilted her wand at herself and muttered, "Scourgify," as Hugo waggled his fingers at her with a grin. She scrunched her nose at him and shoved him toward the door.

"Go catch us a taxi or stand guard or something!"

"A taxi? For what? Where are we going?" he asked as he opened the door.

"St. Mungo's."

Hugo raised his eyebrows at her. "Does Al know we're going to see him?"

"Did you tell him we were coming?"

"No?"

"Then what do you think, idiot?"

"Shut up, you prat, how was I supposed to know?"

"Because, you dolt, neither of us can perform a half decent healing spell for our lives' worth."

"I'll bet I can do one better than you."

"Codswallop."

"Bet you ten galleons."

"Off with you," she said, flicking her wand toward him. He laughed and ducked behind the door. She chuckled and stuffed her wand in the small vertical pocket Hugo had gotten Hermione to stitch at the base of the hood. She turned back to call Scorpius, but paused with the words on the tip of her tongue.

He was sitting on the arm of the sofa, leaning with his elbows on his knees, and he had the most tender of smiles on his face that she'd ever seen. When he saw her turn to him, he got up and walked toward her, tugging at his ponytail. He came to stand beside her with his hands in his pockets and looked down at her with eyes as clear as a perfectly brewed cauldron of Veritaserum. Her breath caught when he smiled at her, the corner of his eyes crinkling. She felt her chest tightening and for some reason her eyes felt unusually moist.

The smile vanished from his face and was replaced by a look of concern, and she felt like she'd lost something too precious to name. She shook her head and laughed dryly, as she stared up at him.

"Rose?"

Even his voice was soft and gentle, not at all like it had been when he had looked over his shoulder at her as she tended the wounds on his back.

"You are a horrible, horrible man, Scorpius," she whispered and his brows furrowed, as he stared at her in confusion. She shook her head and sniffed.

"It's not fair that you can read me like an open book and for the life of me, I couldn't guess what you were thinking."

A strange emotion flickered in Scorpius's eyes and he leaned down toward her. "Can you guess what I'm thinking now?"

"That I'm an idiot for getting carried away about useless things," she said matter-of-factly, her voice sounding thick and unnatural.

He smiled at her in the same way he would when she passed him in the hallways of Hogwarts… right before he turned away and pretended she wasn't there.

"That was quick," Scorpius told Hugo – who had just poked his head in. Hugo nodded and Scorpius made his way toward the door without looking at Rose.

She stood there staring at her feet, suddenly exhausted and feeling the intense desire to curl up into a ball and weep.

"Rose?"

She cleared her throat and blinked rapidly before looking up at his expectant face. He motioned outside and asked, "Coming?"

And she wanted to laugh at herself again for thinking seventeen-year-old Scorpius was the same as twenty-five-year old Scorpius. She smiled and nodded, jogging toward the door. Maybe if she finally accepted the fact that the Scorpius she knew – or rather, didn't know – had grown into the man before her, she may have a chance at figuring him out yet.

He gave her a bemused smile and asked with a voice laced with laughter, "What are you looking so pleased with yourself, for?"

"Oh, you'll see."

A/n: This chapter kinda put me off [mostly because I've been procrastinating about posting it for the past two days] and I'm not in the mood to say much, so anything you want to ask, leave it in your review and I shall answer! :D

Love~