𓂃 𓈒𓏸‪‪Tea𓈒𓏸‪‪𓂃

Nobody ever asked about you first.

It wasn't cruelty. It was simply the shape of things — you'd been born four minutes after your brother, and it seemed, some days, that those four minutes had determined the entire architecture of your life. Harry was the Boy Who Lived. You were the girl who'd lived too, technically, in the same house, on the same night, but nobody wrote articles about the scar you didn't have, because you didn't have one, because Voldemort's curse had rebounded off your brother and not off you, and there was no poetry in being the twin who simply survived by proximity.

You'd grown up quiet at the Dursleys' because quiet was safer, and by the time Hogwarts letters arrived — two of them, in the same storm of owls, though only one name ever got shouted about in corridors afterward — you'd already perfected the skill of standing one respectful step behind your brother's shadow, watching everything, saying very little.

The Weasleys were the first family who ever seemed to see you as something other than an appendage. Molly Weasley had folded you into her chaos of a household the same she folded in Harry, no questions asked, an extra plate simply materializing at the table every time you turned up, an extra bed made without being requested. You spent that first time mostly quiet, mostly watching, astonished by the sheer volume of a family that argued and laughed and forgave each other in the same five minutes, astonished most of all by how easily they included you in both.

"You're not just an extra, dear," she told you once, catching you hovering in the kitchen doorway instead of coming in. "You're welcome here because you're you."

It was in that chaos, that first moment, twelve years old and still working out who you were allowed to be outside of Harry's orbit, that you first really saw Fred Weasley — the one who asked you questions about you, not Harry. Small things. What you liked to read. Whether you'd rather have a quiet birthday or a loud one. Nobody else had thought those things mattered enough to ask.

You didn't understand yet, at twelve, what that small, specific kindness was going to cost you.

You started the letters the way most habits start — accidentally, almost embarrassed by your own need for it.

It became a ritual almost without your noticing. Every time you came close — every single time some moment with Fred left you standing somewhere with your heart going too fast — you wrote it down instead of saying it. And then, later, you kept writing even on days when nothing dramatic had happened at all, just to get the feeling out of your chest somewhere it couldn't do any damage.

Hermione helped you charm the box in third year. Small, unremarkable, carved from pale wood, opening only for your touch, sealed against prying eyes and prying magic both.

"Why don't you just tell him?" Ginny asked once, watching you fold another letter into an even smaller square than strictly necessary.

"Because he's Fred Weasley," you said, like that explained everything. Because his mother had all but adopted you into this family already. Because you'd learned a long time ago that the things you wanted quietly, for yourself, had a way of getting lost under the weight of everything everyone else needed from your brother.

Better to write it down. You had no idea, at twelve, how many letters there would be by the time you were fifteen.

Second year.

Letter One: fuck-i think' i like you.

Fred,

I don't know how to write this without sounding ridiculous, so I'm just going to be ridiculous. Today you stopped a fifth-year prefect from making me cry in front of half the corridor, and I don't think you even noticed you did anything extraordinary. You did it the way you do everything — loud, fast, like it cost you nothing — and then you just walked me to class afterward, like that was the obvious next step.

I keep thinking about the way your face changed. One second you were laughing with George, the next you'd gone completely still, watching him corner me, and something in you snapped into motion. I've never seen anyone look genuinely angry on my behalf before.

I'm not going to tell you. You're fourteen and I'm twelve and you probably still think of me as Ron's quiet friend who happens to share a surname with the Chosen One. But I think this is the first time I've felt this, whatever this is, and I don't think it'll be the last.

I like you, I think. Or something dangerously close to it. Merlin help me, I cringed by myself.

It had happened fast, the way most bad things at Hogwarts did. A Slytherin prefect named Higgs had planted himself in the corridor, blocking your path, sensing exactly whose sister you were and deciding that made you fair sport.

"Potter's little shadow," he'd said. "Bet you love it, don't you. Following him around, basking in it."

Fred had arrived like weather — sudden, loud, impossible to ignore, planting himself between you and Higgs without any apparent regard for the four-year age gap or the prefect badge on the other boy's chest.

"You've got something to say to her, you can say it to me instead. Bet it sounds a lot less clever out loud to someone your own size.” Fred had said, all the mischief drained out of his voice.

"This isn't your business, Weasley."

"Everything involving someone being a prat to my friends is my business, funnily enough." Fred's voice had gone flat and cold in a way you hadn't heard from him before, all the usual mischief drained out of it entirely. "You want to dock points off Gryffindor for me hexing you, go ahead and try me. I've got a Filibuster firework in my pocket that goes off if provoked, and I'd say you're doing a fair job of provoking."

Higgs, weighing a prefect's dignity against the very real threat of public humiliation at the hands of a Weasley twin, had backed down, muttering something about not worth the trouble before disappearing back down the corridor.

"You alright?" Fred asked afterward, already falling into step beside you.

"I'm fine."

"You don't look fine." He walked you the rest of the way to Charms, entirely out of his path. "For what it's worth, you're not boring. Anyone who thinks that hasn't actually talked to you."

"You don't even know me that well."

"I know you well enough to know you attract trouble like it's a hobby. Corridors, prefects, whatever's next." He grinned, easy and unbothered. "That's what I'm calling you now, by the way. Trouble. Seems accurate."

"That's a terrible nickname."

"It's an excellent nickname. You'll grow into it." He said it like it was already decided, already permanent, and — infuriatingly — it was. You hadn't known what to say to any of it.

You hadn't known what to say. You'd written until your candle burned down to nothing.

Life at Hogwarts kept happening around the feeling, the way ordinary life always does around the enormous things.

You had your own friends by then, though in practice they were mostly the same friends as Harry's — the two of you had shared a dormitory corridor, a timetable, and a best-friend pair since your very first train ride to Hogwarts. Ron and Hermione had folded you into their trio so early and so completely that most of the school simply thought of the four of you as a single unit, even if you were quieter than the other three put together. Hermione, in particular, had taken an immediate, protective liking to you the moment she'd worked out you were twice as observant as your brother and considerably better at keeping your mouth shut about it. You had your own running jokes with Ron about Harry's appalling handwriting, your own quiet corner of the library you claimed as yours whenever the trio's adventures got to be too much, your own life that had nothing to do with Fred Weasley at all, most days.

Except that Fred had a talent for turning up in the corners of your life anyway. He'd started saving you a seat at Gryffindor table on the mornings he got there first — not obviously, not with any fanfare, just a bag dropped on the bench beside him that happened to be exactly where you usually sat, close enough to Ron and Hermione's usual spot that nobody thought twice about it. He'd started asking Ginny, with elaborate, transparent casualness, whether you'd had a good week.

"He's so obvious," Katie Bell told you once, laughing, catching you both mid-conversation across the common room. "You do know that, right? Half of Gryffindor's placing bets on when he's finally going to say something."

"Say something about what?"

Katie had just grinned at you like you were being deliberately dense, and refused to elaborate further.

Letter two: ¿Why are you so charming? UGH

Today you gave your last Chocolate Frog to a crying first-year because he'd lost his own on the train and wouldn't stop sniffling about it. You didn't know I saw Or that anyone could see you, you just wanted that child to stop crying. I like you more now UGGHH, Fred Weasley, you complete charming freckled fool.

Letter tree: It's the little things, you know?

Fred.

You let George take credit for the dungbomb prank today even though it was your idea — I heard you tell him so afterward, quiet, like it didn't matter. You always do that. I don't think you even notice yourself doing it But I notice it, I notice every little detail where you let someone else take the spotlight and enjoy watching them shine. It's the little things, you know? That make me like you more and more. I like you, Fred.

It had been an ordinary, golden sort of afternoon — the kind the Burrow specialized in, warm and slow and full of the specific chaos of six children and one very patient set of parents. Fred had gone up to the shed roof to fix a leak, and you'd followed on instinct, the way you'd started following him around that entire summer without quite admitting to yourself why.

"You're going to fall," he'd said, watching you climb up after him with more determination than grace.

"So will you, eventually, and I want to be there to laugh about it."

He'd grinned at that, made room for you beside him, and for a while neither of you had said much at all, content to watch Arthur wage his ongoing, deeply serious war against the garden gnomes below.

"Can I tell you something?" Fred had asked eventually, quieter than his usual register.

"Always."

"George and I are going to open a joke shop someday. Properly. Our own place, our own name on the door." He'd picked at a loose bit of roofing, not quite meeting your eyes. "Haven't told him the full plan yet. Haven't told anyone, really."

"Why me?"

"Because you're easy to tell things to." He'd shrugged, like it wasn't a significant thing to say, though it had landed in your chest like something considerably heavier than a shrug should carry. "You don't make it weird. You just listen."

You'd wanted, badly, to tell him something back — something true, something that mattered as much as what he'd just handed you. Instead you'd made a joke about the shop's name, and he'd laughed, and the sun had kept setting, and you'd gone to bed that night and written for two hours by candlelight instead.

Summer after second year.

Letter four: I'm a coward and you're a wonderful guy.

Fred,

I nearly said it today. We were sitting on the roof of the shed — you'd climbed up to fix something George had broken, I'd followed because I just wanted to spend time with you— and somehow we ended up sitting there for an hour, watching your dad wage war on the garden gnomes.

You told me about wanting to open a joke shop someday. Your own place, your own name on the door. You told me because, and I'm quoting you directly, "you're easy to tell things to. You don't make it weird."

I almost told you right then. What came out instead was some joke about your shop needing a better name than "Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes," and you laughed, and the moment closed itself back up before I could pry it open again because I'm a coward and I'm afraid you'll laugh at me or something.

I think about that hour on the roof more than I think about anything else that happened this summer.

I like you and I'm going to keep feeling like that for a very long time I suppose.

A few days later, Gryffindor won a scrappy end-of-summer pickup match against a scratch team of Diggory cousins visiting the Burrow's neighboring field, and Fred, high on victory and thoroughly pleased with himself, had swept into Molly's kitchen afterward still in his mud-streaked practice robes, arms thrown wide.

"Did you see that last save?"

"Everyone saw it, Fred, you announced it three times on the way in."

"It deserves announcing three times." He dropped into the chair beside you, breathless, grinning, glowing with the particular happiness that only came after flying well. "Did you see it, though? Properly? From the fence?"

"I was cheering the whole time."

"Yeah?" Something in his voice had gone strangely careful, half joking and half not, watching you with an attention that made your pulse do something unhelpful. "You were cheering for me? Specifically? Not just, you know, generally pleased violence was occurring on a broomstick?"

"Of course I was cheering for you, you enormous idiot. Who else would I be cheering for?"

He'd laughed — really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere lower than his chest — and reached over to muss your hair with a muddy hand before you could dodge, and you'd shrieked and swatted him away, and it had felt, for one unguarded moment, like something a girlfriend might do, and something a boyfriend might do back, before either of you seemed to remember you weren't that at all.

Letter five: Of course I was cheering you on, stupid. Btw, you look so radiant when you laugh.

Fred,

You cried today — actual real tears, laughing so hard at your own joke you couldn't finish telling it. I've never loved anything as much as I loved watching that, And what I loved most was that in the middle of your moment, your celebration, you looked at me with that silly smile and asked me if I was cheering for you. And why not? I love you, you ridiculous person.

As the years went by the whole of Gryffindor tower had, in the vague, half-articulated way houses develop collective knowledge, started to treat you and Fred as something adjacent to inevitable, As if there were some particular quality between you that indicated you were an exception to the rule for each other. Even if you were both too stupid to see it.

"You two are going to end up together, you know," Angelina Johnson told Fred flatly, one evening in the common room, not even looking up from her Charms homework. "Everyone can see it except possibly the two of you."

"We're friends, She's my younger brother's friend. What are those crazy little heads of theirs thinking?" He acted with his casual ease, his jokes masking the strange spark in his chest. As if thinking of you that way were ridiculous, impossible, foolish.

"Sure." Angelina's tone made it very clear she thought this was, at best, a technically true but wildly incomplete description of events. "Friends who he saves seats for. Friends who abandoned an actual date to go talking nonsense with each other, laughing like never before in their lives from a corner at Katie's party last month."

"That was one time."

"It was the third time, actually, I've been keeping count."

Fred hadn't had a response to that, mostly because Angelina wasn't wrong, and he learned by then that there was no good way or good joke to argue with the truth when it was delivered that plainly.

Letter six: I just- I just love you okay? Not much more hereee ugh

Fred,

You always let the house-elves finish talking before you say thank you, even when you're in a hurry. Nobody else does that. I don't think you even know you do it. I noticed months ago and I still think about it more than I should admit. It's totally stupid, but I think it makes me...love you - I finally said it, I love you Fred Weasley, you and the way you treat elves with respect.

Pd: Hermione would be proud of you for that, you know? Long live elf rights!

Sometimes spending time with your friends ended in embarrassing and overly romantic conversations about your feelings for Fred—feelings you hadn't fully admitted to them yet.

‘Why are you avoiding telling him? It's obvious you fancy him” Hermione turned to you afterward, gentler, with the patient, knowing look of someone who'd clocked the whole thing years earlier and was simply waiting for you to catch up to your own feelings. "You know you talk about him in your sleep. Not often. Just enough that Ron's heard it too, through the wall at the burrow."

“Who likes whom?" your brother questioned, jerking his head up and adjusting his glasses, intrigued by the gossip, Hermione just sighed, rolling her eyes at how slow Harry could be sometimes.

"I do not."

"You really do," Ron muttered, still faintly pink, clearly torn between loyalty to his brother's dignity and loyalty to yours. "It's fine. I've decided not to have opinions about it. That's my policy now."

"What do you mean we're not going to have opinions about? I need context ASAP." Harry tried again, leaning over the table and scanning the three of you.

"You idiot! About your sister being in love with Fred!" Hermione exploded in exasperation, glaring at him. Ron just groaned.

“¿Fred Weasley?” He simply asked, completely surprised.

You'd buried your face in your hands and groaned,refusing to discuss it further, though the conversation stayed with you long after the candles in the Great Hall had burned low.

Fred, for his part, seemed to have absolutely no idea any of this was being discussed. He continued flirting easily and often with half the girls in his year, the way he always had — light, weightless, over the second it stopped being fun — and continued, with equal ease, abandoning those conversations the moment you appeared anywhere nearby.

Letter seven: So clever about some things and so foolish about others!

Fred,

You needed help with a charm for one of your prank ideas and, out of everyone you could have asked, you asked me. I spent two hours helping you cross-reference obscure charm theory in the library while you made me laugh so hard Madam Pince nearly threw us both out.

You're actually clever, underneath all the noise. People don't give you enough credit for that.

I almost told you. You looked up at me, delighted, and said "we make a good team, you know," like it was a discovery, and something about how you said it nearly undid every ounce of restraint I've built. I said "yeah, we do" instead of anything true, and you didn't notice the difference, why? Like- omg just notice what im not telling you goood.

I love you. Stupidly, completely, I love you Fred.

“You should be careful," Ginny told you one night, sitting cross-legged on your bed, watching you fold yet another letter into the box with the particular precision you always used when a feeling was too big to write neatly. "Not about him. About how much you're keeping in there, If you don't get it off your chest soon, you'll explode."

"I'm fine."

"You're not, though. You're carrying an entire relationship's worth of feeling in a box under your bed, and he doesn't even know it exists." Ginny wasn't unkind about it, just direct in the specific Weasley way that ran in her family. "One day that thing's going to be too full to hold, and I don't know what happens then."

"Nothing happens. That's the whole point of the box."

Ginny had given you a long, considering look, and hadn't argued further, though you noticed — much later, in hindsight — that she'd never seemed entirely convinced.

Letter eight: "Oh my, look at me, I'm cute and I talk like a fool when I'm with Fred!" Ugh - I hate myself, take that back, I'm just jealous.

Fred,

You danced with Katie Bell in the common room today, three songs in a row;She was hanging on to your arm for an extra minute, laughing at absolutely everything you said—and not everything was funny, it wasn't your best day, you know? and I sat in the corner pretending to read while my whole chest turned into a fist. I hate this. Why do you flirt with them and not with me? Is it the age difference? My friendship with Ron? Although I could fake a fight with him if that's it... maybe we can continue being secret friends until you're my boyfriend…Merlin, what am I thinking?. I hate you a little, for making me feel like this.I love you anyway, idiot and It's very inconvenient.

You told yourself you were only in the stands to wait for Ron and Harry, who'd promised to walk to the library with you the moment practice ended, and Hermione, dragged along under the same excuse, had not once believed you.

"You could just say you're here to watch him," Hermione said, entirely too pleased with herself, watching Fred run drills below.

"I'm here for Ron."

"Ron is currently on the opposite end of the pitch, doing keeper laps. You are watching Fred do loops."

You hadn't had a response to that. When practice ended, you'd gone down anyway, and found Fred flushed and sweaty and grinning, still riding the high of a good session, and handed him — with more nonchalance than you felt — the chocolate bar he'd mentioned craving three days earlier, in passing, at breakfast, the kind you'd walked all the way to Hogsmeade for on your last free weekend without telling anyone why.

"You remembered." He looked, for a moment, genuinely surprised, unwrapping it immediately. "Trouble, you're going to make me fall off my broom one of these days, being this thoughtful."

"It's just chocolate, Fred."

"It's not just chocolate." He'd looked at you like he meant to say something else — something bigger, something that had nothing to do with confectionery — and for a second the whole pitch had gone very quiet around the two of you.

Then George and the rest of the team jogged over, and Fred, visibly startled out of whatever he'd been about to say, straightened up and cleared his throat and did the thing he always did when a moment got too close to something real.

"Oi, everyone — look what Harry's sister brought me. Ron's mate here's got good taste in snacks, if nothing else." He grinned at the team, easy and loud, gesturing at you like a prize on display, and George, catching the exact false note in his brother's voice, shook his head slowly, muttering something under his breath that sounded a great deal like 'you utter, utter idiot'.

You'd gone quite red, and quite still, and said nothing at all, and walked back up to the castle with Hermione a few steps behind you, saying nothing either, which was somehow worse than if she'd said something.

Letter nine: Sometimes you raise my hopes... and then you ruin it, you huge idiot!

Fred,

Today you called me "Harry's sister" in front of your Quidditch team, as a joke, and I wanted to disappear into the floor WHY, YOU HUGE IDIOT? UGH, before the others arrived you were being so...so charming, your freckled cheeks red, your smile so warm...AND YOU HAD TO SCREW IT UP. I know you didn't mean it the way it landed. I'm not going to tell you it landed at all—For the record; I plan to ignore you all through dinner and probably the weekend, you hurt me, you know? But still, much to my regret, I love you, even though sometimes I hate you a little for being such an idiot without realizing it.

The Fourth Year was the year of the Triwizard Tournament. It was the year Harry’s name came out of the Goblet of Fire, and the world became a nightmare of press coverage, dragons, and constant terror. You spent every evening in the common room helping Harry research hexes, your own anxiety making you lose sleep.

And then came the Yule Ball.

You remembered every detail of that night with an intensity that embarrassed you slightly — the particular blue of the dress robes, the way the enchanted ceiling had mirrored the real sky outside, the specific, sinking humiliation of watching Seamus's attention drift toward Lavender Brown within the first hour, leaving you standing alone by the punch table with a smile you were having to actively maintain.

"You know what? If you're going to be staring at her all night, you should just ask her to dance. It's not like her date's going to come back for her," Angelina murmured to Fred with a lopsided smile, not angry at all, as if she understood that this was the normal cycle of things; Fred always coming towards you.

"It's not—it's just—how can you invite her and then leave her? She looks gorgeous today and he just leave her for someone else!" He complained, wrinkling his nose in confusion, his gaze fixed on you.

"Oh, tell me about it, buddy. Ignoring your date because you're staring at another girl? I can't even imagine it." Angelina scoffed harmlessly, arms crossed. She found it hilarious that Fred didn't realize he was doing the same thing as Seamus. "Seriously, Fred, you should just tell her you like her."

“WHAT?" He gasped, looking at his date. "I don't like her, she's just my friend and I'm going to cheer her up!" he said determinedly, walking directly in your direction.

Angelina just shrugged and shook her head amusedly before going to find George and dance for a while.

Fred had crossed the entire dance floor for you, ignoring at least two people trying to catch his attention on the way, and arrived in front of you with his hand already extended.

"Come on,Trouble."

"Fred, you're with Angelina — "

"Angelina's got plenty of other people wanting to dance with her, believe me." He'd tugged you gently onto the floor before you could protest further, spinning you into the fast, chaotic rhythm of the song with an ease that suggested he did this sort of rescue mission often. "Wasn't going to let you stand there sulking all night."

You'd laughed — really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere lower than your chest, the kind Seamus's abandonment hadn't managed to touch at all — and for the length of that song, nothing else in the castle had mattered.

"Better?" he'd asked, when the song finally ended, both of you breathless.

"Better."

He'd squeezed your hand once, quick and easy, and something in his face had gone briefly serious, like he was about to say something that mattered. Then George's voice had cut across the hall — something about an unfortunate incident with the punch — and Fred had let go with a rueful grin, murmuring "later, alright?" before disappearing to deal with whatever chaos his twin had caused.

Later never came, not that night. You'd gone back to your dormitory with your feet aching and your chest full of a feeling you didn't have anywhere safe to put, and you'd written until the candle burned all the way down.

Letter ten: Is it so bad that I keep dreaming about that "later"?

Fred,

Tonight, I wore a dress that made me feel like a real girl instead of just 'the other Potter.' It was pale blue, and Hermione helped me with my hair so it didn't look like a bird's nest for once. For a few minutes, when I walked down the stairs, I thought maybe—just maybe—you’d look at me the way Ron looked at Fleur.

I went to the Ball with Seamus, and he ditched me for Lavender within the first hour, and I stood by the punch table trying to look like I was having a good time alone. You noticed. Of course you noticed.

You left the dance floor — left Angelina mid-conversation — walked straight over, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the fastest song they played all night, spinning me until I forgot I'd been sad five minutes earlier. "Wasn't going to let you stand there sulking all night," you said, like it was obvious.

I almost told you on the dance floor. The song ended, we were breathless, and for one dizzy second I thought I might actually say it, It was something so fragile, so beautiful that I thought... I thought, why not say it now? I thought you felt the same when I looked into your eyes. Then George called your name about a punch bowl emergency, and you squeezed my hand once before letting go and said "later, alright?" and the moment scattered like it had never happened at all.

You walked away. And I realized that no matter how pretty my dress is, or how much I laugh at your jokes, I will always be the girl you dance with out of pity while you live your real life with someone else.

I love you. Later never came. I hope it comes eventually, I keep dreaming about that "later," what would have happened?

You found your brother the next evening, curled into the far corner of the common room away from the noise, and for once neither of you said anything about danger or dragons or the tournament at all. Just talked — properly talked, the way you rarely got the chance to anymore, about nothing in particular, catching up on the small, ordinary things siblings are supposed to know about each other and so rarely find the time for.

"You looked happy last night," Harry said eventually. "Dancing with Fred."

"I was-."

"You don't have to pretend you weren't, you know. Not with me."

You'd been about to say something honest back — something you weren't sure you were ready to say even to your own twin — when a knot of Hufflepuffs passed close enough to overhear, deep in their own conversation.

"...bound to happen eventually, right? Everyone saw them dancing together for ages. Fred and Angelina, it's obvious."

You'd gone very still. Harry's eyebrows had gone up, watching your face carefully.

"That's not — " You stopped, unsure whether you were more embarrassed or more hollowed out by the sentence. "That's fine. It's fine. It's not like there was ever anything to lose."

Harry hadn't said anything else, but he'd looked, for the rest of the evening, like a boy quietly filing something away for later use.

Letter Eleven: What if I just give up? Technically — how can I give up on something I never even started?

Fred,

Everyone's saying you and Angelina might finally happen and I spent all of dinner smiling like it didn't matter. It mattered. What if I just give up? I want to stop loving you BUT I CAN'T; I'm tired of loving you without action or purpose. I love you, Fred, and it's exhausting and inconvenient and I still wouldn't trade it for anything.

(Postscript, added the following week in slightly different ink: I have never in my life been so relieved to be an idiot. Turns out the Hufflepuffs meant George. GEORGE. Angelina is dating George, and has apparently been dating George for a month, and I have wasted an entire letter's worth of despair on a case of mistaken identical twins. I am never trusting secondhand gossip again.)

Letter twelve: What should I do with you? Kiss you? Hit you? Run away to the ends of the earth, far from you?

Fred,

You remembered to ask about my difficult exams today without me ever mentioning it twice. I said it once, months ago, in passing. You remembered. I don't know what to do with a boy who remembers things like that and still doesn't seem to know what it does to people.

The spring of your fourth year turned dark all at once, the way spring sometimes does, without warning, without mercy. Cedric Diggory didn't come back from the maze, and your brother returned looking like he'd aged a decade in a single night, and the whole castle seemed to hold its breath for weeks afterward.

It was Fred — not Ron, not Hermione, all of them consumed by worry for Harry — who found you crying alone by the lake two days later, overwhelmed by a grief that wasn't entirely your own but had lodged in your chest anyway.

"You don't have to be strong for him tonight," Fred said, sitting down in the grass beside you, not touching you, just present. "Everyone's so busy checking on Harry, I don't think anyone's asked how you're doing."

"I'm not the one who watched someone die." You answered by sniffing, your cheeks flushing from the sudden attention to how YOU felt.

"Doesn't mean you're not carrying something." He was quiet a moment. "You're allowed to be scared too, you know. Being his sister doesn't mean your feelings come second."

Letter thirteen: I feel that I will love you silently all my life.

Fred,

You found me by the lake tonight and didn't try to fix anything. You just stayed. I think I love you a little more every time you refuse to let me be smaller than him. I love you, Fred Weasley.I love you silently, again.

Fifth year arrived grey and heavy, Umbridge's reign settling over the castle like a fog nobody could quite breathe through. The Ministry's presence turned ordinary classes into minefields, turned dissent into a punishable offense, turned the whole of Hogwarts brittle with a fear that had nothing to do with exams.

Fred and George, in their final year, seemed to take it as a personal insult that anyone might try to make Hogwarts less fun on their watch. Their rebellion grew louder as the year went on — small acts of chaos scattered through the corridors, each one a tiny act of defiance nobody quite dared say out loud was defiance.

"He's going to get himself expelled one of these days," Hermione muttered, watching Fred saunter past a portrait he'd clearly just booby-trapped with something involving Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder.

"He's not," Lee Jordan said, entirely unbothered, appearing at your shoulder. "He's too clever for that. Also, he'd never actually risk getting kicked out before he graduates. He's got plans, you know. Big ones. Shop and everything." Lee's eyes had gone briefly sharp, considering. "You'd know more about that than I would, though, wouldn't you."

You hadn't known what to say to that, and Lee, grinning, had wandered off before you could ask what exactly he meant by it.

It happened on an ordinary Tuesday, in a corridor outside the Charms classroom — Umbridge, delighted with some new pretext, had cornered a small, trembling third-year Hufflepuff over an infraction that amounted to nothing at all, quill already raised, and you'd stepped in before you'd fully decided to.

"He didn't do anything, Professor. He was helping me pick up my books."

"And you are?"

"His friend," you said, evenly, though your heart was going far too fast. "You can dock points from me instead, if points need docking. He didn't do anything wrong."

Umbridge's smile had gone thin and unpleasant, the quill catching the light, and you'd genuinely believed, for one long, terrible second, that you were about to find out exactly what that quill could do — until Fred's voice cut across the corridor, loud and cheerful in a way that was, you'd come to learn, precisely how he sounded right before something went badly for whoever he was aiming at.

"Professor Umbridge! Perfect timing, actually — George and I need someone with real authority to settle a dispute." He'd arrived at speed, George a half-step behind, and inserted himself smoothly between you and the quill with the casual, practiced ease of a boy who'd been running interference for people he cared about his entire life. "Purely hypothetical question. If a student were to accidentally, say, detonate a Filibuster firework directly outside your office door at midnight — purely hypothetically — how many points would that cost Gryffindor, do you reckon?"

Umbridge, momentarily derailed, had rounded on him instead, and by the time she'd finished threatening detention for a crime that hadn't technically happened yet, the Hufflepuff third-year had vanished down the corridor to safety, and you along with him, tugged gently but firmly by the sleeve by George while Fred kept Umbridge occupied.

Letter fourteen: Oh my hero, you make me love you more, damn it!

Fred,

You stood between me and Umbridge's detention quill today, took the blame for something I did. I let you. I hate that I let you. I love you, you absolute idiot, I should have stopped you before your hand started bleeding for something that wasn't your fault.

George found his brother alone that evening, hand still faintly scarred from a detention that hadn't, in the end, been entirely hypothetical, and sat down across from him with the specific look he reserved for conversations he intended to win.

"You're going to hurt yourself one of these days, playing hero for Harry's sister."

"She's a friend, George. Friends do things for friends."

"Right. Course." George didn't bother hiding his skepticism. "Just a friend. Just Ron's mate. Just Harry's sister."

"Exactly."

"Do you say that as a fact," George said, quiet now, entirely serious, "or as a reminder for yourself?"

Fred hadn't had an answer for that. He'd gone very still, staring at his own bandaged hand like it might offer some clarity, and George, satisfied he'd landed the point without needing to press further, had simply clapped him on the shoulder and left him to sit with it.

The Hufflepuff boy's name was Marcus Belby, and he was, by any reasonable measure, perfectly pleasant — funny in an easy, low-key way, decent at Potions, entirely undeserving of the reaction his flirting produced in Fred Weasley, standing three feet away in the corridor with his arms crossed like a bad weather system rolling in.

"You should come to the next Hogsmeade weekend," Marcus was saying, leaning against the wall beside you with the relaxed confidence of someone who had no idea he was about to be interrupted. "I know a good place for butterbeer, quieter than the Three Broomsticks."

"That sounds — "

"She's busy that weekend," Fred said, appearing at your shoulder with no warning whatsoever, entirely too loudly for a corridor that hadn't required his input.

"Fred, I didn't say — "

"You're busy. Trust me. Very busy." He'd steered Marcus away with a hand on the boy's shoulder and a smile that didn't reach his eyes at all, murmuring something you couldn't hear, and Marcus had gone slightly pale and mumbled an excuse and left with considerably more speed than he'd arrived.

"What was that?" you demanded, the second Marcus was out of earshot.

"Nothing. Making conversation."

"You told him I was busy without asking me."

"You didn't seem that interested."

"That wasn't your decision to make!" Your voice had risen, drawing a few curious glances. "You don't get to decide who I talk to, Fred, you're not — you're not my — " You'd stopped, furious and flustered in equal measure, unable to finish the sentence with anything that didn't reveal more than you meant to.

"I'm not your what?" Fred had asked, quieter now, something unreadable in his face.

You hadn't answered. You'd simply turned and walked away, leaving him standing in the corridor looking, for once, considerably less pleased with himself than usual.

George, Angelina, and Lee cornered him about it within the hour, the three of them arranged around him in the common room with the specific, coordinated energy of people who'd clearly discussed strategy in advance.

"You do know you were jealous," Angelina said, without preamble.

"I wasn't jealous."

"You physically inserted yourself into a conversation to tell a boy she was busy on a weekend she wasn't busy," Lee pointed out, delighted. "That's not a neutral action, mate."

"I was looking out for her."

"From Marcus Belby? He once apologized to a chair for bumping into it." George folded his arms. "Just admit it. You didn't like watching someone flirt with her."

Fred had opened his mouth to argue, found nothing convincing to say, and shut it again, which the three of them took, correctly, as a confession.

Letter Fifteen: What am I supposed to do with your mixed signals, Fred Weasley? Make up your mind!

Fred,

You chased off a perfectly nice boy today for the crime of asking me to Hogsmeade, and then you looked at me like I'D done something wrong when I got angry about it. What am I supposed to think? You don't want me, you've made that clear, you've had three years to make it clear — but you also apparently can't stand the idea of anyone else having me either, which is, frankly, the single most infuriating thing you have ever done, and you've set off a Filibuster firework in a first-year's cauldron for a laugh, so that is genuinely saying something.

I don't know what you want from me. I don't think you know either. I am going to go to bed extremely annoyed and I am, against every ounce of good judgment I possess, still completely in love with you. Sort yourself out, Fred Weasley. Honestly.

Fred didn't apologize the next day, not properly, not in words — that wasn't really his way, you'd come to understand, when something had gone wrong that he didn't fully know how to name. Instead he turned up at breakfast with a small paper bag, set it down in front of you without comment, and sat down like it was nothing at all.

Inside was the exact brand of sugar quills you'd once mentioned, in passing, months earlier, that you missed from a shop that had since closed near your childhood home.

"Where did you even find these?"

"Trade secret." He shrugged, not quite meeting your eyes, ears faintly pink. "Wasn't trying to make a thing of it. Just — thought you might like them."

You hadn't brought up Marcus. He hadn't brought up the corridor. Neither of you said the word sorry, or the word jealous, or any of the things George and Angelina and Lee had spent an entire evening trying to get him to admit — but something in the quiet, deliberate care of the gesture said all of it anyway, and you'd sat there together over breakfast, easy again, without needing to name what had passed between you.

Letter sixteen: I would love to be in those protections of your future.

Fred,

You've started talking about the shop like it's inevitable instead of a dream. Every time you mention it now, it's "when we open," not "if." I love watching you become certain of something. I want to be half that certain about anything, someday. Maybe about you.

Not every letter came from something dramatic. Some days nothing happened at all, and you wrote anyway, because the feeling didn't seem to need a reason.

Letter sixteen: so jealous I hate my breakfast because of you.

Fred,

I watched you flirt with a Ravenclaw at breakfast for ten straight minutes today and I have never hated eggs so much in my life.

Letter seventeen: such a good brother. Will he be a good father someday? AH, WHAT AM I THINKING?

Fred,

You always save the last bite of pudding for Ron even though you complain about him eating too much. You'd never tell him you do it on purpose. You are very protective, and there is something almost gentle in the way you look after all your siblings, even without boasting about it; Always providing comic relief on the surface, but paying attention to many more details behind the scenes. I only know because I watch you more than is probably healthy.

Seeing you like this with them makes me wonder if you'd be a good father. What would our children be like? I'd have a lot of them with you because—well—it's you, and besides, I wouldn't mind going through the process of doing them several times, OH MY GOD, WHAT AM I THINKING AND WRITING? I'M GOING TO DIE, I WILL DEFINITELY DIE OF SECONDHAND EMBARRASSMENT.

You had, in fact, been writing that particular letter at the Gryffindor table during dinner, quill moving faster than your good sense, entirely absorbed, right up until the moment you reread the last line you'd written and made a sound somewhere between a cough and a small, dying animal noise, going scarlet from the collar up.

"Are you alright?" Harry asked, alarmed, half out of his seat. "Are you choking? Do you need — "

"I'm fine," you wheezed, slamming the parchment face-down onto the table with more force than strictly necessary, water sloshing from your goblet.

Hermione, seated directly across from you, had gone very still, eyes darting between your mortified face and the corner of parchment still visible beneath your hand, and you watched, with dawning horror, comprehension bloom across her features.

"Did you just — " Hermione's voice had dropped to a delighted whisper. "Were you writing about children? Fred Weasley's children?"

"Hermione — "

"I'm not judging! I think it's sweet! I just need you to know that your ears have gone the exact color of the Gryffindor banner." Hermione had pressed a hand to her mouth, shoulders shaking with barely-contained laughter, and by the time Harry finally wrestled the context out of her — in fragments, punctuated by Hermione's increasingly unhelpful giggling — you'd buried your entire face in your arms on the table and refused to emerge for the rest of dinner, while your brother patted your back with the confused, well-meaning sympathy of someone who understood approximately none of what had just happened but wanted to help anyway.

Letter eighteen: You can rest with me, you know?

Fred,

You made the whole common room laugh tonight, right in the middle of the worst week of the year, and I don't think anyone but me noticed how tired you looked doing it. I wanted to tell you that you don't have to be funny for everyone all the time. And i did it cause you aparently are my problem. Obviously.

You found him afterward, once the common room had thinned out and the performance had visibly drained out of his shoulders, and sat down beside him on the sofa without asking permission.

"Alright, Trouble?" He'd already started reaching for a joke, some easy deflection, mouth opening on the beginning of a bit.

"You don't have to do that. Not with me." You said it gently, no accusation in it. "You looked exhausted up there. You don't have to perform for me."

Fred had gone quiet, the half-formed joke dying on his tongue, something in his face loosening, like a held breath finally let go.

"Thank you," he said, simply, and you'd sat together in comfortable silence for a while after that, no jokes, no performance, just two people resting in the same quiet, and it had felt like one of the most honest things that had ever passed between you.

Letter nineteen: Maybe Ginny was right and this writing-thing was going to become a burden (I'm NEVER going to tell her that)

Fred,

I am so tired of writing these instead of saying them. I am so tired of being the careful one. I love you, I love you, I love you, and I'm so tired of keeping it to myself that I don't know what to do with all of this anymore.

Harry found you crying quietly in an empty classroom two days later, overwhelmed by nothing in particular and everything at once, and sat down across from you with the specific, careful patience your brother had only recently learned how to offer anyone.

"You should just tell him."

"You don't understand."

"I understand that you cry in empty classrooms about a boy who looks at you like you hung the moon and neither of you ever says anything about it." Harry shrugged, uncharacteristically direct. "I think he likes you too, you know. I've watched him. I'm not an idiot, whatever Hermione says."

"And if you're wrong? If I tell him and it ruins everything — not just for me, for you and Ron too, for all of us, for every Christmas at the Burrow for the rest of our lives?" You wiped your face, furious at your own fear for sounding so reasonable out loud. "I can't risk that. I won't."

Harry hadn't argued further, though he'd looked, watching you, entirely unconvinced.

That Christmas at the Burrow, Molly and Arthur stood together by the kitchen window, dishes forgotten in their hands, watching you and Fred sprawled in front of the fire, deep in some private conversation neither of you seemed aware anyone else could see, laughing easily, entirely comfortable in each other's space in the particular way of people who'd stopped noticing the distance between them because there wasn't any left.

"Do you think they know?" Molly murmured.

"Not a clue," Arthur said, fondly. "Reminds me of someone else who used to sit exactly like that, actually, watching a girl across a kitchen and pretending he wasn't."

"Arthur Weasley."

"I'm only saying." He'd bumped her shoulder gently with his own, both of them smiling, entirely unwilling to interrupt whatever was quietly happening by the fire, content to let it happen in its own time.

Letter twenty: What it would be like to be yours

Fred,

I sat by your family's fire tonight and let myself imagine, just for a minute, what it would be like if this were real — if I got to come here every Christmas not as your brother's friend but as yours. If Molly got to call me something other than "dear" and mean daughter-in-law by it. If I got to hold your hand in front of everyone instead of just when nobody's looking.

I know it's not real. I know I'm borrowing a feeling I haven't earned. But I let myself have it for a minute anyway, sitting there by the fire with you, and it was the warmest I have felt in a very long time. I love you. I think I'd be so happy, being yours.

By the middle of fifth year, it had become an open, near-comedic secret that half the castle had opinions about you and Fred that neither of you had ever been formally told about.

Molly's letters home, forwarded and occasionally read aloud by an oblivious Ron, had started including lines like ‘Let me know if I should set up Percy's room for Fred and if Y/N is coming!’ or ‘Don't leave me out of any of the news, any of you! Let me know if any of you are going to give me grandchildren!’ that one made Ginny choke on her pumpkin juice every single time.

Ron, by then, had reached a kind of weary, resigned acceptance about the whole situation. "I don't want details," he told you flatly, one evening, when you'd tried — uncharacteristically — to mention something small Fred had done that week. "I just want you to be happy, and I want to never have to picture my brother's face while you're telling me about it. Those are my only two conditions." Hermione, for her part, had taken to simply raising one eyebrow, wordlessly, every time Fred did something transparently devoted in your direction across the common room — a silent, running commentary the two of you had come to understand perfectly without ever needing to say a thing about it out loud.

"It's not a secret, you know," Lee told Fred one evening, entirely too pleased with himself. "The whole not-saying-anything thing. Pretty sure First Years know at this point."

"There's nothing to know." Fred said, slightly irritated, as if this topic touched a nerve he didn't even know he had.

"Sure," Lee said, in exactly the same tone Angelina always used, and he was beginning to suspect the entire school had collectively agreed on that particular inflection just to torment him.

Letter twenty: At this point, I might just take your face in my hands and kiss you until you understand why I'm doing it.

Fred,

You walked me back from the Order meeting at the Burrow tonight, even though it was perfectly safe ground the whole way and you didn't need to. We didn't talk about anything important. We talked about nothing at all, actually, and it was somehow the best conversation I've had in weeks.

I think I've loved you for three years now, properly, not just as a crush that should have faded by now. I don't know how to keep carrying this quietly. I don't know how much longer I can watch you be brave and kind and funny and only sometimes let myself imagine what it would be like if you looked at me the way I look at you.

I love you. I love you so much. I don't know how else to tell you, maybe kissing you stupid until you realize(?

You'd folded that letter into the box on an ordinary Tuesday evening, twenty-something letters deep into a habit you'd never once told a soul the full extent of, and gone down to the common room afterward without any idea that it would be the last one you'd ever get to keep entirely to yourself.

Romilda Vane had never been particularly known for respecting other people's belongings.

It happened on an unremarkable evening, the dormitory mostly empty, Romilda rummaging through your trunk in search of a borrowed Potions textbook she swore she'd returned. In her haste, elbow catching the shelf above your bed, the small carved box tumbled to the stone floor and cracked open with a sound sharp enough to make her jump backward, startled.

You weren't there to see it. You were down in the common room, laughing at something Ginny had said.

The enchantment, built by a thirteen-year-old's careful but imperfect magic, hadn't been designed to survive impact. It broke instantly, and the letters — no longer sealed, no longer yours alone — caught the residual charm meant to contain them and turned it, in the chaotic way broken magic sometimes does, into precisely the opposite of its original purpose.

They flew. Out the dormitory window, across the grounds, toward the boys' side of the tower, toward a room three floors up where two boys and their best friend were in the middle of an entirely unrelated argument about Chocolate Frog cards.

Romilda, horrified, said nothing to anyone. You wouldn't find out what had happened for several days.

The first letter came in through the window with no warning at all, drifting lazily on some current of half-broken magic, and landed directly on the Chocolate Frog card Lee had been mid-sentence about, which was, in retrospect, an almost comedic amount of precision for something no one had aimed.

"What in Merlin's name — " Lee picked it up before Fred could, turning it over with the delighted curiosity of someone who'd never once in his life resisted an unattended piece of parchment. "Oi, Fred, it's got your name on it."

The second letter arrived thirty seconds later. Then the third, then a fourth and a fifth in quick succession, drifting through the open window one after another like a very slow, very confused flock of owls that had forgotten how to fly in formation, scattering across George's bed, Fred's trunk, the floor, until the dormitory looked less like a bedroom and more like the site of a mild indoor blizzard made entirely of parchment.

"Is this a prank?" George said, delighted, already scooping up two of them. "Did someone finally get us back for the swamp thing?"

"George, wait — " Fred had gone very still, one letter held carefully in both hands, staring down at handwriting he recognized instantly. He'd been receiving small, cheerful notes in that same hand for years, tucked into birthday presents and passed between friends. Fred.

He opened it before he could think better of it.

By the time the tenth letter drifted through the window, Fred had gone almost entirely silent, sitting very still on the edge of his bed, the color slowly draining from his face and then, in patches, returning as something closer to disbelief.

"Fred?" Lee, still holding two of the shorter ones — the "i love you Fred Weasley you complete idiot" variety, which he was currently reading with the barely-contained glee of someone who'd stumbled onto the best gossip of his entire Hogwarts career — looked up, grinning. "Mate, I don't know what's happening but I think this might be the best day of my life — "

"Lee." George's voice had gone abruptly quiet, sharp in a way that cut through the chaos immediately. He'd clocked his brother's face — properly clocked it, the way only a twin could — and was already crossing the room to physically remove the letters from Lee's hands. "Out."

"What? Why? This is incredible, I want to know how this ends — "

"Out, Lee. Now. I mean it." George steered him bodily toward the door, ignoring Lee's protests entirely, and shut it firmly behind him before turning back to his brother, who hadn't moved from the bed, still holding the first letter like it might dissolve if he loosened his grip.

The remaining letters kept arriving over the following hour — fifteen more, twenty, until all twenty-two had drifted in through the window and settled across the room like some strange, patient snowfall. But Fred, overwhelmed, hadn't read them all that night. He'd gathered them carefully instead, sorted by whatever chronology he could piece together from the handwriting and the dates scrawled at the top of a few, and tucked them into the bottom of his own trunk, beneath his spare robes, like something too fragile to rush.

"You're not going to read the rest tonight?" George asked, watching him close the trunk lid.

"I don't think I can. Not all at once." Fred sat back down, looking faintly stunned, still holding the very first letter — fuck, I think I like you — like it explained something enormous about the last three years of his life. "I think I need to take this slowly. She wrote three years of feelings into these. Feels wrong to swallow it in one sitting like it's gossip."

It didn't happen all at once. That was, perhaps, the strangest part.

Fred read one or two letters a week, whenever he found a private moment — tucked into a corner of the common room after everyone else had gone to bed, in the shop's future site during a Hogsmeade weekend, once, memorably, hiding in a broom cupboard for twenty minutes because he couldn't find anywhere else quiet enough. Each one rearranged something in him a little further. Each one made the boy in the letters — protective, observant, quietly kind, entirely unaware of his own good qualities — feel more and more like someone he recognized, uncomfortably, as himself.

You noticed the change before you understood it, because it came slowly, in fragments, over that entire month.

He started correcting small things about himself, as though testing whether the version of him in the letters was one he could grow into more fully. He stopped letting George take all the credit for their better pranks. He started thanking the house-elves more deliberately, like he'd only just realized someone had been watching him do it all along and wanted to be worth the watching. He got, unmistakably, nervous around you — fumbling sentences he'd never once fumbled before, going faintly pink at compliments he'd have shrugged off a month earlier, watching you with a new, searching carefulness that felt entirely unlike the easy confidence you'd known him for.

He also, without ever quite explaining why, started flirting with you — properly, deliberately, in a way that was new and different from three years of easy teasing. Small things. A compliment that lingered a beat too long to be casual. A hand that found the small of your back guiding you through a doorway and didn't move away as quickly as it used to. Once, memorably, he'd called you "gorgeous" instead of "Trouble" in front of the whole common room, then gone scarlet and covered it with a joke so badly delivered that Angelina had actually laughed out loud at the attempt.

"Is something wrong with Fred?" you asked Ginny, watching him trip over an entirely simple sentence during a perfectly ordinary conversation.

"No idea," Ginny said, though something in her tone suggested otherwise. "Maybe ask him yourself?"

Lee, when you cornered him separately, was significantly less subtle about it, grinning at you like he was one comment away from bursting. "Oh, you don't know yet? This is going to be so good, I can't wait — "

"Know what?"

"Nothing. Nope. Not my story to tell." Lee had practically skipped away, delighted with himself, leaving you more unsettled than before.

Nearly a month after the box had shattered on your dormitory floor, unable to shake the feeling that something had shifted between you without your permission, you did what you always did when a feeling grew too large to carry silently.

You went to write it down.

Your hand met empty air on the shelf.

For one long, disbelieving moment you simply stood there, certain you'd misjudged the shelf, certain the box had merely slipped further back than usual. You checked the whole shelf. You checked your trunk, under the bed, behind every book in every corner of the dormitory the box could conceivably have migrated to on its own.

It wasn't there. It hadn't been there, you realized with mounting, sickening horror, in nearly a month — and you hadn't even noticed, hadn't reached for it, too distracted by Fred's strange, gentle unraveling to register that your own most private confession had gone missing weeks earlier and simply hadn't been needed.

"Hermione." Your voice came out strange, too tight, catching your dorm-mate mid-essay on her own bed. "Have you seen my box? The wooden one, small, carved — it's always on that shelf."

Hermione looked up, and something shifted in her face — not quite guilt, but the particular carefulness of someone who already suspected more than she wanted to say out loud. "I haven't seen it. But Romilda's been acting strange for weeks, actually, now that you mention it, and Ginny's been oddly quiet on the subject of Fred lately." She set down her quill slowly. "I think you should go find Ginny. Now, probably."

You found Ginny in the common room ten minutes later, and one look at her face told you everything you needed to know before either of you said a word.

"Ginny." Your voice came out strange, too tight. "Ginny, have you seen my box?"

"It broke," Ginny said, gently, wincing in anticipation of your reaction. "About a month ago. Romilda knocked it off the shelf, and the charm shattered, and the letters — they flew, love. All of them. Straight to Fred's dormitory window."

The floor seemed to tilt slightly beneath you. "A month ago?"

"He's had them a month. He's been reading them slowly — I only found out myself last week, and I swore to keep it quiet because I didn't know how to tell you without it sounding like an ambush, and I am so, so sorry — "

"He's had them a month, Ginny, and he's just been — " Your voice cracked, mortification crashing over you in waves you couldn't get ahead of. Every strange, flustered, gentle thing Fred had done over the last few weeks rearranged itself instantly into horrifying new context. The compliments. The nervousness. Gorgeous, slipping out in front of the whole common room. He'd known. For weeks, he'd known, and let you keep noticing him fumbling without ever telling you why.

"You should sit down," Ginny said, gently. "And I think you should talk to Fred."

You found him by the lake, at dusk, the very evening you'd learned the truth, having spent the intervening hours in a state of mortified, disbelieving panic that had only sharpened with every reconstructed memory of the last four weeks.

Fred was sitting on the grass, all twenty-two letters stacked carefully beside him, weighted down against the evening breeze with a smooth stone, and when you approached he stood immediately, something anxious and hopeful warring across his face in equal measure.

"You know," you said, before he could speak, because you needed to say it before your nerve failed entirely. "Ginny told me. You've had them a month, Fred. A month."

"I have." He didn't try to soften it, didn't try to pretend otherwise. "I wasn't going to keep it from you forever. I just — I didn't know how to read three years of your feelings in one sitting and then walk up to you the next morning like nothing had changed. I needed time to let it be real before I said anything, and I know that probably made it worse, watching me go strange on you for weeks without explanation, and I'm sorry for that part. Truly."

You stood frozen at the edge of the grass, every carefully constructed wall you'd built over three years suddenly rendered pointless, entirely, uselessly exposed. "How did they even get to you? The box was charmed — "

"I don't know the mechanics of it. I just know they arrived, all twenty-two of them, over about an hour, through my dormitory window, while George and Lee were both sitting right there." He winced slightly, rueful. "Lee got to read two of them before George threw him out. I'm sorry about that part too. I've sworn him to secrecy under threat of considerable bodily harm, though I make no promises about how long that'll last."

You let out something between a laugh and a sob, mortified and relieved in equal, dizzying measure. "This is a disaster."

"It's a bit of a disaster," Fred agreed, gently. "But it's also — " He stopped, visibly gathering himself, and when he spoke again his voice had lost the joking edge entirely. "I need to say this properly, because you deserve properly, and I've had a month to plan it and I'm still going to say it badly, so bear with me."

"Fred — "

"I love you,Trouble." He said it plainly, without performance. "I don't know exactly when it started. I think some part of me has known for a long time and just refused to look directly at it, because you're Harry's sister, and careful in a way that made it easy to convince myself I was imagining things, and because I genuinely believed someone as clever and steady as you would eventually want someone more serious than a bloke who's spent the last five years perfecting how to make an entire classroom explode." He exhaled, unsteady. "Reading those letters didn't create anything that wasn't already there. It just made me stop lying to myself about it. And I know that's not the same as three years, but I need you to know it wasn't nothing before this either. Ask George. Ask literally anyone in this castle, apparently, because it seems everyone but the two of us already knew."

"You never said anything."

"Neither did you," he pointed out, gently, no accusation in it. "Twenty-two letters, love. We've apparently both been standing very close to the same door, too scared to be the one who opened it first."

You crossed the grass before you'd fully decided to, and he met you halfway, and the kiss that followed was nothing like the easy, weightless things you'd watched him give other girls over the years — careful, a little desperate, entirely, unmistakably real, three years of near-misses finally collapsing into something solid.

"For the record," Fred murmured, forehead resting against yours, "you were never boring. Not for a single second, in three years, not once."

"You said that in second year."

"I meant it in second year. I've meant it every year since." He laughed, a little disbelieving. "I can't believe it took my dormitory getting hit by a paper storm to get here."

"I can't believe Lee read two of them."

"He's already been threatened within an inch of his life. George is very thorough."

Molly Weasley cried — properly cried, apron still on, wooden spoon abandoned mid-stir — when Fred brought you to the Burrow that summer and, with considerably more ceremony than either of you had intended, announced that you were together, properly, no longer some slow-motion inevitability the entire family had been quietly waiting on for years.

"Finally," she said, pulling you both into a hug so fierce it nearly knocked the wind out of you. "I have been waiting for this since you were twelve years old."

"Mum," Fred said, laughing, entirely unembarrassed. "Let her breathe."

"I will not let her breathe, I have earned this hug — "

"Everyone did," George put in from the doorway, unhelpfully delighted. "Angelina and I had a running bet. I believe I've technically won, since I always said Fred would break first."

"You knew?" you asked, half-laughing, half-mortified. "All of you knew?"

"Love," Ginny said, with the weary patience of someone who'd been holding her tongue out of loyalty to your privacy for years, "everyone in this family has known since roughly the second summer you and harey spent here, You two were just spectacularly slow catching up to the rest of us."

Ron, sprawled across the nearest armchair with the specific relief of someone whose long ordeal had finally ended, raised his glass of pumpkin juice in your general direction. "Thank Merlin. Do you know how many times I nearly said something and stopped myself? My policy held for three years. I deserve an award."

"Now will you explain that policy to me or...?" Harry asked curiously, still confused, earning laughter from everyone and an exasperated "You're a very slow idiot!" from Hermione.

Hermione, beside him, simply smiled — the quiet, satisfied smile of someone who'd been right the whole time and had the good grace not to say I told you so out loud, though her eyes said it clearly enough.

"You could have just told me" Fred said, half laughing, half exasperated, looking between all of them.

"And ruin twenty-two letters' worth of a perfectly good story?" Ron said, with real feeling. "Absolutely not."

Later that evening, sitting together on the same shed roof where a fourteen-year-old boy had once told a twelve-year-old girl about a joke shop nobody else knew he wanted, Fred pulled the letters — still carefully carried with him since the day they'd arrived, wrapped now in a spare bit of ribbon — from his bag and set them gently between you.

"What do we do with these now?"

"I don't know," you admitted. "They were never supposed to be read by anyone. Least of all you."

"I'm glad they were." He took your hand, lacing his fingers through yours. "I got to watch myself fall in love with you twenty-five different times, from your side of it. Not many people get proof like that. I'd like to keep them, if that's alright. Somewhere sturdier than a coat pocket this time."

"You could get a box," you offered. "Charm it properly. Something that actually stays shut."

"I could." He smiled, slow and certain, nothing performative left in it at all. "Or I could just tell you how I feel out loud from now on, and we could stop needing letters altogether."

"Both," you said, leaning into his shoulder as the sun set over the garden, gold and warm and entirely unhurried. "I'd like both, actually."

"Both it is, then." He pressed a kiss to the top of your head, easy as breathing, three years and twenty-five letters and one very well-timed accident finally, finally arriving somewhere solid. "Only took us the better part of a decade to get here. Give or take."

It's the morning of the second task, the day crisp and frosty, creating puffs of air as Mattheo huffed in exertion, marching down to the Black Lake surrounded by his friends. Suffice to say, he was pissed. It was fucking frigid outside and he hadn't seen you all morning, the combination enough to set him dangerously on edge.

You'd told him you'd come spend the night with him, and if nothing else you always ate breakfast together, so when you didn't show up last night and you were nowhere to be found this morning he was furious that you'd blown him off. Now he was spending his entire walk from the castle to the lake ruminating over it, piling on every perceived slight over the last few days, including the way he saw you talking to a group of guys from Durmstrang in the Great Hall yesterday, causing him to involuntarily curl his hands into fists at his side.

His friends walked beside him, surrounding him in a sort of semicircle, but moving in complete silence; they knew better than to try to say anything to him when he was in a mood like this. Before long, Pansy came running to meet them, nearly out of breath as she said, exasperated, "I couldn't fucking find her. She's not anywhere in our dormitory, in the library, I don't know where she's gone." Concern and frustration laced her voice as she looked at the group and then up at Mattheo.

This wasn't like you.

You had been Mattheo's #1 supporter throughout the whole tournament, helping him prepare, cheering him on, jumping into his arms the moment he'd defeated his dragon, and generally always glued to his side. In fact, you were always glued to all of their sides, the group of you being nearly inseparable, so having you missing made all of the boys feel shifty and on edge as they looked at one another.

Fear bloomed in Mattheo's chest. And the feeling of fear when it came to you did not sit well with him. He didn't want to feel afraid, to feel vulnerable when it came to you, so he opted to shove the feeling down, keeping instead with anger which was much easier and more natural to him.

"I don't have time for this" he muttered, quickening his pace as they all scrambled to keep up with him.

The biting wind whipped through his dark curls and stung his cheeks as he stood on the platform above the lake, staring into the middle-distance of the dark and choppy waves. Students and staff alike were cheering and shouting their encouragement for their champions, but he was completely zoned out, his mind bouncing back and forth between your lingering absence and the task ahead of him. He only perked up when Dumbledore's loud voice rang out over the crowd.

"Welcome to the second task!" it radiated.

"Last night something was stolen from each of our champions, a treasure of sorts—"

Mattheo's heart plummeted so fast into his stomach that he subconsciously grasped at his chest. A treasure? There wasn't a thing he owned that he valued enough to call a treasure, not a single thing in his life that held that much weight... except you. You were undeniably his treasure. He looked back into the murky water of the Black Lake... it couldn't be... he thought ... surely they wouldn't... as Dumbledore's voice continued.

"—These four treasures, one for each champion, now lie on the bottom of the Black Lake—" Mattheo's stomach lurched with what little breakfast he'd been able to eat as his eyes shot to Pansy's in the crowd in enough time to see her clasp her hand to her mouth as she pieced the situation together.

"—In order to win, each champion need only find their treasure and return to the surface. Simple enough. Except for this. They will have but one hour to do so and one hour only. After that, they'll be on their own. No magic will save them."

Mattheo's feet were moving before Dumbledore said another word, sprinting towards the water because fuck this stupid tournament, and fuck the geezer for thinking he could take you away from him, that he could put you in danger.

"You may begin at the sound of the cannon."

BOOM!

Mattheo heard the blast as his body hit the water, diving headfirst into the waves without bothering to cast a spell, without a care to what he'd find within the foreboding depths.

The cold shocked his system, but his heart was hammering for plenty of other reasons as he pulled his body through the fierce current, his strong arms and legs working against the waves.

For a minute he was surrounded in dark nothingness. He could feel rather than see that he wasn't alone in the water, occasionally sensing something moving on either side of him, but he didn't have time, you didn't have time for him to care. His lungs started to burn and he pressed his wand to his neck, casting a spell frantically so as not to waste another second.

After swimming at an impossible pace for so long he wondered if there even was a bottom to the lake, he heard an ethereal sound, like singing and changed course to swim towards it, which brought him to a large clearing where he could see merpeople swimming around. The few nearest him whipped their heads toward him, surprised at his presence as they turned to face him fully. He dared them, dared any fucking one of them to come near him, welcomed it actually, a chance to take out his rage, but they steered clear, perhaps sensing it would be a losing battle despite the tritons they carried and their razor-sharp teeth.

He swam on, his muscles straining, aching with the exertion of pulling his weight through the thick water at such an unwavering and desperate pace, but the feeling faded, drained from him, as four distinct figures came into view, four bodies, tethered and floating in the water, their hair moving eerily around their faces, their bodies stiff and still, like corpses.

He identified you immediately and he swam harder and harder until he was close enough to touch you. He brushed a hand against your cheek; your skin held a blueish tint and your face was expressionless, void of the smile that you always had for him, that reached your eyes, that lit up your face, the absence of it was enough to make his eyes sting in a way that had nothing to do with the brackish water.

He grasped your stiff form, the resistance of your body against his continuing to mess with his mind as he sent a spell to sever the rope that secured you and tried not to think about how rigid you felt in his arms.

His ability to breath underwater didn't matter for shit, because he was certain he didn't breath the entire way back, climbing harder and harder as he carried your weight with him, desperate to reach the surface, desperate to save you, thinking the entire time how fucking foolish he'd been to spend even one second mad at you today.

Finally, he could see the light of the surface, the grey clouds in the sky reflecting in the waves, and after a final series of strong kicks he broke through the current.

Immediately, he felt you come alive again in his arms, spluttering and coughing as you grasped for him.

"M-Matty!?" you said hysterically, the cold and fear in your voice setting his heart in a vice as your eyes fluttered open and you looked around in confusion at your surroundings. "What happened?! Where—?!"

"—It's okay, you're okay, you're safe" he said, pulling you against him, keeping you both afloat even as you rocked in the waves and he gasped deeply for air.

"C'mere, c'mon" he said, swimming with you in his embrace towards the platform, anxious to get you out of the freezing water.

The crowd had erupted into cheers when you'd breached the surface, and they were announcing that Mattheo was the champion by a long shot, not having been in the water for more than 20 minutes, the other champions still completely unaccounted for. But hearing talk of the competition and seeing everyone's ignorance about the whole situation as they clapped and smiled was pushing him to his limit as he hoisted you up to Pansy who greeted you with a thick towel.

Mattheo pulled himself out of the water, barely taking time to wrap a towel around his shoulders before grabbing three more and pulling them around you. You laughed under the heavy bundle, even as your shivering continued uncontrollably. "I-I'm okay, I-I'm okay" you said, trying to reassure him, even as you noticed that he wouldn't meet your eyes.

"Buncha fucking idiots" you heard him muttering as he rubbed your arms before he stooped down and swept you off your feet bridal style, one hand around your waist, the other holding on to your legs. The crowd cheered again, erupting in a sigh of "awws" at the gesture until he began barreling towards them.

"Matty?" you asked, concerned, "Where are we—?"

"—Anywhere but here" he growled as people began pushing each other to get out of his way.

"Mr. Riddle!" McGonagall chided, chasing after you both as you watched her from over his shoulder, urging him to stop as a couple of other professors followed in pursuit.

He veered towards the raised platform where the headmasters were seated, coming to a brief stop in front of Dumbledore who had stood to his feet.

"You are out of your fucking mind!" Mattheo spat at him.

Several people around you gasped, even Igor Karkaroff had the wherewithal to look surprised, impressed even, before Mattheo walked away, marching right off the platform and back towards the school as the entire crowd watched you go.

You could tell Mattheo was tired, beyond tired, physically, emotionally; you could feel his arms shaking against your weight.

"Matty, I can walk, it's okay" you said quietly, but he wouldn't let you go, wouldn't set you down, wouldn't even respond to you or meet your eyes. So you resigned yourself to resting your head on his shoulder, nuzzling against his neck which seemed to relax him a bit.

He carried you all the way to his room, making his way to the bathroom where he finally set you down and immediately began running you a hot bath. Wordlessly, he found a towel and a set of his clothes for you to wear, placing them at the edge of the tub before leaving without a word, closing the door gently behind him.

You looked anxiously at the closed door, aware that something was very very wrong, but also acknowledging that he might need a minute, and that you still couldn't feel the tips of your fingers or toes, so you resigned yourself to the hot water.

It felt heavenly, as did washing the muck of the lake off your skin and out of your hair. You reveled in the smell of his soap, like cedar and evergreen, but you were too anxious to sit there any longer than necessary, quickly pulling on his sweatpants and sweatshirt that engulfed your frame as you toweled your hair dry and pushed the door open.

Mattheo was seated at the edge of his bed, still dripping wet, his body shaking noticeably as he stared at the ground. He glanced up when he heard you, visibly relaxing a bit as he took in your warm, rosy cheeks and your soft smile, his mind flashing for only a moment to your unsmiling rigid form floating in the water, trying to reconcile that version of you with the one in front of him.

You approached him slowly, moving to stand between his legs as you took his face in your warm hands, tilting it to look at you. He had a strained, puzzled expression on his face as his eyes drank you in before his hands came to rest on your waist.

"Babe—" you started.

"—I love you" he said.

Your heart somersaulted over the words you'd never heard him say before as you let out a small breath, your hand moving to cover your mouth in shock as your eyes widened.

"I'm-I'm a fucking wreck for you" he continued, laughing humorlessly as he shook his head. "Today... really fucked me up. I thought I'd lost you, I thought..." he paused, getting quiet "...The way you looked down there, alone, miles under the water, surrounded by all sorts of shit" he shook his head harder like he could unlive the memory of it all.

"I should have told you sooner, because I've known for awhile, for a long fucking time, but I've been too scared to say it, too scared that you don't remotely feel the same way, but that doesn't matter anymore, nothing fucking matters other than you hearing me say it, today, every day, I love you, YN." His eyes met yours finally, wide and sincere. "With everything I've got, I love you."

"I love you too!—" you whispered, and the words were barely out of your mouth before he pressed his cold lips to yours, pulling you into him so tightly you let out an involuntary squeak as your arms moved to wrap around his neck and he fell backwards onto his bed, continuing to mumble against your lips "Iloveyou, loveyou, I loveyou", smushing your kisses with his affectionate words until you were laughing with joy, the sound finally reassuring him that you were his, and that you were okay.

♡

The boys didn’t hate love, far from it. But this? This was something else entirely. Because before you Mattheo was smug smirks and one night stands, careless hookups and relentless flirting. And now? Now he was heart eyes, soft kisses, intertwined hands and sweet whispers, nuzzling noses, pink roses, monogamous. And if that could happen to Mattheo? It could happen to any of them.

Terrifying.

Theo shook his head with his own look of disdain that slowly transformed into an irked confusion.

“It’s like he’s been drugged, like he’s on Amortentia.” He paused, a brief look of shock on his face. “Wait, you don’t think?…” He let the sentiment hang and looked around at his friends.

They all thought for a moment.

Then collectively shook their heads at the notion.

You weren’t that kind of girl. And if they were completely honest with themselves they didn’t blame Mattheo, though they’d never admit it. You were the kind of girl any of them would fall for, too sweet for your own good, with a beautiful smile and a kind heart. No, you didn’t need to drug anyone to make them fall for you.

“Can you imagine him on it, though?” Theo laughed. “I mean, what’s left? Would he stand on the table and serenade her?!”

“He’d probably propose,” Blaise said flatly.

“There would be tears involved—“ Enzo added.

“—Poems. Sonnets,” Draco snickered.

They laughed.

Then, a collective moment of silence ensued as they all imagined the utter humiliation of their lovesick friend. Slowly their thoughts permeated, and it was like small lightbulbs clicked on over each of their heads as they shared sly, mischievous smiles with one another.

— ⋆.˚⟡ ࣪ ˖

Two weeks later you slid into breakfast beside Mattheo, your thigh pressing against his, close enough to feel his radiating warmth, to be wrapped in his scent like vetiver and pine. He looked over to you and smiled so wide his eyes twinkled and a small dimple formed in each cheek.

“Good morning, YN!” Draco said eagerly, pulling you from the moment. You were taken aback at his unusually chipper energy.

“Hi, Draco,” you said, turning to smile across the table at him.

You looked around and realized all of the boys were smiling back at you, which was slightly confusing but ultimately a very welcome change; you knew your presence irked them, they were never subtle about it. So this felt… nice.

“Drink up, mate!” Blaise said, pushing a goblet towards Mattheo. “Got a big game this afternoon, don’t want you dehydrated.” Mattheo snorted but acquiesced, accepting the goblet and taking several gulps before you both busied yourselves with your breakfast.

In a moment you could feel Mattheo’s hand under the table gently squeezing your thigh and you looked over to see him smiling at you, his amber eyes twinkling and his mouth quirked in a perfect grin that you immediately mirrored.

“Hey, I love you,” he whispered and pressed a quick warm kiss to your lips. It lingered with heady pressure and your eyes fluttered closed before they opened again as he gently pulled away.

Theo and Draco were batting each other’s arms in anticipation.

Blaise was holding his breath.

But that was it.

One sincere statement. One chaste kiss. And then the morning continued in relative normality. Sure, you ogled each other, finished each other’s sentences, giggled at each other, blushed. The boys watched the two of you intently like a tennis match back and forth waiting for Mattheo’s impending implosion, his grand, drug-induced outburst. It never came.

“You fucking twat! You got a bad batch,” Theo whisper-yelled to Draco.

“Excuse me who couldn’t be bothered to go get it himself? I assure you it’s the best money can buy,” Draco rebutted.

“Clearly didn’t work…” Blaise muttered under his breath as the three of them continued to argue, each too busy bickering to notice Lorenzo sliding in beside Mattheo, half-asleep, mid-yawn reaching for the wrong goblet and taking a swig. Then another.

He felt his cheeks flush and set the goblet down very very slowly. He let out a deep breath. And then he calmly stood and sauntered down the table next to you, nearly pushing a third year off the bench to make space beside you.

He sat backwards, leaning against the table so he was facing you directly. Closely. Mattheo looked up briefly, clocking his movement.

“Hey,” Enzo said, smoothly running his hand through his hair, tousling it in the effortless way he liked to do to get attention.

“Hi Enzo,” you giggled.

“Fuck I love how my name sounds on your lips” he said, low and sultry.

“What?” You laughed again, your giggle a bit more unstable.

“What the fuck did you just say to her?” Mattheo echoed, the rising edge of his tone finally catching the others’ attention.

But Lorenzo only had eyes for you and your lips… his lidded eyes locked on them as he bit his own like he was indulgently imagining what you tasted like.

“You’re so fucking hot, YN. I’m crazy about you,” he said, breathless.

Mattheo was on his feet. “Berkshire you have two fucking seconds to back the fuck away from her before your face meets the table.”

You looked quickly between Enzo and Mattheo, trying to diffuse the situation.

And now Theo, Draco, and Blaise were paying attention for an entirely different reason.

Blaise reached for Mattheo’s goblet, confirming it was empty. “Enz,” he asked. “Did you drink this??”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”Mattheo snapped, his eyes never leaving Lorenzo whose eyes never left you. He couldn’t look away from you, his cheeks swirling pink with flustered desire. He couldn’t stop thinking about kissing you; you, you, you, your gorgeous hair, your delicious perfume, your laugh, your perfect laugh, your goddamn lips, all of you, right there in front of him this whole time. He had to have you. He reached for you.

And was yanked off his seat and flung to the floor.

“—No no no!!” Theo shouted.

“—Wait!!” Blaise yelled.

They tried to intercede, leaping over table.

“—You don’t fucking touch her!” Mattheo roared as he pinned Lorenzo down.

“Matty!!” you shouted, scrambling to your feet.

“I love her!!” Enzo shouted valiantly. “She’s everything to me, Riddle you’ll never understand the way I feel!”

Mattheo’s fist flew and Enzo let out a yell as he grabbed his face, blood gushing between his fingers.

“Say that shit again!” Mattheo dared, just as his friends managed to grab ahold of him, barely holding him back.

“ILUFFHER!” Enzo cried, the sentiment muffled in tears beneath his hands and his blood.

Mattheo tried to swing again.

“Mattheo!!” Theo shouted as they held him back. “He’s drugged! He’s on Amortentia!!”

Mattheo’s attention finally snapped to his friends. “What?!”

“We put it in your goblet” Blaise admitted quickly.

“Why the fuck?—“ Mattheo started.

“—Come on,” Draco said, pushing the group towards the door as he nervously eyed the nearby professors.

— ⋆.˚⟡ ࣪ ˖

All of you sat side by side on a bench outside the infirmary.

Blaise was rubbing his temple.

Draco had his arms crossed as he pouted.

Theo looked down at his hands in his lap.

Mattheo flexed his split knuckle which was slowly mending itself as you held his other hand.

And on the far end of the bench, Lorenzo held a rag to his bleeding nose, staunching the blood there as the side effects of the Amortentia wore off, leaving him confused and very grumpy.

“What doesn’t make sense is that you drank it too, didn’t you?” you asked Mattheo quietly.

“Yeah, I mean I remember feeling warm in my chest, like I wanted to be near you and tell you how I felt,” he said.

A pause.

“Maybe that just means I can’t possibly love you more than I already do?” he concluded, glancing at you with a lopsided, lovesick smile.

Lorenzo gagged.

Draco sighed.

Theo groaned.

And Blaise ran his hands down his face as you leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Mattheo’s lips with a satisfying smack.

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."

It was no wonder that his brother told him that this year would be exciting, and while Fred thought it would be exciting simply because of the triwizard tournament, something even more exciting is happening, and that something is wearing blue. While some of the other male Hogwarts students were looking where they shouldn’t as the beauxbaton’s students performed their elaborate introduction in the blue uniform with the short skirts. Fred was more focused on something else. 

She was wearing the uniform better than anyone else, the blue making her shine more than any of the others. She wasn’t in the centre of the performance but it sure felt like she was for him. Ron whispered (though whispered is giving him too much grace) beside him, “Bloody hell!” 

Hermione rolls her eyes from next to his oblivious brothers, George teases Ron, but Fred didn’t pay a spec of attention to the interaction between his brothers. As the students of beauxbaton’s reach the end of their introduction, Fred stands up to not lose sight of her. They conclude their performance with a bow and a smile. The boys holler with far too much enthusiasm. Fred only claps quietly, and stays standing up until George forces him to sit down. 

Fred’s cheeks flush when his brothers turn to him this time. George teases him, shoving his shoulder, asking, “so who’s caught your fancy?” 

The question makes more people from the table turn around to face them. It’s a rare sight to see Fred flush and look at his lap in embarrassment. Lee, Angelina, Ron, Hermione, Harry and Spinnit, all watching attentively. The persona glides back on and he scoffs, shrugging his shoulders slightly, “Don’t be silly, no one.” 

His eyes still trail to where she’s still standing in the ending pose while Professor Dumbledore kisses the headmistress of Beauxbaton’s whose name he didn’t catch, too distracted. His focus is pulled only by the jarring and contrasting fire when the Durmstrang students enter the hall, but even then, he notices her reactions to the Durmstrang boys, only a little green. His brain elsewhere until the students start walking towards the long dining tables, more specifically when the students wearing blue silk start walking towards the Gryffindor table. 

He smacks his hand repeatedly on his twin’s shoulder and asks, “Where are they going? Where are they going to sit?” 

“Didn’t you hear? Durmstrang males with Slytherin, Durmstrang females with Hufflepuff, Beauxbatons males with Ravenclaw and Beauxbatons females with Gryffindor,” George explains quickly, as Fred’s face morphs with horror. All too knowing, George says, “Don’t worry, what are the odds that she’ll sit near us?” 

The odds were apparently not in their favor (or maybe they were?) because instead of sitting in a cluster at one end of the table, their headmistress encouraged them to socialise with the students of Hogwarts, so they spread out all along the table. As luck would have it, she sat smack dab right in front of them on the opposite end of the table, smoothing her skirt with her hands before sitting on the wooden bench. She shoots everyone a smile while they all stare as if she were an alien. 

“She might not even know English, it’s gonna be okay,” Fred whispers to George, trying to calm down the marching thumps of his heart. The Weasley boys don’t know how to whisper. Her head snaps towards them and in a perfect King’s English British accent, she says, “I do know English, thank you very much, no need to whisper about me.” 

She folds her arm in front of her chest. Fred’s mouth hangs just enough so his lips part, it takes him too long to answer, so George takes the lead, “Sorry, we didn’t mean to be rude, what’s your name?” 

Her name drips from her lips as sweet as honey and as perfect as she is, less with the scowl that she’s currently pointing towards him. George gives his brother a look and when the response is still loading, he offers their names. Just as fast as he blinks, Fred switches his demeanour. A known and comfortable mischievous grin slips on his face. He leans forward towards her and says, “So, what’s Beauxbaton’s like and what’s a Brit doing there and not here?”

“Well, my step-brother went there first because he’s French and then mom decided it’d be easier if we both went to the same school,” she shrugs, the defensive attitude melting away. Dumbledore claps his hands and the tables flood with food, the Hogwarts students note that it’s more extravagant than their usual dinners. 

“Shame, I could’ve known you earlier,” Fred flirts, and she half chokes on the spoon in her mouth. She coughs twice and her eyes dart around, nervous, her cheeks flushing, the complete opposite of the guarded look she had. Fred grins satisfied when he sees the red tint to her face, completely neglecting his brother noticing his own flush. The conversation continues, “What does it look like there?”

“It’s a lot more…glamorous than here,” she says, looking around her, finally taking a good look at the hall for the first time, “Both beautiful of course, but Beauxbatons looks more like something out of an art museum. There’s ice sculptures everywhere, lots of big gardens and nymphs that sing music to us during meals.” 

“Sounds like better entertainment than this,” Fred jokes, looking around and she notices that most of her friends have moved from sitting next to the older years to the younger ones. She shrugs her shoulders and muses, “This is alright too.” 

There isn’t any other way to describe Fred’s reaction other than he positively beams, so much so that Ron snickers at him. Fred shoves him from underneath the table, it’s not as if Ron is any better when it comes to these matters. Fred clears his throat, “As for the gardens, I could show you around.” 

“I’d like that.”

***

It’s starting to become an inconvenience. Fleur is lovely, everyone is at Beauxbatons. It’s a misconception that we all secretly hate each other, but I might consider throwing myself from a large mountain into a cold ocean if another boy from Hogwarts or Durmstrang asks her to the Yule Ball in front of me. She’s part Veela and not to mention absolutely stunning, she’s just completely magnetic, but that’s not the problem.

I’ve been asked out plenty, though not by who I wanted. Fleur’s already secured a date with Roger Davis who she’s enamoured with. Elodie had agreed to go with the best looking guy from Durmstrang, though a little bit vexed because Viktor Krum was taken. George had already asked Angelina ages ago! The Yule Ball is only a week away now and nothing! If only Fred could pluck up some of the courage his twin had.

Exploring Hogwarts in the last two months has been incredible, as well as the first challenge (Though having my friend fight off a dragon was not as enjoyable for me as it were for everyone else cheering in the arena). It also helps that I have one of the most charming (and handsome) people I’ve met show it all to me, along with a secret trip to Hogsmeade.

He arranged it in secret, led us through tunnels when it was after dinner and curfew. The cobwebs were horrible but all worth the sight of the old buildings under the night sky while Fred and I shared a butterbeer. I thought he’d for sure ask me then, when he, not so subtly, asked me about all the guys that have asked me to the ball, and not just that, he also asked me what their invitations were lacking. I replied: 

“It’s not like I want something big, I would actually hate it if someone asked me in front of everyone, it would feel more like I’m being pressured, not invited. I think I’d like something more secluded, maybe just something we’d get, we don’t have to be alone or anything but it should still feel intimate. I just want to feel like they care” 

After pouring my heart out, he’d simply nodded and kept walking to show me where the best sugar quills were sold. I was left flustered and it took me a few seconds before I could get my feet to follow him. Maybe it’s taking him so long because he’s planning something special…at least I hope so. 

It’s too difficult not to think about when I’m on my way to a mandatory study session that Madame Maxime demanded we take with the Hogwarts students. Apparently, many of the students, myself included, in all of the schools have neglected their studies in favor of experiencing the tri-wizard tournament with all its perks. 

There’s even been some talk about some chaotic parties thrown by the seventh years right after the champions were selected that had resulted in detention for a week for everyone involved. 

It’s only a small up-side when Madame Maxime tells us that we can sit anywhere we’d like. Without a second thought I choose to sit with the Gryffindors, regardless of the fact that the horrible professor Snape that Fred tells me about is the one directing their session. Regardless, any time spent with Fred is better than time spent without him. It’s only slightly unnerving how much I like him.

The table is spilling students from each side, everyone cramped onto the bench, so I sit opposite to Fred instead of right beside him. It wasn’t as disadvantageous as I’m making it sound, I could sneak glances at him when he wasn’t looking; his hair, his eyes and his freckles, I could spend days just looking at them. I dream of the opportunity to be so close to him that I could count them. 

Unintentionally and hopelessly, I let out a sigh. It’s just then when I’m shushed by Snape quite aggressively though I’d take it over being smacked on the head like Harry and Fred’s brother, Ron. It’s then when I realise that Snape wouldn’t let us let a whisper out, squandering my plans of sharing whispers and mumbles with Fred. 

I’m not sure if he would’ve liked that, though. When I entered the Great Hall, I was greeted by his friends and family, but not him, not so much as a glance. He didn’t peek from his paper to even offer a wave and it left a pit in my stomach. He hasn’t so much as created a bit of mischief, which he’d adore, considering that it’s Snape that’s watching over us. 

It seems that he’s actually studying. He hasn’t lifted his head from looking at his paper and jotting down the answers with his quill. My own studies weren’t too long. I’m nearly finished with the work when I feel something hitting me on the head before falling on my papers. It’s a- small paper ball? My face twists in confusion, another one smacks my head. Frustration bubbles inside me until I hear a familiar voice going, “PSSSTTT!” 

I grin, looking at Fred. ‘What?’ I mouth, before looking back, thinking of our safety from the professor’s anger, finding Snape looking somewhere else entirely. I look back and prompt Fred to go on, nodding with my head. He grins and instinctively, I grin too. Along with some elaborate motions with his hand, and twisting his torso left and right, he half mouths-whispers, ‘Would you go to the ball with me?’ 

My smile drops while he eagerly looks at me. Didn’t he listen to a thing I said? It was only a few days ago, he couldn’t have forgotten? As always, the question prompts people around us to whisper to each other, some giggle and others just mumble. I can hear them speculating what my answer would be. 

I flush under everyone’s eyes. I don’t enjoy being the subject of people’s discussions. I look back at Fred, his eyes wide with anticipation. I can’t keep the frown off of my face. The pit in my stomach grew and it made my eyes prickle. I reply, firmly, “No.” 

I stand up quickly, gathering my items haphazardly, thinking of the absolute horror of being rejected in front of many people, and that I’d put Fred through that. With my head down, I hand Snape the papers in my hand, missing the answers to the last paper before I semi-sprint out of the Great Hall. 

***

“Hey, can we talk?” Fred asks me as soon as I walk out of Astronomy. In truth, I didn’t want to talk to him. It’s only been a few hours since he’d ‘asked’ me, and I need some time to myself. Not to mention that it’s past midnight and I’m desperate for some sleep, my eyes heavy with sleep and ache. Still, my heart urges me to nod my head and follow him down the spiral steps and to the left towards some alcove, one that’s only secluded now because of the lack of students. 

I chew on my bottom lip, feeling the lip gloss on my tongue. I shudder at the taste even if it does taste like vanilla. I fold my arms and lean against the wall behind me, looking at him through my lashes, waiting for an explanation. When I adjust my satchel on my shoulder, he takes it out of my hands saying, “Let me hold that for you.” 

Against my better judgement, it makes all sorts of butterflies in my stomach fly that die when just like earlier today, he’s avoiding my eyes, staring at the ground, the ceiling, the wall above my head, anything, just not me. I gulp when he starts talking, “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable today…”

“I just thought you liked me.” 

Against my better judgement, and beyond my ability to control it, my face twists. My upper lip scrunches up and my eyebrows touch and I frown. The words are so inaccurate that it’s hard for me to believe them coming out of his mouth. I scoff, “That can't seriously be the reason why you think I said no.” 

He snaps his head up from admiring his shoes and he says, “It’s not?” 

“I do like you Fred, but I hate the way you asked me,” I start, and then I sigh, unfolding my arms and trying to relax my face, I touch my cheek before continuing, “I hate how you asked me. It felt like you didn’t even care, like you were just asking me for the sake of getting a date and not actually because you wanted to ask me. I told you how I wanted to be asked and you did the exact opposite!” 

“I do care! I only want to go to the Yule Ball with you,” Fred admits, and the heat crawls up my neck. It takes everything in me to hold my ground, it nearly crumbles when he reaches out to hold my hand. His long fingers, encasing my hand perfectly, the warmth, exactly what I needed after the long lesson in the tall tower. 

“I’m sorry…I was scared, I didn’t want you to say no to me, so I made it impossible for you to not say no,” Fred explained, and I blink a couple of times before I laugh, “Fred, that’s the worst logic I’ve ever heard in my life.” 

It makes a smile break out on his face, and he squeezes my hand, “I know, I don’t understand why I get so nervous when I’m around you.” 

“You? The Fred Weasley nervous?” I tease. He commands every room with ease, comfortable with everyone’s attention, he revels in it. His pranks are always done where everyone can see them and applaud. So he’s nervous? Because of me? His face turns the same color as his hair and he raises his other hand to rub the back of his neck, throwing his head back, looking at the ceiling. He chuckles, “Don’t you remember the day we met?” 

“I just thought you were rude,” I say, remembering his whispers to George, but now, it makes sense. His jaw hanging and the way he let George do most of the talking. Fred laughs again at my comment. A moment passes and then he says my name and adds, “I really, really like you.” 

“I like you too, Fred,” I answered in a heartbeat. The heat reached up to my ears. He takes my other hand in his and he promises, “I’m going to ask you again tomorrow and it’ll be exactly what you want.”

I nod my head and my cheeks hurt from how wide my smile is, and I can barely see his face from how the smile makes my eyes squint. It seems like he’s the same. He nods his head along the path and motions for us to start walking. He takes a big step with his long legs before I grasp on to his hand tighter, stopping him. He stumbles and I giggle before hesitantly saying, “Fred, I know this would be much more romantic after the ball, but kiss me now instead?” 

It’s so fast that I couldn’t take a breath before he twists his arms around my waist and pulls me flush against him. His other hand cradles my head and he slams his lips onto mine, my own hands finding his back and shoulders. Madame Maxime would have a fit finding one of her students snogging a Hogwarts student past midnight in the middle of the hallways. He mumbles, “Don’t worry, it’ll be just as romantic when I kiss you then.” 

a/n: I hope you enjoyed reading! If you think this didn’t completely suck, feel free to check out my other masterlists. You can also support the blog or buy me a coffee here.

The Divination classroom was overwhelmingly warm, the air thick and foggy with incense as you ascended the ladder into the classroom. This was not your favourite class, by far: nobody, even yourself, a keen academic, could take Professor Trelawney's 'seeing' seriously, especially not after she had predicted your bloody death four times last term. Much to her disappointment, you were still alive.

Without Divination, you would be averaging all O's (Outstanding), but because of Professor Trelawney's class, your average was brought down by your A (Acceptable). You just could not help yourself from drifting off into a light snooze when the classroom was so warm and she was droning on for so long... It was not at all an environment conducive to learning. Of course, it made it even harder to concentrate when she paired you with the Fred Weasley. You’d been hopelessly in love with him for two years, and how couldn't you be? He was selfless, clever, popular, funny, and really didn't care what anyone thought of him: he was the perfect combination of silly and serious. It didn't help that he was also about six-foot-three, built well from all of the years of Quidditch, and had a real knack for making you blush. Still, there was no way he could like you back. You were, according to Fred, 'just as bad as Hermie the Bookwormie' when it came to studying. You didn't fool yourself with the idea that Fred Weasley, notoriously averse to schoolwork, would be interested in more-than-friendship with someone as interested in their grades as Hermione Granger.

As you tried to look unbothered by your partnering, Fred slid into the much-too-small seat across from you with an easy, crooked grin that made your stomach flip. “Looks like fate’s finally smiling on me,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “Or Trelawney’s trying to get me to behave by pairing me with you." You huffed out a quiet laugh, shaking your head as you pretended to study the crystal ball between you whilst actually fighting back a grave blush. “We should, erm, probably look for revelations or something.” You furrowed your brows in faux concentration. Fred leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers idly playing with the doily in boredom. "Yeah. Patterns. Sure.” His eyes wandered the room listlessly before settling on you; you could feel him staring as you took notes on what you saw "So, I think I see three rings... maybe that's something to do with Quidditch? Oh no, maybe they're doors, actually..." You scratched a line through your notes, jotting down your findings with as much enthusiasm as you could muster for the subject.

Professor Trelawney drifted by in a cloud of perfume and scarves, peering into your and Fred's crystal with dramatic flair. “Oh, my dear boy,” she gasped, clutching Fred’s shoulder. "What? Death again?" “No, no! I see great romance in your very near future! A passionate connection… someone who has been right under your nose for a very long time…” Fred’s eyes flicked to you instantly as she continued; you stifled a laugh, sure that his look was one of disbelief.