maeve

Before any of this was a bet, Fred Weasley had been shameless about it for two full years before the bet ever existed.

He wasn't subtle. He never tried to be. He'd corner you in corridors just to tell you your hair looked good, hand you the last treacle tart at dinner before you'd even reached for it, materialize at your elbow in Hogsmeade with some excuse about ‘just happening to be going the same way’. Half the school had watched him do it so often it had become a kind of background noise to Hogwarts life, like Peeves or the moving staircases — Fred Weasley, hopelessly gone on you, making absolutely no effort to hide it.

"You're doing it again," you told him once, fourth year, when he'd shown up at the library table where you were studying for no reason except that he'd seen you go in.

"Doing what?"

"Following me around like a lost Kneazle."

"I prefer 'devoted.'" He dropped into the chair across from you, propping his chin on his hand, watching you with the kind of open, unembarrassed adoration that should have been unbearable and somehow, infuriatingly, wasn't. "Also I wasn't following you. I was here first."

"You were not."

"Prove it."

You couldn't, because he'd clearly followed you in, and he knew it, and he grinned at you like getting caught was half the fun.

He flirted with other girls, plenty of them, loudly and cheerfully — but it never once looked the same as whatever this was. With other girls it was a performance, easy and weightless, over the second it stopped being fun for either of them. With you it had teeth in it. It meant something, and everyone could see it meant something, including, eventually, the entire castle.

There was an afternoon in fifth year — you never knew about it, not for a long time — when a Slytherin boy named Warrington had made a comment in the corridor outside the Great Hall, loud enough in a malicious tone for a knot of people to hear, about how you'd 'been through half the boys in your year' and ought to charge admission.

Fred had been three feet away, and something in his face went very still and very cold in a way that people who only knew his easy grin rarely saw.

"Say that again," he said, quiet, which was somehow worse than shouting.

Warrington, sensing an audience and stupidly emboldened by it, said something about how he was "just being honest," and Fred stepped in close enough that the corridor went silent around them.

"She can kiss whoever she wants, however many times she wants, and it's worth exactly nothing to you," Fred said. "You don't get a say in what she does with her own life. And if I hear you talk about her again — if I hear you talk about any girl in this castle like that again — you'll wish McGonagall had gotten to you before I did."

He hadn't hexed him o punch him. Hadn't needed to. Warrington had gone pale and muttered something and left, and by the next week the story had made its way quietly through Gryffindor and half of Hufflepuff, and nobody — not once, in all the time since — ever said anything like that about you again where it could be traced back to a source.

You never found out it was Fred. He never told you, never held it over you, never once used it as leverage in all the months that followed. It simply sat there, one more thing he did for you without expecting anything in return, the kind of thing that made George, who had seen it, look at his twin sometimes like he was trying to solve a puzzle he already knew the answer to.

All Hogwarts had opinions about you, and none of them were particularly kind.

It wasn't just that you moved from person to person without apology — that alone might have earned you a raised eyebrow and nothing more. It was that you did it loudly, unapologetically, with a kind of sharp, biting wit that made you genuinely frightening to cross. You'd been known to reduce a seventh-year Slytherin to stammering silence in the middle of the Great Hall over a comment about your skirt length. You'd hexed a boy's eyebrows off in third year for grabbing your wrist too hard on the dance floor, and never once apologized for it, even when a professor docked house points. You picked fights the way other people picked flowers — easily, often, and without much regard for whether it was strategic.

"She's not exactly warm," a Ravenclaw prefect had said once, within earshot of Lee, not realizing — or not caring — that word traveled. "Fun to watch from a distance. Terrifying up close."

It wasn't entirely fair, and it wasn't entirely wrong either. You were sharp. You picked fights with people who deserved it and let the collateral reputation fall where it may, because defending yourself — and, quietly, defending anyone smaller or softer than you — had always felt safer than being soft yourself. Better to be the girl people whispered about than the girl people could hurt.

This was, more or less, why the rest of Gryffindor found Fred's devotion so baffling. It wasn't that you were unlikeable. It was that loving you looked, from the outside, like signing up for a fight you hadn't started.

"You're an idiot, mate," Lee Jordan said, not unkindly, one evening in the common room a few weeks before the bet, watching Fred watch you across the room with an expression Lee had personally seen aimed at nothing but a decent plate of chips before. "She's turned you down, what, four times now? Five?"

"Six," George supplied helpfully, not looking up from his cards. "I'm keeping a tally."

"She called me an insect last week," George added, half delighted, half baffled, "because I asked if she and Fred someday they would go out and she would be my sister-in-law.. An insect, Fred. Unprovoked."

"You deserved it," Fred said, not looking up from his toast. "You'd been needling her for ten minutes."

"That's not the point. The point is most people would be scared off by that. You're just — encouraged."

"She only bites when she's protecting something," Fred said, simply. "Usually herself. Sometimes other people. It's never actually cruelty, George, it just looks like it if you're not paying attention."

"You're never going to wear her down by mooning at her from across a room," Lee tried again.

"I'm not trying to wear her down," Fred said, mildly. "I'm not a bloody millstone."

"Then what are you doing?"

Fred considered the question with more seriousness than either of them expected. "I like her," he said. "Properly like her. Not the version everyone talks about — the reputation, the casual thing. I like that she memorizes people's likes and dislikes and never tells anyone she does it. I like that she reads the same three books over and over because she says knowing how they end is comforting, not boring. I like that she's rude to people who deserve it and unbearably gentle with everyone who doesn't. I like that she pretends she doesn't care what happens to Kettleburn's ridiculous creatures and then sneaks food to the injured ones at two in the morning." He shrugged, entirely unembarrassed. "I'm not chasing an idea of her. I know her. That's the whole point."

Lee and George exchanged a look.

"You've actually got it bad," Lee said.

"Been saying that for two years," George muttered, and dealt another hand.

"Someone should have thought about why she bites first," Fred added, quieter, almost to himself, "since she's spent five years making sure nobody else bothers."

The thing about Fred Weasley was that he never pretended to be subtle about it.

You'd been at the Three Broomsticks for exactly eleven minutes when he abandoned the sixth-year Ravenclaw girl he'd been leaning over — hand braced on the table, grin doing all the work his mouth hadn't gotten around to yet — because you'd walked past the window. Just walked past it. Hadn't even looked in.

He was outside a minute later, coat half-on, cheeks red from the cold or from running, you couldn't tell which.

"You didn't come in," he said, like it was an accusation.

"I wasn't invited."

"You don't need an invitation, you're — " He gestured at you, vaguely, as if the rest of the sentence was self-evident. "You're you."

Behind him, through the frosted window, the Ravenclaw girl was watching with the particular expression of someone recalculating her entire evening.

"Go back inside, Fred."

"Come with me."

"I have somewhere to be."

You didn't. But it was easier than telling him the truth, which was that being anywhere Fred Weasley was for longer than ten minutes had a way of rearranging things in your chest that you'd worked very hard to keep in order.

He caught your wrist — not hard, just enough that you stopped. "One of these days," he said, "you're going to run out of somewhere to be."

"Careful, Weasley. Almost sounded like a threat."

"It was a promise." He let go, stepped back, and the grin came back like it had never left. "See you at the match Saturday? George says Angelina's captaining us to an early grave but I have faith."

"Wouldn't miss it."

You would have missed it, gladly, except that everyone in Hogwarts had come to understand, without ever being told outright, that watching you and Fred Weasley orbit each other without touching was better entertainment than most of what happened on a Quidditch pitch.

It was Angelina who finally said it out loud, three days later, sprawled across your bed with a Chocolate Frog card held up to the candlelight like she was reading tea leaves instead of Dumbledore's face.

"You know he means it. The thing he says. That you're ‘the love of his life’."

"He says that to everyone."

"He says charming things to everyone. He says ‘you're the love of my life’ only to you. There's a difference." She flicked the card onto your blanket. "He turned down Diane Fenwick at the party last week. Mid-flirt. Because you walked by and glanced at him for maybe two seconds."

"I didn't glance."

"You glanced."

"I was looking for the exit."

Angelina gave you a look you'd been on the receiving end of enough times to recognize instantly — patient, a little exasperated, entirely too knowing. "You like him."

"I like a lot of people. Liking people casually is sort of my whole thing."

"Right. Casual." She said the word like she was testing it for weak spots. "Except you've never once been casual about Fred. You've been very deliberately, very determinedly not about Fred, which isn't the same."

You didn't answer that, because there wasn't a good answer that didn't require unpacking things you'd rather leave packed.

It was true, what people said about you — that you didn't do serious. You did fun, you did easy, you did a few weeks of somebody's attention and then a clean, friendly end before anybody got in too deep. It wasn't cruelty. It was maintenance. You'd learned a long time ago that the deeper a thing got, the more of you it could take when it left, and you had exactly one data point on what that looked like, and it had nearly ended your father.

Fred Weasley was not a few-weeks kind of complication. Fred Weasley was the kind of complication that rearranged furniture in a person's life and didn't apologize for the mess.

So you didn't do Fred. You did everyone except Fred, sometimes rather pointedly, and if his ears went a bit red every time he found out about it, that was his business, not yours.

The bet happened almost by accident, the way the worst — or best — decisions usually do.

It was at Katie Bell's birthday, the common room too warm and too loud, and Fred had been telling some story about the twins' latest almost-catastrophe with a swamp-in-a-teabag prototype, gesturing so widely he knocked over someone's drink, and you'd said, half into your own cup, "You'd never survive being someone's boyfriend for longer than a week, you know. You've got the attention span of a niffler."

The common room didn't go silent, exactly. But it definitely leaned in.

Fred set his drink down very deliberately. "I beg your pardon."

"You heard me."

"I could absolutely be someone's boyfriend."

"For a week. Maybe. Before you got bored, or they got bored, or George set something on fire and you forgot the person existed."

"Name a month," Fred said, "and I'll prove you wrong."

"A month?"

"A month. Thirty days. You pick the person, I'll be the perfect, patient, devoted boyfriend, and you'll eat your words."

And this was the part where you should have laughed it off, should have said 'sure, ask Diane, good luck,’ should have done anything except what you actually did, which was look at him — really look, the way you tried very hard not to — and hear yourself say:

"Me. I'm the person."

The common room, this time, actually did go quiet.

Fred blinked. "You?"

"Me. One month. You be my boyfriend, properly, no cheating, and if you make it thirty days without losing your patience with me — " you paused, because some reckless, self-destructive part of you had already decided to make this as impossible as you could — "I'll stand up in the Great Hall and tell all of Hogwarts I've fallen hopelessly in love with you."

Somewhere behind you, George choked on a Butterbeer.

Fred didn't say anything for a long moment. Then: "And if I lose my patience even once?"

"Then I get to say I was right, and you never bring it up again."

"Deal." He held out his hand, and when you shook it, his grip was warm and sure and didn't let go half a second longer than it should have. "Thirty days, starting tomorrow."

"You're going to lose."

"Maybe." His eyes were bright, delighted, entirely too pleased with himself. "But I've wanted this for two years, love. I'll take losing on these terms over winning on any other."

You went to bed that night with your heart doing something complicated and refused, absolutely refused, to examine it.

You had a plan, and the plan was simple: be exactly difficult enough, exactly often enough, that Fred's patience — which you privately suspected was more myth than fact — would crack within the week.

Day one, you were forty minutes late to meet him at the lake, on purpose, and arrived to find him lying in the grass reading a Quidditch magazine, entirely unbothered.

"You're late," he said, without looking up.

"I got held up."

"Sure you did." He turned a page. "Sit down, I saved you the good spot, the one without the ant hill."

"I didn't say I was staying."

"You didn't say you weren't, either." He patted the grass beside him, and — this was the maddening thing about Fred — he didn't beg, didn't sulk, didn't make you feel guilty for the lateness. He just waited, easy as anything, like your company was worth the wait and the waiting itself wasn't a hardship.

You sat down. You told yourself it was strategic — better to needle him up close.

That first week you noticed, despite yourself, the small things. The way he always split whatever food he had in half without being asked, sliding the bigger portion toward you and pretending he hadn't. The way his handwriting went looping and careless in his own notes but turned neat, almost careful, on the little scraps of parchment he occasionally left folded on your books — a joke, a doodle, once just the words 'you looked tired at breakfast, sleep well tonight’ — as if the difference in penmanship was his way of saying ‘this part is serious, even when I'm not.’

He had a habit, too, of touching the back of his neck when he was nervous, which he almost never was except, you began to realize, around you, in the seconds right after he'd said something that mattered to him and was waiting to see how you'd take it.

You weren't supposed to be cataloguing these things. You did it anyway.

Day four, you flirted, deliberately and obviously, with a Hufflepuff boy in front of him at breakfast, waiting for the flash of jealousy, the crack in his composure. Fred watched for a moment, then turned to George and said, loudly enough for you to hear, "d'you reckon she's trying to make me jealous, or does she actually fancy Wentworth's personality?" and went back to his eggs, apparently unbothered, though you noticed — you always noticed, damn it — that his knuckles had gone white around his fork.

He found you after breakfast anyway. Not angry. Just there, falling into step beside you like nothing had happened, and he'd slipped his own scarf around your neck without asking, because you'd complained about the corridor draft the day before and he'd apparently filed it away like everything else.

"You're not going to ask about Wentworth?"

"Do I need to?"

"Maybe I like him."

"Maybe you do." Fred shrugged, hands in his pockets. "Doesn't change my thirty days. I'm not trying to win you by being the only option, love. I'm trying to win you because I'm the best one."

You had absolutely no response to that, so you didn't give him one, and he seemed content to let the silence sit between you all the way to Transfiguration, his sleeve brushing yours the whole walk, never quite closing the last inch of distance unless you closed it first.

It happened in the middle of the Great Hall, at lunch, with absolutely no warning and no discernible reason, sometime around day ten.

Fred stood up from the Gryffindor table, climbed — actually climbed, one boot on the bench, one on the table itself, ignoring the way plates rattled and pumpkin juice sloshed dangerously close to the edge — and cleared his throat with the exaggerated gravity of a man about to deliver a State of the Union address.

"Fred," you hissed, already feeling your face heat up. "What are you doing."

"Attention, Hogwarts!" he announced, arms spread wide, entirely unbothered by the two hundred faces now turning toward him. "I would like it formally recorded that I am, as of this moment, the luckiest man in this castle, possibly this country, arguably this hemisphere."

"Fred, get down — "

"I am dating," he continued, undeterred, gesturing grandly at you like you were a prize being unveiled at a fair, "the cleverest, funniest, most terrifyingly competent witch in our year, who has, against all odds and several of her own better instincts, agreed to put up with me for thirty days! I would like everyone here to know that I do not, in any way, take this for granted."

Someone at the Hufflepuff table actually started clapping. McGonagall, three seats down at the staff table, had pressed two fingers to her temple in the specific way she did when deciding whether a rule violation was worth the paperwork.

"You're an idiot," you said, hiding your face in your hands, mortified down to your toes, while half the hall laughed and George banged appreciatively on the table.

"A very devoted idiot," Fred corrected, hopping down at last, landing with a flourish, entirely pleased with himself. "Ten points from Gryffindor, probably, but worth it."

He was right. McGonagall docked exactly ten points on his way out of the Hall, muttering something about theatrics under her breath, and Fred didn't look remotely sorry about any of it — grinning at you the whole walk to class, utterly without shame, while you buried your burning face in his shoulder and told him, with zero real conviction, that you were never speaking to him again.

You forgave him by dinner. You suspected he'd known you would would before he even climbed onto the table.

One evening that same week, George cornered his brother by the fire while you were off at something, and asked, half-teasing, half-genuinely baffled, the question that had apparently been bothering both him and Lee for a while now.

"Why do you keep at it? She's said no more times than I can count. Most blokes would've called it after the third."

Fred didn't even look up from the essay he wasn't really writing. "Because she's not actually saying no to me. She's saying no to the version of this that scares her." He tapped his quill against the parchment, thinking. "You know she's got the entire Hogwarts kitchen staff's names memorized? Talks to every one of them like they matter, because to her they do. You know she reorganizes her whole schedule during exam week just to sit with first-years who are panicking, doesn't tell anyone she does it, would be mortified if I brought it up to her face. She picks fights with people who bully smaller kids and never once mentions it afterward like it's something worth being proud of, even though it obviously is."

"That's — a lot of very specific detail, mate."

"I pay attention." Fred finally looked up, and there was nothing performative left in his face at all. "Everyone sees the version of her that flirts and moves on and doesn't stick around. I see the rest of it. The part she doesn't let people see because she thinks it'll get used against her eventually." He shrugged. "I'm not chasing someone who doesn't exist. I know exactly who she is. That's rather the whole problem — once you know, you can't really unknow it."

George didn't have anything to say to that, for once, and simply reached over and clapped his brother on the shoulder instead.

Day twelve, you told him, flatly, over a shared table in the library, that you thought this whole thing was stupid and he should give up now and save you both the trouble.

Fred looked up from his essay, and for once there was no grin, no performance. "Why do you want me to give up?"

"Because you're wasting a month on something that isn't going to end how you want."

"That's my risk to take."

"It's not just your risk. It's mine too, and I don't — " You stopped yourself, aware you'd said more than you meant to.

"You don't what?"

"Nothing. Forget it."

He didn't push. That was the thing about Fred that you hadn't accounted for, hadn't built into your plan at all — you'd expected loudness, persistence that grated, the kind of pressure that would make walking away easy. Instead he gave you room. He noticed when you needed the room and he gave it to you without making a production of it, and somehow that was so much harder to resist than anything else could have been.

It was that same evening, walking back from the library, that he asked, apropos of nothing, "What's your favorite flower?"

"Why do you want to know that?"

"Because I don't know it yet, and I'd like to."

You considered lying, just to be difficult, and then didn't, mostly because the question had caught you off guard enough that the honest answer came out before you'd thought better of it. "Lilies."

"Yeah? Any particular reason?"

"They're the only thing that ever grew properly in the garden at home. My dad planted them the year my mum left, said the garden needed something that would keep coming back even if nobody remembered to look after it. They just do it on their own." You shrugged, embarrassed at how much you'd said. "I don't know. I like that about them."

Fred didn't say anything clever back, for once. He just nodded, filed it away the way he filed everything else, and didn't bring it up again for weeks — not until much later, when he mentioned to Hermione in passing that he wanted to get you lilies for your birthday, and Hermione, delighted and a little smug, informed him that in the old language of flowers, lilies carried a particular meaning: I dare you to love me.

Fred laughed for a solid minute once she told him, half disbelieving, entirely charmed, because of course — of course — the flower you loved without knowing anything about its meaning turned out to be exactly, precisely the dare the two of you were already living inside.

Whatever else you wanted to say about Fred Weasley, this much was true and had always been true, long before the bet: he noticed people. Not in the loud, performative way he flirted — that was for show, mostly, harmless and a little silly — but underneath it, quieter, he actually saw people.

He'd seen you, once, crouched by a first year's trunk in the corridor outside Gryffindor tower, helping a small, frightened boy repack the mess of robes and books he'd spilled everywhere after some older student shoved past him too fast. You hadn't known Fred was there until you stood up and found him leaning against the wall, watching, something unreadable in his face.

He'd seen you with Ginny, too — hadn't said anything at the time, hadn't needed to, but he knew you'd sat with his little sister the night of her first period, scared and embarrassed and not wanting to bother Molly over the holidays, and that you'd talked her through it with the kind of steady, unbothered warmth that made a terrifying thing feel ordinary. Ginny had told him, eventually, in the offhand way siblings share things, and Fred had filed it away like he filed away everything about you — evidence, slowly accumulating, of the person underneath the reputation.

He'd seen you be kind to professors, too, the ones the students mostly ignored or mocked behind their backs — Professor Kettleburn, half-forgotten by the current wave of Care of Magical Creatures students, and you always stayed a few minutes after class to ask him something, anything, because you couldn't stand the idea of someone feeling invisible in their own castle.

None of that was casual. None of it fit the story Hogwarts told about you, the story you told about yourself. Fred had known, for two years, that the girl everyone thought was allergic to seriousness was in fact one of the most quietly serious people he'd ever met — she simply reserved it for everyone except herself.

He didn't say any of this to you. Not yet. But it was why, when you tried to provoke him, tried to be difficult and prickly and impossible, he never quite managed to be as frustrated as you wanted him to be. He wasn't fighting the version of you that you were trying to perform. He was fighting for the version he'd already seen.

What you didn't expect — what genuinely surprised you, somewhere around the second week — was how much you had started noticing about him.

You noticed that he was left-handed but wrote with his right because a teacher had corrected him as a child and he'd never bothered to switch back, and that when he was truly exhausted, past the point of performing anything for anyone, his handwriting would slip back to the left without him seeming to realize it.

You noticed the small scar above his eyebrow that he'd gotten from a garden gnome incident at age nine, which he told you about with such delighted, self-deprecating detail that you'd laughed until your ribs hurt.

You noticed that he hummed under his breath when he was concentrating on something fiddly — usually a prototype for one of the twins' inventions — and that the humming stopped entirely the second he thought someone was watching, like he was embarrassed by a habit that was, in fact, one of the more endearing things about him.

You noticed that he always let George take credit for the funnier of their jokes in front of teachers, quietly stepping back so his twin could have the moment, and that he never once seemed to mind.

You noticed the way his ears went pink before the rest of his face did, every single time, a full half-second warning system for whatever he was about to say.

None of this was information you had gone looking for. It had simply accumulated, the way sand collects in the folds of a coat without anyone noticing they've been to the beach, and by the time you realized how much you knew about Fred Weasley that had nothing to do with his reputation, it was already far, far too late to pretend you hadn't been paying attention.

It happened on day sixteen, in a mostly empty corridor after dinner, torchlight throwing long shadows, and you weren't entirely sure afterward which of you moved first.

You'd been arguing — not seriously, the kind of argument that was mostly banter with teeth — about whether he'd cheated by having George slip you compliments on his behalf—he hadn't, George had done it entirely of his own accord, delighted by the whole arrangement—, and somewhere in the middle of your sentence Fred had simply stepped closer and kissed you.

It was not a gentle, testing kiss. It was two years of 'almost finally’ allowed to happen, and for several long seconds you kissed him back like you meant it, like your hands hadn't fisted in his shirt entirely on their own, like this was easy, like this was nothing.

Then you pulled back, breathing unsteady, and said the cruelest thing you could find fast enough to reach for:

"I've kissed better than you, Weasley. You're not the first, and you won't be the one who makes me fall for anyone."

You watched it land. Watched something flicker across his face — hurt, quick and real, before he shuttered it.

"Alright," he said, quietly.

"Alright?"

"You're allowed to say that. Doesn't mean I believe it." He tucked his hands in his pockets, and there was none of the usual performance in his voice, just something steadier and sadder. "But you don't kiss someone like that if you're trying to convince them you don't feel anything. You might want to work on your delivery."

He walked away before you could answer, and you stood alone in the corridor for a long time, furious at him for being right and furious at yourself for kissing him like you meant it, because you had.

The next Quidditch match fell three days later, Gryffindor against Ravenclaw, and Fred found you at breakfast that morning with a piece of chalk-paint and an expression far too pleased with itself.

"You're coming to watch."

"I always come to watch."

"You're coming to watch as my girlfriend, which means you're required, by ancient and binding tradition, to wear my number." He was already reaching for your cheek before you'd agreed to anything, carefully painting a small, crooked 5 just below your cheekbone, tongue between his teeth in concentration like it was the most important spellwork he'd ever attempted.

"This is ridiculous."

"This is tradition." He leaned back to inspect his work, grinning. "There. Perfect. Now everyone in the stands will know exactly who you're cheering for."

"I could cheer for you without face paint, Fred."

"You could. But this is more fun." He kissed the corner of your mouth, quick, easy, like it cost him nothing at all to be that soft with you in front of half the Gryffindor table, and jogged off toward the pitch before you could tell him to stop grinning like an idiot.

You cheered loudest for him that match, whether you meant to or not, and when he help to scored — showing off, clearly, doing an entirely unnecessary loop before landing — he looked straight up into the stands and found your face in the crowd like he'd known exactly where to look the whole time.

The invitation came two days before the holidays, delivered with the kind of casualness Fred clearly hoped would disguise how much he wanted you to say yes.

"Mum's doing Christmas at ours. Everyone'll be there. You should come."

"Fred, we're in the middle of a bet. I don't think 'meet the family' is part of the terms."

"It's not a term. It's an invitation." He shrugged, but his ears had gone slightly pink, the way they did when he was hoping harder than he wanted to admit. "You don't have to. But I'd like you there. And Ginny's been asking, and Mum already knows about you — "

"Your mum knows about me?"

"Ginny wrote her a very detailed letter. I had no editorial control." He grinned, but it softened almost immediately. "Come. Please."

You went. You told yourself it was for the sake of the bet, optics, keeping up appearances — you did not tell yourself the truth, which was that some small, starved part of you wanted, badly, to know what it felt like to be somewhere a family actually wanted you.

The Burrow was chaos in the best way you'd ever seen it — crooked, warm, impossibly full of noise and love in a way that made your chest ache before you'd even taken your coat off. Molly Weasley hugged you like she'd known you for years, pulled you into the kitchen, put a mug of something hot in your hands before you'd said a full sentence, and asked about your classes with a warmth so unguarded it nearly undid you on the spot.

"Fred talks about you constantly," Molly said, conspiratorially, stirring something on the stove. "Has done for ages. I was starting to think we'd never actually meet you."

"He's — persistent."

"He's smitten, dear, there's a difference, and don't let him tell you otherwise." Molly's eyes crinkled with quiet amusement, and then, gentler: "You look tired. Not sleep-tired. The other kind."

You hadn't expected to be seen that clearly, that fast, by someone you'd known for twenty minutes, and it knocked something loose in you that you weren't prepared for.

"I'm alright."

"You don't have to be, in this house. Whatever you're carrying, you can put it down here a while." Molly patted your hand once, brisk and warm, and went back to her stirring like she hadn't just cracked something open in your chest with a sentence.

The days passed, the afternoon turned bright and cold, and the whole yard behind the Burrow dissolved into an impromptu game — some chaotic Weasley variant of tag crossed with a made-up Quidditch drill, played entirely on foot because Ron insisted his broom needed ‘repairs’ that suspiciously coincided with him being terrible at flying that week. Ginny recruited you onto her team without asking, on the grounds that you ‘looked fast,’ and George immediately declared this an outrage and demanded a trade.

Fred ended up on the opposite team, which meant the entire game rapidly stopped being about the actual rules and became almost exclusively about the two of you trying to tackle each other into the frost-hardened grass, laughing too hard to actually catch anyone properly.

"That's cheating," you shouted, when he scooped you clean off your feet to stop you scoring past him, spinning you half around before setting you down, both of you breathless and pink-cheeked from the cold.

"Everything's fair in love and backyard Quidditch."

"You made that up just now."

"Doesn't make it less true." He was grinning at you in a way that had nothing performative left in it at all, snow-dusted and delighted, and for one unguarded moment you grinned back just as helplessly, forgetting, entirely, that this had ever started as a bet.

From the kitchen window, Molly and Arthur stood side by side, drying dishes that had long since stopped needing drying, watching the two of you chase each other across the yard.

"She's laughing," Molly said, quietly, like it mattered. "Really laughing. Have you seen her do that before?"

Arthur shook his head, smiling. "Not like that." He nudged his wife gently. "Reminds me of someone else I used to watch through a window, actually."

Molly swatted him with the dish towel, but she was still smiling when she turned back to the glass.

Dinner that night was loud and enormous, plates passed hand to hand faster than anyone could track, Fred's knee pressed warm against yours under the table the entire meal, and it was somewhere in the middle of the noise and the warmth and the sheer, overwhelming muchness of the Weasley family that it slipped out of you before you'd caught it.

"Could you pass the potatoes, Mum?"

The table didn't go silent all at once. It went silent in pieces, the way a held breath does, Ron's fork stopping halfway to his mouth, Ginny's eyes going wide, George actually turning to look at you properly for the first time all dinner.

You heard it a half-second after you'd said it, the word sitting in the air long after it left your mouth, and your face went hot with a mortification so total it felt like drowning.

"I — sorry, I didn't — " Your chair scraped back before you'd finished the sentence. "Excuse me."

You were up the stairs before anyone could stop you, into the first empty room you found, door shut, back against it, hands pressed to your burning face, humiliation crashing over you in waves you couldn't seem to get ahead of.

Hermione found you there less than a minute later — she'd been at the table too, had followed without a word, and simply sat down on the floor beside you without asking permission or offering platitudes.

"That was mortifying," you said, voice thick.

"It was an accident. Nobody thought anything of it."

"Everybody thought something of it, Hermione, I just called Molly Weasley ‘Mum’ in front of her entire actual family and Fred and — " Your voice cracked. "I don't even know where that came from. I don't call anyone that. I haven't had anyone to call that in five years."

"Maybe that's exactly where it came from," Hermione said, gently. "You've been sitting in a house that feels like what you didn't get to have. It doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. It means you noticed something you needed."

You didn't have an answer to that, and Hermione, wisely, didn't push for one, just sat with you on the floor until your breathing evened out.

It was Fred who came up eventually, knocking once before letting himself in, dropping onto the floor across from you with the specific, careful casualness of someone who'd clearly rehearsed several serious speeches on the stairs and decided, at the last second, against every single one of them.

"So," he said. "Word around the house is you've adopted my mother."

You groaned into your hands. "Fred."

"I'm only saying, if this keeps up you'll technically outrank me. Mum's had five sons and a daughter, and you managed it in one dinner. Efficient, really."

"I want to disappear."

"Don't. I like you visible." He nudged your knee with his. "For what it's worth, Mum nearly cried into the gravy boat after you left the table. Good tears. She's been saying for weeks she hoped you'd feel comfortable enough here to slip up exactly like that."

You peeked at him through your fingers. "You're not going to let me be embarrassed about this in peace, are you."

"Not a chance. It's far too good material." But his voice had gone soft underneath the teasing, and he reached over, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear with a gentleness that didn't match the joking at all. "You didn't do anything wrong. You just felt safe somewhere for a second and it came out sideways. That's not something to apologize for, love. That's just a house doing its job."

You let yourself laugh, finally, shaky and real, and let him pull you up off the floor and back down to a dinner that had, mercifully, moved on to arguing about dessert by the time you returned.

Later that night, unable to sleep, you found Fred out by the garden fence, staring up at a sky far too full of stars for anywhere near a city, and settled beside him without a word.

"Can I tell you something nobody outside my family knows?" he asked, after a while, voice quieter than you were used to hearing from him.

"Of course."

"George and I want to open a joke shop. A real one — Diagon Alley, our own name on the door, everything we've ever built and tested finally getting sold properly instead of confiscated by Filch." He picked at the fence post, not quite meeting your eyes. "Mum thinks it's a phase. Dad's supportive but worried, because it's not exactly a stable career, is it, and everyone assumes we'll end up doing something safer eventually because that's what's expected." He exhaled. "We've got savings hidden away. Not much. Enough to start, maybe, someday, if we're careful and lucky. But I don't really tell people that part, the plan, because it's — it's the thing I actually want, underneath all the jokes, and it feels like it'd hurt more than usual if someone laughed at it."

"I'm not going to laugh at it."

"I know. That's rather why I told you." He glanced over, something unguarded and slightly nervous in his face — the same look you'd catalogued weeks ago, right before he said something that mattered. "You're one of maybe four people who know that's real and not just a running joke with George."

"For what it's worth," you said, quietly, "I think it's a brilliant idea. And I think you'll actually do it. You're the most relentlessly clever person I've ever met, when you're not busy being an idiot about girls."

"Only one girl," Fred said, "and she's sitting right here," and you let him take your hand in the dark without pulling away, both of you quiet for a long time after that, comfortable in a way that had nothing to do with a bet at all.

"My mum left," you said, eventually, into the dark. "When I was eleven. Told my dad she couldn't do it anymore — couldn't do me anymore, said living with us would kill her. She wasn't wrong to leave, probably. But she made it sound like I was the reason staying wasn't possible."

Fred didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "That's not love talking. That's her limits talking. Those aren't the same thing, even if it felt like they were."

"You don't know that."

"I know you helped a terrified eleven-year-old with her first period because you didn't want her to feel alone with something scary. I know you sit with Kettleburn because you can't stand the idea of him feeling forgotten. I know you shoved half your dinner at a first year last week because his trunk got trampled and he looked like he hadn't eaten." He looked at you, steady, unflinching. "You are not difficult to love. You're just used to people who weren't equipped to try."

You didn't have an answer for that. You let him keep the silence with you instead, and for the first time in longer than you could remember, the quiet didn't feel like something you had to fill or flee.

You wrote to your father that week, from the Burrow's kitchen table while Molly hummed over the stove, and found yourself telling him more than you'd meant to — about the noise and the warmth of the house, about Fred, about the word that had slipped out at dinner and the shame that had followed it.

His answer came back three days later, his familiar cramped handwriting filling both sides of the parchment.

'You don't have to feel guilty for wanting a full table, love. I've watched you build yourself into someone who doesn't need anyone, these last five years, and I've let you, because I didn't know how to teach you otherwise while I was busy learning it myself. But your mother leaving wasn't a rule about what happens to people who let themselves be loved. It was one woman's limit, not a law of the universe. I've thought that every day since, and I should have said it to you sooner. If this Weasley boy makes you feel like a full table is possible again, don't apologize for it. Let yourself have it. We're a good team, you and I, always have been — but a team of two was never meant to be the whole shape of your life."

You read it twice, sitting very still at the Weasleys' kitchen table, and folded it carefully into your pocket instead of your trunk, where you could find it easily whenever you needed to.

Back at Hogwarts after the holidays, the little things kept accumulating, on both sides, in a way neither of you commented on directly.

Fred gave you his jumper without being asked, the first properly cold morning back, sliding it over your head before you'd finished complaining about the temperature in the corridor, sleeves swallowing your hands entirely. He saved you breakfast on the mornings you slept through your alarm, wrapped in a napkin and left on your usual seat with a scrawled note 'eat something,’ before he'd gone to Quidditch practice. He fixed your hair without thinking about it, tucking a strand behind your ear mid-conversation the way you'd catalogued him doing for weeks, an absent, easy gesture that had nothing showy in it at all.

You, in turn, had started doing things you didn't fully notice yourself doing until Angelina pointed it out over lunch one day.

"You've been carrying an extra quill in your bag for two weeks."

"So?"

"Fred's quills keep exploding because George keeps testing prototypes on them. You've been quietly replacing his without him asking." Angelina raised an eyebrow. "You also started reminding him to eat when he skips lunch because he's too deep in some invention to notice he's hungry."

"I haven't — " You stopped, because you had, actually, done all of those things, without deciding to, the way you'd apparently decided things about Fred a long time before you'd agreed to admit it.

"You're taking care of him," Angelina said, not unkindly. "You've just been doing it so quietly you didn't clock it as anything."

You didn't have a response to that, mostly because it was true, and because some part of you had apparently started treating Fred's wellbeing as something worth quietly managing long before you'd agreed this was anything more than a bet.

There were other things, too, that you only noticed because you were looking for reasons to stop noticing him, and kept finding the opposite.

You once braced for him to say something petty about a boy you'd dated briefly the year before. Instead Fred just shrugged. "He seemed alright. Didn't work out, clearly, but I've no interest in trashing someone just to make myself look better by comparison. Not really my style."

When Angelina needed to talk to you privately during a Hogsmeade trip, Fred didn't sulk about being excluded or ask what it was about. He simply said, "Take your time, I'll get us a table," and did exactly that, without a single pointed question when you returned.

He'd shout compliments across the Great Hall without a shred of embarrassment, but the second you were alone and something had actually gone wrong — a bad grade, an argument, a bad day — his teasing dropped instantly, replaced by something quieter and far more careful, like he understood the difference between performance and the moments that actually mattered.

None of it was dramatic. All of it, taken together, was somehow harder to argue with than any grand gesture could have been.

It hit you at the most ordinary moment — Fred's hand laced through yours at breakfast, nothing dramatic, nothing new — and still your chest went tight and your pulse spiked and some old animal part of your brain screamed this is too much, this is too close, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets taken away.

You excused yourself before anyone noticed, made it to an empty corridor, and stood there with your back against cold stone, breathing hard, furious at your own body for betraying you over something as small as a held hand.

Fred found you five minutes later — you hadn't heard him follow, hadn't wanted him to — and didn't touch you, didn't crowd you, just stood a careful few feet away.

"You don't have to tell me what that was," he said quietly. "But I'm not going anywhere, whatever it was. Take whatever time you need."

"I don't understand why this is so hard," you admitted, voice cracking. "It's just a hand. It's nothing. Why does nothing feel like everything with you?"

"Because it isn't nothing to you," Fred said gently. "It hasn't been nothing in a long time. That's allowed to be frightening. It doesn't mean you're broken for finding it hard."

He didn't bring it up again after that — no careful check-ins over breakfast, no meaningful looks — just quiet, steady normalcy that let you decide, on your own timeline, whenever you wanted to explain it further. You didn't, not for a while. He never once made you feel like you owed him the explanation sooner.

The closer you got to the end of the bet, the less it felt like a bet and the more it felt like something... natural, something that was always meant to be.

It happened on an ordinary Tuesday, late, the common room fire burned down to embers, most of Gryffindor tower gone up to bed. You'd been curled against Fred's side on the sofa, half-listening to him and George argue happily about a Filibuster firework variant, and at some point, without deciding to, you'd simply fallen asleep against his shoulder.

Fred noticed the exact moment it happened — your breathing evening out, the weight of you settling fully against him — and went very, very still, like any movement might undo it.

"Oi, don't wake her," he hissed, when Lee came thundering down the stairs a few minutes later with some story that clearly required a loud audience.

Lee stopped dead, took in the sight of you asleep against Fred, and grinned slowly. "Oh, this is precious."

"Lee, I will hex you."

"Wouldn't dream of waking her." Lee lowered his voice to an exaggerated whisper, which somehow drew more attention than his normal volume would have, and George, delighted, immediately shushed the common room with the enthusiasm of someone orchestrating a very important event.

"Everyone quiet, Fred's got a girl asleep on him and he looks like Christmas came early."

"I hate all of you," Fred whispered, and did not move an inch, one arm curled carefully around you, expression so unguardedly happy that Angelina — arriving from the girls' dormitory, hand in George's the second she reached the bottom step, since the two of them had gotten together earlier that term — actually laughed out loud at the sight of him.

"Someone get a camera," she said. "This is going in a frame."

Someone did, in fact, get a camera — Colin Creevey, roused from his dormitory by the commotion and thrilled beyond measure to be included — and the photograph that resulted, developed and delivered the next morning, showed you fast asleep against Fred's shoulder, his arm around you, his face turned slightly toward you instead of the camera, wearing an expression of such uncomplicated happiness that even you, seeing it for the first time, felt something in your chest go soft and unguarded.

Fred kept that photograph in his trunk for the rest of the year, tucked inside the cover of his Charms textbook where nobody but him would think to look.

You woke an hour later, disoriented, to find the common room mostly empty and Fred still exactly where he'd been, patient, unmoving, one hand resting loosely against your hair.

"You didn't wake me up."

"Didn't want to." He smiled, soft in the low firelight. "You looked like you needed it. Figured Lee's shouting could happen literally anywhere else in the castle."

"How long was I out?"

"Hour, give or take. George took a photo. Fair warning, it's going to end up somewhere embarrassing eventually."

You should have minded that. You found, somewhat alarmingly, that you didn't.

All that new familiarity, this affection, awakened something in you had come loose and frightened, and you did what you always did when things got too real too fast: you reached for the one language you trusted completely.

You sent Fred a note — the password to the prefects' bathroom, a time, nothing else. He arrived to find candles floating over water gone opal-soft with bubbles, and you, waiting, dropping your robe with a steadiness you didn't feel, offering him exactly the kind of easy, physical, uncomplicated thing you knew how to give without breaking.

Fred didn't move toward you. He looked, for one unguarded second, and then very deliberately looked away, reaching for a towel and holding it out instead.

"Put this on."

"Fred — "

"I'm not doing this." His voice was gentle, but there was no give in it. "Not like this. Not because you got scared and this is easier than talking about it."

Something in you flared, humiliated. "I'm offering you exactly what you've wanted for two years and you're turning it down?"

"I've wanted you. All of you. Not the part you hand out easy so the rest stays safe." He kept his eyes carefully, deliberately on your face, patient even now, even with you furious and half-dressed and lashing out. "If we do this — when we do this — it's going to be because you want me, not because you're trying to prove something's still simple between us. That's not a punishment. That's just — that's what I want it to mean, when it happens."

"You're an idiot," you said, voice thick.

"Probably. Ask George." He held the towel a little further out. "Get dressed. I'll wait outside. We can still talk, if you want to."

You didn't talk that night. But you didn't send him away either, and something about the walk back to the common room in silence, his hand loosely, carefully not-quite-touching yours the whole way, felt like the first honest thing that had passed between you in weeks.

It happened on day twenty-four, and it was, in retrospect, almost funny how small the argument actually was.

Fred had made plans — dinner, just the two of you, sneaked down to the kitchens with help from a very smug house-elf — and you'd cancelled at the last minute with a flimsy excuse—Just because your self-destructive side was faster than your new feelings—, then been caught twenty minutes later by George, laughing easily with a Ravenclaw boy in the library, clearly not otherwise occupied at all.

Fred found you afterward, jaw tight, some of the easy warmth gone out of his face entirely.

"You lied to me."

"I didn't lie, I just — didn't feel like dinner."

"You didn't feel like dinner with me, so you made something up instead of just saying so." His voice had an edge to it you'd never heard directed at you before, frustration finally breaking through weeks of careful patience. "Do you know how that looks? I planned something, I told the elves, I was excited, and you couldn't even be bothered to tell me the truth instead of making something up."

"I didn't think it mattered that much — "

"It mattered to me!" It came out louder than he meant it to, echoing slightly in the empty corridor, and you both went still, startled by it. Fred's hands had curled into fists at his sides, and for one long, terrible second you thought, with something like grim vindication, 'there it is. There's the crack. He's finally done’.

Then you watched him catch himself. Watched him take a breath, visibly, deliberately, and unclench his hands one finger at a time.

"I need a minute," he said, quieter now, strained but controlled. "I'm not — I don't want to say something I can't take back. Give me a minute."

He walked a short distance away, back to you, shoulders tight, and you stood there in the sudden quiet feeling something you hadn't expected to feel at all: not triumph, but a strange, unfamiliar guilt.

When he turned back around, a minute or two later, his voice was steadier, though his eyes were still bright with the leftover heat of it.

"That hurt," he said, simply. "I'm not going to pretend it didn't. You lied to me over something small, and it stung more than something small should, because I keep hoping you'll trust me enough not to need to." He exhaled. "But I'm not giving up on you. Not over this, not over one bad night. I got frustrated, and I'm allowed to get frustrated, and I'm telling you honestly instead of swallowing it — but that's different from losing patience with you. I haven't. I'm still here."

"I thought you'd bolt," you admitted, quiet, thrown by your own honesty. "I thought that was it. I thought I'd finally found the thing that would make you stop."

"I'm not your mother," Fred said, gently, echoing Hermione's words from weeks before without knowing it. "Getting annoyed isn't the same as leaving. I'm allowed to be human about this without it meaning I'm done with you."

You reached for his hand, and this time it was you who didn't let go first. "I'm sorry, i-i get scared…again.That wasn't fair, what I did,"

"No," he agreed. "It wasn't. But I forgive you, and I'd still rather have dinner with you tomorrow than not have you at all." He squeezed your hand once. "Next time, just tell me the truth. Even if the truth is you'd rather have a night alone. I can handle that far better than I can handle being lied to."

The habit didn't stay confined to Fred, and it hadn't started with him, either — which was, in its own strange way, some comfort a few days later, when Hermione was the one who felt the edge of it.

You picked the fight with her over something so small you could barely remember it afterward — a comment about a shared essay, a joke that landed wrong — and escalated it far past where it needed to go, voice sharp, words chosen precisely because you knew they'd sting.

Hermione didn't yell back. She just went quiet, hurt clear on her face, and said, "Why are you doing this? I didn't do anything to deserve that."

The question landed like a slap, mostly because you didn't have a good answer. You apologized within the hour, mortified, but the pattern was old enough that Hermione recognized it before you did.

"You do this when you're scared," she said later, gently, no accusation in it. "You did it to Fred a lot of times. You're doing it to me now. It's like you need to test whether people will still want you around after you've been at your worst — and it's exhausting for the people on the other end, even when they understand why."

"I'm not trying to hurt you."

"I know. But you are, a little, and I'd rather you just told me you were scared instead."

It happened again later, worse, with Fred himself, though this time you knew exactly what you were doing even as you did it.

You told him, unprompted, that you thought the entire relationship had been a mistake, that you'd been counting down the days until you could stop pretending.

It wasn't true. You knew it wasn't true the second it left your mouth. But some old, frightened part of you needed to see what his face did when you said it — needed, badly, to catch him in the act of finally, finally giving up on you, so you could point at it and say see, ‘I told you so’ and never have to risk this again.

Fred went very still. Then, quietly: "That's not what you actually think."

"How would you know?"

"Because you've been leaving me notes in my Charms book and you cried actual tears telling me about your mom and your dad and you fell asleep against my shoulder in the common room like it was the safest place you'd been in years. People who think something's a mistake don't do any of that." He wasn't angry, just steady, watching you with something that looked uncomfortably like understanding. "You're trying to make me leave first so it doesn't feel like your fault when it happens. I'm not going to do that for you."

You didn't have an answer. You went to bed that night furious at yourself, and it was Hermione, again, who found you crying about it afterward, who said nothing except I know and let you sit with the shame of it until it passed.

The letter had been sitting under your pillow for eleven days.

It was from your half-brother — a name you'd known about only distantly, a fact more than a person, the son your mother had gone on to have after she left, at a school in the north with a name that sounded cold even to say. He'd written to you out of nowhere, careful, hesitant handwriting, saying he'd like to meet you, if you'd be willing. He didn't mention your mother beyond a single line: ‘she's not really part of my life either, not the way you'd think’.

You hadn't answered. You weren't sure you could.

Hermione was the one who finally asked about it directly, catching sight of the parchment corner poking from your bag. "Are you going to write back?"

"I don't know what I'd even say."

"You don't have to know everything before you start. You could just say hello."

"He's got the same mother who thought staying with us would kill her. What if he's — what if there's something about the way she raised him that means he'll leave too, eventually, the second I'm inconvenient?"

"Or," Hermione said, carefully, "he's a kid who never got a sister and is trying, awkwardly, to have one. That doesn't mean he inherited anything except her handwriting."

You looked at the letter a long time that night before you finally wrote back — three sentences, tentative, an agreement to meet during the Tournament, when the delegations were all at the castle together. It felt like the bravest thing you'd done in years, and also the smallest.

By the last days of the bet, something had settled between you that no longer felt like performance at all.

You'd started sitting together at breakfast without any prompting, your hand finding his under the table as easily as breathing. He walked you to class even when it took him wildly out of his way. You'd started leaving your own notes back, tucked into his books — nothing profound, sometimes just ‘good luck in practice’ or a badly drawn picture of George's face — and he kept every single one.

"Twenty-eight days," Fred said one evening, lying beside you in the grass by the lake, fingers laced loosely through yours. "Two to go."

"Feels strange, doesn't it. Counting down to the end of something."

"Doesn't have to be the end of anything." He turned his head to look at you, something hopeful and a little nervous in his face, the look you'd catalogued weeks ago. "I know how this started. But it doesn't have to stop just because the thirty days run out. I'd rather this kept going. Properly. No bet attached to it at all."

"I know," you said, and found, to your own quiet astonishment, that you meant it entirely. "I'd like that too."

He kissed you then, slow and unhurried, nothing like the first kiss weeks before that you'd tried so hard to undercut with a cruel joke. This one you didn't pull away from. This one you leaned into, both hands fisted gently in his shirt, and when you finally broke apart he rested his forehead against yours, breathing uneven, smiling in the dark.

"Two more days," he murmured.

"Two more days," you agreed, and let yourself, for the first time in five years, imagine what came after without flinching from it.

Your brother's name was Kirill, and he was younger than you by two years, gangly and awkward in his Durmstrang uniform, with your mother's eyes and none of her coldness that you could find, not yet, not in the hour you spent with him in a quiet alcove near the courtyard.

He talked too fast, nervous, told you about his father — not yours, a stepfather who'd never quite warmed to him — about a mother who was, in his words, ‘around, but not really there, not for either of us, I think’. Somewhere in the middle of him showing you a battered photograph of a ship he wanted to sail someday, something in your chest cracked open with a feeling that wasn't grief exactly, more like relief: 'it wasn't just me. It was never just me.’

When he finally, awkwardly, hugged you goodbye — stiff-armed, unpracticed, clearly unused to affection — you were laughing, eyes bright with tears you hadn't let fall, cheeks flushed from the cold courtyard air and the strange, enormous feeling of maybe, possibly, gaining something instead of losing it.

Fred saw you like that. From across the courtyard, half-turned toward the castle doors, he saw you wrapped around a Durmstrang boy, laughing, glowing, happier than he'd seen you in the entire month he'd been trying to earn exactly that look.

He didn't wait to find out who it was. He turned around and walked back inside, something cold and quiet settling into his chest, and told himself, with the particular, practiced ease of someone protecting a heart he'd handed over freely: 'of course. Of course it was never really me’. She was always going to find someone easier to be happy with.

Fred didn't confront you. That was almost worse.

For the last day he was polite — cordial, even, still technically your boyfriend, still technically inside the bounds of the bet — but the warmth had gone out of it, replaced by a careful, controlled distance that felt like watching a fire go out one ember at a time. He didn't seek you out at meals. He didn't find you in corridors. When you spoke, his answers were short, correct, and utterly without the teasing warmth you'd only just let yourself start expecting.

"What's going on with you?" you finally asked, cornering him outside the library.

"Nothing. Everything's fine."

"You're lying."

"I saw you," he said, finally, voice tight, "with him. In the courtyard. Looking happier than you've looked with me all month." He wasn't looking at you, jaw set hard. "I'm not angry. You're allowed to want someone else. I just — I'd rather know now than keep pretending for the sake of a bet you never wanted to lose anyway."

You stared at him, and for a second you almost laughed, except it wasn't funny, it was awful, this entire month reduced to a single misread hug.

"Fred. That was my brother."

He blinked. "Your — what?"

"My half-brother. From Durmstrang. My mother's son." Your voice was shaking now, some mixture of fury and relief and old grief all tangled together. "The letter I've been avoiding — I finally answered it. I met him for the first time today. He hugged me because neither of us have ever had a sibling, and I was crying because for once in my life something about my mother didn't feel like it was going to hurt, and you thought — you actually thought — "

"I didn't know." His voice cracked, just slightly, guilt flooding in fast behind it. "I'm sorry. I should have asked. I should have come and asked instead of just — deciding."

"Yeah," you said, some of the fight going out of you, replaced by something rawer. "You should have."

"I was scared," he admitted, quiet now, all the careful distance gone. "The whole month I've been terrified you'd wake up one day and realize you didn't actually want any of this, that I'd just worn you down instead of actually winning you over, and then I saw you look at someone like that, and every fear I've had for two years just — came true, all at once, before I could stop it."

You let the silence sit a moment, let both of you breathe through it.

"I'm not in love with my brother, Fred."

"I know that now."

"Are you still in love with me?"

"I have been for two years," he said, simply, no performance left in it at all. "That's never been the question. The question's always been whether you'd let yourself believe it."

Day thirty one arrived on a grey, ordinary Tuesday, and you stood at the doors of the Great Hall with your heart going faster than it had any right to, watching four long tables full of people who had, whether you liked it or not, spent a month watching this exact thing unfold.

Fred was at the Gryffindor table, not looking at you, giving you the space to do this on your own terms, which was, you thought, exactly like him.

You didn't need to stand on a table or make a speech dramatic enough for the whole month to deserve. You simply walked to the middle of the hall, waited for enough eyes to land on you that the room quieted on its own, and said, plainly, "I lost the bet."

A ripple went through the hall. Somewhere near the Gryffindor table, George was already grinning like Christmas had come early.

"Fred Weasley did not lose his patience with me once in thirty days, which is either the greatest feat of patience in Hogwarts history or proof I'm not nearly as difficult to love as I've spent the last five years convincing everyone, including myself." Your voice wavered, just slightly, and you let it. "So. I fell for him. Completely, embarrassingly, against every plan I had. I'm in love with Fred Weasley."

The hall erupted — laughter, a few cheers, someone, definitely George, actually applauding — and Fred was already crossing the hall toward you, disbelief and hope and something helplessly fond all fighting for space on his face.

"You didn't have to do the whole hall," he said, when he reached you, voice low, just for you now. "A quiet word would've done."

"You didn't win a quiet bet. You won loudly, in front of everyone. Seemed fair you got your answer the same way."

"I love you," he said, like it was easy, like it had always been easy, like the only hard part had ever been getting you to a place where you could hear it without flinching.

"I know," you said. "I love you too. Try not to let it go to your head."

"Too late," Fred said, and kissed you in the middle of the Great Hall, in front of all of Hogwarts, like he'd been waiting two years for exactly this moment and finally, finally, wasn't waiting anymore.

Later, much later, curled together by the lake with his jacket around your shoulders and his fingers laced loosely through yours, you asked him the question you'd been sitting with since the courtyard.

"What would you have done? If it really had been someone else. If I really had wanted out."

Fred was quiet a moment, thoughtful in a way that had nothing to do with the easy performance he gave the rest of the world. "Let you go," he said, finally. "Badly. Probably pathetically. But I wouldn't have made you stay somewhere you didn't want to be, no matter how much it would've wrecked me." He looked at you, steady. "Wanting you was never about winning, love. It was always just wanting you happy, even in the version where that didn't include me."

You thought of your mother, then, the version of leaving that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with limits she wasn't equipped to hold. And you thought of Fred — thirty days of staying, of noticing, of giving you room instead of pressure, of a hand held out with a towel instead of taken advantage of, of a moment of real frustration met with honesty instead of an exit.

Not everyone who could leave, would. Not everyone who loved you was destined to find you too difficult to keep.

"Good," you said, finally, resting your head against his shoulder. "Because I'm not going anywhere."

"Neither am I," Fred said. "Never was." He reached into his pocket, a little sheepishly, and produced — of all things — a slightly crumpled lily, clearly transfigured rather than grown, given the season. "Hermione told me what these mean. In the old language. Apparently I've been daring you to love me since October without even knowing the word for it."

Year 2:

Soulmates were a tricky business.

No one fully understood the magic behind it—how the universe could possibly decide, from the moment you were born, that there was one person out there meant specifically for you. Even now, it remained one of the greatest mysteries of the magical world. There were no rules you could study, no spells to influence it, no way to predict it.

All anyone really knew was this: somewhere out there existed a person whose magic matched yours so perfectly that the universe itself would one day intervene and make it known.

How it chose to do that, however, was entirely unpredictable.

Some people were born with timers on their wrists, ticking down to the exact second they would meet the person meant for them. Others lived their entire lives in muted shades of grey until they met their soulmate and the world burst into colour all at once. Some carried their soulmate’s first words etched permanently into their skin, waiting for the moment they would finally hear them spoken aloud.

For others, it came later.

Marks that appeared on first touch. Marks that only revealed themselves after years of friendship. Marks that didn’t appear at all until it was far too late to matter.

There was no pattern. No certainty. No way to guess what form your own bond would take—or when it would appear, or who it would tie you to.

And so, by your second year, you had stopped thinking about it too much.

Well... not entirely.

Like any other girl, there were nights when you lay awake staring at the ceiling, letting your mind wander to the inevitable moment when it would happen. You imagined the first meeting in painstaking detail—how everything would fall into place like the final pieces of a puzzle, how suddenly the world would make sense in a way it never had before, as if you had finally found where you were meant to be.

You imagined what it would feel like to be close to them.

To hold their hand. To kiss them. To run your fingers through their hair and feel them do the same to you.

You imagined quiet moments and laughter, whispered words meant only for the two of you, a future that felt certain in a way nothing else ever did.

And sometimes, buried into your pillow so no one could hear, you’d find yourself smiling—giddy with anticipation for a life that hadn’t even begun yet.

But it was easy not to dwell on it too much.

None of your friends had found their soulmates yet—not Hermione, not anyone—and that made it easier. It meant you weren’t falling behind. It meant there was still time.

When it happened, it would happen.

And when it did, everything would make sense.

Until then, your biggest problem remained your exams.

The Great Hall was silent in that suffocating, unnatural way it only ever was during exams.

Rows upon rows of desks stretched endlessly beneath the enchanted ceiling, each one placed with careful precision—far enough apart to make cheating impossible, close enough to remind you that you weren’t alone in your misery. The usual warmth of the hall felt stripped away, replaced by something rigid and tense.

The only sound was the uneven scratching of quills against parchment, echoing faintly in the vast space like a hundred tiny clocks ticking out your time.

You hunched over your Transfiguration paper, brow furrowed in concentration, your hand moving quickly but carefully—fast enough to keep up with your thoughts, slow enough to avoid smudging the ink.

You were on the last question.

Finally.

Relief flickered through you as you exhaled quietly, adjusting your grip on your quill. You leaned in slightly, beginning to write your answer, already thinking about how quickly you could leave once you were done—how good it would feel to be free of the stifling silence, the pressure, the weight of it all.

A shadow fell across your desk.

Your quill stilled mid-word.

“Miss (Y/N).” Came Professor McGonagall’s voice, low and composed.

You looked up sharply, your pulse jumping.

She stood just behind you, posture as straight as ever, hands folded neatly behind her back. Her expression gave nothing away—no irritation, no warmth, just that familiar, impenetrable calm.

“Yes, Professor?” You whispered, instinctively lowering your voice to be mindful of your fellow classmates. The last thing you needed was Hermione scolding you after the exam for making a ruckus while she was trying to focus.

Her gaze flicked briefly to your paper, lingering for just a moment, before returning to your face.

“I’ll need you to come with me.” She said quietly.

Your stomach dropped.

“Now, please.”

For a second, you just stared at her.

Confusion hit first—sharp and immediate.

Had you done something wrong? That didn’t make any sense. You hadn’t even finished your exam yet. Your eyes darted down to your parchment, then back up at her.

“…my exam—?”

“I will take it with us.” She replied smoothly, already reaching forward.

Before you could protest, she lifted the parchment from your desk, your unfinished answer still drying on the page. You stared up at her in surprise, your quill still clutched in your fingers, ink well sitting open on the desk.

Something wasn’t right.

Slowly, you pushed your chair back, the scrape of its legs against the stone floor sounding far too loud in the heavy silence. A few heads turned at the noise—quick, curious glances—but just as quickly snapped back down to their work.

After all these were your final exams, they didn't have the time for their focus to be broken.

Your heart began to beat a little faster as you stood, a faint, uneasy feeling settling in your chest.

“Follow me.”

You trailed after her down the narrow aisle between the desks, acutely aware of every step you took, every eye you could feel flicking toward you before darting away again.

The large doors of the Great Hall loomed ahead, growing closer with every step, and with them, that strange, creeping sense that something had shifted.

You didn’t know what you had done.

Still, you bit down hard on the inside of your cheek and clenched your fists at your sides, willing yourself not to cry from sheer anxiety. The past few weeks had already left your nerves stretched painfully thin.

Between late nights revising, early mornings spent cramming information into your head, and the constant pressure hanging over every second-year student during exam season, it felt as though every nerve ending in your body had been stripped raw.

Even now, as you followed Professor McGonagall through the corridors, you could feel your heart hammering painfully against your ribs. You dug your nails into your palms until they hurt, desperately trying to ground yourself, but the growing lump in your throat refused to disappear.

Professor McGonagall led you into an empty classroom adjacent to the Great Hall and quietly shut the door behind you. The click of the latch sounded far louder than it should have.

"Sit."

You obeyed immediately, lowering yourself into the nearest chair while she remained standing. For a long moment she simply looked at you, her expression unreadable save for a distinct note of disappointment that made your stomach sink even further.

"Miss (L/N)," She began, her voice calm and measured, "students are made aware at the beginning of every examination period that cheating results in an immediate Dreadful. Your parents will be notified and the staff will need to discuss whether you will be permitted to sit a reexamination or whether further disciplinary measures are necessary."

For a second, you genuinely thought you had misheard her.

The words didn't make sense.

You stared up at her blankly.

"Professor... what?"

Her expression remained unchanged.

"You were found in possession of examination materials during your Transfiguration exam."

"I wasn't copying."

The denial left your mouth before you could stop it.

McGonagall's gaze lowered pointedly and, confused, you followed it.

The moment you saw your leg, your entire body went cold.

Written across the skin of your calf in cramped black handwriting were notes. Definitions. Theories. Entire sections of information taken directly from your textbooks and condensed into neat little sentences. There had to be dozens of them, stretching across your skin in dense clusters of writing.

Your breath caught painfully in your throat.

"What the hell?"

Your mind immediately began scrambling for an explanation. Had someone done this while you slept? Had ink somehow transferred from your notes? Had you absentmindedly written on yourself during a revision session? None of it made sense. You had showered the night before.

In your panic, you failed to notice that this wasn't even your handwriting.

"No."

You immediately started rubbing at your skin.

"No, Professor, I didn't write this."

You scrubbed harder, panic making your movements frantic.

"I swear I didn't."

The notes didn't budge.

Your palms were beginning to sweat, but the ink remained exactly where it was, stubborn and unmoving.

"It's not even coming off!"

The last few words came out dangerously close to a sob.

You looked back up at McGonagall, your vision beginning to blur around the edges as tears gathered in your eyes. Everything suddenly felt horribly unfair. You had spent weeks preparing for these exams. You had stayed up late memorizing definitions, quizzed yourself until your head hurt, worried yourself sick over every possible outcome.

"I swear I didn't do this, Professor," you said, your voice wobbling despite your best efforts. "I promise. Please don't fail me. I studied so hard."

The tears escaped before you could stop them.

One moment you were trying to hold yourself together and the next you were crying outright, fat tears rolled down your cheeks while the tiny amount of mascara you'd put on that morning in an attempt to look slightly less exhausted began smudging around your eyes. The embarrassment only made it worse. You couldn't remember the last time you had cried in front of a teacher, but now you couldn't seem to stop.

It was only through your tears that you noticed something change in McGonagall's expression. The disappointment that had been there moments ago had vanished completely, replaced by something that looked remarkably like realization. Her eyes flickered briefly from the notes scrawled across your skin back to your face and you watched as the pieces seemed to fall into place behind them.

"Miss (L/N)," She said, her voice considerably gentler than it had been a moment ago, "it would appear that I owe you an apology."

You blinked up at her through watery eyes, still struggling to catch your breath.

"What?"

"I believe there has been a misunderstanding."

For a moment you simply stared at her, the words refusing to make sense. A misunderstanding? Five minutes ago she had been discussing whether you would be forced to repeat the year.

"Once you've composed yourself," McGonagall continued, clearing her throat and smoothing a hand over her robes, "You may return to the examination hall and complete your exam."

The room fell silent.

You looked down at the notes still covering your skin and then back up at her, trying to understand what had changed. The writing was still there. The evidence hadn't disappeared. If anything, it seemed even more obvious now than it had before. Yet whatever conclusion McGonagall had reached was apparently enough to completely alter the situation.

Before you could ask any further questions, however, she was already moving toward the door.

By the time you had managed to stop crying and make yourself somewhat presentable again, your eyes were still red and your cheeks still blotchy. You clutched your exam paper tightly against your chest as you made your way back toward the Great Hall, still trying to piece together what had happened.

The corridor ahead was empty save for two approaching figures.

At first you barely paid them any attention.

Professor Snape was walking briskly in your direction, his dark robes billowing dramatically behind him as they always seemed to. Beside him walked another student, hands shoved into his pockets and expression thunderous enough to make most people step out of his way.

Mattheo Riddle.

At first, you barely paid attention. Then your eyes caught on the black smudges beneath his eyes—dark, uneven streaks that clung to his lashes and marked the skin beneath them. Mascara. Your mascara.

You stopped walking.

Mattheo stopped too.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. The corridor around you felt strangely distant, as though everything else had faded into a muffled blur while the two of you stood suspended in something sharp and disorienting.

His gaze moved over your face, lingering on your red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks. Slowly—almost visibly—understanding began to settle across both of your expressions at the same time, like the final pieces of a puzzle clicking into place.

The notes that hadn’t been written by you but had appeared on your skin anyway.

The mascara that hadn’t been applied by him but was now smeared across his face.

The reason Professor Snape was escorting him down the corridor.

His expression darkened first.

Yours followed not long after.

You had never met him before. Never spoken to him.

And yet somehow, within minutes of discovering he was your soulmate, Mattheo Riddle had nearly gotten you expelled.

As he continued to glare at you from across the corridor, looking every bit as offended by the situation as you felt, you came to one very simple conclusion.

The universe had an absolutely horrific sense of humour.

Year 6:

It was quiet in the dormitory—far too quiet for a weekday morning.

You frowned slightly, still half-asleep as you burrowed deeper beneath your blankets, turning your face further into the pillow. Usually by now the room would already be alive with noise: drawers slamming shut, sleepy complaints about unfinished homework, someone inevitably losing a sock five minutes before class. But there was none of it. No chatter. No rushing footsteps.

Which could only mean one thing.

You had woken up too early.

A pleased little sigh escaped you as you snuggled further into the warmth of your bed, already drifting back toward sleep. Maybe you had another hour left. Maybe—

“(Y/N) (L/N), FOR GODRIC’S SAKE, WAKE UP! YOU’VE ALREADY MISSED BREAKFAST!”

You bolted upright so fast you nearly headbutted the bedpost.

“WHAT?!” You shrieked, voice rough with sleep as panic shot through you all at once, “Hermione, why didn’t you wake me?!”

“I DID, YOU TEA TOWEL!”

The insult barely registered as you threw your blankets off yourself and stumbled out of bed in a frenzy, hair a complete mess and heart racing with the immediate horror of being late. Your bag was still unpacked from the night before, half your books hanging out of it as you rushed around the room trying to pull yourself together.

“Why didn’t anyone shake me harder?!” You complained, yanking your uniform shirt over your head inside out before realizing and swearing under your breath.

Hermione, already fully dressed and exasperatingly put together, didn’t even look up from stuffing parchment into her bag, “I did! It's not my fault you sleep like the dead.”

You huffed, grabbing your skirt and tugging it on crookedly as you rushed toward the mirror, mentally planning the fastest possible route to class. If you skipped properly brushing your hair and just fixed it on the way—maybe if you brushed your teeth in the bathroom nearest the Charms corridor—

And then you looked up.

Your stomach dropped so suddenly it felt like the floor had disappeared beneath you.

For a moment, all you could do was stare.

Your own reflection stared back at you in equal horror, pale and frozen and impossibly awake now, but you barely noticed the expression on your face because your eyes were locked on the red mark pressed against your cheek.

A lipstick stain.

Bright. Smudged.

Unmistakably shaped like the imprint of someone’s mouth.

Your breath caught.

There was another near the corner of your lips, blurred slightly like it had been kissed there carelessly. One against your jaw. Another lower down, just beneath your ear.

Dread began settling into you slowly, horribly, piece by piece.

“No.” You whispered.

Your hands started shaking.

“No, no—”

You turned slightly toward the mirror, fingers fumbling desperately with the collar of your shirt as you pulled it aside.

More.

Faint red marks scattered across your skin, disappearing beneath the fabric of your clothes. Some were clearer than others; some were smeared, dragged slightly, as though whoever had left them behind had done so thoughtlessly. Casually.

You stared at them, your reflection blurring around the edges as tears began burning in your eyes.

Your throat tightened painfully.

The room suddenly felt too small, too warm, your chest caving inward as realization settled fully over you.

“)Y/N), come on, class starts in—”

Hermione stopped mid-sentence.

You didn’t turn around, but you saw her expression shift in the mirror from annoyance to shock. Her eyes caught on the marks scattered across your neck and collarbone, and the look on her face softened so quickly it made something inside you crack further.

“Oh.”

You squeezed your eyes shut.

A heavy silence settled across the room. Then you heard Hermione approach slowly, carefully, like she was afraid one wrong movement would shatter you completely. She stopped just behind you, her reflection appearing over your shoulder, and when you finally forced yourself to look up again you saw nothing but sympathy written all over her face.

“Oh, (Y/N),” She said softly, and somehow the gentleness in her voice hurt worse than the marks themselves, “I’m so sorry.”

You swallowed hard and forced yourself to inhale, then exhale, trying desperately to hold yourself together.

“It’s fine,” You said immediately, too quickly, your voice unnaturally flat, “It’s not like I liked him anyway.”

The second the words left your mouth, your chin trembled.

Hermione’s expression crumpled.

And suddenly you couldn’t do it anymore.

A broken sound escaped your throat before you could stop it, and then the tears were falling all at once, hot and uncontrollable as the ache in your chest finally split wide open. You covered your mouth with your hand like that could somehow hold the sobs back, but it was useless. Your knees nearly gave out beneath you as weeks and months of buried hope came crashing down all at once.

Hermione caught you before you could fall properly, pulling you into her arms immediately.

And the second she did, you broke completely.

You cried into her shoulder so hard it hurt, fingers clutching desperately at the fabric of her jumper while humiliation and heartbreak tore through you in waves.

Your soulmate had slept with someone else.

A few mornings later, when Hermione sat down at the Gryffindor table for breakfast, she wasn't remotely offended when the eyes of her friends immediately flicked over her shoulder.

It had become something of a routine.

Every day for the past week, someone would look up when she arrived, expecting to find you trailing behind her. Every day their faces would fall when they realized she was alone.

Just as she was today.

Harry was the first to break the silence, "She still won't come down?"

Hermione's grip tightened slightly around her spoon.

The concern on his face mirrored exactly how she felt.

You hadn't attended a single class all week. The first two days had been the worst. You had cried until you physically exhausted yourself, until your body finally gave out and sleep claimed you against your will. By the following morning, you'd developed a fever bad enough that Hermione had practically dragged you to the Hospital Wing herself.

Madam Pomfrey had taken one look at your blotchy face, red-rimmed eyes, and dangerously high temperature before ordering you into a bed and refusing to hear arguments.

Hermione had stayed beside you for as long as she'd been allowed.

She remembered watching you sleep fitfully beneath white sheets, occasionally stirring only to curl further into yourself. She remembered the way your hand would sometimes move unconsciously toward your neck, fingers brushing against skin where the marks had long since faded.

Eventually Madam Pomfrey had forced Hermione out, insisting there was nothing more she could do.

Now several days later, the fever had broken.

But you still hadn't left your room.

Hermione shook her head, "No."

Hermione sighed, reaching for her tea, though her attention was nowhere near her breakfast. Her gaze swept across the Great Hall, not aimlessly skimming over the hundreds of students filling the room, but locking onto its target almost immediately like a heat-seeking missile.

Mattheo Riddle.

He sat at the Slytherin table with his friends, laughing at something one of them had said, completely at ease, looking every bit like he hadn't a single worry in the world. The sight of him sitting there so carelessly, smiling like life had handed him every reason to, made Hermione irrationally want to march across the hall, grab him by the ears, and squeeze his head until it popped like an unsightly pimple.

He had absolutely no idea.

No idea that his soulmate hadn't left her bed in days.

No idea that she'd cried herself into a fever.

No idea that Hermione had spent hours sitting beside her, listening to her sob until she had nothing left in her, only to watch her stare blankly at the canopy above her bed as though she'd forgotten how to exist.

Her jaw tightened.

"Look at him," She muttered bitterly, her eyes boring so intensely into the side of his head that she was almost disappointed when he didn't spontaneously burst into flames, "I spent half the week consoling her, and he's sitting over there like he's the bloody king of the world."

Then, she looked back down into the untouched cup of tea in front of her, watching her own furious reflection ripple across its surface. The anger was still there, burning hot beneath her skin, but it had long since become tangled with something far more unbearable.

Helplessness.

Because no matter how angry she was, it wouldn't undo what had happened.

It wouldn't stop you from shutting yourself away in your dormitory, curtains drawn around your bed, convinced that facing four wooden bedposts was somehow easier than facing the rest of the world.

She felt the sting behind her eyes before she realized she was blinking a little too often.

"I can't believe someone like her is supposed to end up with someone like him." She murmured, her voice losing all of its earlier bite.

She absentmindedly stabbed at her pancakes with her fork, skewering a lone berry in the process without even noticing.

"She's the sweetest, kindest, most selfless person I've ever met," Hermione continued quietly, swallowing around the lump that had formed in her throat, "She'd do absolutely anything for the people she loves, and somehow..." She gave a humorless laugh, shaking her head, "Somehow he's the person the universe chose for her."

Finally, Hermione let out a slow, defeated sigh.

"How could the universe be so cruel?"

Harry and Ron exchanged a glance, but neither of them answered.

Because what could they possibly say?

Afterall, they had no idea what it was like to be rejected by your soulmate.

Your head felt impossibly heavy.

When you'd finally cried yourself to sleep the night before, you'd hoped that maybe—just maybe—you'd wake up feeling even a little bit lighter.

Instead, it felt as though someone had stuffed your head full of damp cotton.

Everything was muted.

You could see the familiar shape of your dormitory around you, the sunlight spilling lazily through the windows, painting warm patches across the wooden floor, but none of it felt real. If someone had asked you to name half a dozen things in your own room, you weren't entirely convinced you could have done it. Your thoughts drifted in and out without ever quite settling long enough to grasp them.

Outside, Hogwarts carried on as though nothing had happened.

Somewhere below the tower, students laughed as they crossed the courtyard on their way back from breakfast. Every so often, a shrill whistle carried in through the open window, followed by the distant roar of voices from the Quidditch pitch.

Life went on.

It always did.

But inside your dormitory, it felt as though time itself had stopped.

Like you were sitting inside a vacuum, sealed away from the rest of the castle, where even the sound of your own breathing seemed impossibly far away.

You hadn't even realized someone was knocking.

The sound barely registered through the haze clouding your mind, so faint and distant that you mistook it for part of a dream. It wasn't until the door slowly creaked open that you finally stirred, letting out a weary sigh without even bothering to look up.

"Hermione," You mumbled into your pillow, your voice hoarse from days of crying, "Please... I don't want breakfast."

There was a brief pause.

"Well," Came a decidedly unfamiliar voice, "It's a good thing Chocolate Frogs aren't considered breakfast."

Your eyes snapped open.

Slowly, you pushed yourself upright, blinking through the fog in your head until the figure standing sheepishly in your doorway came into focus.

Messy ginger hair.

Hands buried deep in his pockets.

A crooked smile that looked like it wasn't entirely sure whether it belonged there.

"...Fred?"

The way you said his name made him chuckle softly.

Not because it was funny, exactly, but because your tone carried that slight undercurrent of cautiousness, like you were trying to work out whether you were looking at Fred Weasley or his identical twin.

"It's me," He assured you with an easy grin, "George is considerably uglier."

Despite everything, the corner of your mouth twitched.

Fred caught it but, to his credit, didn't point it out. He simply closed the door quietly behind him and wandered further into the dormitory, his hands still buried in the pockets of his jumper as though he were only stopping by for a casual chat.

Although, you knew better than to believe that.

He was here for something.

You just couldn't work out what.

Had Hermione sent him? Had she somehow decided that Fred's ridiculous sense of humour might succeed where she had failed? More importantly, how in Merlin's name had he even managed to get into the girls' dormitory in the first place?

"...What are you doing here?" You asked.

The question left your mouth more out of politeness than genuine curiosity.

Truthfully, you didn't really care.

Whether Fred was here or not, whether he'd come to cheer you up or drag you to breakfast or simply stare at you until you spoke, all you wanted was to be left alone again. So you settled back against your headboard, waiting for whatever explanation he had prepared so you could nod absentmindedly, mumble something about still being tired, and hope he'd take the hint.

Fred scratched the back of his neck.

"I don't really know," He admitted after a moment with a small shrug, "I heard Hermione talking about you downstairs."

He finally pulled his hands from his pockets.

A handful of Chocolate Frog boxes tumbled into his palms.

"I heard she was worried." He looked down at the collection of sweets before giving one shoulder another little shrug, "Next thing I knew, I was standing outside your door."

He crossed the room and sat down carefully on the edge of your bed.

Instinctively, you tugged your cocoon of blankets out from beneath him, unwilling to surrender even that small comfort. Fred pretended not to notice. Instead, he simply dropped the Chocolate Frogs into your lap one by one.

"I figured," He said, "if nothing else, chocolate rarely makes things worse."

You stared down at them for a second before absentmindedly picking one up and peeling open the box.

"Whatever Hermione's worried about..." You murmured, carefully unfolding the cardboard, "...it isn't going to happen."

The chocolate frog immediately sprang from your hands.

You watched it bounce across the dormitory floor, disappearing beneath someone's bed but you paid no heed, fishing the card from the now-empty box instead.

Helga Hufflepuff.

Nice.

"I just wanted some time to be alone," You said quietly, your thumb tracing absent circles over the edge of the card, "Some time to think. You wouldn't understand."

Fred's smile faded.

"Oh," He said, leaning back on his hands, "Believe me."

His eyes drifted toward the window for a moment.

"I know exactly what that's like."

You froze, your thumb absentmindedly tracing the edge of the Nicolas Flamel card as you silently cursed your own stupidity.

Of course.

You had completely forgotten who you were talking to.

Everyone knew Fred Weasley's story.

It had been impossible not to.

It had spread through Hogwarts like wildfire the day the twins turned sixteen and discovered, to the absolute bewilderment of the entire school, that they shared the same soulmate mark. The same name inked onto both of their wrists.

Angelina.

No one had known what to make of it. How could the universe make a mistake? It wasn't supposed to.

Yet somehow, two brothers had been promised the same girl.

In the end, Angelina had chosen George.

No one blamed her. She'd simply followed her heart.

And just like that, Fred had become the boy without a soulmate.

What followed had been painful to watch.

Every passing week seemed to chip away at something that had once felt unbreakable. Fred and George had always existed as a pair. Joined at the hip, people liked to joke. Before that, joined by an umbilical cord. There had never been one without the other.

It had been heartbreaking watching the distance grow between the twins afterwards. Not all at once, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, until people realized Fred no longer occupied the seat beside George in the Great Hall. They stopped seeing them sneaking through corridors together after curfew. Their jokes became less frequent, their laughter less shared.

Fred simply couldn't bear to watch the girl he'd spent years believing was destined to love him fall into his brother's arms instead.

Eventually, time had done what time always did.

The sharp edges had dulled.

The twins laughed together again. They pulled pranks together. They looked, from the outside at least, like themselves again. But anyone paying close enough attention could tell they were never quite the same.

How could they be?

Their seemingly inseverable brotherhood had been eclipsed by an ineffable bond.

Soulmates.

It was no longer Fred and George, the terrible terrors. Now, it was George and Angelina, the star-crossed lovers, and Fred, who had been left behind.

"I'm sorry." You whispered, the apology slipping out before you could stop it.

Fred's eyes met yours.

"So am I."

He didn't elaborate.

He didn't have to.

And for the first time in days, you felt the glass jar you had trapped yourself in begin to crack.

This whole time, you'd convinced yourself that hiding in your dormitory was helping. As long as you stayed within these four walls, you could pretend the world outside had stopped moving. Pretend that morning had never happened.

Reality settled over you with unbearable clarity.

That was what this was, wasn't it?

Rejection.

Mattheo had known exactly who you were. He'd known that every mark left on his skin would bloom across yours. He'd known you would wake up wearing the evidence of his choices.

And he'd done it anyway.

The thought hollowed you out.

Your entire life, you'd been told that soulmates were certainty. That somewhere in the world there was one person who would choose you above everyone else because the universe itself had decided you belonged together.

So what did it mean when they didn't?

If even your soulmate could look at you and still choose someone else...

Where exactly did that leave you?

Slowly, you lifted your eyes from the card to Fred, who was sitting beside you now, close enough that your shoulders nearly brushed, his gaze already fixed on you.

Your heart ached.

Because the answer to your unvoiced question was written all over his face.

He was every bit as heartbroken as you were.

Just as lost.

Just as unsure of where he fit into a universe that had promised him one thing, only to hand him another.

It hurt him every time he saw George with Angelina. You knew it did. No matter how much he loved his brother, no matter how genuinely happy he wanted to be for him, there had to be a small part of him that wondered why it hadn't been him.

Why fate had bothered writing her name onto his skin at all.

And you knew, with sickening certainty, that the next time you saw Mattheo...

It would tear you apart in exactly the same way.

Fred's expression softened as he noticed your eyes beginning to fill again.

He offered you a small, sympathetic smile.

"Well..." He said, giving one shoulder an exaggerated shrug, "At least we've got each other."

A laugh escaped you before you could stop it. It was watery and quiet, immediately chased by the tear that finally slipped down your cheek. Fred grinned a little wider, looking entirely too pleased with himself for managing to get even the tiniest laugh out of you.

"I suppose the reject bin isn't completely empty."

"No," Fred agreed, "Turns out it's got surprisingly good company."

Turns out misery really did love company.

It was almost pathetic, in a way.

The only reason you had finally been able to leave your room, to walk back into the Great Hall, to sit through classes without feeling like the walls were caving in around you, was because you'd discovered you weren't the only person carrying around this strangely specific kind of heartbreak.

Your chest still tightened whenever Mattheo walked into a room. Every accidental glance across a corridor still left you feeling hollowed out from the inside, wondering how someone who was supposedly destined to love you had found it so easy to choose somebody else instead.

But sitting beside Fred somehow made it easier to breathe.

You supposed anyone watching from the outside would've found it to be the most obvious outcome imaginable.

Birds of a feather.

Two people who had somehow fallen through the cracks of destiny naturally gravitating toward one another.

Before long, spending time with Fred stopped feeling like something you consciously chose to do and instead became part of your routine. You'd find him waiting outside your classroom without either of you having planned it, or he'd drop into the empty seat beside you at breakfast as though it had always belonged to him.

Sometimes you talked about soulmates.

Most of the time, you didn't.

And somehow, those were your favourite conversations.

You hadn't realized just how grateful you'd become for his presence until one morning at breakfast when Harry slid onto the bench opposite you, looking unusually flustered and whispered, "I met my soulmate last night."

Thankfully, Hermione's excited gasp and Ron's loud, "You what?!" completely drowned out the sound of your breath catching in your throat.

For a brief, horrible second, it felt as though you had left your own body.

The conversation continued around you in muffled voices while you watched it all unfold from somewhere far away, like you were observing it through thick glass. Hermione was already peppering Harry with questions. Harry, red-faced and grinning despite himself, tried unsuccessfully to answer them both at once.

You just... watched.

Until something warm wrapped gently around your hand beneath the table and your attention snapped back. Without saying a word, you laced your fingers through his beneath the tablecloth, hidden from everyone else.

The knot in your stomach loosened.

Not completely. But just enough so that when you turned back to Harry, the smile on your face no longer felt so forced.

"Congratulations, Harry," You said softly, "I'm really happy for you."

Harry's smile faltered.

Only then did it seem to occur to him what he'd just blurted out—and who he'd blurted it out in front of.

A flicker of guilt passed across his face behind his glasses.

"Oh, (Y/N), I didn't—I wasn't thinking—"

You shook your head before he could finish, "It's okay."

And surprisingly...

It was.

Harry relaxed, offering you a small, grateful smile before Hermione immediately launched into another question, successfully stealing his attention once more.

Only then did you turn your head.

Fred was already looking at you.

Your joined hands still rested beneath the table, his thumb absentmindedly brushing across your knuckles.

"I just can't believe how much time I've wasted."

Your voice was quiet as you stared up at the canopy of Fred's bed, watching the afternoon sunlight dance lazily across the faded red fabric. Beside you, Fred lay with one arm tucked behind his head, the other dangling over the edge of the mattress. He turned his head slightly.

"Hm?"

It wasn't often the conversation drifted back to soulmates anymore.

Somehow, the two of you had become remarkably good at avoiding the very thing that had brought you together in the first place. But every now and then, usually when the castle had gone quiet around you, one of you would bring it up again.

And somehow it was always easier talking to Fred than anyone else.

"I've never even been on a date," You admitted with a humourless laugh, "Can you believe that?"

Fred's eyebrows lifted.

"I just... wasted so much time." You sighed, picking absentmindedly at a loose thread in the blanket. "I kept thinking there was no point. Why bother dating when the universe was supposedly going to hand me the perfect person eventually?"

You shook your head.

"I was so convinced that one day everything would just... happen."

A small smile tugged at your lips.

"I suppose, in retrospect, that's a rather ridiculous way to live."

Fred was quiet for a moment.

Then he nodded.

"I get it."

You looked over at him.

"Before my soulmate mark appeared," He continued, "I never really bothered trying either. I always figured I'd meet my soulmate eventually, so whoever I dated beforehand wouldn't really matter."

He let out a small breath through his nose.

"And after..." His smile turned a little sad, "Well, there wasn't much point then either."

You understood immediately.

"Everyone already had someone they were meant to end up with."

"Exactly."

He shrugged, "It felt like borrowing someone else's future."

Silence settled comfortably between you.

"I know exactly what you mean," You murmured, "Even if I'd somehow found someone I actually liked. It would've only been a matter of time before they found their soulmate."

"And then I'd just be..." You trailed off, "Temporary."

Fred didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

Because he'd spent the last year feeling exactly the same way.

You groaned dramatically, throwing an arm over your eyes, "I just want to go on a date for once."

Fred snorted.

"Is that too much to ask?" You bemoaned.

"I don't even want anything extravagant," You continued, finally sitting upright since the topic had become important enough to warrant an actual discussion. You gestured vaguely with your hands, trying to paint the picture in the air between you, "Just… one completely ordinary date."

Fred turned his head to look at you.

"I want to wear a pretty dress," You admitted, counting on your fingers, "I want to spend far too long doing my hair, even though it'll probably end up looking exactly the same as it did before. I want someone to bring me flowers."

The last part made Fred's eyebrows climb.

"...Flowers?"

You frowned at him as though he'd just said something outrageously offensive.

"Yes. Flowers."

"You've just spent the last minute insisting you don't want anything extravagant."

"They're flowers. It's the bare minimum."

A comfortable silence settled over the room again. You flopped back against the mattress with an exaggerated sigh, staring up at the canopy above while Fred continued looking at the ceiling beside you.

"I just..." You murmured after a while, your voice softer now, "I wish I knew what it felt like."

"What?"

"To have butterflies."

The admission felt oddly embarrassing.

"To get excited because someone asked me out. To spend the whole day wondering what they're going to think when they see me. To hold someone's hand because they wanted to hold mine." You laughed quietly at yourself, "I don't even care whether it's life-changing anymore."

You swallowed, the words catching slightly in your throat.

“I just wanted to know what normal feels like.”

For a moment, Fred didn’t respond.

He just lay there beside you, one arm tucked behind his head, eyes fixed lazily on the canopy above as though he were turning your words over somewhere quieter than conversation. The pause stretched longer than you expected it to—long enough that you almost convinced yourself he wasn’t going to answer at all, that the moment had passed and you’d said too much again.

Then, almost absentmindedly, he spoke.

“So let’s go on one.”

You frowned, turning your head slightly, having forgotten how the conversation had even ended, “...Go on what?”

“A date.”

That made you sit up a little more properly, the word feeling strangely out of place in the softness of the room, “A date?”

“Seems like the obvious solution.” He added, as though he were suggesting something as simple as going for a walk.

You blinked at him, trying to make sense of his expression, “...With who?”

Fred looked almost insulted.

"With me."

Silence.

Not the comfortable kind this time.

The air between you shifted—just slightly. You became acutely aware of the space between your shoulders, the way your fingers were curled into the blanket, the way Fred didn’t seem to notice any of it at all.

He, meanwhile, looked completely unconcerned with the fact that he had just suggested something that felt like it should be impossible to say out loud.

“I mean…” He continued after a beat, shrugging one shoulder as if it were obvious, “Think about it.”

You hesitated, “I am.”

“We’re both sitting here complaining we’ve never really dated anyone.”

“Yes…”

“We’re both catastrophically single.”

“Unfortunately.” You muttered, despite yourself.

“We both want to know what all the fuss is about.”

“I suppose.”

“So…” He spread his hands slightly, palms up, as though presenting the most logical conclusion in the world, “Why don’t we just take each other? Scratch the itch a bit.”

You looked away for a second, down at your hands where they were picking absently at the edge of the blanket, “I don’t know…” You admitted quietly.

Fred didn’t push. He rarely did.

Instead, he shifted slightly closer—not enough to crowd you, just enough that his presence was harder to ignore.

“You said you wanted to wear a pretty dress.”

“I did.” You murmured.

“You said you wanted a normal date.”

That made you glance back at him again.

Your voice came out softer this time, almost uncertain, “I do.”

A pause.

The kind that felt like something was being decided inside it.

Fred’s expression didn’t change much, but his voice gentled.

“So let me take you on one.”

Even though you were almost entirely certain Fred had suggested the date as a joke, you found yourself surprisingly nervous when the day finally arrived.

Not because you expected anything to happen.

It wasn't really a date, after all.

Not a real one.

Just two rejects pretending, for a few hours, that the universe hadn't forgotten about them.

Still, you couldn't deny there was something undeniably exciting about getting ready for it.

You stood in front of the mirror for far longer than you cared to admit, smoothing invisible creases from your clothes before immediately finding new ones to fuss over. Your hair had already been redone twice, and you were currently debating whether it looked better tucked behind your ears or left loose around your shoulders.

You had practically licked your lips dry, wanting to put on just a little bit of gloss, if not to look good then at least to stop you from worrying them so much.

But third year had taught you that makeup simply wasn't worth the argument.

The memory still made you grimace.

You had gotten a tube of cherry lip gloss as an impulse purchase from Hogsmeade. The bottle was just so cute and the colour was just right and it smelt like a cherry pie.

You'd worn it exactly once before Mattheo had cornered you in a corridor, positively livid over the matching sheen that had mysteriously appeared on his own lips.

The argument had been spectacular.

You'd shouted.

He'd shouted louder.

By the end of it both your cheeks had been burning, partly from anger and partly from the sheer humiliation.

After that, you'd quietly switched to glamour charms.

You shook your head, willing the memory to leave your mind. A light spritz of perfume followed, and then another after you convinced yourself the first one hadn't been enough.

This wasn't a date.

You reminded yourself of that several times while changing outfits.

And yet, by the time you finally slipped out of Gryffindor Tower—carefully timing your escape before Hermione and the others returned from lunch so nobody could make a spectacle of it—you couldn't deny the flutter of anticipation low in your stomach.

Your first date.

Fake though it may have been.

Fred was already waiting beside the Black Lake when you arrived. The moment he spotted you, his face broke into an easy grin. He awkwardly straightened where he stood before holding out a small bouquet of hand-picked wildflowers.

A smile spread across your face before you could stop it.

You accepted them carefully, bringing them close enough to catch their sweet scent, asking with a teasing lilt to your tone, "Now whose Herbology project did you ruin by nicking these?"

Fred clutched dramatically at his chest.

"I would never."

"No?"

"I'll have you know these were ethically sourced. Well, a bit of unpaid labour." He said, showing you the slight dirt that was still left on the tips of his fingers.

You grinned, leaning to give him a quick peck on the cheek, "There, paid for in full."

"So..." You said, looking up at him, "What's the plan? It isn't swimming, is it? Because I spent entirely too long on my hair."

His eyes flicked over said hair for only the briefest moment.

"It looks nice."

You blinked.

"...Thank you."

The words came so casually that he didn't even seem to realize he'd said them aloud. Then his usual grin returned, "And don't worry. I've got something much more special in mind."

Rather than reassuring you, that somehow made you considerably more suspicious.

Fred simply laughed before turning on his heel and beckoning for you to follow. He led you around the edge of the Black Lake and toward a dense cluster of trees you'd never paid much attention to before.

"I thought we'd collectively agreed wandering into mysterious forests was a terrible idea after the centaurs last year." You remarked as you ducked beneath a low branch he held out of your way.

"We did."

"And?"

"We also established I was the worse student between the two of us."

You rolled your eyes, "Can't argue with that."

A few moments later he stopped.

Nestled between several thick tree trunks was what appeared to be nothing more than a tiny tunnel woven entirely from vines and ivy.

Before you had time to question it, Fred crouched down and disappeared inside.

You stared after him.

"...Bit brazen of you to expect a girl to get on her knees on the first date, don't you think, Weasley?"

His laugh echoed back through the tunnel.

"Oh, come on."

"I'm simply making observations."

"Get in here, (Y/N)."

Still muttering dramatically under your breath, you crouched down and crawled after him. The tunnel only lasted a few feet.

The first thing you noticed as your head emerged from the other side was the sunlight. Bright summer sunshine spilled across your face exactly as expected.

The second thing you noticed was the cold.

A sharp, winter chill immediately kissed your cheeks and nipped at the end of your nose.

You blinked.

Then looked up.

Your breath caught.

Hidden away beyond the curtain of vines was a tiny clearing unlike anywhere else on the Hogwarts grounds.

Wildflowers carpeted the earth in every imaginable colour while rabbits darted lazily through the grass, entirely unconcerned by your arrival. Golden afternoon light poured through the canopy overhead, making the entire place glow like something lifted straight from a fairy tale.

But none of that was what stole your breath.

At the very centre of the clearing lay a lake.

Perfectly still.

Perfectly frozen.

A sheet of flawless ice sat beneath the blazing summer sun as though winter itself had been trapped inside this tiny corner of the world.

"...What on earth..."

"Amazing, isn't it?"

You turned to find Fred watching you rather than the lake.

His grin was quieter now. There was still that unmistakable stretch of pride across his face as he took in your gobsmacked reaction, but beneath it lingered a hint of fondness that sent a slight flush to your cheeks, one you stubbornly insisted was caused by the cold.

"I was mucking about here in second year," He admitted with an embarrassed scratch at the back of his neck, "George and I were trying to invent a product that could make it snow indoors."

"And?"

"And... I may have perpetually frozen the entire lake."

You stared at him, "You may have?"

He shrugged, "I got scared I'd be in trouble if anyone found it."

"So you..."

"So, I never told anyone."

As he spoke, he reached out and absentmindedly cast a quiet Scourgify over your clothes, brushing away the bits of moss and leaves that had collected while crawling through the tunnel.

His fingers paused near your shoulder.

"There."

He gently plucked a tiny twig from your hair before tucking a loose strand behind your ear with absent familiarity.

"So..." You looked back at the lake, "You've never shown anyone this?"

"No."

"...Not even George?"

Fred's smile softened.

He shook his head.

"No."

Something warm unfurled low in your chest.

Warmer than the summer sun beating down on you.

You felt it.

The butterflies.

Walking back toward the castle felt strangely bittersweet.

Like stepping out of a storybook.

The hidden clearing disappeared behind the curtain of vines the moment you stepped through it, swallowed once again by the forest as though it had never been there at all. If you hadn't still felt the lingering chill clinging to your clothes, you might have convinced yourself you'd imagined the entire afternoon.

Your nose stung from the cold.

Your cheeks, however, had turned pink from hours spent laughing beneath the summer sun.

The two of you had spent hours on that frozen lake.

By the time the sun had begun sinking below the treeline, painting the ice in shades of amber and gold, the two of you had been too exhausted to do much more than sit side by side on the frozen shore, talking until the growing darkness reminded you that professors generally frowned upon students disappearing into enchanted forests after curfew.

Now, the familiar warmth of the castle wrapped around you as the heavy oak doors swung shut behind you.

The sudden change in temperature made your fingers tingle unpleasantly as feeling slowly returned to them.

A comfortable silence settled between you as you wandered through the entrance hall.

Students passed around you in little groups, chatting animatedly over dinner plans and unfinished essays, but neither of you made any move toward joining them.

Eventually, you reached the foot of the marble staircase.

You turned toward Fred.

He'd been unusually quiet for the last few minutes.

The easy confidence he'd carried all afternoon had somehow disappeared somewhere between the lake and the castle, replaced instead by something unexpectedly hesitant. His hands had found the pockets of his jumper again and he rocked back slightly on his heels before clearing his throat.

"(Y/N)..."

"Hm?"

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"So..."

You waited.

"I know..." He let out a small, awkward laugh, "I know this wasn't exactly a date-date. But…" His eyes found yours again, "I had a really good time."

Something in your chest fluttered.

"And unless I've completely misread today..." He continued carefully, "I think maybe you did too."

You did.

Far more than you'd expected to.

"So..." He took a small breath, "Unless I've made an absolute fool of myself here, I was wondering if maybe—"

"Let's go on a second date, Fred."

The words escaped before your brain had the chance to stop them.

You hadn't meant to interrupt him.

Truthfully, you'd been rather enjoying the exceedingly rare spectacle of Fred Weasley stumbling over his own words. It was oddly endearing watching someone who always seemed to have a joke ready suddenly become hopelessly tongue-tied.

Unfortunately, your own anticipation had won the race.

Silence settled between you. Fred simply stared. For one wonderfully long moment, he looked completely dumbfounded.

Then, slowly, a grin began tugging at the corners of his mouth.

It spread across his face before he could stop it, bright enough that you watched him actively try to suppress it.

"Well," He drawled, folding his arms as though he hadn't just been struck speechless, "Someone's certainly getting ahead of herself, isn't she?"

You folded your own arms in mock offence.

"Oh?"

"I hadn't even finished asking yet."

"You were taking too long."

He took one thoughtful look at you before his grin returned in full force.

"...So," He tilted his head ever so slightly, "Same time next week?"

Fred was always good at date ideas.

You knew that much by now.

Every time you met him, there was something planned—something a little ridiculous, a little exhausting, and always, without fail, something that made it impossible for you to think about anything else except how much you were laughing.

But with the July heat pressing down over Hogwarts like a heavy, unrelenting spell, even Fred’s usual energy had begun to soften at the edges.

The castle itself felt sluggish. Corridors held onto warmth long after sunset, windows stayed permanently open, and even the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall seemed stuck in an endless stretch of pale, hazy blue.

But it seemed the unbearable heat had given Fred an idea for another date.

Which was how you found yourself standing at the edge of the Black Lake in a cute bikini you’d been waiting all summer to wear, your shoes discarded somewhere in the grass behind you, watching him attempt to skip stones across the water.

He managed one bounce.

The stone immediately sank.

“Hm,” Fred said thoughtfully, staring at the ripples like they had personally betrayed him, “I’ve gotten considerably worse at that.”

“You were never good.”

“I distinctly remember being excellent.”

“That’s the heat talking. It’s cooked your brain.”

He gasped, pressing a hand to his chest in mock offence.

“You wound me.”

“I try.”

He looked at you, a sinister smile on his face that gave you a feeling that he was planning something, “Well, I try harder.”

You barely had time to process the warning in his grin before you felt it—a sharp splash against your shoulders, cold water exploding across your skin.

“Fred!”

You sputtered as you broke the surface, hair dripping into your eyes just in time to see him double over laughing.

And then, before you could retaliate, he cannonballed in after you.

Every moment of calm dissolved into splashing, laughter, and half-hearted attempts to dunk one another beneath the surface. Fred succeeded exactly once before you retaliated by grabbing his ankle and dragging him under with you, emerging seconds later breathless and triumphant.

By the time the chaos finally eased, you’d drifted farther from shore, your limbs heavy with exhaustion and your sides aching from laughing too hard.

For a moment, there was nothing but gentle movement. Water lapping softly against your shoulders. Sunlight scattering across the surface in broken gold. Fred floating nearby, hair plastered to his forehead, grinning like he didn’t have a single thought in his head except this.

You turned slightly, your gaze catching on something in the water near your hands.

It glimmered faintly beneath the surface.

“Oh—wait—” You said, reaching out instinctively, “I think that’s a shell or something. It's pretty."

Before you could even finish the sentence, Fred was already diving.

He disappeared beneath the surface without hesitation.

"Chivalry is dead, they say."

The words died in your throat when he resurfaced a moment later, shaking water from his hair.

In his hand, he held the shell out proudly, grinning at you, “Ta-da.”

You smiled automatically, already reaching for it, already preparing some teasing comment until your eyes slipped past his hand.

Past the shell.

To his wrist.

Angelina.

The name sat against his skin like it belonged there.

Like it had always belonged there.

Your fingers stopped mid-air.

Fred was still talking, still smiling, still looking at you with that easy warmth that had become so familiar you didn’t even think about it anymore. His voice blurred slightly at the edges, like it was coming from farther away than it actually was, and the lake around you suddenly felt quieter, heavier, as though it had decided to hold its breath with you.

You couldn’t look away from it.

Angelina.

It wasn't wasn't the first time you were seeing it. It definitely wasn't new.

And yet seeing it like this—so close, so real, so casually visible between moments of laughter—made something inside you tighten in a way you hadn’t been prepared for.

The universe’s choice.

Not you.

Never you.

A strange stillness settled in your chest, not sharp at first, just heavy, like the slow sinking of something you hadn’t realized you were holding. Your thoughts began to slip before you could catch them, drifting in directions you couldn’t stop.

Would they make a good couple?

Did she ever think about him when she looked at George?

Did she ever wonder what it would’ve been like if she’d chosen differently, if she’d taken a different path, if she’d looked at the wrong twin and hesitated just a second longer?

And worse—did Fred ever think about it too?

The shell in his hand suddenly felt irrelevant, something from a different moment entirely, like it didn’t belong in this one anymore. Like it had been part of a version of the world where you weren’t thinking about this. Where you weren’t standing in the middle of a lake watching the evidence of a future you didn’t belong in wrapped around his wrist.

You weren’t even fully aware of the shift until it had already happened.

One moment you were here, in sunlight and laughter and water that still clung warm to your skin.

The next, everything felt distant.

Muted.

As though you had stepped just slightly outside of yourself.

“…(Y/N)?”

You blinked, forcing yourself back into your body, into the moment, into the lake and the shell and him.

Fred was closer now, his expression no longer playful. The smile had faded without him even seeming to notice, replaced by something quieter, more attentive.

“You alright?”

For a second, you forgot how to answer.

Then you managed something that almost resembled normal.

“Yeah.”

A pause.

His eyes didn’t leave your face.

“You sure?”

Too quickly—too automatically—you nodded.

“Just cold.”

Even as you said it, you knew it wasn’t convincing.

Fred didn’t push. He rarely did when it mattered.

Instead, he moved closer through the water until his arm brushed yours, steady and grounding, and then—like it was the most natural thing in the world—he slipped it around your waist to keep you from drifting too far with the current.

“Yeah? Well,” He said softly, almost lightly again, as though trying to pull you back without forcing it, “We can fix that.”

And for a moment, you let him.

Just a moment.

A final moment.

In all honesty, you hadn’t meant to avoid him.

Really, you hadn’t.

It wasn’t like you actively chose to turn around every time you saw Fred in the corridors, or pretend you hadn’t received his notes because you’d gone to bed early, or slip out of a room the second you heard his boisterous laughter drawing closer—the same laughter that used to send a wave of warmth flooding through you.

But every time you saw him—his warm brown eyes, shadowed by long lashes—you felt that sinking pit open up in your stomach, swallowing everything else whole. It ruined your day before it had even properly begun.

And even though all you wanted was to be near him, you couldn’t help but turn away every time his eyes searched for you.

You really should have considered the fact that Fred wasn’t going to take it lying down.

And that he knew all about the secret passageways scattered around Hogwarts.

So you really shouldn’t have been surprised when he appeared in the corridor that had been empty not even a second ago—grabbing your wrist and stopping you in your tracks.

“Fred.”

“This push-and-pull bullshit isn’t going to work with me, (Y/N),” He said immediately, “If you want to break up with me, you better look me in the eye and do it.”

Ironic.

Because you couldn’t.

Your gaze stayed anchored to his wrist—specifically, to the inked name along his pulse, peeking out from beneath his sleeve.

And just like that, the pit in your stomach returned.

“This isn’t going to work, Fred.”

His brows twitched, his grip tightening just a fraction—like he was afraid you’d slip away again if he loosened it.

“Why?”

You let out a breath, shaking your head like the answer should be obvious.

“Because you’re not meant to be with me,” You said, “You’re already… destined for someone else.”

A flicker of confusion crossed his face.

“My brother’s soulmate?” He said, almost incredulous, “I would never do that to him. And she’s already made her choice.”

“And if she didn’t?” You pressed, your voice tightening, “If she changes her mind tomorrow? If she decides you’re the one she’s meant to be with… would you change yours?”

The question hung between you.

Fred didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, his gaze sharpened.

“Well then what about you?” He shot back, “If Riddle suddenly realizes how badly he messed up—comes crawling back, begging you to take him—would you go?”

The edge in his voice hit harder than you expected.

Suddenly, you were back in your dorm room again, staring at lipstick marks you hadn’t chosen, feeling that same hollow, awful ache in your chest.

Except this time—

he wasn’t your soulmate.

You had no claim to Fred.

If he turned around tomorrow and chose Angelina, you couldn’t fault him for it.

After all… she was his soulmate.

And if he wasn’t by your side—

If Mattheo came back, asking for your forgiveness—

Would you really be able to go back to him like nothing had happened? Could you let him touch you with the same hands that had touched someone else, pretend you didn’t know exactly where they had been? Could you stand there in his arms and still feel that sense of certainty you used to dream soulmates would bring—the feeling that this was your place in the world, that you were chosen, needed, loved completely?

“No,” You said, your voice barely above a whisper as the realization settled in, “I wouldn’t.”

Your voice steadied as you continued.

“I don’t want someone who would hurt me on purpose,” You said quietly, “I don’t want someone who makes me feel like I’m something they can come back to when it suits them. Like the only reason I’m with them is because someone out there decided it.”

Your eyes lifted to meet his.

“I want you.” You admitted, your voice tightening as you realized just how true it was.

These past few weeks with Fred had been the happiest you’d been in a long time. When you were with him, it felt like you’d finally found your place in the universe.

And that terrified you.

Because he wasn’t yours.

Not really.

And if those lipstick marks had broken your heart, then watching Fred walk away from you and go back to Angelina the second she called would destroy you.

“But I want you to want me too,” You finished, “Not just because I’m there. Not just to fill some empty space.”

Silence settled between you.

Fred’s grip loosened—not letting go, just sliding from your wrist to your hand, holding it instead.

“I’ll admit it,” He said after a moment, “That’s how it started.”

Your chest tightened.

“Just… something to make it hurt less,” He continued, quieter now, “Something to not feel so bloody lonely all the time.”

He looked at you then—really looked at you.

“But it’s not that anymore, (Y/N).”

And when you met his eyes, all you saw was sincerity. It hit you in a way you couldn’t quite explain—like the two of you weren’t just standing in a corridor anymore, but somewhere else entirely. Somewhere smaller. Quieter.

Just the two of you in the entire universe.

“I’m falling for you,” He said, like it scared him a little to admit it, he'd been burned before and he was scared he was going to be again, “And I want to be with you. Soulmate or not.”

You wanted to believe him.

You really did.

But the tattoo of her name lingered in your mind—a ghost between the two of you you didn’t know how to exorcise.

“But what about—”

“Fuck Angelina, alright!”

Your eyes widened and he dragged a hand through his hair, frustrated, desperate, “There isn’t a single part of me that wants her right now,” He said, “I thought I did. I thought I was supposed to. But I don’t.”

His voice dropped.

“Not like I do when I’m with you.”

You stared at him, that pit in your stomach beginning to dissipate, just slightly.

“(Y/N), please.” He said, taking your hand in both of his and pulling you closer, guiding your palm to rest against his chest.

His heartbeat was fast.

Almost as fast as yours.

“If you don’t feel the same way about me, that’s okay,” He said softly, “But don’t push me away because you think I’d rather be with anyone other than you. Because there is no one else, and there never will be.”

Something in you shifted, quiet but undeniable, and before you could second-guess it you stepped closer, your hand coming up to rest against his shoulder as you rose onto your toes, leaning in with the simple intention of pressing a soft kiss to his cheek.

But at the last second, he turned his head.

Your breath caught, your lips just a hair away from meeting his, so close you could feel the warmth of him, could see your own reflection in his blown out pupils. Your gaze dropped, almost involuntarily, to his mouth for just a moment and before you knew what was happening, you had closed the distance.

You had always thought your first kiss would be with your soulmate. You had saved it, carefully, stubbornly, building it up in your mind during sleepless nights—imagining electricity in little jolts rushing through your body, feeling inexplicable heat where he would've grabbed the dips of your waist, imagining certainty, imagining that unmistakable feeling that would tell you, without question, this is it.

You thought you would feel boundless joy rush through you, a state of euphoria that made you feel tethered and floating at the same time as you kissed the person you were meant to be with for the very first time.

As your arms slid around Fred’s neck and pulled him closer, as he kissed you back, his arms looping around your waist as he began to lose himself into you, blurring the lines between where you ended and he began.

You realized—

It was everything you had ever dreamed it would be.

The Gryffindor common room was rarely this quiet.

It almost felt like you had managed to catch your foot in the rug and slip into some kind of alternate dimension. Normally, it was chaos in its purest form—laughter spilling over armchairs, someone shouting about Quidditch from across the room, first-years getting shushed for the tenth time in five minutes. But tonight, the fire crackled softly instead of roaring, and even that felt like it was trying not to disturb the peace.

You were curled up in Fred’s lap like it was the most natural place in the world, one of his arms loosely around your waist while the other lazily traced patterns against your knee. You, meanwhile, were fully invested in a crossword puzzle like your life depended on it.

“Six across,” You murmured, brow furrowed, “Ten letters. ‘An ingredient in Pepper-Up potion—’ oh, this is easy.”

Fred hummed behind you, amused, “You say that about every single clue.”

“Because I am right every single time.”

“You absolutely are not.”

You glanced up at him over your shoulder, squinting, “Are you challenging my intellectual superiority?”

He shrugged, though that infuriating smirk was still on his face, “Not at all. Oh look—twelve down. Another word for humility. Quick, how many letters in 'not (Y/N)'?”

You clicked your tongue, rolling your eyes, and moved on to the next clue, solving it just as quickly as the last one. You leaned back against him with a satisfied little grin—and Fred tightened his arm around you just enough to make you tilt into him again.

“Show-off.” He murmured.

You solved another clue, and without thinking, pressed a quick kiss to his jaw.

Fred paused.

Then, like it was nothing at all, he kissed the top of your head in return.

It became a rhythm after that—clue, answer, kiss; clue, answer, kiss—soft and absentminded, warm in a way that made the rest of the world feel very far away.

Until it didn’t.

“You two are adorable.” Came a voice behind you.

You both turned slightly.

Lavender Brown stood a few steps away, arms folded, her expression somewhere between pity and smug satisfaction. Her gaze flicked pointedly between you and Fred, lingering just a second too long on the way you were sitting together.

“It’s just…” She continued lightly, “such a shame, isn’t it?”

You blinked, “What is?”

“That you’re not actually soulmates.” Her lips curled, “It’s such a shame you’ll never know what it feels like to be in your soulmate’s arms.”

Silence settled for half a beat.

Fred’s hand stopped moving on your waist.

You slowly closed the crossword book.

Then you looked up at her properly.

“Well, I actually take a lot of pride in that,” You said, voice sweet as honey, “At least I’m not like some people who the big man in the sky clearly knew wouldn’t be able to land a partner with that face and personality… so he had to shackle some poor bloke to them just to make it work.”

Fred made a sound that suspiciously resembled a cough hiding a laugh.

Lavender’s face went red instantly, “That’s— I didn’t—”

“Mm.” You tilted your head, “Anyway, good talk.”

She opened her mouth again, clearly searching for something to salvage her dignity, but nothing came. After a second of flustered silence, she spun on her heel and walked away far faster than she’d arrived.

The moment she was gone, Fred let out a low whistle.

“Good job, sweetheart.”

“Well,” You said with a small shrug, “I am the funny one in this relationship.”

Fred hummed quietly—the sound vibrating through his chest where your back was pressed against him.

“Oh yeah?” He murmured.

There was something in his voice now—lower, slower, warmer.

“S'that so?”

Something about it—the depth of his tone, the way his words seemed to slur like they were weighing on his tongue, the way he looked at you like he was genuinely drunk on you—made your stomach drop in a way you’d never felt before.

The crossword book slipped from your lap and fell to the floor.

And then you were turning fully in his arms, grabbing the front of his jumper, and kissing him properly.

Fred made a sound of surprise that quickly melted into something far more pleased. His palm slid to your back, pulling you in, and you felt yourself go slightly hollow with it—like every thought had been knocked clean out of you. Your hands moved up to frame his jaw as he kissed you back with growing desire.

And for a moment, the rest of the world didn’t exist at all.

Ron Weasley chose that exact moment to walk into the common room like he had impeccable comedic timing and absolutely no sense of mercy.

The door swung open with a creak, letting in a burst of cold corridor air—and Ron, flanked by a couple of his friends, froze mid-step.

Ron physically recoiled.

“For God’s sake,” He groaned, dragging a hand down his face, “Can you guys stop this disgusting display of affection?"

Fred didn’t even look embarrassed. If anything, he looked mildly offended that Ron had interrupted his very important work of being glued to your lips.

You, still slightly breathless—and also slightly offended—were actually a little relieved he’d walked in. Because if you’d been allowed to carry on, you were fairly certain you’d be expelled for public indecency.

Ron gestured vaguely at the scene like it physically pained him, like he was about to wretch up his guts at the thought of one of his best friends with his brother, “It makes other people who haven’t found their soulmates feel bad.”

Your eyes flicked to Fred.

And before you could stop it, you both shared the same secret smile.

Ron hadn’t even realized what he’d implied.

Still, something warm and oddly sweet curled in your stomach anyway.

Fred noticed it too. Of course he did.

“Right,” He said lazily, looking back at Ron, “We’ll make ourselves scarce then. Wouldn’t want to traumatise poor, lonely Ronald.”

“Oi—”

But Fred was already standing, pulling you up with him in one smooth motion like it was second nature.

You barely had time to steady yourself before his hand found yours.

And just like that, he was leading you toward the staircase.

You glanced over your shoulder at Ron one last time, sending him a mischievous smile and a quick wink.

He responded with a face of pure disgust.

It made you laugh—but the sound faded as you climbed higher into the tower, Fred still holding your hand like he had no intention of letting go.

epilogue: (lowkey the og plan was to kill off freddie but i changed my mind lol)

Eventually, Mattheo Riddle became very good at pretending.

It was a skill he perfected over the years in the same quiet, miserable way people learned to live with old injuries—carefully, stubbornly, until the pain became less of a sharp wound and more of a permanent ache woven into everyday life.

At first, it had been difficult. Mattheo had always been a man of candor. When he wanted something, he took it. When he felt desire, he showed it, and more often than not the world bent willingly into his hands. When he felt anger, disgust, hatred—he made sure everyone around him felt it too.

But heartbreak?

Guilt?

Regret?

Those emotions sat strangely on him, like clothes tailored for someone else entirely.

For a long time, he found reminders of you everywhere. Every couple passing him in the street felt like a mockery of something he had ruined with his own hands.

But time had a cruel way of dulling even the sharpest pain.

Eventually, Hogwarts became memories instead of places. The castle faded into nothing more than fragments in the back of his mind. He stopped dreaming about you eventually. Or perhaps he simply stopped remembering the dreams by morning.

He learned how to fill his days well enough.

Work helped.

Noise helped.

Women helped sometimes too, though never for very long. He became frighteningly good at moving from one distraction to the next without ever lingering long enough for silence to settle around him properly.

Because silence was dangerous.

Silence was where you lived.

People stopped mentioning your name around him after a while.

That helped.

Or at least, that was what he liked to believe.

Years passed that way.

Quietly. Pathetically.

And eventually, he became good enough at pretending that even he almost believed himself.

Until one morning, long after he had stopped allowing himself to think about soulmates at all, Mattheo woke to faint silver lines stretching across the skin of his stomach.

For a long moment, he simply stared at them in the mirror.

Then, silently, he swallowed the pain.

And pretended he never noticed them.

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"Hello to you too, babe." He looked up from his case files—civilian case files, he'd learned to hide those very carefully. "What's going on?"

"I found a new forum. Well, not new—it's been around for three years—but new to me. And Dick, they have theories." You sat down next to him, already pulling up browser tabs. "Look at this analysis of Nightwing's fighting style. Someone broke down footage from seventeen different encounters and compared it to known martial arts disciplines."

Dick leaned over, his stomach sinking as he recognized one of the breakdowns. It was... actually pretty accurate.

"That's cool," he said carefully. "But isn't this kind of thing a little invasive? These are real people."

"Real vigilantes," you corrected. "Who operate in public. This is public information." Your eyes were shining with that particular intensity you got when you were excited about something. "Besides, I'm not trying to expose them or anything. I just think it's fascinating. Like a puzzle."

"A puzzle."

"A really complicated, really interesting puzzle." You pulled up another tab. "Look at this thread about Batman's possible identity. Someone did a financial analysis of Wayne Enterprises' R&D spending and cross-referenced it with Bat-gadget appearances."

"That seems like a lot of work."

"It's thirty-seven pages. I'm only on page twelve." You were already scrolling. "Oh! And there's this whole section on Robin—well, the Robins, plural. The theory is there have been at least four different ones."

There had been five, but Dick wasn't about to correct you.

"Why are you so interested in this?" he asked.

"Are you kidding? They're superheroes, Dick. Real-life superheroes in our city. Don't you want to know who they are?" You looked at him like he was crazy. "Don't you wonder what kind of person decides to dress up in a costume and fight crime?"

"I mean, sure, but—"

"I think Nightwing is someone local. Mid-twenties to early thirties, probably. The way he moves—he has formal training. Gymnastics, maybe? Circus background?" You were pulling up video footage now. "Look at this flip. That's not just martial arts. That's acrobatic training from childhood."

Dick's mouth went dry.

You'd just described him perfectly.

"That's a pretty specific theory," he managed.

"I know! And get this—someone on the forums thinks they saw Nightwing at a coffee shop in Blüdhaven. Out of costume, obviously. They said he had the same build, same hair color, similar mannerisms." You were scrolling through comments now. "Of course, half the comments are calling them crazy, but what if they're right?"

"What if they are?" Dick asked carefully. "Would you want to know?"

"Are you kidding? Of course I would! Can you imagine? Finding out someone you pass on the street is secretly Nightwing?" You grabbed his arm excitedly. "Actually, that gives me an idea."

"What idea?"

"We should do a stakeout."

"A what?"

"A stakeout! A Bat-watch!" You were already pulling up maps of Gotham. "There are patterns, right? Areas where Nightwing patrols more frequently. If we stake out those areas, we might see him. We could try to follow him, see where he goes—"

"That sounds dangerous."

"We won't get close! We'll just observe from a distance. Take notes. Gather evidence." You looked at him with puppy-dog eyes. "Please? It'll be fun. Like a date, but with more vigilante watching."

"That is not a normal date activity."

"Dick, we once spent three hours at that antique store looking at old medical equipment. Normal left our relationship a long time ago."

He couldn't really argue with that.

"One stakeout," he heard himself say. "But if it's dangerous, we leave immediately."

"Yes! Oh my God, this is going to be amazing!" You kissed him quickly. "I need to prepare. Make a list of locations, times when Nightwing is most active, equipment we'll need—"

"Equipment?"

"Binoculars, obviously. A camera with a good zoom lens. Snacks. Coffee. Oh, and I should make an evidence board!"

"An evidence board."

"To track patterns! Don't look at me like that, this is basic detective work."

"You're not a detective, babe. You're a graphic designer."

"A graphic designer with excellent research skills and a PowerPoint addiction." You were already typing. "This is going to be so fun!"

Dick watched you, already lost in planning your "Bat-watch," and wondered if this was karma for all the times he'd teased Tim about his conspiracy theories.

This was going to be a disaster.

A hilarious, terrible disaster.

Dick came over to find your apartment transformed.

There was a literal cork board on your wall covered in photos, string, and sticky notes.

"Is that... is that Bruce Wayne?" Dick asked, staring at a photo of his adopted father.

"Possible Batman candidate," you said, not looking up from your laptop. "I know, I know—billionaire playboy doesn't fit the profile. But it's the perfect cover, right? Everyone assumes he's too busy partying to be Batman."

"Bruce Wayne is not Batman."

"That's exactly what someone would say if they were trying to protect Batman's identity." You added another note to the board. "Plus, the timeline works. Batman appeared around the same time Bruce Wayne returned from his 'world tour.' Suspicious."

Dick was going to have a stroke. Or laugh. Possibly both.

"What else do you have up there?"

"Oh! Okay, so—" You jumped up excitedly. "This section is Nightwing theories. I've narrowed down possible occupations: athlete, stunt performer, circus performer, or someone with serious military training."

You'd literally listed his actual background.

"And this section is Robin theories. The current one, at least. I think he's a teenager, probably fifteen to seventeen. Still in school, which explains why Robin appearances drop during exam seasons."

You'd just profiled Damian perfectly.

"How long have you been working on this?" Dick asked weakly.

"Since yesterday. I got kind of obsessed." You grinned sheepishly. "I know it's a lot, but Dick, this is fascinating. These people are real. They're out there right now, and nobody knows who they are."

"Maybe they want it that way."

"Maybe. But don't you wonder? Like, what's Nightwing's real name? What does he do when he's not fighting crime? Does he have a family? A girlfriend?"

"Why do you assume he has a girlfriend?"

"I don't. Could be a boyfriend. Or multiple partners. Or no one." You shrugged. "But he's got to have a life outside the costume, right? He's a person."

"Yeah," Dick said softly. "He is."

You looked at him curiously. "You okay? You've been weird about this whole thing."

"Just worried about you getting too invested. These are real people doing dangerous work. Following them could put you at risk."

"I'm not going to do anything stupid," you promised. "I just want to observe. Maybe get a good photo. Gather some evidence."

"For what?"

"For the forums! Do you know how much credibility I'd get if I posted an actual clear photo of Nightwing? I'd be a legend!"

"Or you'd be painting a target on your back."

"Dick." You took his hands. "I appreciate you worrying, but I'll be careful. I promise. This is just for fun."

He wanted to tell you. Right there, looking at your evidence board with his face probably somewhere in those photos, he wanted to just admit it.

I'm Nightwing. You're dating him. You don't need to stakeout anything because he's literally standing in your apartment right now.

But the words stuck in his throat.

Because what if you were only interested in Nightwing? What if finding out he was just Dick Grayson, boring civilian, ruined the mystery?

"Okay," he said instead. "But I'm coming with you on this stakeout. For safety."

"Deal!" You kissed him. "Tomorrow night? I've identified three high-probability locations."

"Can't wait," Dick lied.

You'd chosen a rooftop in Blüdhaven with a clear view of the area Nightwing patrolled most frequently.

Dick knew this because it was his usual route.

"Okay, so according to my research, Nightwing usually passes through this area between 10 PM and midnight," you said, setting up your camera. "We should have a good vantage point here."

"You brought a telephoto lens."

"I told you, I want good photos!" You were adjusting settings, completely in your element. "Oh, I also brought snacks. There's coffee in the thermos, and I made sandwiches."

"You made sandwiches for a vigilante stakeout."

"It's still a stakeout! People get hungry on stakeouts!"

Dick couldn't help but smile. You were so excited, so genuinely enthusiastic about this. It was adorable.

It was also absolutely going to expose his secret identity if he wasn't careful.

"So what's the plan if we actually see him?" Dick asked.

"We observe. Take notes. Maybe try to track where he goes?" You looked at him. "Why are you so nervous?"

"I'm not nervous."

"You're doing that thing with your hands. The fidgety thing."

"I don't have a thing."

"You absolutely have a thing." You took his hand. "Relax. This is supposed to be fun. We're just two normal people hoping to catch a glimpse of a superhero."

One normal person and one superhero pretending to be normal, Dick thought.

They sat in silence for a while, you watching the streets below through your camera, Dick wondering how he was going to get out of this.

"There!" You suddenly grabbed his arm. "Did you see that? Someone just grappled between buildings!"

Dick looked. Sure enough, someone in a dark costume was moving across the rooftops.

But it wasn't him.

"That's not Nightwing," he said immediately.

"How do you know?"

"Wrong build. Nightwing is taller. And he doesn't move like that."

You lowered your camera, looking at him suspiciously. "You seem to know a lot about how Nightwing moves."

"I've seen him before. Around."

"When?"

"Just... around. He saved me once. From a mugging."

This was technically true. Dick had saved himself from a mugging while in costume. It counted.

"He saved you? And you didn't tell me?" You were looking at him with new interest. "What was he like?"

"Uh... tall? Dark hair. Very acrobatic."

"Did you talk to him?"

"Briefly. He asked if I was okay, I said yes, he left."

"What did he sound like?"

Dick realized, with growing horror, that he was about to describe his own voice.

"Normal? Maybe a little deeper than usual. Hard to say, it was a stressful situation."

"Was he nice?"

"Very professional."

"But nice?"

"Yeah. Nice."

You were smiling now. "You have a crush on Nightwing."

"What? No!"

"You totally do! You got all flustered describing him!"

"I did not get flustered—"

"Your voice went up an octave!"

"That's just—I'm not flustered, I'm—" Dick stopped. "Wait, am I being jealous of myself?"

"What?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

You laughed, kissing his cheek. "It's okay. Everyone has a crush on Nightwing. He's a superhero. It's allowed."

"I don't have a crush on Nightwing."

"Sure you don't." You went back to your camera. "Oh! There's someone else. Is that him?"

It was actually Red Robin, but Dick wasn't about to explain that.

"Different costume," he said. "Red and black, not blue."

"There's more than one?" You were already zooming in. "Oh my God, I need to update my evidence board."

This was getting out of hand.

By hour three, you'd seen Red Robin, Batgirl, and someone who might have been Spoiler.

No Nightwing, because Dick had very carefully texted the group chat to avoid this area tonight.

Taking the night off. Personal stuff. - Dick Personal stuff = girlfriend stakeout? - Tim SHUT UP - Dick This is hilarious - Jason I want updates - Steph Focus on patrol - Bruce

"I can't believe we didn't see Nightwing," you said, packing up your camera. "We saw literally everyone else."

"Maybe he had the night off."

"Vigilantes don't get nights off."

"Maybe he was patrolling a different area."

"Or maybe he somehow knew we were here and avoided us." You looked at him suspiciously. "You didn't tip him off, did you?"

"How would I tip off Nightwing? I don't have his number."

"I don't know, you seem weirdly knowledgeable about vigilante stuff."

"I just pay attention to the news."

"Mm-hmm." But you were smiling. "Well, this was still fun. Even if we didn't see your crush."

"He's not my—you know what, never mind."

You laughed, taking his hand as you headed back down from the roof. "Same time next week?"

"You want to do this again?"

"Are you kidding? This was the most exciting date we've had in months!" You squeezed his hand. "Plus, I have three new theories I want to test."

Dick was definitely going to have to tell you.

Eventually.

Maybe.

Probably not.

You're absolutely right! Let me revise that section - she wouldn't know his full legal name unless he'd told her, and she'd know him as just "Dick" not "Richard Grayson." Here's a better version of that scene:

You'd dragged Dick on four more stakeouts, each one more elaborate than the last.

You'd also expanded your evidence board to include:

Possible Nightwing sightings (12)

Potential secret identity candidates (47)

Fighting style analysis (6 pages)

A color-coded timeline of all Bat-family appearances

It was impressive and terrifying in equal measure.

"I've been thinking," you said during stakeout number five. "What if Nightwing is someone famous?"

"Why would he be famous?"

"Think about it—he moves like a performer. What if he's an athlete? A gymnast, maybe?"

Dick, who was literally a former Olympic-level gymnast, froze.

"That's a big assumption."

"Is it though? Look at this footage." You pulled up a video on your phone. "That's a perfect aerial. You need serious training for that. Years of training, probably starting in childhood."

"Lots of people train in gymnastics."

"Not like this. This is professional level. Maybe even circus level." You were scrolling through more footage. "The way he moves—it's not just gymnastics. It's acrobatics. Performance acrobatics."

Dick's mouth went dry.

"There aren't that many people with that kind of training," you continued. "And in Gotham? Even fewer."

"I'm sure there are more than you think."

"Actually, I looked into it. There were several circus families that used to perform in Gotham, but most of them moved away or disbanded years ago." You pulled up your notes. "The Flying Graysons were the most famous—a family of acrobats. But they died in a tragic accident over a decade ago."

Dick's chest tightened at the mention of his parents.

"That's awful," he managed.

"It is. Their son survived though. He was adopted by Bruce Wayne and completely disappeared from public life." You looked thoughtful. "He'd be the right age now for Nightwing, actually. Mid-twenties."

"You think Bruce Wayne's adopted son is Nightwing?" Dick tried to keep his voice steady. Thank God you still believe it was just the same name, but he had no connection with them.

"I don't know. Maybe? The skills would line up. And Bruce Wayne is still on my possible-Batman list, so..." You shrugged. "It's a theory. Hard to prove though—the kid's been kept completely out of the spotlight. No social media, no public appearances. I can't even find a recent photo of him."

"Maybe that's intentional. Maybe he just wants privacy after losing his parents."

"Maybe." But you didn't sound convinced. "Or maybe Bruce Wayne is protecting his identity because he's training him to be a vigilante."

Dick desperately tried to redirect. "That seems like a big jump from 'traumatized orphan' to 'crime-fighting vigilante.'"

"Is it? Think about it—lose your parents to crime, get adopted by possibly-Batman, have the perfect skill set..." You were getting that excited look again. "It actually makes perfect sense!"

"Or he's just a regular person living a quiet life."

"You're awfully defensive about this theory."

"I'm not defensive, I just think jumping to 'everyone connected to Bruce Wayne is a vigilante' is a stretch."

"But am I wrong?"

Dick didn't answer.

You studied him carefully. "You're being weird again."

"I'm not being weird."

"You are. You get all tense and fidgety whenever I get close to something." Your eyes narrowed. "Dick... do you know something about this?"

"About what?"

"About Nightwing's identity. About Bruce Wayne. About—" You gasped. "Oh my God, do you work for Bruce Wayne?"

"What? No!"

"That would explain the weird hours! And why you know so much about him! And—"

"I don't work for Bruce Wayne," Dick said firmly. Which was technically true. He didn't work for Bruce. He worked with him. As Batman and Nightwing.

There was a difference.

"Then why are you being so weird?"

"I'm not—okay, yes, maybe I'm being weird. But not for the reasons you think."

"Then what reasons?"

Dick ran his hand through his hair, stressed. "I just... I think maybe you're getting a little too deep into this. These theories about people's private lives—"

"Are just theories. I'm not going to actually do anything with them." You touched his arm gently. "Dick, this is just for fun. I'm not trying to expose anyone or put anyone in danger. I'm just... curious. Is that so bad?"

"No," he said quietly. "It's not bad. I just worry about you."

"I know you do." You kissed his cheek. "But I'm careful. I promise."

Dick wanted to tell you right then. Wanted to explain that your "wild theory" about the Flying Grayson survivor was sitting right next to you. That you didn't need to investigate because you were dating the answer.

But the moment passed, and you went back to your notes, and Dick stayed silent.

Dick had decided to tell you.

He'd planned it perfectly. Dinner at your place, a serious conversation, maybe a demonstration of his abilities.

What he hadn't planned for was walking into your apartment to find you standing in the middle of your living room, arms crossed, looking simultaneously furious and vindicated.

"We need to talk."

Those four words. Never good.

"Okay..." Dick set down the takeout he'd brought. "What's going on?"

"I figured it out." You pointed at your evidence board, which had somehow quadrupled in size overnight. "All of it."

Dick's stomach dropped. "Figured what out?"

"You're Nightwing."

The words hung in the air.

"I—what? That's—"

"Don't." You held up a hand. "I know. And before you try to deny it, let me show you my evidence."

You walked to the board, and Dick saw that you'd reorganized everything. Photos of him—civilian him—were now connected with red string to photos of Nightwing.

"I started thinking about what you said last night. About me getting too deep into people's private lives." You pointed to a photo. "You were defensive. Really defensive. And you're never defensive unless something matters to you personally."

"That doesn't mean—"

"So I thought: what if it matters because you're the person I'm investigating?" You pulled up a video on your laptop. "This is footage from last month. Nightwing stopping a robbery downtown."

Dick watched himself on screen, taking down three armed men.

"Now watch this." You pulled up another video—this one from your phone. "This is you, at the gym last week. I was filming to show you your form on those pull-ups."

It was him, in a tank top, doing a complex gymnastic routine on the bars.

"Same body type. Same height. Same movement style." You played them side by side. "And look here—" You zoomed in on Nightwing's exposed forearm. "That scar. From the motorcycle accident you had two years ago."

Dick instinctively touched his left arm, where that exact scar was.

"And then there's this." You pulled up a photo of Nightwing from behind. "Your hair. Nightwing's hair is black, but in certain lights—" You zoomed in. "You can see dark blue. Like someone dyed it. Like someone with naturally dark auburn hair might dye it to be less distinctive."

Dick's hair was indeed dark auburn-brown, which he did dye darker for the Nightwing persona.

"That's—that's circumstantial—"

"There's more. Your schedule." You pulled up your calendar, which apparently you'd been using to track his comings and goings. "Every time there's a major Nightwing sighting, you're mysteriously unavailable. Every time Nightwing takes a night off, you're suddenly free."

"Lots of people work weird hours—"

"Dick." You looked at him directly. "Last week, I mentioned that Nightwing had been spotted with a shoulder injury. The next day, you showed up with your shoulder wrapped, claiming you hurt it at the gym."

Oh. Oh no.

"And the final piece—" You pulled out your phone. "I called the crime lab this morning. Asked if Dick Grayson was working today. They said there's no one by that name employed there."

Dick's heart stopped.

"You lied about where you work. You lied about your schedule. You've been lying about everything." Your voice cracked slightly. "Who are you really?"

Dick stared at you, at your evidence board, at two months of careful deception unraveling in front of him.

"You're right," he said quietly. "About all of it."

You let out a breath. "So you are Nightwing."

"Yes."

"And your name isn't just 'Dick'?"

"It's Dick Grayson. That part's true. But I don't work at the crime lab—well, I do sometimes, consulting for the GCPD, but it's not my main job. My main job is..." He gestured helplessly. "Being Nightwing."

"And Bruce Wayne?"

"Is Batman. And my adoptive father. And yes, before you ask—I'm the Flying Grayson survivor. My parents died when I was eight. Bruce took me in." The words came pouring out now. "I became Robin when I was nine. Then Nightwing when I was eighteen. I've been doing this for seventeen years."

You sat down heavily on your couch. "Seventeen years."

"Yeah."

"You've been a vigilante since you were a child."

"Bruce gave me a choice. I wanted to help. I wanted—" His voice broke. "I wanted to make sure what happened to my parents didn't happen to anyone else."

You were quiet for a long moment, processing.

"Why didn't you tell me?" you finally asked. "We've been dating for two months."

"Because everyone I tell becomes a target. Everyone I care about gets hurt." He sat next to you, careful to leave space between you. "I've lost people. I've seen what happens when villains find out who I care about. I couldn't—I can't lose you too."

"So you just lied?"

"I was protecting you."

"By lying to me for two months? By letting me waste time investigating something you could have just told me?" Your voice rose. "I made an evidence board, Dick! I dragged you on stakeouts to find yourself! How is that protecting me?"

"I know! I know it's messed up! But you were so happy with your theories, and you liked Nightwing without knowing he was me, and I—" He took a shaky breath. "I liked being normal with you. Being just Dick. Not Nightwing, not Robin, not Bruce Wayne's ward. Just... me."

Your expression softened slightly. "Dick..."

"I'm sorry. I should have told you sooner. I should have trusted you." He looked at you directly. "I love you. I've loved you since you almost hit me with your car. And I was terrified that if you found out who I really was, you'd leave."

"Why would I leave?"

"Because I'm not normal. I'm a vigilante with more trauma than most people can handle. I disappear for days sometimes. I come home bleeding. I've died before—twice actually—and I'll probably keep putting myself in danger because I can't not help people." His laugh was bitter. "I'm not exactly boyfriend material."

You grabbed his face, forcing him to look at you. "Dick Grayson. You're an idiot."

"I know."

"I just spent three months investigating you. Building evidence boards. Dragging you on stakeouts. Creating spreadsheets." You smiled despite yourself. "Do you really think finding out you're Nightwing is going to scare me off?"

"It should."

"Well, it doesn't." You kissed him firmly. "I'm mad that you lied. We're going to have to work on the trust thing. But Dick—I fell in love with you. Not Nightwing. You. The guy who brings me coffee in the morning and lets me ramble about my theories and does terrible impressions of Batman—"

"One time—"

"—and helps old ladies with their groceries and cries during animated movies." You stroked his cheek. "Finding out you're also a superhero? That's just... extra."

"Extra?"

"Bonus Dick. It's great. But it's not why I love you."

Dick felt something tight in his chest finally release. "You still love me?"

"Of course I still love you, you absolute disaster." You pulled him into a hug. "Though we're taking down some of these evidence photos. It's weird dating someone while having surveillance photos of them on your wall."

"That's fair."

"But I'm keeping the board."

"Why?"

"Because I figured out Nightwing's identity through detective work! That's impressive! I want proof!"

Dick laughed, really laughed, pulling you closer. "You're incredible."

"I know." You pulled back to look at him. "Now show me. Do the thing."

"What thing?"

"The Nightwing thing! The flips! I want to see it!"

So Dick did a standing backflip in your living room, landing perfectly in front of the couch.

"Okay, that's really hot."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." You pulled him back down next to you. "My boyfriend is Nightwing. This is insane."

"Good insane or bad insane?"

"Good insane. Definitely good insane." You kissed him. "Though you're going to have to tell me everything. And I mean everything. No more secrets."

"Deal. But first—" Dick pulled out his phone. "I need to warn my family that you figured it out."

"Your family?"

"The other vigilantes. My brothers and sisters." He started typing. "They're going to want to meet you."

"Because I figured out your identity?"

"Because you're the first person who did it through actual detective work and not, like, walking in on me in costume." He smiled. "They're going to be impressed. And possibly intimidated."

"Good." You leaned against him. "Now tell me everything. And I mean everything. Start with how an eight-year-old becomes Robin. Because that seems like terrible parenting on Batman's part."

"Oh, it absolutely was..."

And Dick told you everything.

About his parents. About Bruce. About Robin and Nightwing and the complicated, dangerous, wonderful family he'd found in the vigilante community.

You listened to all of it, asking questions, holding his hand, occasionally declaring "That's insane" or "Bruce Wayne needs therapy."

But you stayed.

You stayed through all of it.

And when Dick finally finished talking, the sun starting to rise through your windows, you just smiled and said:

"Well. This explains why you're always late."

And Dick knew, absolutely knew, that you were going to be okay.

More than okay.

Perfect.

Even if he did have to live with a six-foot evidence board documenting his secret identity.

no, she wouldn't be. she's been silent on all her social media accounts for a while, and the last time he saw her photographed was when she popped up in a photo dump rowan posted a couple months ago.

he hates that he knows that information, the fact that he even has a burner account in the first place, its sole purpose being to keep tabs on her. he knows it's not healthy, and it's fucking pathetic, but he can't help it. all he's ever known how to be is obsessive over her.

he downs the rest of his disgusting drink before he stands up, making his way to the entrance of the bar to leave. whether she's here or not, he still can't risk it. he doesn't know what he'd do if he saw her again, but he knows he doesn't want to find out.

he's almost to the door when he hears the chords of an all too familiar song. he whips his head around to look at sarah on stage, eyes widening. she can't actually be-

she starts to sing, and despite every bone in his body telling him to run, to get the fuck out of here, he can't get his feet to move.

so he stands there, like a deer in headlights, as sarah performs all i wanted.

-------------

he can't believe sarah played that song. arabella's song.

it wasn't enough that he thinks about her everyday, or that he dreams about her every night when he finally manages to fall asleep. arabella still has to somehow decorate his life like outdated furnishings, always there as a reminder of the time that's passed.

he should've left the minute he saw it was her friend performing. it should've told him he was in unfriendly territory and that he should've high tailed out of there, but he didn't, for reasons unknown to him, and now he's desperately trying to leave before anyone can see him and dare to ask him about said song.

he's not stupid. he knows if he sees any one of their mutual friends that'll be the first thing out of their mouths. and he can't do it. he can't take another round of 'damn, she fucking hates you' or 'don't you think it's crazy she wrote that about you?'

maybe it's for the best she hates him. he thinks it'd be worse if she didn't feel anything toward him at all.

besides, he's in a new band now and he's doing good. great, even. he has friends now that would never question his skill or what he brings to the table. they encourage his input, his songwriting, and they treat him the way friends are supposed to treat friends.

so why is he still so fucking worried about what his ex-girlfriend thinks of him? why can he never seem to let this go? he moved on from the rest of dead apple just fine.

he knows, deep down, why he can't move on from arabella, and the tattoo on his wrist burns as a reminder. he rubs it out of habit as he walks through the back hallway of the bar, trying to bury the impulse to look at it with every step he takes.

he keeps his head down as he moves with the crowd of people leaving through the back hallway of the bar, eager to put this whole stupid night behind him.

maybe he can get some takeout on the way home, so that this trip wasn't all for nothing. he should probably check-

shit. his wallet isn't in its usual pocket, his hands doing a quick search of his jeans and coming up empty. as if this night couldn't get any worse, now his wallet is gone.

he's never going to another bar ever again.

he stops in the hallway, turning back in the direction he came from, trying to think of when he last had it-

"hey," that voice stops him in his tracks completely. no. this can't be happening. no no no- "you dropped-"

he sees arabella a split second before she sees him, and that would be a torture in and of itself, if it weren't for the face she makes when she sees its him. her eyes widen, and a frown overtakes her features. why is she looking at him like that? it makes him furrow his brows.

shit, the wallet has-

he snatches it from her, putting it back in its rightful place in his pocket.

did she look inside of it before he saw her with it? no. surely not. she would've said something. she would have. she'd probably laugh in his face. what's worse? her knowing what's in there and making fun of him or knowing and not saying anything-

he's broken out of his spiraling by the sound of arabella clearing her throat, a slight flush to her cheeks. what the fuck was she thinking about just now? it's eating at him. he wants to ask, but he knows he can't. he shouldn't. "didn't expect to see you here," she finally says, voice weak.

"me either," he replies. during his spiral, he didn't get a chance to look at her properly, having zoned out.

he knows he shouldn't, but he allows himself this one thing by letting his eyes roam over her face. he wishes she looked like shit, but that was never something arabella was capable of. she's grown her hair out a little, jet black tresses sat halfway down her chest, and she still has her septum piercing, the silver of the hoop glinting in the light. her freckles that he used to love still dot her tan cheeks.

he looks down at her arms, disappointed to see they're covered up by her jacket. he wants to know if the tattoo is still there. it takes every bit of his self-restraint not to ask.

"yeah, well," arabella jerks a thumb behind her, and they both look over her shoulder to see nothing there. arabella chuckles. "well, sarah was there a minute ago. i only came to see her perform-"

fucking sarah. he's instantly reminded of her singing all i wanted and he's pissed all over again. did arabella tell her to do that? he wouldn't put it past her. "did you tell her to sing that song?"

"no," she bites, narrowing her eyes a him. "why the fuck would i tell her to do that?"

is she serious? he can tell the angry look on his face makes her squirm. good. "don't do that. you knew i was here-"

she laughs at him, and the sound is like nails on a chalkboard to his ears. "i didn't. believe it or not, i don't keep track of your whereabouts anymore."

please. if he has a burner account, she definitely does too. whatever. he has to leave. he can't do this, already starting to feel the effects of being in her presence for too long. "okay, whatever. i don't care."

he's walking away for all of two seconds before she's calling out to him.

"it seems like you do," she says, taunting him. great. he's been here long enough for arabella to start trying to push his buttons. of course she still knows how to do it. "i don't know why you're upset. it's a good song."

he knows all she's trying to do is rile him up, but it's working. she knows exactly why he'd be angry that he had to hear a song about him unprompted.

"i'm sure you feel that way," he snipes at her, hoping his voice is able to portray just how angry he is. the nerve of her to even say that to him. she has to know, not just for all i wanted, but how every song on that album affected him. it was his worst fucking nightmare.

your ex-girlfriend writes a whole album about how she hates you. about how the band you created together is better off without you. and every song drives that point home over and over again to where he knows if he thinks about it long enough, every scathing lyric about him will bounce around in his head until he wants to scream.

maybe that was the point. she couldn't possibly know that he still hasn't gotten over her, despite his best efforts. this album was made to ensure it wouldn't happen anytime soon. and she succeeded.

"i mean, better her singing it than me, right?" arabella asks him. he doesn't think so. although, the thought of seeing arabella perform any of those songs has his stomach in knots. it'd make him feel even worse than he already does.

that's another thing that's been bothering him. he hasn't seen dead apple doing any gigs since before the album came out. he knows he shouldn't care, but it's been eating at him. despite not wanting to see it, he's still been waiting for it to happen. he doesn't have time to pour over the possibilities before he watches arabella frown, a look of pain crossing her features before saying, "it's not like it's getting performed live otherwise."

he knows that look. it's the look she wore the last time they saw each other, when she came to his apartment to trade off the stuff they had of each other's. she had looked absolutely miserable, and he knows he didn't look that much better. but this look was… different. she had looked at him as if she wanted him to feel bad for her.

a realization dawns on him then. there haven't been any gigs because the songs are difficult for her to perform.

he wants to laugh. the songs are hard for her? she should try being the inspiration behind them.

“you've turned our relationship into a fucking spectacle and you expect me to feel sorry for you?” he challenges, his face growing hot. it's not even just the songs. it's her behavior after they came out. the subtweets about him. the liking of posts talking shit about him. doing nothing to stop her fans from attacking him, the other members of soft violence, and his own fans.

she's seemingly stopped doing all of that now, for whatever reason. maybe she just stopped caring. and the thought of that should make him feel better, but it doesn't. not when he still cares, so deeply and so stupidly.

“right, how could i forget! you can't feel sorry for anyone unless it's yourself.” those words out of her mouth feel like a punch to his gut. does she really feel that way? of course she does. she doesn't know him anymore.

he knows he's about to sound like a broken record, but he doesn't care. she needs to be reminded of the fucked up situation her and the band put him in, since she seems to have forgotten. “you let them kick me out of the band-”

a groan leaves her lips before she interrupts, “you didn't get kicked out! you left!”

“i didn't have a choice!” he didn't. he had no choices. the situation he was put in was impossible. the only thing he could do was run for the hills as fast as he could. why can she not understand that? this feels like that stupid night at the party all over again. trying to make her see reason and failing miserably.

she has the audacity to roll her eyes at him, crossing her arms. “you had plenty of choices, don't act like-”

“would you have stayed? if they did that to you? if your partner didn't even stick up for you when it happened?” he already knows the answer. she wouldn't have taken that shit. she would have told all of them to fuck off if it was her being demoted to backup singer. and he would've never let her think for a second that he was okay with that happening. he would've never done that to her. but unfortunately, it didn't happen that way, and when the time came, she didn't even fucking fight for him.

she laughs, apparently finding that line of questioning ridiculous. she shakes her head before saying, “that's bullshit and you know it. i voted to keep you as lead-”

the bare minimum. does she want a fucking medal? he cuts her off, exhaling, “like that fucking mattered.”

she gives him an exasperated look, slapping her hands down on her thighs in frustration. “what did you want me to do, seven? quit the band?”

“yes!" he blurts, his voice coming out louder than intended. they didn't need the band. they had each other. wasn't that enough? he foolishly thought it was. "and you wouldn't. because you got what you always wanted.”

she rolls her eyes at him again, looking completely done with this conversation. "what are you fucking talking about?”

it's the thoughts he doesn't dare think about for too long, because he knows he doesn't actually believe them. but there's no coming back from this conversation anyway. and right now, all he wants to do is hurt her even a fraction of how much she's hurt him. and so he does, using his fingers to list off reasons that feel like bile coming up in his throat.

“you want the fame, the attention, the recognition that comes from being a lead singer, the only singer. i was just a fucking obstacle in your way," he watches the way her face falls at his words, and he presses on despite the pain in his chest at the sight, "and the fact that you won't even admit that-”

“there's nothing to admit!” she cuts him off, her hands flying up in between them, eyes starting to shine with unshed tears. “you’re saying this bullshit as if you don't know me.”

that's the worst part, he thinks. he does know her, and he knows how deeply it would hurt her to say the things people in their scene and industry say about her constantly. but she doesn't deserve any kindness from him anymore, despite the internal battle that wages in his mind. of course he doesn't believe in what he's saying, but it's for the best if she does. and if he tries to convince himself that he does too.

“i don't know you.” liar. it feels like that word is written across his forehead. he'll always know arabella, and he knows that deep down to the core of his being. it's always been that way, and he doesn't know anything else. that's the problem.

she's looking at him in annoyance. he hates even after a year apart, she can still see right through him. “can you stop with the dramatics? for fuck’s sake, sev.”

hearing her call him by his nickname makes him flinch. it makes him think about all his past memories with her when she would call him that, and that's the last thing he needs right now. “don't call me that.”

she scoffs, moving to start walking away from him. he hates how much he doesn't want that to happen. “what fucking ever. i'm over this. fuck you and goodbye.”

“you came up to me!” he argues, and he knows how immature he sounds right now, but he's past the point of caring.

“to give you your wallet back?" she's looking at him like he's a fucking idiot, and maybe he is. she scoffs again. "you're right, i should've just stole it."

"you've already stolen enough from me," he fumes. the band, the songs he wrote, all taken from him. all the time and love that he gave to her, wasted.

she lets out a sardonic laugh, making him recoil. "are you fucking serious? you can't be."

his face burns in embarrassment. is everything he says a fucking joke to her? he's so sick of it. "glad to know you still don't take anything seriously," he says, blowing out an irritated breath.

she gives him a dirty look. "i take plenty things seriously. my mental health, for one. so will you please leave me alone and go haunt a different hallway?"

and what about his mental health? did she ever consider that when she tossed him aside? when she wrote a whole album about him? he's not going to let her stand there and act like she was the only person wounded by this situation. he shakes his head at her. “don't try and make yourself the victim right now-”

she interjects, her eyes blazing with anger. “why? so you can say that in another song? fuck off.”

he wants to laugh. of course she hates siren song, the most honest song about her that he's ever written. it's not like she has any room to talk. she has ten siren songs of her own, all on one album. but he likes that he managed to get under her skin. “i think it's pretty fair considering what you said about me.”

she looks so frustrated with him. good. maybe now she understands how he feels. “any lyrics in particular you wanna talk about? since it bothered you so much? i mean, god fucking forbid i write about my life-”

where would he even start? the lyrics are beginning to flash in his mind like neon signs, each one more blinding than the last. but they all say the same thing. something that's truly the worst part about all this, even worse than him still knowing her: the way she talks about him. he cuts her off to say, “you write about me like i’m the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

it seems to shock her into silence. is she really surprised he feels that way? no other ex of hers has gotten the type of lyrics or the amount of songs that he did. why is it so different for him? he knows why, but he wants to hear her say it. that this has affected her just as much as it's affected him.

“well?” he presses, feeling like he's on the edge of a cliff, and whatever she says is going to push him over, making him crash into the rocks below.

“you just…” she trails off, staring at him with the same intensity that she used to when she was trying to get him to understand her. “you really hurt me.”

no shit, he thinks. “you hurt me too-”

“i know,” she cuts him off, before closing her eyes for a brief moment. “i know. but you…” her voice cracks, and her eyes open again with tears brimming them.

he's suddenly hit with a wave of the emotions he used to feel whenever she would cry in the past. it was rare, but when it did happen it always made him feel hopeless. like he couldn't do enough to help her. knowing he's the reason behind these tears right now makes his own come to the surface, threatening to bubble over just like hers are now.

“you weren't there after everything happened,” she says, sounding like the words are stuck in her throat as she tries to say them. she looks down at her shoes. he hates that she won't even look at him, when she's being the most honest with him she's been the whole night.

“i didn't know what to do, and i couldn't talk to the band because i hated them for what they did to us, and i couldn't talk to you because you were gone and i-” she lets out a sob, her shoulders shaking and it takes everything for seven to not reach out to her and comfort her. to pull her in an embrace and apologize for everything. anything to get her to stop crying. anything to get him to stop crying too.

he feels so pathetic. all it took was arabella crying and he's right back to where he was before they broke up. still in love with her. still eager to be close to her. still wanting to be attached at the hip. his work in the past year to move on and get over her is gone in the face of her words and her tears, but it's not like it was working anyway.

“all i could do was write about it. writing about it was one of the only things that helped me get through it,” she lets out a ragged breath before continuing, “that and trying to drink myself to death.”

his heart clenches at that. right after they broke up, he swore off any alcohol, the drinks in his system that night at the party being one of the primary reasons their fight got so bad. so many things he said that he definitely didn't mean. just like tonight.

"and it just," she hesitates over her words, like she doesn't know if she should even be saying them at all, "it just seems like it was all for nothing. i was so upset and angry and it didn't change anything. i still lost you." she laughs, but it sounds so hollow. tears are still falling as she continues, "and it kills me because all i ever fucking wanted was-"

"don't." he can't let her finish that sentence. if she does, the last piece of him that's keeping him from folding and going back to how he used to be will shatter to the floor. he can't let that happen, even though he wants to. so badly.

she dares to glance up at him, and he feels his face heat in embarrassment. he knows they're sharing the same look, eyes full of tears, faces showing nothing but the pain they've caused each other, not just from this night, but from this whole year. the countless fights, the ghosting, blocking each other, writing songs about each other. the love that was lost and the hate that replaced it.

but he knows he doesn't hate her. he never could, as much as he tries. how could he ever do that?

"don't say it. please," he pleads, hoping she'll grant him this small act of mercy. he feels so incredibly vulnerable right now, like she's seeing all of him, just like she used to.

she coughs, wiping her eyes as she does it. “okay, yeah.” she lets out a dark laugh, as if she thinks the last five minutes were just a lapse in judgment for her. he starts to see the arabella from the past morph into the arabella he knows now before she says, “jesus, this is so fucking embarrassing-”

“it's not,” he interjects. it was always so hard for arabella to open up to him, and when she finally did, it felt like he unlocked something. a part of her that nobody else ever got to see. behind all the arrogance and the humor she uses to deflect, there was a girl who desperately just wanted someone to understand her. and seven did. earlier tonight he knows he didn't fully believe that, but he does right now. it seems so obvious to him in this moment. he'll never see arabella and not understand her fully and completely.

he's still in love with her. and as much as he's tried and fought against that truth, it's no use. she's rendered him defenseless. every single wall he tried to build to keep her out has fallen, and despite every part of him screaming at him to stop, he can't stop the words that leave his mouth.

“arabella, i-” i'm sorry. i'm sorry for ever leaving. i didn't mean any of the stupid shit i said. i love you. i never stopped. there's simply too many things he wants to say.

unfortunately, he isn't able to complete his sentence as he's immediately met with the feel of someone's hand on his shoulder, but it's not arabella. he rips his attention away from her to look at who the hand belongs to.

it's chase, one of his friends who is clearly very drunk and unaware of what he just interrupted.

“hey, man! how's it going?” he stumbles through his words, and seven wants to shove him away and tell him to fuck off.

chase finishes his drink before he finally seems to notice arabella standing in front of them, his eyes widening as he takes her in. "oh shit. was this a bad time?"

"dude, go the fuck away," seven snaps at him, his hands balling into fists at his sides.

“i…” arabella stammers, startling him. she looks trapped. like she's about to- “i should go,” she mutters as she turns and walks away, and he wants nothing more than to stop her. maybe-

“bella, wait-” using her nickname feels strange in his mouth, but it also feels like the most normal thing he's done all night. he just wants her to stay. he knows he shouldn't, but he does.

he doesn't miss the way her entire body freezes before she opens the door and walks out of the bar. out of this conversation, out of his life. again.

for some reason, chase is still standing next to him. he doesn't even notice, his eyes still trained on the door arabella used to leave, until he speaks.

"bro, what the fuck?" chase blurts, and seven turns to glare at him.

"fuck off," seven snaps and starts to walk away from him, but in the opposite direction arabella left. he can't risk seeing her again, as much as he might want to.

he makes his way through the bar, feeling like he's floating as he gets to the front door. he doesn't come out of his daze until the cold air from outside hits his skin, and he makes his way to his car, climbing into the driver's seat and shutting the door.

he doesn't turn the car on right away as he suddenly feels like his wallet is trying to burn a hole in his pocket. he knows he shouldn't, but he pulls it out and opens it.

the picture that greets him immediately causes a sob to escape past his lips.

it's arabella's senior yearbook photo. she's wearing the basic black drape the school gave all the girls in their class to wear in the photo, with her mom's pearl necklace around her neck. the only makeup she's wearing is mascara, and the freckles that fan across her cheeks are on proud display. her hair is straight and long, framing her face, and she's wearing the prettiest smile, her eyes so excited, as if someone behind the camera had just told her dead apple got signed to a major record label.

this picture is the version of arabella he fell in love with. he doesn't know why he ever tried to fight it back then. there was no point.

he holds the picture close to his face now, sniffling as he examines the speck of silver right underneath her nose. his favorite part about the picture. arabella had just got her septum piercing, freshly eighteen and free to do anything to her body now that she didn't need her parents permission. but the piercing was still a secret, knowing her parents would lose their minds if she got it before what her mom had called "the most important picture of her life." he can still see the roll of arabella's eyes as she told him. so, she had to flip the piercing up for the photo, and it did fool her parents, but seven knew. and he remembers the conversation so vividly it's like he's still there.

arabella's fiddling with the piercing, using her compact mirror to inspect how it looks. she turns her head from side to side, trying to see if it's noticeable from any angle.

seven, as usual, is watching her. it's become his favorite pastime as of late, with everything she does or says being so fascinating to him.

he grimaces at the thought. he thought this stupid crush on her would have went away by now, but as he watches her, he's beginning to realize that this feeling is taking root and staying there. for how long, he doesn't know. a delusional part of him wants it to stay forever. the rational part of him is telling him to shut up.

arabella snapping her compact shut breaks seven out his thoughts, offering her a smile as she glances over at him, hoping she didn't notice him staring at her.

she gives him a teasing smile. "you're staring again, sev."

heat rushes to his cheeks. of course she noticed. she notices everything he does, even when he doesn't want her to.

he rubs his hand on the back of his neck, feeling awkward. "sorry," he mutters, face growing hot. "i zoned out." liar.

she doesn't fully believe him, her eyes giving him a once over. her gaze always feels so intense, and these weird feelings he has for her has dialed that up to a million.

she looks away to move further up in the line that's moved since they first started talking. he almost sighs in relief.

she turns to look at him again, a frown on her face. he wants to kiss it away. whoa. where the fuck did that come from? he doesn't have any time to unpack that before arabella says, "is it noticeable?"

he knows she's talking about her piercing. he hates that her parents even care about something as stupid as that. and it's her senior picture anyway. who cares?

but he knows she just doesn't want an argument with them. if they somehow found out about it they would lose their shit and that's the last thing arabella wants.

"it's not," he reassures her as they move up in the line again.

"okay," she says timidly, like she's trying to her best to believe him.

"bella, it's gonna be fine," he tries to convince her, hating that her parents have the power to make her this nervous. it's not an emotion she wears often, so when it does rear its head in times like these he wants nothing more than for it to go away.

"i know," she sighs. "it's just a lot of pressure. this picture has to be perfect."

"it will be," he smiles at her. because it's you, and you've never taken a bad photo in your life. but he doesn't voice that.

she smiles back at him and his heart feels like it's gonna explode if she does it for too long. suddenly though, they both realize that she's up next in line and she quickly opens her mirror back up to check herself one more time.

"okay," she lets out a breath, trying to dispel her nerves, running a hand through her hair. "how do i look?"

gorgeous, he wants to blurt out. it takes every ounce of his self control not to. the shitty lighting of their school auditorium would make anyone else look horrible, but not arabella. she's somehow glowing, her bright eyes settling on him, looking at him expectantly.

"you look fine," he says instead, rolling his eyes good naturedly.

she huffs in fake annoyance, smiling at him. "gee, thanks. tell me how you really feel, sev."

he wants to laugh. if i told you how i really felt, you'd hate me. i'd ruin this friendship. i can't jeopardize that. i can't risk losing you forever.

"you don't need me feeding your ego," he teases, hoping that the playful tone in his voice hides the thoughts in his head.

she laughs. he wants to bottle up the sound.

luckily, the photographer calls her name before any of his embarrassing thoughts about her slip through his mouth.

the memory fades away and all that's left are the silent sobs that wrack his body as he sits in his car, holding the picture in his hand so delicately as if it'll float away. he takes everything in him to place the photo back in his wallet and close it.

he knows he should've thrown it away, he knows it shouldn't be in his possession anymore in the first place, but it's always been there. as soon as he got it he put it in his wallet and it stayed there. even after the vote and the breakup, he couldn't bring himself to get rid of it, making him feel so fucking pathetic as he wipes his eyes with his sleeve.

how can he ever expect to get over her when he always has the knowledge of that? that despite everything, he can't get rid of one fucking photo. he got rid of everything else.

the night seems to finally catch up to him as his shoulders slump in exhaustion. being in arabella's orbit used to overwhelm him in all right ways, but now, as he tries to stop himself from crying again, it just feels like the worst kind of overstimulation.

seeing her cry shouldn't have made him so close to forgetting about all the horrible things that have transpired between them. he knows that's why she did it, to just make him feel bad for her. she's always had a flair for the dramatic, like when she used to run away during dumb arguments with him and he'd follow her-

is she doing that right now? if he went to the back exit of the bar, would he see her right outside the door? waiting for him to come and find her, like how he used to?

no, he thinks. that's fucking ridiculous. there's no way she remembers ever even doing that, and she'd probably laugh at him if she knew that he did.

whatever stupid fantasy he knows his brain is trying to come up with, it has to stop. he has to get over this, once and for all. he needs to get rid of that picture. he needs to stop listening to that stupid album that's about him. he needs a complete and total break. he needs to hate her. it's much easier to do that than whatever the fuck happened to him tonight.