XII. CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE
The next couple of weeks were difficult ones for Sirona. Caroline refused to stop talking about the upcoming Hogsmeade date, and Roger wouldn't stop pestering her about seeing if Auguste would introduce him to Fleur. Besides that, Sirona didn't understand half of what McGonagall said in Transfiguration anymore. On top of that, Cissonia and Damara were refusing to speak with each other, which almost certainly had something to do with the rapid appearance of the POTTER STINKS badges; Sirona had already confiscated five of these badges from Cissonia, who kept replacing them as though she had them stockpiled in her dormitory. Then, she had to deal with the fact that Damona failed one of her quizzes in her History of Magic class; Sirona had had to console the girl and added study sessions with Damona to her ever-growing list of things to do.
"You mother them too much," George had informed her during their Charms class one Tuesday morning.
"You should take a leaf out of our book," Fred had said. "At any given moment, George and I have absolutely no clue what Ron and Ginny are doing."
"Nor do we particularly care," George had said.
This advice didn't exactly sway or comfort Sirona given what had happened to their little sister two years prior and the fact that their little brother and his friends had managed to find themselves in sticky situations repetitively since their first year. She chose not to mention this to them. However, Caroline and Roger echoed the twins' sentiment; both of them had had older siblings, and as such, they thought they were experts on how older siblings should behave.
"Catherine and Camille hardly batted an eyelash when we passed each other in the corridors," Caroline had told Sirona.
"Chester let me do whatever I wanted as long as I stayed out of his hair," Roger had added.
"I don't remember Saegon lingering about you this much when he was still here," Caroline had pointed out.
Perhaps she had a point, but Saegon had also been Head Boy and worried about passing his N.E.W.T.s. Besides, Sirona had been far less of a handful than her three younger sisters currently were; that she was certain of.
If there was one thing that all of her siblings and friends agreed on, it was that Sirona — when under immense pressure and extremely stressed — could become very unpleasant to be around. She rarely ever "snapped" as a normal person would because that wouldn't fit into her busy, busy schedule, so being uncharacteristically vexatious and snippy for a time seemed to be her brain's way of dealing with things. Another reason she never "snapped" was because Sirona had a set of warning signs that she started to display that let the people closest to her know that they needed to allow her time to decompress.
Warning Sign Number One: Sirona would bite and pick at her fingernails and cuticles.
Over the past few days, Caroline had continually found herself telling Sirona to get her fingers out of her mouth. Sirona's fingernails had slowly become ragged and uneven; at least two were surrounded by angry red skin from having been bitten a little too far down to the quick. Sirona had often looked down to find that her cuticles were bleeding from having been torn the wrong way. Her container of nail and cuticle salve from Madam Primpernelle's was starting to get dangerously low.
Warning Sign Number Two: Sirona became overly sensitive to the slightest of nuisances.
So far in the past week alone, Sirona had become annoyed with Roger for "chewing too loud" and threatened to hex Lee for whispering to George in the seat behind her during Defence Against the Dark Arts while she was struggling to pay attention. Roger had had to stop her from taking points from a second year Ravenclaw who kept tapping his quill against the table while Sirona tried to study in the common room.
Warning Sign Number Three: Sirona started taking her prefect duties too seriously.
It was theorised among her friends that this third sign was an offset of the second sign and rose out of Sirona's need to yell at someone whenever she was stressed beyond measure. When Roger noticed that she actually sped up to catch a third year Slytherin that was out of bed just to give them a detention, he knew that something needed to be said to her. Unfortunately, this wasn't a job that anyone particularly wanted.
If not done correctly, trying to get Sirona to relax could result in a fallout that could last for over a week and was, arguably, worse than her anxiety-driven attitude. Sirona wasn't one that liked to admit when things were wrong because that meant asking people for help. Admittedly, that wasn't a luxury she'd been afforded very much growing up; she was always the fixer not the fixee. As such, she didn't like accusatory statements about her emotional wellbeing and reacted to them poorly.
It was largely agreed upon that the people best equipped to deal with Sirona when she was like this were Fred and George. This was because they were neither scared of her nor easily deterred by her overall unpleasantness. After all, their friendship with Sirona had been born out of blackmail; she'd not always liked them so much. Therefore, it was something they could handle quite well.
It was Friday, one day before her Hogsmeade date with Auguste, and from the time that Sirona brushed her teeth after getting out of bed, she'd already had the day mapped out. Herbology was after breakfast, and though it was her only class that day, she'd filled her schedule with other activities that she deemed of the utmost importance. After Herbology, she was going to spend her time in the library trying to decipher her own Charms notes enough to start writing an adequate essay all while keeping a close watch on Cissonia, who seemed to be spending a suspicious amount of her own free periods in the library with a fourth year Ravenclaw boy. After that, it was to the Great Hall for a quick lunch before meeting Damona in Ravenclaw Tower for a promised History tutor session. After that, Sirona needed to finish copying two star charts from the first drafts she'd done during her Astronomy class the night prior. After that, she might allow herself some time to breathe before dinner and prefect duties.
None of these plans included Fred or George, so when George promptly wrapped an arm around her shoulders and steered her in the opposite direction of the greenhouses, Sirona was confused.
"What is it? Did you forget your gloves again? You're a big boy; go get them by yourself."
"Oh, Rone, you and I are not going to Herbology today," he said in a matter-of-fact tone, slipping her schoolbag from her shoulder and slinging it carelessly over his own.
Sirona immediately scowled at him. She grabbed for her bag, but George placed his palm on her forehead and pushed her away from him as he continued his trek back up to the castle with her bag still on his shoulder. She scoffed, quickening her pace after him.
"Give it back!"
As they reached the stone steps of the castle, a pair of arms wrapped around her, pinning her arms to her sides and effectively stopping her from grabbing George by the back of his uniform. She craned her neck back to see Fred smiling down at her.
"Oh, this is worse than I thought," George said, and Sirona looked back at him to find that he was now sitting on the stone steps, going through her bag. He looked up at Fred with a faux mortified gaze. "She hasn't even packed one of her usual boring books that she likes to read just for fun."
"No boring-fun books?" Fred asked in an appalled tone.
"Just boring-school books!"
"Well, that just won't do," Fred said, and Sirona started to push against his arms, managing to wiggle herself free of him. She walked towards the steps, and George scrambled to his feet, pulling her schoolbag with him.
"Stop going through my bag and give it back. You've already made me late for class."
"Oh, you know the rules," George told her. "You can have it back at the end of the day."
Sirona furrowed her brows. Rules? But those were for—
"No!" Sirona whined when the realisation dawned on her.
"Yes," they both said simultaneously, sporting identical grins.
"A Weasley Intervention Day," George said, patting her on the head. She swatted his hand away.
"You need one, love," Fred told her. "You've been — what's the word?"
"Manic," George supplied.
"I have not," she denied heatedly as Fred propped an elbow on her shoulder.
"Rona, you gave a student an actual detention the other day," Fred said. "Granted, it was a Slytherin, but still."
"Besides, as you're well aware, we are permitted one Weasley Intervention Day per term," George reminded her, "void of any kind of notice."
"But I've got so much to do today!" she said, sounding like a petulant child. Fred tutted.
"You know you aren't allowed to talk about your to-do list on Weasley Intervention Days."
"Besides, that's what it's for!" George exclaimed. "For you to stop being so uptight. This Weasley Intervention Day is brought to you by special request of one Caroline Becker, who is worried that you will, and I quote, 'scare the dreamy Beauxbâtons boy away if you don't relax a bit,' unquote."
Sirona scowled. Of course this was Caroline's doing, and of course it was because she was worried about Sirona's date.
"And she's right, you know," George continued in a joking voice. "Boys don't like high-strung girls."
"Oh, what do I care what boys like? They could all fall of the face of the earth tomorrow for all I care," Sirona declared in a huff. Fred rolled his eyes, adjusting his arm so that it was now around her shoulders.
"Well, before we all go off and do that, you're going to loosen up a bit even if it kills you," he told her, guiding her up the stairs and into the castle. She dragged her feet, reluctant to shirk her responsibilities for the day.
"Someone needs to tell Damona that I can't—"
"What do you take us for? Amateurs?" George asked in a slightly offended tone.
"It's already taken care of, love," Fred assured. "Davies was more than happy to fill in for you, and he's going to cover for your loathsome prefect duties as well. And before you ask, no, we did not get someone to stalk your little sister in the library during her free period."
"I don't stalk her," Sirona defended. "I keep a watchful eye on her while I do my schoolwork."
"Oh, let her snog a boy in the library if she wants to," George told her as they started climbing the staircase up to the second floor. "What's the point of being young and 'in love' if your older siblings are always hovering about? She's going to grow up with a complex."
"She's already got one," Sirona grumbled.
"Just because you don't find time for boyfriends doesn't mean your sisters can't either. Stop projecting your issues onto them," George told her in a pointed way.
"Issues?" she asked heatedly.
"Oh, relax, Rona," Fred said, grinning at her as she bristled. "You're meant to be having fun, remember? We're going to pop up to the dorms, grab a few things and then you—" he tapped a finger on her nose for emphasis, and she frowned up at him "—will stop being so unpleasant and enjoy the day we've prepared."
"It would be quite rude and ungrateful of you not to after all our planning," George said.
Sirona sighed dramatically as they made their long trek up to the seventh floor. When they reached the Gryffindor boys' dormitories, she sat on the edge of Fred's bed and watched as the twins dug through their respective trunks. She tried to keep a sour expression on her face but couldn't help to be a bit curious when they started pulling out various items and tossing them onto their beds.
"Need that," George said, tossing a bag of Wet-Start, No-Heat Fireworks onto his bed.
"That's for Filch," said Fred, tossing a Nose-Biting Teacup onto his bed.
"The day's going to need a soundtrack at some point," came George's voice as he dug a portable radio out of his trunk.
"Where are the — never mind," Fred murmured before producing a bag of dungbombs.
"Those might come in handy," George was saying as a pack of Exploding Snap cards joined the growing pile on his bed.
"These are for you," Fred said to Sirona as a bag of Fizzing Whizzbees flew towards her; she caught them before they could smack her in the face, not bothering to hide her smile anymore.
"You know those have Billywig stings in them, right?" George quipped, his head still in his trunk as he dug around. Sirona merely shrugged as she opened the bag and popped one of the candies into her mouth as Fred started to speak again.
"Of course, we can't forget the most important thing!"
Whatever it was, he did not throw it onto his bed. Sirona craned her neck to try and peak around the lid of the trunk, still sucking on her candy as she floated a few inches from the bed.
"Nicked it just last week," George informed her.
"Ogden's Old Firewhiskey," Fred exclaimed, finally shutting the lid of his trunk and revealing quite a large bottle of the amber liquid. Sirona smiled before cracking the candy in her mouth with her teeth, promptly falling back onto the bed as the candy fizzled in her mouth.
George produced three flasks and tossed them on top of Fred's trunk, sitting on top of his own as he watched his brother carefully fill the metal containers.
"You can use Lee's since I know you don't have one on you," George said to Sirona as though judging her, and she shook her head.
"Well, excuse me for not being prepared to drink at a moment's notice," she said.
"Disgraceful," Fred teased, grinning up at her and nearly spilling the Firewhiskey. Once he was finished filling the flasks, he handed one to Sirona and one to George. Sirona looked down at the silver flask, her fingers running over small dings and dents and the letters L. J. that had been roughly scratched into the bottom left-hand corner.
"Cheers!" Fred said, and the three friends quickly clinked their flasks together before taking their first draught. Sirona winced at the unfortunate taste of the drink mixing with the flavour of her fruity candy as she swallowed before screwing the lid of the flask shut. She stood from the bed and could already feel the warmth spreading from her stomach as she stuck the flask into one of her robe pockets. George quickly cleared out his school bag, discarding his books in favour of the stuff he and Fred had gathered. He slung the bag over his shoulder and grinned as Sirona popped another Fizzing Whizzbee into her mouth.
"C'mon," he said, "we've got lots to do today."
Sirona sucked on the candy in her mouth and swung her feet back and forth cheekily as she floated off the ground.
"Can't walk," she said in a childish manner. "Gonna have to pull me along."
George rolled his eyes but walked over to Sirona, grabbed her by her robes and pulled her along as he walked towards the door. Sirona grinned at George's slight annoyance with her and winked at Fred, who only shook his head and chuckled as she glided past him. When they got down to the common room, Sirona's feet finally touched the floor as she bit down on the candy.
"Are you going to be doing that all day?" George asked as they walked out of the common room. Sirona shrugged.
"It's not like I'm making you carry me," she said, debating on popping another one of the candies into her mouth just to annoy him but deciding against it for now. "What's first on the Weasley agenda?"
"Every time you ask a question about what we have planned for today, you have to take a drink," George told her.
"It wouldn't be half as fun if you knew everything ahead of time," Fred concurred.
"So, that's your way of saying that there is no plan," Sirona teased, pulling the flask from her pocket and taking a drink from it.
"Reverse psychology will get you about as far as your questions, love," Fred told her knowingly.
They all made their way down the stairs at a leisurely pace, taking the time to make up rules for their day-long drinking game. Take a drink whenever the staircases moved with you on them. Take a drink when you notice a portrait that was missing its inhabitant(s). Take a drink as covertly and quickly as possible when a Hogwarts faculty member is spotted; the last person to manage this has to take two drinks. Take a drink whenever passing by a student with a POTTER STINKS badge and stick out your foot to trip them up (that second part was optional). Take a drink whenever you just bloody felt like it (which was the rule that always ended up gaining the most traction anyway). They finally stopped when they reached the entrance hall, and Fred turned to Sirona.
"Now, where's that eyesore you call a prefect badge?" he ask. Sirona looked down at her robes and lifted the lapel, revealing where the little badge was hiding.
"Right, well, put that front and centre," George said. "We're going to use you to get Filch out of his office for just a little bit."
"How am I supposed to do that?" she asked, re-pinning her prefect badge to the front of her robes as it was originally intended to be worn. She rubbed the smudged fingerprints off of it with her robes for good measure.
"You're clever," Fred said.
"You'll figure it out," George continued for him.
"How long do you need him gone?"
"Not long."
"Fifteen, twenty minutes?" Fred speculated aloud.
This was how Sirona found herself knocking frantically on the door of the caretaker's office just off the side of the entrance hall, earning quizzical looks from passers-by. The man opened the door, scowling and ready to scold.
"Why're you banging on my door?" he asked in his wheezy voice, his eyes very briefly flickering down to the prefect badge on Sirona's robes.
"I heard some students say that Peeves is throwing school relics off the Astronomy Tower again," she lied, trying to make her voice resemble that of someone who would actually care if Peeves did such a thing.
Filch's eyes gleamed at this bit of false information, and he promptly scrambled his way out of his office, pushing past Sirona, Mrs. Norris following closely behind him. Once Filch was out of sight, Fred and George appeared.
"Good job," Fred told her, patting her on the head as he passed her to get into the office. "Now, stand lookout in case he comes back."
Sirona rolled her eyes, reaching for the flask in her pocket.
"I'm having flashbacks of first year, and if that doesn't warrant a drink, then I don't know what does," she said, tipping the flask up as she drank. She returned the flask to her pocket, shut the door to Filch's office and moved to a portion of the entrance hall that gave her a good view of the staircases.
The twins didn't stay long in Filch's office, just long enough to place a few Wet-Start Fireworks very precariously on the edge of a mop bucket full of water and to pilfer through Filch's Confiscated and Highly Dangerous Cabinet, emerging with two Screaming Yo-yos and an Ever-Bashing Boomerang. They spent the next hour or so just walking about the castle, taking turns sticking Exploding Snap cards to almost every door frame they came across, drinking every time one exploded prematurely, after running away of course.
"The best part about this is that when the door opens and the card explodes, it just returns right to the pack," George had said, shaking the little box that the cards had come in.
"Next time, we'll have to slip them into books in the library," Sirona had ventured as she pulled out her hawthorn wand to stick her last card onto the doorframe of a classroom that was currently being used; she could hear the professor's muffled voice from the other side of the closed door.
"Pince would skin us alive as soon as the first one exploded on us," Fred told her.
"One of you, maybe," Sirona said, smirking. "I'm much faster than either of you; I'd be out of the library before the book stopped singeing."
"You hear that, George? She reckons she's faster than us."
"I know I'm faster than you," Sirona challenged before muttering the sticking curse under her breath. "In fact, I bet I—"
As Sirona pulled her hand away from the card, it exploded. She jumped back as the loud bang echoed through the otherwise silent corridor. She only took a split second to process what had happened before she was taking off down the corridor as fast as she could, Fred and George running along after her, laughing as she frantically whispered, "Shit, shit, shit!"
The rest of the day, while gloriously unproductive, was a fun one. They were functionally drunk by the time lunch rolled around, which they elected to eat in the kitchens. They continued to drink throughout the day; though, they slowed down so as to remain just sober enough to compose themselves while passing by people who might care that three sixth years were walking about the school grounds drunk. After lunch, they were joined by Lee, who was marginally offended at having not been asked to kick off Weasley Intervention Day with them but got over it rather quickly when invited to drink and wreak a little havoc them.
By the time that the sun started to hang a little lower in the sky, just half an hour or so before dinner would be ready, the friends found themselves sitting on the cold ground out by the Black Lake. They each took turns discreetly throwing food they'd nicked from the kitchens earlier in the day as close as they could to the Durmstrang ship while listening to the WWN on George's portable radio. Whenever they got one particularly close to the side of the ship, the giant squid would knock into it as it reached up with its large tentacle to pull the food into the watery depths of the lake.
Eventually, once they'd run out of food, George and Lee suggested that they go poke around at the Blast-Ended Skrewts that Hagrid was keeping; Lee reckoned that they were over three feet long by then. Sirona stayed on the ground, complaining about being too comfortable to move, and she was; she'd finally managed an acceptable Heating Charm on her cloak the other week, and she felt cosy all wrapped up in it as she watched the sky change colours with the setting sun. She fully expected a protest about how the day wasn't technically over yet and that she still had to go through with their plans, but it never came. When she looked up, she realised that Fred hadn't moved from his spot either.
"You aren't going with them?" she asked as George and Lee walked away. Fred shook his head slightly, a small smile on his face.
"Well, at least one of us has to stick around to make sure you don't do something absurd, like run off to the library."
Sirona rolled her eyes as she plucked the dry and brittle grass blades from the ground, the radio still playing softly in the background.
"I do have to admit, I had a lot of fun today."
"Oh, you must be really wasted to admit to that," Fred teased, and Sirona let out a laugh.
"I'm serious; it was much less stressful than the last time you guys forced me to do this," she told him; though, he wasn't wrong — she was still quite intoxicated.
"What was wrong with last time?" Fred asked, brow furrowed in confusion.
"We nearly blew up a classroom!" she exclaimed, and Fred waved a hand dismissively as though it weren't a big deal at all.
"Not one with that was being used. Besides, nearly blowing up a classroom is not the same as actually blowing one up," he said. Sirona cut her eyes at him and threw the little bits of grass she'd accumulated in her hand at his face; though, a small smile rested just at the corners of her lips. "What has you so stressed out anyway?" he finally asked; she shrugged.
"Oh, you know, just the general shitshow that is my life; I feel too busy too much of the time," she said, and though, the smile still resided on her lips, it didn't seem to reach her eyes anymore. "And on top of everything going on here, Saegon wrote me and told me that Mum and Gus have decided to pop off to the Cayman Islands for a week or so."
"What's so wrong about that?"
"You mean besides the fact that she's going on vacations that we can't afford?" Sirona asked caustically. "She just dropped Zach off at Saegon's without any proper notice; he had to take off work for a few days before he found someone to watch Zach while he was at the Ministry; I'm certain it didn't reflect well on his professionalism at the office."
Sirona paused. While her more prominent drunk mindset didn't care at the moment, the small still-sober voice in the back of her head was telling her that she would regret telling Fred any of this later. She wasn't typically one for complaining about her mother to anyone but Saegon because he understood; he'd lived this reality too and still was even though he'd long since moved out of the Bordeaux house.
"Well, when you graduate and move out, it won't be your problem anymore, right?" Fred asked, and Sirona shook her head, the drunk urge to keep talking winning out over the knowledge of future regrets.
"If I just leave, that makes it Sonia's problem, and I won't do that to her. She deserves to not have to worry about the family budget and making sure the twins and Zach are taken care of. That's always been mine and Saegon's job," she said, refusing to look at him as she started pulling up bits of grass again. "It won't be so bad. Zach's two, so the way I see it, Saegon and I have only got fifteen, sixteen more years of all of this, and then we can do whatever we want, you know? Save up our money for things that we actually want to buy. Start going off on trips without worrying about if Mum's got everything under control. Stop lending her money that we know we'll never see again."
"You know that's fucked up right?" he asked her. She finally pulled her eyes up to meet him and shrugged in a tired sort of way, seeming resigned to this way of life.
"It's just how it is," she said in a disinterested, matter-of-fact tone. She sighed, rubbing her hands together and watching the bits of grass fall away from them, deciding that she'd said enough on the subject. "C'mon, let's go up to the castle. Dinner should be ready soon."
Sirona lifted herself from the ground and dusted off her cloak and skirt. She held her hand out to Fred, but he didn't move to take it and didn't get up from the ground.
"What happened to travelling the world after graduation and studying and collecting exotic and rare herbs?" he asked. Sirona chuckled.
"I told you that when we were, like, twelve. Why do you still remember that?" she asked.
"Is it not still your big dream?" he inquired.
"Oh, what do you care?" she teased. "If I remember correctly, you told me that being an Herbologist was the dullest thing you'd ever heard."
Fred rolled his eyes, sensing that Sirona was finished with the conversation. He shut off the radio and slung George's bag over his shoulder as he got to his feet.
"I suppose you're right," he said, smiling a bit. "Better for you to choose more exciting things to do with your life rather than stare at plants all day."
Sirona rolled her eyes and lightly shoved him away from her, but she smiled nonetheless as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and they started back up to the castle.