Coping Mechanisms
I had this idea of doing a story with multiple endings for all the people who can't decide between Seb or Ominis.
Plot Summary: So what would happen if you'd been friends with Anne, Sebastian, and Ominis since you were sorted into Slytherin at eleven. What would you do if someone tried to curse your best friend in front of you?
I'll link at the bottom Ominis, Sebastians, and a poly chapter with both! Because why choose
If anyone wants to read anything else about these two please let me know! I'm a little besotted
Disclaimer: This chapter is PG but the final chapters with the boys are a hard (wink) E. If you're not into that and want to read a fluffy PG version let me know!
You woke up the summer of your fourth year to one of your best friends poking you insistently.
“Wake up!” Anne hissed. You blink groggily up at the pale brunette, slightly annoyed.
“I am not helping you put toad spawn in Sebastian’s shoes.” You groan, burying your face into your pillow. Anne rolls her eyes and pokes you again.
“Never mind that. There’s someone at the old manor! I think they’re robbing the place.” You lift you head and stare at her.
“And that pertains to us how?” You ask. Anne huffs and grabs your wrist.
“Because. It’s our village and we have to protect it from thieves and rapists.” You can’t help but snort as you dress, fingers automatically lacing and buttoning your cloths in the dark.
“Your uncle is an Auror. Shouldn’t he handle this?”
“Ex-Auror.” Anne corrects, already dressed. “And he’s not here tonight.
“The boys?” You inquire, nodding towards the door at the other end of the room leading to the room that held your other two best friends. Anne shook her head.
“They wouldn’t let us go. You know how Sebastian is.” With that she grabbed her wand and marched out of the house. And, knowing how Anne was, you followed vowing to keep your friend as far from bodily harm as possible.
You met her outside the house and with a jerk of her head and a finger to her lips Anne guided you up the hill towards the old house that stood like a lurking creature at the top. As you squinted at it you saw that what Anne had said was true. Torches were moving back and forth in the windows and you could hear voices carrying down to you. The two of you quickly made your way there and stopped just outside the stone fence, crouching behind it and peeking out. You saw short figures moving to and fro and heard dark gravelly voices muttering back and forth. Anne’s brow furrowed in confusion.
“Goblins? What would goblins want with an old house?” Before you could answer Anne stood up and ducked around the wall.
“I’m going to get a closer look.” Before you could protest she was running into the dark. You hissed her name and followed, but when you went around the corner of the house after her a dark voice ripped through the gloom.
“Children should be seen and not heard.” A bolt of red shot through the air at your friend. Without evening thinking you threw yourself forward, hitting Anne and taking her to the ground. As a result, the curse hit you full in the back and you felt your skin splitting down to the bone as agony coursed through you. You’d never had Crucio cast on you but you could imagine that it felt like this. You heard screaming but you weren’t sure if it was you or Anne.
~~~
You woke later the next day in St. Mungo’s. At your change of breathing you heard frantic shuffling, then a familiar voice.
“Hey. Hey, you’re awake. Thank Merlin.” You open your eyes to see Sebastian standing over you, eyes wide and hair even messier than usual. Glancing around him you see Anne slumped asleep in a chair by the window next to an also sleeping Ominis. Sebastian glances over his shoulder at the two then back at you.
“How are you feeling? I was so scared when I heard Anne screaming. I – we – thought you were dead.” You open your mouth then wince at the dryness of your throat. Sebastian sees this and quickly goes to work grabbing you some water. He carefully lifts your head and helps you take a sip before settling you back down.
“Thank you.” You whisper and he nods.
“No, thank you. Anne says that the curse was meant for her. You’re a hero.” His eyes are a little shiny in the dim candlelight and you flush a little at his words and shake your head. You plant your arms on the bed and try to push yourself up to refute his claim but a wave of agony so strong you almost pass out whites out your vision. It feels as if you’re being skinned alive and a strangled scream leaves your throat. Both of your sleeping friends jolt awake at the sound and suddenly you have three sets of hands holding you up.
“What happened.” Ominis is staring at you in that uncanny way he has, always able to find your face and eyes even across the room.
“I don’t know.” You whimper. “My back. It hurts.”
You’re gasping by now. Slowly and gently, the three of them pull you up to a sitting position and Anne carefully pulls the back of your gown down, her fingers feeling amazingly cool against your burning skin. You’re too busy lost in the soothing touch to even be embarrassed about Sebastian seeing the bare skin of your shoulders.
“There’s nothing here.” She whispers. “Just a scar. Where the curse hit you I think.” You frown.
“I felt it cut me when I got hit.” Sebastian’s fingers tighten in rage where they held your arms.
“They put a healing salve on it.” Ominis explained. “I heard them say so to Solomon.”
“It looks like those four sided stars they put on Christmas trees.” Anne said, putting your dress back to rights. You lay back, the pain fading to almost nothing.
“At least its pretty.” You sigh. Anne smiles but then begins to cry.
“It’s all my fault. I brought you there. I wanted to see what they were doing. I’m so sorry..” She trails off, burying her face in her hands.
“No, no.” You coo, slowly leaning forward so as to not aggravate your injury. “I’m glad it hit me and not you. I can handle pain much better than you.”
Anne stopped crying instantly, her indignation cutting off her grief.
“What makes you think that?” She demanded.
“I’m taller than you.” You say pertly and Anne sputters.
“You’re the same height.” Ominis pipes up dryly and before you can ask him how the hell he knows that, a nurse pokes her head into the room.
“Oh good, you’re awake.” She says smiling a little too brightly. You sit up again and Sebastian quickly moves to help you, settling you fully upright against the pillows.
“Your parents are here. I’ll send them in. Your friends can wait outside.” You swallow and nod, sending a slightly panicked look to Anne who glances back in commiseration.
You were muggle-born and while your parents weren’t ‘anti-magic’ it scared the hell out of them. They thought you might explode either themselves or their house at any second which was the reason you spent so much time at the Sallow house even if they did claim it was because the train ride was shorter from Feldcroft to Hogwarts.
Your friends shuffled out and a pair of terrified muggles shuffled in. Instead of coming to sit next to you as the others had they both stood at the foot of the bed, your father standing slightly in front of your mother as if shielding her. Suddenly you realize that your earlier explosion metaphor may not be all that far off in their eyes.
Over the next few minutes you alternately try to coax them closer and calm them down but in the end, its Solomon’s intervention that saves you. He announces that you would stay with him for the rest of the summer and the professors at Hogwarts would surely have a solution in the coming semester. You knew they trusted the man, all you’d had to do was tell them he was a wizard police officer, so they agreed quickly and with relief. They left soon after that, edging nervously around Ominis as he and the others came back in. This made you scowl at their backs as no insult to you could.
“They still think he’s cursed?” Sebastian asked in a low voice at your look. You nod.
“Superstitious twaddle.”
You spend the next few days with healer after healer attempting to rectify the curse placed on you. It caused terrible pain radiating from the scar if you moved too quickly or harshly; otherwise it was a dull ache. You insisted you could manage it. You had to. If you couldn’t return to Hogwarts you would be consigning yourself to being a muggle for the rest of your life and after five years of magic, the thought of having your wand snapped gave you worse pain than any curse could ever.
So, in a week you return to the Sallow house with your three best friends to support you. By the time you are all back at Hogwarts, you’re starting to get a handle on what causes the pain to worsen and what helps in the times when it's unavoidable. The dull ache fades to the back of your mind most of the time but it's always there and it's exhausting. There are times when you can’t sleep for hours on end because of it and even when you can you are plagued with nightmares. What if you hadn’t been there? Or if Anne had woken Sebastian or Ominis? What if the pain was bad all the time? You’d wake up covered in sweat or wracked with agony. At first, you woke the others in your dorm with your cries but after a while, you got better at keeping silent. You knew Anne was so full of guilt already, that you didn’t need to add to her suffering.
It was when you stopped sleeping that you noticed a difference in the two boys. They had always been caring in their own way, they were your best friends after all, but now they took it up to eleven. Sebastian in particular wouldn’t let you carry anything heavier than your wand and would probably carry you from class to class if you’d allow it. Ominis was always fetching anything you wanted or needed and encouraging you to eat even if the pain got too bad. Because of your injury, you couldn’t ride a broom so you spent those classes with your blind partner in crime. You found it soothing to read to him on the lawn while the other student flew around far above your heads. He joked he wanted to be close for when Sebastian eventually fell off his broom.
Sebastian got many a-detention by sneaking into the restricted section in hopes of finding ways to help the pain until you impatiently asked him why he hadn’t asked a teacher for access. This befuddled him enough that he didn’t say anything while you marched to Madam Scribner and asked if Sebastian could help in the library in return for a pass to the section. He became an assistant of sorts to her and what that meant was that you barely had to think of a book you wanted before he had it for you.
To be fair he did find a few helpful treatments, including a numbing oil that he commissioned from Garreth Weasley after you explained a muggle version you’d read about. It made it so that drying off after a bath wasn’t agonizing. Of course, Garreth brewing this did come at a cost, namely Sebastian not turning him into a small mammal after he finally asked Anne to go to Hogsmeade with him, which you were grateful for. You would hate for all your hard work encouraging them to actually talk to each other instead of staring longingly across the potions table to come to nothing because of a jealous twin brother. You even held his attention on the day of the big date by insisting Sebastian teach Ominis to fly while you shouted encouraging things from the ground.
At the end of the year, you went home and spent two whole weeks with your parents with them alternately scurrying around you, and trying to make you take muggle pain relievers, which you outright refused; you knew what things like cocaine did to people's minds. Thankfully they sent you to Feldcroft not long after for which you were thankful.
In your sixth year, Ominis found out you weren’t sleeping when you fell asleep during charms, a class you actually enjoyed. After much coaxing, you admitted to him about the nightmares and he finally opened up to you about his. You discovered his secret about his parents using the unforgivable curses on him and found solace in your shared experiences. You also discovered what a nice napping buddy he could be and, as you both found the undercroft soothing, you could often be found there curled up in a pile; like bunnies in a warren.
Ominis never kept secrets if he could help it so after hearing Sebastian ask you for the umpteenth time about the dark circles under your eyes he took Sebastian aside and quietly explained the situation. At first, the dark-haired boy was angry, demanding to know why you hadn’t told him yourself. Ominis told him your worries about Sebastian’s anxiety and Anne’s guilt. How Sebastian had finally stopped constantly looking for a cure. He listened, and together with Ominis, met with you at the library where they softly comforted you and explained that they would always be there to help.
A few nights later when he couldn’t sleep Ominis found you in the common area, staring out into the water. Without a word, he sat next to you on the lounge and pulled you close, and together you fell asleep. This became routine, one of them would come down to the common room in the middle of the night and curl up with you on the couch by the window where you'd both be found fast asleep in the morning. It was like they had a second sense of when your pain got bad.
As you got older, the burden of the pain became harder to bear. You found yourself, instead of waiting for one of them to join you on the couch, simply going to their dorm room and slipping into one of their beds. Usually whoever was most awake. This is how you found that Sebastian was a serious cuddler, he liked to wrap his arms around you and pull you so tightly to his chest that you could barely move.
Ominis on the other hand simply liked having you close to him and would lightly lay a hand on some part of your body. Top of your head, arm thrown over your waist, or holding your hand in his. If you woke with a nightmare or pain he would whisper gentle words to you and stroke your face. Sebastian would hold you tightly and do the same.
When you told Anne she acted scandalized and later confronted the boys about the possible consequences to your reputation.
“Reputation?” Sebastian scoffed. “Who cares about something daft like that.”
But Ominis looked concerned for a moment.
“Wait. Maybe Anne’s right. What about when she wants to get married?”
Sebastian glanced at the girl in question who was deep in conversation with Poppy across the lawn. She was clutching Duncan tightly by the back of the robes as the Hufflepuff girl held a Puffskein out to him. Sebastian grinned as he turned to face Ominis.
“Then one of us will have to marry her.”
Ending A: Ominis
Ending B: Sebastian
