Fred Weasley was somehow your greatest academic rival, and you had no idea how. How - when all he does is slack off - is it that he keeps matching your grades? You’re determined to get to the bottom of whatever his (undoubtedly nefarious) secret is.
———————————————————————
The air in the Transfiguration classroom was stifling, even in late autumn. The late afternoon sun slanted through the tall mullioned windows in golden strips, casting long shadows across the rows of desks and dust particles that floated like glitter in the light. Quills scratched. Parchment rustled. Somewhere near the back, someone sneezed.
And still, the only sound she could hear was the frantic thrum of her heart pounding in her ears. She hunched over her desk, the nib of her quill racing across parchment like a broomstick in a storm. Her fingers ached from the grip. The muscles in her hand screamed. But there was no time to ease up. Not when McGonagall’s countdown to the end of the timed essay hovered around two minutes.
She dipped her quill swiftly in ink and began the conclusion: In sum, Animagus transfiguration, while complex and regulated, functions as an exemplary case of intent-driven magical theory, particularly in contrast to involuntary or accidental transformations—
A faint laugh from across the aisle. She didn’t even need to look up. She didn’t need to see him to recognise it was him.
Fred Weasley was leaning back in his chair on two legs, arms crossed behind his head, looking as though he hadn’t a care in the world. His essay - if it could be called that - was folded into an origami dragon, already finished, resting on his desk smugly. He was smiling to himself, one leg swinging casually under the table, as if Transfiguration Theory and Application was merely a light suggestion in his day rather than a critical O.W.L.-level subject.
Her eye twitched.
“I will not let him tie with me again,” she hissed under her breath, attacking her parchment with renewed fervor.
It had become routine, the two of them. Every class where they shared a syllabus, she ended up sharing the highest mark too. Always a tie. Always announced with a faint, vaguely amused smile from the professor. And always followed by a smug glance from Fred Weasley, who somehow achieved her level of success despite doodling on his parchment and spending most of his class time whispering jokes to Lee Jordan or trying to make paper birds attack George.
And he had the audacity - the gall - to look relaxed while she was fighting for her academic life.
“Time’s up!” Professor McGonagall announced.
Quills dropped. Parchments flew to the front in a neat enchanted shuffle, stacking themselves on the desk beside her. She finally let her fingers relax, flexing the ache out of her knuckles as her breath came out in a slow, deliberate exhale. She didn’t even dare look across the aisle yet. But Fred spoke first.
“Well, that was invigorating,” he said, stretching like a cat, arms over his head. His shirt tugged slightly up from his belt, and she forced herself not to look at the sliver of skin that flashed.
Instead, she rolled her eyes and muttered, “You didn’t even try.”
“I’ll have you know,” Fred said, swinging his legs out into the aisle and resting his elbows on his knees, “I used a very advanced studying technique.”
“Oh, this I’ve got to hear.”
He leaned in conspiratorially. “I dreamt the entire essay up last night. McGonagall was wearing a top hat and shouting theories at me while juggling ferrets.”
She blinked at him.
He nodded solemnly. “Very informative.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“And yet, I’m a smart idiot,” he said with a wide grin. “Which makes me, technically, your equal.”
She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I don’t need to,” he said with a wink. “McGonagall does it for me when she announces our mutual top marks.”
That did it. Her jaw clenched. Her arms crossed. Her whole posture radiated thunderclouds.
Fred’s smirk faltered slightly. “Wait…are you actually mad?”
She glared. “You think this is a joke.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked, raising a brow. “A fun little back-and-forth? Bit of friendly competition?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you want to know what I did last night while you were probably charming your shampoo to sing backup vocals or whatever idiotic things it is you get up to?”
He snorted. “That actually sounds brilliant.”
She plowed on. “I stayed up revising every single sub-category of Animagus law. I re-wrote my notes. Color-coded my citations. I practiced conjuring six different species of feather. Do you know how hard it is to get magpie plumage exactly right?”
Fred blinked. “I thought that was just…you being thorough.”
“No, Fred,” she hissed. “It’s me trying not to lose. To you of all people.”
He tilted his head, still not quite grasping it. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It is when you don’t even care. You just show up, half-awake and smug, draw little creatures in the margins, and still walk away with the same grade I do!”
“Look, I study—”
“When?” she snapped. “Between setting off peeves and blowing up fireworks in the stairwell?”
Fred grinned faintly. “I have excellent time management.”
She nearly combusted. “I hate you.”
His grin widened. “No, you don’t.”
She huffed and shoved her books into her satchel, the leather flap snapping with finality. Her cheeks were burning, a deep flush spreading across her skin. Part rage, part embarrassment, and maybe a little part of something else.
He was too damn calm. Too charming. Too…unbothered. It drove her insane.
The class emptied around them as students poured into the corridor, chattering about the weekend’s Quidditch match. She stepped quickly, not wanting to share the hallway with him. But of course, Fred easily matched her pace, hands in his pockets, long legs catching up in two strides.
“Say,” he said, as if their conversation hadn’t just ended in emotional arson, “since we’re obviously so academically compatible—”
“Don’t you dare say we should study together.”
“I was going to say duel for the affection of Hermione’s cat, but now that you mention it—”
“I will hex you.”
“I’d let you,” he said, grinning, “but only if you promise to bandage my wounds afterward.”
She stopped mid-step. Turned. Glared up at him. “You think this is all a game.”
Fred’s smile faded a little. “I think you’re brilliant. And it’s fun keeping up with you.”
She didn’t know what to do with that. Her heart stuttered. “I have to go,” she muttered, turning on her heel.
———————————————————————
It started with a smirk.
A small one. Barely a twitch of the lips, really. But on Fred Weasley, it was never just a smirk. It was a declaration. A flare in the sky. A banner that read: I know something you don’t, and I’m going to enjoy it.
She knew that smirk too well. She had seen it across the Great Hall when Marcus Flint got locked in the broom cupboard with a howler that screamed in French for ten minutes. She had seen it when Lee Jordan tried to tell a joke and Fred finished it louder and better. And she had definitely seen it every time a professor announced a tie for highest marks in a class.
“Quiet down, everyone,” Professor McGonagall said as she entered, robes sweeping behind her like a storm cloud. She waved her wand, and the stack of freshly graded essays floated into her hands. “I’ve marked your last assignments. Some of you showed significant improvement. Others—” her eyes flicked toward Lee, who visibly wilted, “—may need to reconsider their priorities.”
The classroom buzzed with low-level tension. Desks creaked. Students sat a little straighter. Fred leaned back, arms folded behind his head like he was in a hammock. She felt it then, that tight coil in her stomach, like something was coming.
McGonagall began handing out the essays one by one. Her name hadn’t been called yet. Neither had his. She swallowed hard.
She knew she did well. That was the best damn essay she’d probably ever written for this class. Her arguments were structured, she used sources from the restricted section, and she had even added a footnote on shifting transfiguration theories in ancient Egypt. She had revised until her candle burnt down to its waxy nub and left a scorch mark on her desk. There was no way Fred Weasley could have outdone that.
McGonagall stopped at her desk, offered a nod, and handed her the parchment.
She took it, flipped it over, and froze. 98. She blinked. Checked again. Still 98. That was…still an excellent mark. Outstanding. Almost flawless. And everyone knew McGonagall never gave out full marks, so it was almost as perfect as perfect could get for a Transfiguration grade.
“Mr. Weasley,” McGonagall said next, placing his paper on the desk with a flick of her wrist. “Congratulations. A well-earned 99.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Fred gasped, loud and theatrical. “OH NO. NO WAY.”
George cheered. “HE BEAT HER!”
Lee Jordan, from two rows back, clapped like they’d won the bloody Quidditch Cup. “It’s a Hogwarts miracle!”
Fred stood up, arms raised like a champion. “Ladies and gentlemen, it brings me great joy to announce: I am now the superior Transfiguration scholar in this room.”
McGonagall muttered something about decorum under her breath, but didn’t stop him. She stared at her parchment, numb.
He beat her. By one point. One. But still. He’d beat her.
Her quill snapped in her hand. A sharp crack that made the students around her flinch. Ink bled onto her palm like a burst vein.
Fred turned toward her, clearly trying not to laugh. “Come on, love, it’s only a point—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped, standing so abruptly her chair scraped loudly against the stone floor.
The classroom went awkwardly quiet.
Fred blinked. “Right. Okay.”
She snatched up her bag, stuffing her parchment inside with sharp, angry movements. Her chest felt too tight. Her skin was burning. She didn’t even wait for the end of class. She stormed out of the room, footsteps echoing in the corridor behind her.
She didn’t know how long she walked. Just that she needed distance. From that classroom. From those cheers. From him.
When she finally ducked into a narrow corridor behind a forgotten tapestry, the silence hit her like a weight. She leaned against the cold stone wall, clutching her broken quill in her hand, and tried to breathe.
It wasn’t just the grade. It was the injustice of it. The impossibility. The way it felt like all her effort meant nothing.
He hadn’t studied. She knew he hadn’t. She watched him spend that whole period doodling dragons and teasing her.
So how? How could he possibly have done better?
Unless…Unless he cheated.
The idea bloomed slowly, but once it took root, it was all she could think about.
Fred Weasley wasn’t completely stupid - no, far from it - but he wasn’t serious either. Not about school. Not about studying. What if he wasn’t doing it all himself?
Maybe he had a secret tutor. Someone feeding him notes. An older student who took the class last year. Maybe he’d charmed McGonagall’s desk to read her answer key. Maybe he was bribing the portrait of some retired transfiguration master who whispered answers to him after dark.
It would explain everything. The way he never seemed stressed. The fact that he never revised. How he joked his way through every lesson and still kept up.
Her stomach twisted with indignation. He was mocking her. All this time, he’d been mocking her. Letting her believe their marks were an even match. Letting her believe their rivalry was mutual. That he was somehow naturally on her level. When really, he had a trick.
And she was going to find it.
———————————————————————
That night, she sat in the corner of the library under a green-glass reading lamp, chewing on the end of her replacement quill and watching the hourglass tick down.
She was convinced Fred Weasley was cheating. She just had to prove it.
She scribbled a list into the margins of her notes:
Possibility #4: Bribery/blackmail. (Far-fetched. Still possible.)
Possibility #5: Polyjuice Potion?? (Okay, that’s extreme, but who knows with him.)
She underlined #1 three times. If he was sneaking off for secret study sessions…she needed to catch him.
She’d follow him. Discreetly, of course. She’d tail him after classes, find out where he went, who he spoke to. Maybe he had a classroom stashed away with enchanted textbooks that explained why he could quote magical theory in between fart jokes.
Whatever he was hiding, she was going to uncover it. And when she did, she was going to march right up to him, throw the evidence in his annoyingly handsome face, and reclaim her rightful position at the top of the class.
Fred Weasley had started this war. But she was determined to end it.
———————————————————————
The library was cloaked in the sort of silence that didn’t exist during the day. No whispering students. No flickering torches. Just the steady tick of the enchanted hourglass at the back of the room, and the warm golden glow of the single lamp still burning above her head.
She sat tucked behind a pillar, the last student still inside, clutching a freshly signed permission slip in her ink-smudged fingers.
Madam Pince had pursed her lips so tightly when she’d asked for the form, it looked like they might disappear entirely. “You’ll return to your dorm the moment the clock strikes eleven, or I will inform your Head of House,” she’d warned.
“I just need to revise,” she’d said innocently. “You know how behind I feel.”
Which wasn’t technically a lie. Because she had been doing something academic. It just happened to involve planning on stalking Fred Weasley like a hawk stalking a very loud, very smug mouse.
She gathered her bag and slipped out through the towering library doors just as they closed behind her with a hollow click.
The castle at night was a different place. Shadows stretched long and strange. Suits of armor seemed to lean a little too far into her path. The torches flickered lower, their flames subdued to a whisper. Her footsteps echoed far more than she liked.
She wrapped her cloak tighter around her shoulders and took the stairs down toward the corridor near the Ravenclaw tower.
But then, somewhere off to the left, she heard laughter. Two voices. Low. Mischievous. Snickering.
Her spine straightened. She knew those voices. Fred and George.
She ducked behind a pillar instinctively, heart racing. They were supposed to be back in Gryffindor Tower. Lights out had passed. And if they were out now, of all times…maybe this was it.
This was when he snuck off to see a tutor. Or receive some forbidden study notes. Or charm answers out of a locked away paper stashed in a teacher’s office. Whatever it was, she was going to find it.
She crouched low and crept down the hallway, keeping to the shadows. Her shoes made the faintest whisper against the stone floor, but the twins were laughing too loudly to hear her anyway.
“Honestly, I thought she was going to levitate her quill and stab me with it,” Fred was saying.
“That was your own fault,” George replied. “You couldn’t just beat her. You had to gloat.”
“You would’ve gloated.”
“Yes, but I have subtlety.”
“You threw a chocolate frog at McGonagall last week. That’s not subtle.”
“It was a gift.”
She rolled her eyes silently and followed as they turned down a lesser-used corridor. One she recognised vaguely as leading toward the fourth floor.
They moved quickly but not quietly, speaking in excited, low tones. Occasionally, one would cast a charm to illuminate the hall and she had to duck behind statues or alcoves to stay hidden.
Then they reached it. A tapestry. A hideous one, actually, of a unicorn wearing an ugly old hat. The unicorn winked as they approached.
“Got the fireproofing charm right this time?” George asked, brushing his fingers along the edge of the tapestry.
“We’ll find out,” Fred replied cheerfully.
They slipped behind it and disappeared. Her heart leapt into her throat. This was it. The lair. The headquarters. The secret crime scene.
She crept toward the tapestry, pulse pounding in her ears, and waited a beat before pulling it gently aside. Behind it was a dark stone passageway. Lit and long.
She swallowed and stepped through, keeping close to the wall as the warmth of torches bathed her face in orange light. The walls were lined with odd hooks and scratches, like this place had once been used for storage, or hiding things.
After about twenty feet, the hallway curved sharply. She squinted but kept her footsteps light, her pace even, until she heard voices and…bubbling?
Peeking around the corner, she froze. They weren’t studying. They weren’t meeting some secret tutor. They were…brewing? She mentally outlined theory number five in her head - Polyjuice potion seemed like the most likely suspect now.
The room opened into what looked like a secret lab. Cauldrons of all sizes lined the stone counters. Parchment blueprints hung from the walls, covered in inked diagrams and spell annotations. One section of the room held enchanted objects like trick wands and whispering mirrors. Fred was bent over a bubbling cauldron, carefully pouring a shimmering blue powder into the mixture while muttering a charm.
George was testing out a pair of sunglasses that kept rotating lenses over his eyes like a kaleidoscope. “Nope,” he muttered. “Still makes me look like a beetle.”
“Try changing the lens enchantment from ‘chromatic shift’ to ‘spectral flicker,’” Fred said absently.
George blinked. “When did you learn that?”
Fred shrugged. “Ran into Flitwick last week and asked about spectrum illusions. Said I could borrow an old thesis of his.”
She blinked. Flitwick had a thesis? Fred borrowed it? He read it?!
She was stunned. Her eyes drifted to the diagrams pinned around the room. These weren’t just prank ideas. They were complex magical formulas. Layered enchantments, rune stacks, modified potion-brew sequences. She spotted at least three sixth-year level transfigurations and a theoretical Arithmancy formula she’d only seen referenced in textbooks.
This wasn’t just playing around. This was work. Difficult, advanced, academic work.
Her foot accidentally knocked into a stack of boxes. They clattered to the floor with a noisy thud.
Fred and George both froze. Then Fred slowly turned and his eyes locked onto hers.
“Ah,” he said, a smile curling at the corners of his lips. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Miss Obsessed-With-Me.”
Her face burned. “I—I am not obsessed with you!”
“You followed me through who knows how many floors, a unicorn tapestry, and a hidden tunnel system.” Fred pointed out, casually walking toward her. “What would you call it?”
“I was investigating,” she snapped, stepping fully into the room. “I thought you were up to something and I was right! I knew it! I knew you had some secret project, but I thought…I thought you were cheating! Not…this!”
Fred arched a brow. “You thought I was a cheat?”
“I am so…so…angry!” she fumed, stalking up to Fred. “You don’t even try. You sit in class tossing ink pots at people and you still beat me because you’re, what? Secretly a genius?”
“A genius? Fred?” George snickered. “Now who’s telling jokes?”
“I’m serious!” she fumed. “I’ve been working myself half to death all year, and somehow you, with your, you know, jokes and ink-spitting quills and origami during exams, still managed to beat me!”
Fred raised a brow. “You’ve been this upset the whole time?”
“Yes!”
“You’ve been genuinely mad at me?”
“For months!”
George took a polite step back. “And that’s my cue to test our Sneezing Sparkles outside the blast zone,” he said cheerfully, grabbing a vial and vanishing through the opening behind her.
Fred looked stunned for a second. Then he laughed. “I thought you knew this was just fun! A bit of friendly rivalry. Flirting, even!”
“Flirting?!” she shrieked.
“I mean…yeah?” he blinked. “All the snide remarks, eye rolls, dramatic declarations of academic superiority? Kind of textbook, really.”
She gaped at him, stunned. “I spend hours in the library. I revise, I annotate, I stay behind to ask questions, and you, with your bloody fireworks and ‘I dreamt the answers’ attitude, manage to keep up with me effortlessly. And you think that’s fun for me?”
Fred looked genuinely bewildered. “I thought this was, you know…mutual tension. The kind that ends with us eventually snogging in a broom cupboard.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re insane.”
“And you’re adorable when you’re angry.”
She flushed - out of rage, she told herself. Definitely rage. She crossed her arms, refusing to cry in front of him. “I thought if I followed you, I’d catch you cheating. Instead, I find you doing high-level potion transmutations and spell enhancements. I work so hard,” she said, her voice rising. “I miss meals. I skip Hogsmeade trips. I’ve turned down actual friendships to keep up with coursework. And you, you breeze through classes, then disappear to make laughing lollipops!”
“They also induce involuntary levitation now,” Fred offered helpfully.
“I don’t care! It’s—” her voice broke slightly, “It’s not fair that you get to be brilliant and lazy.”
Fred was quiet for a moment. Then he said gently, “Do you want to see what we’re actually working on?”
She frowned. “Why?”
“Because it’s not lazy. And maybe if you really saw it, you’d stop thinking I don’t take things seriously.”
She hesitated, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her pulse pounded in her throat. “…Fine,” she said through gritted teeth.
He walked her through the workspace like he was guiding her through an art gallery.
He explained how their Self-Writing Quill had three layered enchantments. One to mimic the user’s handwriting, one to interpret shorthand, and one to censor swear words if used during school hours. He showed her their latest product in development. A potion-infused chocolate that gave people a five-minute confidence boost using a highly calibrated variation of a cheering charm.
He showed her diagrams, trials, failures. And she was absolutely floored.
The twins weren’t just pranksters. They were inventors. Engineers. Creators. Their jokes were crafted from theory and testing and applied spellwork far beyond the average Hogwarts student. And Fred - who she had accused of coasting at the top - was at the heart of it all.
She watched as he expertly adjusted a stirring charm, his brows furrowed, lips pursed in thought. The flame glowed under the cauldron, turning blue as the potion shifted to the right shade.
He was focused. Intent. And, damn it all to hell, brilliant. When he turned and caught her staring, she looked away quickly.
“So?” he asked, sliding beside her, voice teasing but softer now. “Impressed?”
“…Maybe,” she muttered. He smiled and she sighed, arms folding again. “You do deserve your grades.”
Fred leaned in slightly. “Would you say…even more than you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Let’s not push it.”
He chuckled. “So what now, my sweet nemesis?”
She hesitated. Her brain felt scrambled. She wasn’t sure what surprised her more: the complexity of their work, or the fact that she…actually admired what they were accomplishing. A lot.
Fred Weasley. The class clown. The disaster-in-a-tie. The genius behind a joke shop. He was looking at her now, not smug, but hopeful.
So she cleared her throat and said, “You can call it a truce.”
He grinned. “I’ll take that. And I’ll raise you…a date.”
She blinked. “What?”
“A proper one,” he said, tilting his head. “You know, since our rivalry’s taken a romantic turn.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“I beg to differ,” Fred said. “But tell you what: if you’re too intimidated by my intellectual prowess to say yes—”
“I’ll hang out with you,” she interrupted, flustered. “Only to apologise for calling you a cheat. That’s not a date.”
He lit up like a child who’d just stolen Christmas. “A not-date it is then. See you Saturday?”
———————————————————————
She wasn’t nervous. The butterflies in her stomach were definitely from some dodgy pudding she’d eaten the night before.
The sweater she was wearing - deep navy, soft at the sleeves - wasn’t chosen because it brought out her eyes. And she definitely hadn’t spent twenty minutes trying to flatten the flyaways in her hair. And if her heartbeat quickened a little every time she thought about seeing Fred Weasley outside of school uniform and prank-potion fumes…well, that was probably just lingering adrenaline.
It wasn’t a date. Just a hang out. A perfectly normal, completely platonic hangout with the boy who had driven her to the edge of academic insanity, casually beaten her by a single point, and then smiled like it was the most charming thing in the world.
She told herself, as she tightened the scarf around her neck and checked her hair for the third time in the hallway mirror, that this was absolutely not a date. Again.
Not a date. Not a date. Not a date.
So why did it feel like one?
Her hands were sweating.
By the time she reached the gates of Hogwarts, the November wind had whipped colour into her cheeks and turned her breath to mist. Students streamed toward Hogsmeade in chattering groups, scarves fluttering, boots crunching against the frosty path.
And there, standing slightly apart from the others, leaning against a low stone wall with his hands in his pockets, was Fred.
He looked irritatingly good. His tie was loose. His coat slightly wrinkled. Hair wind-tossed like he’d just rolled out of bed and it had somehow worked. He spotted her and straightened immediately, a crooked grin curling onto his face.
“You showed up,” he said, voice warm as ever.
“I said I would.”
He offered her his arm, mock-chivalrous. “Shall we?”
She raised a brow at the gesture. “Still not a date.”
Fred grinned wider, retracting his hand. “Right. Just two highly competitive classmates on a weekend stroll through a romantically quaint wizarding village.”
“Exactly.”
“Who may or may not end up snogging behind Honeydukes.”
She elbowed him in the ribs, cheeks flushing pink. “Fred!”
“Sorry. Too soon?”
“Try never.”
He clutched his side like she’d cursed him mortally. “You wound me.”
“And yet, I feel no guilt.”
They started with the shops. Zonko’s was their first stop, predictably. Fred tugged her inside by the wrist, eyes alight, launching into an animated explanation of which products inspired theirs (“Our Sneezing Sparkle? That right there is practically the prototype!”) and which they were currently trying to outdo (“Our line of Nose-Biting Teacups will obliterate these sad excuses for chaos”).
She tried not to be impressed and failed miserably at it. It was genuinely thrilling to watch him in his element - his eyes glowing, hands flying as he explained small enchantments, the way he lit up when something sparked his brain. There was something vital about him. Like he ran on joy and creativity and sheer nerve. And the more she watched…the more she liked it.
When he accidentally set off a joke wand that made her hair float five inches above her head, she nearly hexed him. Until he offered to fix it with a charm of his own creation, and cast it so gently that his fingers barely brushed her temple. Her stomach did a very unexpected flip.
Next was Honeydukes.
Fred declared it was their ‘refuelling station’. She pretended not to laugh at that.
They wandered between the shelves, sugar glittering in the air, chocolate frogs croaking from glass boxes. Fred bought one of everything they both reached for at the same time.
“Split custody,” he said, handing her half of a bag filled with Sour Scribblers and Peppermint Bark.
“You’re bribing me with sugar.”
“I’m investing in our future.”
“I’m going to hex you if you keep talking like that.”
“Kinky.”
She tried not to snort. Tried harder not to notice how good his laugh sounded bouncing off the candy jars.
They took their bags outside and walked slowly through the village, passing the tea shop with heart-shaped windows, past Derwish and Banges where Fred pointed out the exact spot Lee Jordan once got stuck in a levitating bathtub.
Her nose was pink from the cold, hands rubbing together to try and create friction. Fred noticed, then wordlessly offered her his gloves. She hesitated.
“Just take them,” he said. “My hands are particularly warm. Comes with the red hair.”
She rolled her eyes. “Naturally.”
But she took the gloves and her fingers did feel much better. With all the walking, they ended up at the Shrieking Shack overlook.
The hill was empty, dusted with frost and silent but for the soft whistling wind. The shack loomed in the distance, crooked and weathered, framed by bare trees and the cloudy winter sky.
They stood side by side, shoulders brushing, looking out over the view in a rare moment of calm. For the first time, there was no teasing. No banter. Just quiet.
“I never asked,” he said softly, “what makes you so competitive.”
She didn’t look at him. “You didn’t have to. You just assumed it was flirting.”
“Fair,” he admitted. “But still. I’m asking now.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “My family.”
“Strict?”
“Not really. Just…accomplished. Everyone’s good at something. Exceptional, even. My sister was Head Girl. My brother played Quidditch for a national youth team. I… have achieved nothing.”
Fred nodded slowly. “Pressure?”
She shrugged. “I guess I thought if I could be the best, then I’d matter. Then I’d be noticed.”
He didn’t laugh. Didn’t tease. He just said, “You matter anyway.”
Her head turned toward him and their eyes met. For once, she didn’t have anything clever to say. Her heart simply fluttered at his acknowledgment.
“…What about you?” she asked, voice softer now. “Why start a business instead of, I don’t know…just coasting through Hogwarts like everyone expects?”
Fred’s gaze returned to the horizon. “Because I want to prove them wrong,” he said. “Everyone thinks we’re just trouble. That we’ll joke our way into some dead-end job. But we’re building something. Something real. With the way the world is going, we’re going to need a little more joy. And if I can make people laugh, and still beat the smartest witch in the year,” he glanced sideways at her, “Well, that’s just a bonus.”
She was quiet for a long time until a broad smile broke free across her face. “Second smartest.”
Fred gave a scandalized gasp. “Who passed you?!”
She turned to him fully now. “You. By one point. Remember?”
He smirked. “Oh, right. That was glorious.”
She shoved him lightly. “I hate you.”
“You keep saying that but I think I believe you a little less each time you do.” Fred leaned in slightly, not quite touching her, but close. So close.
For a moment, she wondered what it might be like to close the distance - what it might be like to kiss him. But then she shook the thought away.
They walked back to the castle slower than necessary. The sun dipped below the horizon as the first evening stars pricked the sky. Hogsmeade glittered behind them, lanterns glowing gold, smoke curling from chimneys. The cold air nipped at their cheeks, but neither of them seemed to notice.
Fred was still carrying her sweets bag. And she hadn’t given his gloves back.
When they reached the Ravenclaw common room entrance, they stopped under the archway, the castle quiet around them.
Fred rocked on his heels. “So. That was…”
“A truce,” she said quickly.
“A truce?” he repeated.
She nodded. “Academic rivals no more.”
“Right,” he said slowly, eyes twinkling. “Except, it wasn’t a date. And yet—”
“Don’t.”
“You still haven’t called this not-a-date a ‘not-a-date’ out loud.”
She crossed her arms. “It wasn’t a date.”
He leaned in. “But it was good, wasn’t it?”
She paused. “…It was.”
Fred smiled. “Good enough for a third date?”
She blinked. Her mouth opened. Then she tilted her head and smirked. “You mean a second date.”
His grin widened. “So you do admit this was the first.”
She stood on her toes, pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, then stepped back. “Ask me again tomorrow,” she whispered, eyes glittering.
And then she vanished behind the common room door, leaving Fred standing there stunned, touched cheek pinker than the other.
Fred Weasley vs. one very odd Slytherin girl should have been an easy win. Unfortunately, his chosen opponent kept treating his sarcasm like constructive criticism, his insults like helpful advice, and his increasingly obvious affection like perfectly normal friendship. What began as a petty attempt to get under a her skin became something entirely different when Fred realised he likes her exactly as she is. Literal-minded, quietly observant, and hopelessly sincere in a world full of people who never say what they mean.
Warnings: oblivious reader, neurodivergent coded, a bit angsty, limited use of Y/N
———————————————————————
The first time Fred Weasley tried to offend you, you thanked him. It happened on a corridor slick with November gloom, the high windows of Hogwarts dimmed by rain so steady it looked less like weather and more like the sky had sprung a leak. Students streamed past in untidy currents of black robes and chatter, the castle full of its usual weekday pulse. Shoes struck stone, laughter ricocheted off the walls, the staircase groaned as they shifted above like summering ancient beast.
You stood to the side of the rush with a stack of books braced against your hip, your tie a neat green-and-silver line against the dark wool of your robes. There was something composed about you even in stillness, as if the chaos of the hallway simply broke itself against you and ran harmlessly away. You weren’t fidgeting or glancing around. That was to say you didn’t seem to share the nervous energy that infected most people in crowded corridors. You existed amongst them, a contrast of cold self-containment, like moonlight on black water.
Fred noticed that before he noticed anything else. That you never hurried, and you never flinched. You wore your aloofness not like armor, but like skin. It was apart of you. And because Fred Weasley was Fred Weasley (because mischief ran in his veins like wildfire and because there had never been a person at Hogwarts he couldn’t get some sort of reaction from) he decided, almost immediately, that he disliked you.
You were a Slytherin, for one thing. Worse, you were a Slytherin with an expression so unreadable it made him feel as though he were performing in front of a brick wall and somehow losing. Other people laughed, snapped back, rolled their eyes, blushed, sputtered, sulked. Other people gave him something, but you only looked at him with those steady, distant eyes of yours as though he were a mildly unusual weather pattern. It was intolerable.
So when he sauntered past with George at his side and caught sight of you rearranging your books by size rather than subject, he slowed, angled himself into your path, and said, with all the sarcastic venom he could muster, “Careful, darling, if you stack those any higher you might finally disappear under with the size of your thrilling personality.”
George snorted beside him. Fred thought it was an excellent line. Light, sharp, just enough mockery to sting. He waited for the flash of irritation, the chilly Slytherin bite, the offended lift of your chin. Instead, you looked down at your books, then back at him. Your gaze was thoughtful when you asked, “Do I seem dull?”.
Fred blinked in surprise. That was not the correct response, yet he recovered quickly as he always did. “Painfully so.”
You nodded once, as though he had confirmed a private suspicion. “I had wondered whether people found me difficult to talk to.”
George made a soft choking noise. Fred stared at you. “I…what?”
“That was helpful,” you said, entirely sincere. “Thank you.”
Then you stepped around him and continued down the corridor, leaving him standing there with his mouth half-open and George dissolving into helpless laughter. Fred turned very slowly to watch you go. Your robe hems whispered over the stone and you didn’t look back. You didn’t seem embarrassed or upset or even faintly annoyed. You simply carried on, as untouched by his words as if he had tossed pebbles into a lake too deep to notice.
George wheezed into his sleeve. “Oh, that is catastrophic. She’s clueless.”
Fred scowled. “Come on, she knew.”
“No,” George said, grinning wide enough to split his face. “That’s the best part. She absolutely did not.”
Fred looked after you a moment longer, jaw tight, something hot and strange prickling at the back of his neck. This, he thought, was not over.
———————————————————————
It became a problem rather quickly. Not for you, but for Fred, because once he had begun he could not seem to stop. He told himself it was a matter of principle. A matter of pride. A matter of restoring balance to a universe in which Fred Weasley, menace of Gryffindor Tower and self-appointed king of mischief, had delivered an insult to a Slytherin girl only for her to receive it as though it were constructive criticism.
It gnawed at him, so he tried again. And again. And again. Each attempt should have been the one that worked. He sharpened his words like knives and sent them skimming in your direction with increasing creativity. He called your handwriting ‘aggressively grim’. You thanked him and explained that you had been aiming for legibility, not warmth. He remarked that your stare could sour milk. You said that was useful to know, as you’d never liked milk anyway. He informed you, with lazy malice, that your silence made you seem vaguely murderous. You considered this, then replied that if people found you intimidating, perhaps they might bother you less in the library.
Every time, he walked away feeling as though he had somehow been outmaneuvered in a game only he had realized was being played. You, meanwhile, appeared to think Fred Weasley one of the more unexpectedly perceptive people at Hogwarts. Which was, perhaps, the most insulting thing of all.
The real issue was not merely that you misunderstood him. It was the way you misunderstood him with such grave earnestness, such calm acceptance, and such complete lack of self-consciousness that it robbed his mockery of its teeth and handed it back to him blunt and useless.
And Merlin, you were earnest. Not in the wide-eyed, fluttery way some girls were. There was nothing soft or eager about you. Your earnestness was stranger than that. It lived beneath the frost of your composure like a lantern under ice, quiet and steady and impossible to extinguish. You took people at their word. You assumed precision where others meant performance. Sarcasm slid off you like rain off slate.
Fred had never met anyone so resistant to tone. It fascinated him in the most irritating way imaginable. By December, he had developed the terrible habit of looking for you. He spotted you at breakfast by the shine of your hair and the silver serpent on your robes. Or in the courtyard with your gloved hands wrapped around a mug of something steaming, your breath ghosting white into the winter air. Or in class with your face bent over parchment, lashes low, expression intent in a way that made the whole room seem blurred around the edges. It was as though the castle itself had gone soft-focus and left only you in sharpened detail. He hated that he noticed such things. He hated, too, that other people began to notice him noticing.
“Mate,” Lee Jordan said one evening in the courtyard, sprawled upside down on a bench with a packet of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans balanced on his chest, “you keep staring at that Slytherin like she owes you money.”
Fred, who had indeed been staring across the courtyard where you sat at a table temporarily occupied by inter-house study partners, snapped his gaze away. “I do not.”
George, from where he was testing a new trick wand on a stick, said without looking up, “You do.”
“I’m observing.”
“Like a scientist?”
“Like a strategist.”
Lee grinned. “Strategising what? How to marry her or murder her?”
Fred threw a handful of grass at his face. The truth was far less amusing and therefore far more dangerous. You confused him. Not just your responses, though they did, or the maddening sincerity with which you accepted whatever nonsense he flung your way. It was the fact that, the longer he watched, the more he began to suspect you were not cold at all. Just private. There was a difference, and he saw it in fragments. Like how you always moved aside for younger students in corridors, one hand sweeping your robes back so they could pass.
Or how you quietly repaired a Hufflepuff second year’s torn essay with a neat Reparo and then acted as though it had not been worth mentioning. In the way you listened carefully when people spoke to you, your eyes fixed on their robes or shoes or hands with a focus so unwavering it unsettled people unused to being taken seriously. Or even how you fed crumbs to the birds by the black lake when you thought nobody was watching.
You were not unkind. You were simply…elsewhere, sometimes. Not cruelly, or dismissively, just set at a slight angle to everybody else. It was as though the language of ordinary interaction had been taught to you from a textbook rather than lived at your kitchen table. You missed jokes, missed double meanings, missed flirtation entirely. You took words as literal offerings and arranged them carefully in your mind, never seeming to realise that most people threw theirs like stones and expected everyone else to duck.
Fred found this both exasperating and, against all odds, a little heartbreaking. He did not care for that feeling. So naturally, he doubled down.
———————————————————————
The trouble deepened in Potions. Professor Snape, in one of his usual fits of theatrical cruelty, paired Gryffindors and Slytherins for a fortnight-long assignment on antidotes. The classroom reacted as though he had announced a plague. Groans rose at once, parchment fluttered, several people looked actively offended by the concept of cooperation.
Then Snape’s gaze slid over the class like oil over water and landed on you and Fred. “Weasley,” he said silkily, “with Y/N.”
Fred nearly laughed from disbelief. Across the room, your expression did not change at all. If anything, you looked mildly relieved, as though being partnered with him was good news. Which, Fred thought sourly, only proved you had not the faintest idea who he was.
He swaggered over anyway, dropping into the seat beside you with performative ease. “Well,” he said, leaning back, “this should be dreadful.”
You arranged your ingredients into exact little rows. “You are very good at slicing valerian root evenly.”
Fred paused. “What?”
“You have steady hands,” you said, not looking up. “I’ve seen you in class.”
He stared at your profile. Your face was lovely in the severe way winter mornings were lovely, something clear and difficult to approach. Your mouth was soft, though most people might not have guessed it from a distance. Your lashes made dark crescents against your cheeks when you looked down. There was no mockery in your voice, no hidden barb, no game. Just observation.
Fred, who had opened his mouth to say something cutting, found his prepared remark vanish like smoke. “That,” he said at last, “might be the most boring compliment I’ve ever received.”
You nodded. “I wasn’t trying to be interesting.”
He barked out a laugh before he could stop himself. Your eyes flicked to his then, startled for the first time, as if you hadn’t expected that sound from him. Something shifted in the air between you. Like the first crack in a frozen pond.
Fred noticed it. And, being a fool, he ruined it immediately. “You know,” he said, slicing the valerian root with deliberate precision, “for a Slytherin, you’re remarkably easy to manipulate.”
You glanced over. “Am I?”
“Hopelessly.”
You considered that with alarming seriousness. “That would explain a few things.”
His knife paused mid-slice. “What things?”
“A group of Ravenclaws convinced me last week that a first-year had been made invisible by a cursed teapot.” Fred choked on air. You went on, brow faintly furrowed. “In hindsight, there were inconsistencies.”
“Just a few?”
“Yes.”
He stared at you for a beat or two, and then he bent over the table. Helpless, bright, genuine laughter that bubbled out of him before he could catch it. Beside him, you watched with quiet puzzlement, your head tilted slightly like a cat hearing a strange sound at the door. It occurred to Fred, suddenly and disastrously, that he liked making you look at him. He sobered too fast after that, which was how the rest of the lesson went poorly.
You measured ingredients with elegant care while he chopped too aggressively. Your sleeves brushed once when both of you reached for the same vial, and Fred jerked back as though burned, knocking over a spoon. You looked at him while he scowled at the spoon as if it had betrayed him personally.
“You’re clumsy today,” you said.
“I’m wounded by your criticism.”
“I didn’t mean it critically. You usually have excellent coordination.”
Merlin. By the end of class, Snape had deducted five points from Gryffindor for Fred’s ‘astonishing inability to maintain even the illusion of competence’, and you said, while packing your bag, “If you want, I can help you practice steadier wand motions before the next lesson.”
Fred looked at you as though you had spoken in Ancient Runes. “You’d help me?”
You blinked once. “Yes.”
“Why?”
That made you pause. The room had begun to empty around you, chairs scraping, students talking in loose knots. Cauldrons clinked as they were put away and Snape’s robes swept past in a black hiss.
You adjusted your grip on your books. “Because you keep helping me.”
Fred felt his face go blank. Helping you. You meant his remarks. His taunts. His endless attempts to needle and provoke. Somehow, through the crooked lens of your earnestness, you had translated all of them into some sort of awkward support. He did not know whether to laugh, deny it, or walk directly into the nearest wall.
Instead he said weakly, “Right.”
You gave him a small nod, as if the matter had been settled, and left. Fred remained where he was, rooted to the stone floor.
George appeared in the doorway a moment later and took in Fred’s expression with immediate delight. “Bad news?”
Fred turned slowly. “I think that girl believes I’m kind.”
George burst into hysterics so violent he had to brace himself against the doorframe.
———————————————————————
Snow came thick over the grounds the following week, swallowing the castle in white. The world beyond the windows softened into blurred charcoal and pearl. The lake became a sheet of black glass rimmed with frost. Pine branches bowed beneath the weight of snow, and the air had that brittle, metallic bite that made every inhale feel newly minted. Hogwarts in winter looked less like a school and more like a fairytale story with it’s turrets dusted white and lanterns glowing amber behind mullioned windows. The whole place hushed beneath the season’s spell.
Fred usually loved it. Winter at Hogwarts meant snowball fights, whispered schemes, and secret products tested in warm common rooms while storms battered the windows. It meant laughter, thick scarves, stolen treacle tart from the kitchens, George at his side and mischief at their fingertips.
This winter, however, now also meant you. Because you were everywhere. Or perhaps not everywhere, only in all the places he found himself looking. In the library’s dim alcoves with your fingers ink-smudged and elegant against yellowed pages. On the moving staircases, one hand skimming the banister while your gaze drifted somewhere distant, as if you were composing thoughts no one else would ever hear. In the courtyard, your Slytherin scarf wound high over your mouth, only your eyes visible above the silver-striped wool, watching snowfall with a solemnity that made it seem sacred.
Fred told himself he was only curious. He told himself that right up until the afternoon he found you sitting alone beneath the covered arch near the Clock Tower, a book open in your lap, snow spinning just beyond the shelter like torn paper in the wind. He had not meant to stop. He had been on his way back from Hogsmeade, cheeks stung red from the cold, pockets full of contraband joke quills and a half-finished plan involving a fake howler. George had run ahead to deliver something to Lee and Fred should have gone straight inside.
Instead, he slowed. You sat with one boot tucked beneath the bench, your gloved fingers holding the page flat against the gusting air. Your hair had caught a few flakes along the crown, white specks scattered in the dark like stars caught in a night sky. There was a stillness to the scene so complete it made him feel irrationally as though speaking too loudly might shatter it.
So he said, “You do realise most people have the good sense to avoid looking like a tragic heroine in weather like this.”
You looked up. There was a visible, silent sorting of his words. Then, “Is that what I look like?”
Fred leaned against the stone pillar, shoving his hands into his pockets to hide the way they’d gone suddenly awkward. “Utterly doomed, very dramatic, probably about to wander into the lake reciting poetry.”
You glanced toward the lake as if considering the practicality of this. “I can’t swim well enough for that. Besides, it’s likely solid ice by this time of year. I’d go sliding like a bear on skates.”
He laughed before he meant to and your mouth twitched into…not a smile exactly, but something close. It was tentative, like sunlight touching frost without melting it. Fred felt the entire world narrow to that nearly-smile. He had seen you expressionless, thoughtful, mildly puzzled, once faintly startled. But this fragile hint of amusement struck him with absurd force. It was like glimpsing a hidden room in a house he had spent months circling from the outside.
He tried to cover the feeling with insolence. “You know, it’s deeply annoying that you keep ruining my insults by taking them as practical advice.”
You closed your book around one finger to hold your place. “I don’t think they are insults.”
Fred stared. You met his gaze steadily, and there it was again, that unnerving directness. That sense that when you looked at someone you did not skim the surface but fixed yourself on them entirely.
“You say unkind things,” you admitted. “But you usually notice something true first.”
The wind stirred and snow hissed softly across the stones. Somewhere overhead the clock tolled the quarter hour, each bell note falling into the cold like iron into water. Fred could not, for a moment, think of anything to say.
You went on, your voice quiet, matter-of-fact. “Most people don’t bother to even take notice, do you’re already a step above the rest.”
There was no self-pity in it and that was the worst part. You said it as one might remark on the weather or the date, plain and unembellished, which made it land with twice the force.
Fred felt something in his chest shift uneasily. He thought of every cutting remark he’d made, every sarcastic observation, every attempt to unsettle you. Thought of you taking each one carefully in hand, examining it for whatever truth it contained, and keeping that instead of the cruelty wrapped around it. He had wanted to get under your skin. Instead, somehow, you had slipped under his.
“Well,” he said, and his voice came out rougher than intended, “that’s a terrible habit. You noticing me taking notice.”
You tilted your head. “Why?”
Because, he thought with sudden panic, I am beginning to notice you back. But before he could answer, laughter rang sharp across the courtyard. Three older Slytherin boys came striding under the arch from the far end, cloaks dusted with snow, boots wet and dark. You stiffened so subtly another person might not have caught it. But Fred did.
He saw the tiny tightening of your shoulders, that fractional stillness. The boys noticed you at once. Their expressions shifted in the ugly, familiar way boys’ expressions sometimes did when they had spotted someone they thought easy to corner.
“Oi,” said one of them lazily. “There you are.”
You closed your book properly this time, sliding it into your bag. “I wasn’t aware I was being looked for.”
“Don’t be difficult,” another said.
Fred’s posture changed without him deciding to change it. One moment he had been slouched against the pillar. The next, he was upright, attention sharpened, something hard and instinctive clicking into place beneath his skin.
The first boy’s gaze flicked to Fred and narrowed. “This doesn’t concern you, Weasley.”
Fred smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. “Funny,” he said lightly, “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
The air altered, the atmosphere turned taut as wire. Fred could see it in the slight narrowing of the boys’ eyes. One of them scoffed. “Run along, Gryffindor.”
Fred’s grin widened, all teeth now, bright as broken glass. “Tempting. But I’m ever so fond of standing exactly where I’m not wanted.”
You rose slowly from the bench, your bag slung over your shoulder. The tallest of the boys looked at you, ignoring Fred with deliberate contempt. “You never came to collect your things from the common room.”
“My things?” you repeated.
“The notes, quill, whatever rubbish you left.”
You considered their words for a minute, then you said, in that same calm tone, “I didn’t leave anything in the common room.”
Something flickered across the boy’s face. Annoyance. Exposure. He had lied, then. Or half-lied, expecting you to follow along. What was worse was Fred saw you preparing to go with them. Of course you were, because some part of you always assumed people meant what they said, even when the whole world was built on half-meanings and traps.
Fred pushed off the pillar. “She’s not going anywhere with you,” he said. The words came out easy and certain.
Everyone looked at him, you most of all. For the first time since he had known you, you looked openly bewildered by him.
The Slytherin boy sneered. “And why exactly do you care?”
Fred did not answer at once. He could have said anything. He could have made a joke, or pretended it was about house rivalry, or opportunism, or even boredom. Instead, he stepped forward until he stood beside you, close enough that the sleeve of his coat brushed your robe and he could feel the cold radiating off your gloves.
And he said, softly, “Because she clearly hasn’t realised yet that you’re idiots.”
Silence greeted him. Then George appeared at the far end of the courtyard as if summoned by the scent of conflict. He called out, “Fred?”
The distraction was enough. The boys cursed under their breath, recalculating now that there were two Weasleys instead of one that the odds no longer worth the trouble or spectacle. After a few more muttered threats, they slunk off into the snowfall, their footsteps crunching away over the frozen stones.
The tension left the arch all at once. George approached with suspicious delight, eyes darting between you and Fred. “Did I miss a murder?”
“Almost,” Fred said.
You were still looking at him. Snowlight softened your face, turning your skin paler than usual and your eyes darker by contrast. There was no fear in your expression. Only that same grave, searching attention with which you seemed to examine everything important. “You didn’t have to do that,” you said.
Fred shoved his hands into his pockets again. “Yes, well. Heroism sometimes strikes without warning.”
George made a rude choking sound, but you only frowned very slightly. “They were lying.”
“Yes,” Fred said.
“I know that now.” You looked down, as though annoyed with yourself. “I might have gone with them.”
Fred’s mouth thinned. “I know.”
Then, quieter, you asked, “How?”
He looked at your too-serious eyes. He peered at the composure you wore so well until someone pressed against its weak points. He watched the strange and shining earnestness in you, so unguarded in all the ways that mattered. Some truths arrived before his pride could smother them, so he answered honestly.
“Because,” he said, “you always think people are being more decent than they are.”
The words settled between you like snowfall. They were soft, cold, and impossible to gather back once fallen. Your gaze lifted to his only to see something had changed there. Not much but enough. George, to his credit, said nothing. The wind moved through the arch, carrying the sharp scent of snow and pine and distant chimney smoke. Fred’s hair was a riot of red in the white light, his freckles stood out stark against cheeks gone pink with cold. He looked older when he wasn’t grinning. Sharper, somehow, all restless angles and held-back heat. Now that his usual smirk had faded, there was a startling clarity to his face, like a mask had slipped and shown the dangerous sincerity beneath.
You studied him as if seeing him anew. With total seriousness, you said, “That was a very kind thing to notice.”
George folded in half laughing as Fred closed his eyes. “Unbelievable,” he muttered to the winter air.
When he opened them again, you were still watching him. You didn’t look confused exactly, but thoughtful, as though he had become a riddle worth cracking. And, God help him, Fred thought you had never looked prettier.
———————————————————————
After the incident beneath the Clock Tower, Fred decided firmly, decisively, and with all the brittle conviction of a man building a dam out of parchment, that something had to be done. You were becoming impossible to deal with. Not in the ordinary sense. You were not loud, nor demanding, nor dramatic. You did not trail after him, or bat your lashes, or attempt in any visible way to insert yourself into his life. In fact, the true problem was almost precisely the opposite. You continued on as you always had, gliding through the corridors of Hogwarts with that same cool stillness, your expression composed, your robes immaculate, your attention often turned inward as though part of you lived on some quiet shore no one else could reach.
And yet now, whenever you saw him, you nodded. Nodded as though the two of you shared an understanding. As if he hadn’t spent the better part of several months trying to needle, mock, provoke, and generally make a menace of himself in your direction. The nod itself was unbearable enough. Small, grave, never hurried, and never flustered. The sort of nod one gave a co-conspirator or a favorite professor or a person one trusted to tell the truth in a room full of liars. Fred hated it. He hated more that each time you gave it, something warm and unruly uncoiled low in his chest like a dragon stirring in sleep.
“This,” he announced to George the following morning, stabbing viciously at his porridge, “has gone too far.”
George, who had witnessed enough of Fred’s spirals to know better than to interrupt prematurely, buttered his toast with saintly calm. “Has it?”
“Yes.”
“Tragic.”
Fred ignored him. The Great Hall hummed around them, alive with the clatter of cutlery and low conversation. Sunlight spilled through the enchanted ceiling in diluted winter beams, silver-pale and cold. Owls swooped overhead with the last of the post. Somewhere down the table, Lee was trying to convince Alicia Spinnet that one of the Ravenclaw sixth years had winked at him. At the Slytherin table, you sat three seats down from the end, a book propped against the pumpkin juice jug, apparently reading while eating toast with a detached attitude. Your scarf lay folded precisely beside your plate. A loose strand of hair had fallen over your cheek, and every now and then you tucked it back without looking up.
Fred scowled. George followed his gaze and sighed with theatrical understanding. “Ah. Her.”
“Yes, her.”
“What has she done now? Continued to exist in a way you find personally offensive?”
Fred leaned closer across the table. “She thinks I’m thoughtful.”
George stared at him for a beat, then let out a slow breath through his nose. “That is serious.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“I would never.”
Fred flung a bit of toast at him. George dodged easily and grinned. “I mean it,” Fred said, lowering his voice. “I have to fix this.”
“Why?”
“Because.” Fred glanced toward you again and immediately wished he hadn’t. You were turning a page with your usual absent precision, brow faintly furrowed in concentration. “Because she keeps looking at me like I’m…trustworthy.”
George burst into laughter loud enough to make Angelina turn around until Fred kicked him under the table. “Oh, that’s rich,” George wheezed. “That’s genuinely rich. After all the work you put in cultivating your terrible reputation.”
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s the funniest thing that has happened to me this month.”
Fred glowered. “I just need to remind her who I am.”
George propped his chin on his hand. “And who exactly is that?”
Fred opened his mouth and then closed it again because the answer, once simple, had lately grown slippery. Who exactly was he, in this particular matter? Fred Weasley, menace and mischief-maker, yes. Fred Weasley, effortless flirt, professional nuisance, connoisseur of chaos, certainly. But there was also now the Fred who noticed the exact shape of your silence, and who could tell when your stillness meant peace and when it meant strain. The Fred who had stepped between you and a pack of smirking boys before his mind had caught up with the instinct of it.
George saw the hesitation and pounced on it with savage delight. “Oh, no,” he said softly, eyes widening in mock horror. “You don’t know anymore.”
Fred shoved his shoulder hard enough to nearly send him off the bench.
———————————————————————
His first attempt at clarification came in Charms. You arrived early, as you often did, and took your seat by the windows where the frost feathered the panes in intricate white veins, as delicate as lacework. Outside, the grounds were all white brilliance beneath a pale sky, but indoors everything glowed warm and golden, lit by floating candles that bobbed gently overhead.
Fred dropped into the seat beside you before anyone else could. You looked up at once. There it was again? that small nod. And worse, the almost imperceptible softening around your mouth that suggested you were actually pleased to see him. He felt his carefully prepared malice trip over itself. Still, he forged ahead.
“Bad news,” he said, pulling out his wand. “I’ve decided you’ve become intolerably smug.”
You absorbed this in silence. “About what?”
Fred blinked. “What?”
“What am I smug about?”
He had not expected a follow-up question. Insults, in his experience, worked better when not required to defend their internal logic. “You just are,” he said, with diminished conviction.
You glanced down at your parchment, considering. “I don’t think I feel smug.”
“It’s subtle smugness.”
“That seems difficult to measure.”
Fred stared at you. Your tone was utterly earnest. You were genuinely attempting to understand the accusation as though it were feedback from a supervisor. Around you, students began filing in, filling the room with voices and dragging chairs. George passed your desk, took one look at Fred’s expression, and bit his lip so hard he had to keep walking to avoid betraying himself.
“I’m insulting you,” Fred said under his breath.
You turned to him more fully. The candlelight caught in your hair and made a halo of it, all sheen and shadow. Up close, your eyes were stranger than most people realised. They were clear and watchful, and difficult to lie to, though you yourself seemed peculiarly vulnerable to lies from others. Your face gave little away, but not because it was empty. Rather because everything in you seemed drawn inward first, filtered through thought before expression. You were not unreadable. You were simply translated through a slower, subtler language than most people had patience for.
“I know you say things that are meant to be unkind,” you said quietly. Fred froze as you looked down, straightening the edge of your parchment. “I just don’t always think you mean them as unkindly as you could.”
For once in his life, Fred Weasley had no ready reply. Professor Flitwick bustled in then, saving him from the moment by clapping his tiny hands for attention, and the lesson began in a scatter of squeaking chairs and raised wands. But Fred heard very little of it. Your words had lodged in his mind like burrs in fabric, clinging stubbornly.
You don’t mean them as unkindly as you could. It was a ridiculous thing to say. It was also, infuriatingly, true. Because if Fred had truly wanted to hurt you he would have known how by now. He had collected enough pieces of you. Made enough observations. Seen enough of your odd little tells and habits and quiet vulnerabilities. He knew what made you hesitate, what made your guard tighten, what made your attention turn bright and startled. He knew, at least in outline, where the softest parts of you were, and he had never once struck there.
The realisation unsettled him so badly he set Lee Jordan’s quill on fire by accident.
———————————————————————
The second attempt came in the library, and fared no better. The library at dusk felt like the inside of a held breath. Rows upon rows of books rose into shadow, their spines dusky with age, their titles glinting gold and silver in the lamplight. The silence there was never absolute. It breathed softly through turning pages, shifting chairs, the scratch of quills, and the occasional ominous throat-clear from Madam Pince. Dust swam through the amber air like powdered sunlight, and the tall windows reflected the room back on itself until the whole place seemed doubled. One library real, one made of shadow and glass.
You were seated alone at a long oak table near the Restricted Section rope, surrounded by books in precarious towers. Fred approached with stealth and slid into the chair opposite you, letting his gaze travel deliberately over the stack. “This looks deeply unhealthy.”
You glanced up. “What does?”
“The amount of joy you appear to derive from researching antidote compounds.”
“I don’t think I look joyful.”
“No, that’s the point. You look alarmingly bored.”
You nodded slowly. “That may be fair.”
He leaned forward, forearms on the table. “You are impossible to understand, you know.”
You studied him across the candle flame between you. “You say that often.”
“Yes, well, repetition sharpens a point.”
“Or dulls it.”
Fred’s mouth twitched despite himself. “That sounded almost witty.”
You blinked. “Thank you.”
He dropped his head into one hand. A shadow fell across the table and Madam Pince narrowed her eyes. Fred immediately sat up straighter and arranged his face into counterfeit innocence. She moved on only after lingering long enough to make her suspicion abundantly clear. When she was gone, you pushed one of the books toward him.
He looked at the title. ‘A Practical Catalogue of Common Poisons and Their Reversals’. “I’m not helping you murder anyone.”
“You are helping me study.” You tapped the page. “You were right.”
Fred frowned. “About what?”
“You said last week my cutting of sopophorous beans was inefficient because I hesitated before each slice.”
“I was mocking you.”
“Yes,” you said, “but you were also correct.”
His pulse did something stupid. “And now?” he asked, because apparently self-destruction had become a hobby.
“Now I’ve been practicing not hesitating.” You said it plainly, but a small current of pride moved beneath the words. Not showy pride but quiet satisfaction.
Fred looked at the book, then back at you. He had spent months tossing remarks like sparks, and somehow you had gathered them into warmth. It made him feel monstrous and honored all at once. He tried, one final time, to steer the conversation back toward safer cruelty.
“You know,” he said, “most people would have the sense to stop taking my advice by now.”
Your fingers paused atop the page. “Why?”
Because I’m mean, he almost said. Because I like watching you look at me. Because I no longer know whether I’m trying to push you away or pull you closer. Instead he only said, “Because I’m a terrible influence.”
You considered him in silence so long he grew aware of the candle burning down between you, of distant pages turning somewhere in the stacks, of his own pulse drumming stupidly in his throat. Finally, you said, “I don’t think that’s true.”
It was your tone that undid him. Not playful, or flirtatious, or dreamy. Merely sure. As if, after observation and thought, you had reached a conclusion and trusted it.
Fred looked away first. “Merlin,” he muttered.
Your brow faintly furrowed. “Was that rhetorical?”
He laughed once, raggedly, and shoved the poison catalogue back toward you. “Study before I decide to become worse out of spite.”
You inclined your head. “All right.” Then, after a pause that felt somehow heavier than the first, you said, “I’m glad you sat with me.”
He did not answer, mostly because he no longer trusted his own voice.
———————————————————————
The problem worsened when other people began involving themselves. It started at lunch two days later. You were crossing the entrance hall with an armful of books, moving with your usual measured grace beneath the vaulted ceiling. Snowmelt had been tracked in across the flagstones, turning the floor slick in patches. The enormous hourglasses stood gleaming in their alcoves, jeweled with house points. Students surged around you in noisy tides, bright scarves and damp hems and winter-reddened cheeks.
From the opposite side of the hall, Fred saw it before you did. A Hufflepuff third year was running too fast and looking over his shoulder at a friend. He collided with you hard enough to send your books sliding from your arms. They struck the stone with a painful clap of leather and parchment and one skidded straight into a puddle of slush.
The boy spun around, mortified. “Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t—”
You were already crouching to gather the books. “It’s all right,” you said, though your voice had gone thinner around the edges.
Fred reached you in three long strides. The third year looked visibly relieved when Fred, a notorious older Gryffindor and usually a sign of incoming trouble for Slytherins, dropped to one knee and snatched the wet book out of the slush before more damage could be done.
“For God’s sake,” Fred muttered, drawing his wand. “Scourgify.”
The water vanished at once. The hall kept roaring around you, but the immediate space seemed to narrow, students sweeping past in blurred motion while the moment itself held still. Fred passed you the dried book and your fingers brushed his for half a second, cold from the stone.
You looked at him again with that searching, solemn gaze. The Hufflepuff boy apologized twice more and scampered off. Fred stood, offering you the rest of the stack. “You really ought to stop letting gravity bully you like this.”
You took the books carefully. “I didn’t let it.”
“Passive resistance, then.”
“I slipped.”
“Yes, I noticed.”
There was laughter nearby where Parvati and Lavender whispered by the staircase, both openly watching. A pair of Slytherin girls passing by slowed almost imperceptibly. George, halfway down the marble stairs, came to a full stop and grinned like a man witnessing prophecy unfold.
You, oblivious to all of them, only adjusted your grip on the books and said, “Thank you.”
Fred opened his mouth for some glib rejoinder, some line to restore the proper shape of things. But you added, with quiet seriousness, “You’re always there very quickly.”
The words landed with the force of a confession. Not because you had meant them that way. You had not. You simply said true things and left them naked in the air, not seeming to realise that other people dressed truth in layers for a reason. Fred felt suddenly, acutely aware of the watching eyes around him.
He should have laughed it teased you. He should have said something easy and throwaway and false. Instead he heard himself ask, “Is that a complaint?”
Your lashes lowered briefly as you shifted the books against your chest. “No.”
That single syllable contained no shyness and no flirtation, only certainty. The noise of the Entrance Hall swelled back in around him. George made a kissing face from the staircase. Fred told him to sod off without taking his eyes off you. You seemed to interpret this as a continuation of their previous conversational thread and gave a small nod before heading toward the dungeons, robes skimming the wet stone.
George bounded down the stairs the instant you were out of earshot. “Oh, you’re finished,” he said gleefully.
Fred began walking. George fell into step beside him like a particularly obnoxious shadow. “I am not.”
“You looked like someone had hit you over the head with a church bell.”
“She says odd things.”
“She says obvious things.”
Fred frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
George gave him a look of exaggerated pity. “Only that you have, in fact, been there very quickly. Repeatedly, almost as if you are forever scanning crowds for one specific Slytherin with the social instincts of a lost fawn.”
Fred stopped walking and George continued two steps before noticing and turning back. “A lost fawn?” Fred repeated, offended.
George shrugged. “A very elegant one.”
Fred resumed walking with increased violence in each step. It was Lee, however, who said the worst thing. That evening, the Gryffindor common room blazed with firelight and noise. The windows were black mirrors against the night, reflecting red-gold warmth back into the room. Students lounged across sofas and rugs, feet tucked beneath blankets, cards and sweets and textbooks scattered everywhere in the comfortable chaos. The fire crackled low and deep, breathing heat into the room until everything smelled of wool, smoke, and melting candlewax.
Fred sat in an armchair with a deck of self-shuffling cards he had no intention of actually using. Lee dropped onto the arm of the chair. “So.”
Fred did not look at him. “No.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Yes, I do.”
Lee grinned. “You like her.”
Fred’s denial came at once, automatic and sharpened by reflex. “Don’t be absurd.”
Lee plucked one of the cards from the deck and squinted at it upside down. “All right. You are obsessed with her in a way that is beginning to affect your timing, your insult quality, and your ability to blink when she enters a room.”
Fred made a grab for the card. Lee whisked it away. “I am not obsessed.”
“You’re something.”
George, sprawled before the fire with a notebook balanced on one knee, said without glancing up, “He’s gone peculiar.”
“Thank you,” Lee said. “That’s the phrase.”
Fred rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t even know her.”
That silenced them both for a moment. Then George looked up. And because George was George and because for all his mockery he possessed the unnerving ability to step sideways into truth when least convenient, his expression gentled. “Don’t you?” he asked.
Fred did not answer. The fire popped. Didn’t he? He knew the line that appeared between your brows when you were thinking hard. He knew you touched the spines of books before choosing one, as though greeting them. He knew you disliked being startled from behind but never said so. He knew that when you were overwhelmed, you grew quieter, not louder. He knew your silence had shades to it. He knew you believed people more often than they deserved. He knew you noticed small things and missed enormous ones. He knew that whenever you thanked him, you meant it with your whole heart.
Fred looked into the fire and felt something in himself shift again, deeper this time, like ice cracking under dark water. “I guess I know enough,” he said at last.
———————————————————————
A few days later, you found him before breakfast in an almost empty corridor on the fourth floor. Dawn had only just begun unspooling itself through the castle windows, turning the grey stone faintly blue. The corridor was chilly and quiet, lined with suits of armor that glimmered dully in the half-light. The castle at that hour felt strange and private, like seeing a great animal sleeping.
Fred had been on his way back from an early errand involving a prototype trick teacup and you stood by one of the tall arched windows, the pale morning behind you. Without the noise of other students around, the silence between you felt more intimate than silence ought to.
“You’re up early,” he said.
You turned. “So are you.”
“Kind of you to notice.”
“I notice many things.”
“I’m beginning to fear that.”
The corner of your mouth moved, again not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. It had become more frequent lately, those almost-smiles. Fred had begun to collect them greedily, each one a rare coin. You held something out to him and he frowned and took it before registering that it was a sugar quill.
He stared down at it. “What’s this?”
“I went to Hogsmeade with Daphne yesterday,” you said. “You mentioned once that the Honeydukes ones are better than the castle sweets and I’ve seen you chewing on a few of these in class.”
Fred looked up sharply. He had mentioned that, offhandedly weeks ago during one of your Potions lessons while waiting for a simmering draught to thicken. He had not thought you were paying attention. At the time you had been crushing dried nettles with the concentration of a saint illuminating a manuscript.
“You remembered that,” he said before he could stop himself.
You looked mildly puzzled by the surprise in his voice. “Yes.”
It was only a sugar quill, a cheap bit of sugar wrapped in bright paper, and yet something in his chest tightened so fiercely it was almost painful. Fred, who gave things constantly - jokes, inventions, chaos, charm, noise - had rarely known what to do with quiet offerings or remembered details.
So of course he ruined the moment. “You do realise,” he said, leaning against the wall and aiming for flippant, “that this is a dangerous precedent. Giving sweets to notorious delinquents.”
You folded your hands before you. “I thought you might like it.”
The corridor seemed suddenly too narrow as Fred looked at you. You had no idea what you were doing to him. No idea how impossible you had become with your grave eyes and literal heart, your solemn thank-yous and your habit of remembering the things other people dropped carelessly in passing. You stood there in the fragile blue of morning, your Slytherin tie slightly crooked for once, your hair loose around your shoulders, and you looked less like a rival and more like something out of a fairytale one stumbled into by mistake. A winter thing, lovely and strange and entirely capable of undoing a man who laughed too easily and felt too much beneath the surface of it.
Fred swallowed. “Well,” he said softly, “that was your first mistake.”
You tipped your head. “What was?”
“Thinking I have any manners left at all.” And then, because he could not help himself, because the impulse arrived bright and wicked and warm, he unwrapped the sugar quill, snapped it cleanly in half, and held one piece out to you. You looked from the sweet to his face. “For you,” he said.
You hesitated before you took it, as though thinking over a thousand possibilities before deciding it was safe. Your fingers brushed his again, and the contact was light as moth wings, brief as breath on glass, but it left a trail of heat in its wake. You looked down at the sugar quill half in your hand with something almost like surprise. “You’re sharing,” you said.
Fred grinned, though it felt strangely unsteady. “Don’t sound so shocked. I’m charitable in winter.”
You considered that. “Is that seasonal? Should I expect a decline in spring?”
He laughed aloud. This time unmistakably, and it made you smile. Your first real smile. It wasn’t dazzling in the conventional sense, but it unfolded slowly like a flower opening under snow. Or like sunlight finally breaking through cloud after a long grey morning. And because Fred had spent so long watching for scraps of expression from you, the sight of your actual smile struck him with catastrophic force.
He forgot every prepared line. Forgot the corridor, the castle, the hour. Forgot, briefly, how to breathe. You seemed unaware of the devastation you had caused. You bit into the sugar quill thoughtfully and looked out the window. The early grounds beyond were washed in silver frost.
“It’s peaceful this early,” you said.
Fred was still looking at you. “Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t looking at the grounds at all.
———————————————————————
He should have known peace never lasted. By the end of that week, things came to a head. It started in a corridor after dinner with two Slytherin girls and one nasty overheard comment. Fred had been heading back from the Owlery when he heard your name. He slowed instinctively. The voices came from around the bend ahead, sharp and low and unmistakably cruel.
“…honestly don’t know what’s wrong with her,” one girl said.
“She’s so weird,” said the other. “She listens like she’s waiting for the rest of the sentence that never comes.”
“And the Weasley thing?” the first added. “Pathetic, really. He’s obviously making fun of her.”
Fred stopped dead. The corridor was lined with torchlight and old stone, shadows flickering along the walls. Cold anger rose in him so quickly it surprised him.
The second girl snorted. “I know. It’s embarrassing. She can’t even tell when people are laughing at her.”
That was when you rounded the corner from the opposite end. You saw the girls, and saw him. From the way your steps faltered only once before smoothing out, Fred knew at once that you had heard enough. Not all, perhaps. But definitely enough.
The girls went still, yet it wasn’t them you eyes were trained on. You were looking at Fred. Your face had gone very calm with stillness that was not peaceful at all. The girls, perhaps sensing the sudden danger in the air, muttered something and slipped past, their footsteps retreating quickly. Silence rushed in after them. You stood there with your hands at your sides, shoulders straight, expression unreadable.
Fred took a step toward you. “Y/N—”
“Were they right?” Your voice was quiet enough that it nearly vanished into the crackle of the torches.
He stopped. You looked at him directly, and there was no confusion in your gaze this time. No careful sorting or hopeful literalness. “Have you been laughing at me?” you asked.
And Fred, for the first time since this began, felt fear. Fear of answering badly and watching something delicate shut forever. He should have said no. The truth had lined itself up for him, terribly easy to reach. He could have stepped into it. Could have told you that what had begun as mockery had become something else so gradually it frightened him. Could have said that the girls were wrong, or half wrong, or that he had been cruel once and was trying, clumsily and too late, not to be anymore.
He should have said no. Instead, something old and ugly reared up in him. It was the same reckless instinct that had started this whole disaster. The same hot cowardice that preferred performance to vulnerability, and cruelty to confession. Fear curdled into defensiveness so fast he hardly felt the turning of it. He only felt the sharp, sudden certainty that here, at last, was his chance to restore the balance. To prove that he had never gone soft. To tear down the impossible, dangerous thing you had built him into inside your own mind.
So Fred smiled wrongly. It wasn’t his real one. Not the warm, crooked grin that arrived when George said something outrageous or when a joke landed just right. This one was honed to a blade’s edge. It was thin, bright, and merciless. A smile meant for crowds.
“Yes,” he said. The word cracked through the corridor like ice splitting under weight.
Your face did not change at first. Fred saw the moment it landed, though. He watched the almost invisible stilling of your breath, and the minute tightening at the corners of your mouth. Behind you, torchlight shivered against the stone, throwing gold over the wall and shadow under your eyes.
“Yes,” he said again, because now that he had begun he could not seem to stop, every instinct in him rushing downhill toward ruin. “Of course I have.”
You stared at him but you didn’t interrupt or protest. You were listening, as you always did, as though every word mattered enough to be taken whole. Fred hated that even then.
“It’s been ridiculous,” he said, his voice gone lazy with a carelessness he did not feel. “Honestly, I thought you’d work it out sooner. But apparently not.”
Still you said nothing. He should have stopped there. He should have looked at your face, at the blankness settling over it like frost over glass, and understood that he was standing on the edge of something irreparable. Instead, he kept going, because if he stopped, he would have to admit that none of this felt like victory.
“Do you have any idea,” he said, “how absurd you’ve looked? Taking everything seriously. Thanking me. Looking at me like I meant any of it.” He gave a short, sharp laugh that sounded wrong even to his own ears. “Merlin, it’s almost impressive.”
Your fingers curled once at your sides. Very slightly. A lesser sign, perhaps, to someone who did not know you. But Fred knew, by now, how still you became when you were straining to hold yourself together. He knew your silences had textures. This one was not thoughtful or calm. It was taut and thin and dangerous, stretched like glass before the break.
And still he did not stop, because some broken, frightened part of him wanted you angry. Wanted you cold. Wanted you to look at him with ordinary hatred instead of the strange faith that had made him feel seen and guilty and wanted all at once.
So he struck where he knew you were soft. “You really didn’t notice?” he asked, almost lightly. “All this time?”
Your throat moved as you swallowed. Fred tilted his head, and the cruelty in him sharpened itself to a point. “No wonder everyone thinks you’re stupid.”
That did it. Not outwardly, at first. There was no large reaction. You didn’t gasp, or flinch, or break in any visible, dramatic way. But something in your face changed so subtly and so completely that the sight of it made his stomach lurch.
It was as if a lamp had gone out behind your eyes. Not because there was nothing there but because suddenly there was too much pain for light to get through. You looked at him as though you were rearranging the entire shape of the world and finding that every piece had been lying to you.
When you spoke, your voice was quiet. “Everyone?”
It was as though your question was giving him another chance. Another chance to take back what he had said. Fred’s pulse thudded once, hard. He had meant it as a line. A careless exaggeration. A weapon. But spoken back in your voice, that one word sounded small and wounded in a way that stripped it bare. He could have stopped there and taken it back but instead he doubled down. “Everyone.”
A long silence stretched between you. Down the corridor, somewhere far off, a door slammed and laughter flared faintly from another floor. Closer at hand, one of the torches hissed as wax spat into flame. The castle went on breathing around you, ancient and indifferent, while inside that narrow strip of corridor the air felt flayed raw.
You blinked once, then twice before Fred realised with a horrible jolt that your eyes had filled. You didn’t wipe them. The tears didn’t spill immediately, they only gathered there, brightening your gaze until it shone as though lit from within. Your face remained composed in a deliberate way that told him you were refusing to let yourself come apart where he could see. Your chin stayed lifted, your shoulders stayed straight. Only your mouth betrayed you, trembling once before you pressed it flat again. And when you looked angry, on top of hurt, it nearly undid him. Humiliation sat so badly on you because you wore dignity like bone, and to see it bruised was like seeing marble crack.
“I see,” you said. Your voice had gone even quieter, but it no longer sounded uncertain. It sounded careful and as controlled as a person stepping barefoot through broken glass because they had decided there was no other way forward.
Fred’s heartbeat was wild now, a trapped thing battering against his ribs. He wanted to take back every word but pride, wretched and instinctive, held his jaw in place. He said nothing. You drew in a slow breath through your nose, and when you spoke again there was a faint change in your tone of clarity.
“No,” you said, the tears finally slipping free, soundless and shining down your cheeks. “I think I finally understand.”
Fred felt those words like a blow. You laughed once, but there was no humor in it, only disbelief turned inward until it cut. “I kept thinking you were saying one thing and meaning another, but I had it the wrong way around.”
Your eyes stayed fixed on his. You didn’t hide from him and that was somehow worse. “I thought you noticed things because you were paying attention,” you said. “I thought you were mean to tell the truth, not for the sake of it.”
Each sentence was calm and precise. It was all the more devastating for the effort it took you to say them while your tears ran unchecked, betraying the grief you were refusing to dramatise. You looked furious now, your anger and humiliation braided so tightly together they made your whole face seem sharper. Your lashes were wet, your cheeks burned, and your hands had balled into fists so hard your knuckles had gone pale. And then, finally, the wound showed in one awful, trembling exhale.
“I know I don’t always understand things the way everyone else does,” you said, and now your voice shook despite your efforts to steady it. “I know I miss things. I know people think it means I’m—”
You stopped. For the first time, you looked away from him, as if the next word itself was hard to bear aloud. Fred felt dread crawl cold and sick through his body. When you looked back, the tears on your face had only made your expression fiercer.
“Stupid,” you said. The word dropped between you like a stone into deep water. Fred went still. You gave a tiny, bitter nod to yourself, as though confirming something you had feared for a long time. “I know that’s what they think. I just didn’t realise you thought it too.”
“No,” Fred said, finally, but the word came late and thin and useless.
Your laugh of disbelief broke with your words. “Don’t start lying for my comfort now,” you whispered.
He knew at once what you meant. He did not get to take it back at the exact moment he saw what it had done. He did not get to fling knives and then rush forward, aghast, because someone had bled. He did not get to choose cruelty and then recoil from its consequence as though he had been misunderstood.
Fred stepped toward you anyway. “Y/N—”
You stepped back faster. The movement was small, but it split something open in him. Your face hardened around your grief with frightening speed. “All this time,” you said, your voice thin with fury, “I thought maybe for once I had understood someone correctly.”
He had no answer to that. None that mattered. Another tear slid down your cheek. You wiped it away now with an angry hand almost roughly, as if furious with your own body for betraying you. Your chest rose and fell too fast. Fred had seen you composed, distant, grave, puzzled, and almost-smiling. He had never seen you hurt, and the knowledge that he had done it made the corridor tilt sickeningly around him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
You looked at him as if the words were an insult. “Don’t be,” you said with such naked contempt that he stopped where he was. “I’m not confused anymore,” you said, and every syllable came out clipped and trembling. “So at least you accomplished that.”
Then you drew yourself up straighter though your tears were still falling, and though your face was flushed with humiliation. Your breath still caught against the edges of your words and whatever was left of your softness vanished entirely.
“Congratulations, Fred,” you said. His name in your mouth had never sounded like that before. Not warm, or thoughtful, or anything but ruined.
Then you turned and walked away with that same dignified, measured stride you always had, even with your face wet and your shoulders rigid and your hurt trailing behind you like torn silk in your wake. The torchlight caught the silver on your robes and turned it briefly bright as a knife. Your footsteps echoed down the corridor, sharp and lonely, until distance swallowed them.
Fred did not follow. He couldn’t. He stood there in the wreckage of his own making, every cruel word still vibrating in the air around him, and felt the full shape of what he had done settle over him like chains. He stared at the place where you had disappeared, his chest hollowing out with a slow, terrible force. Shame arrived first, then horror, and then recognition that this had been the thing he’d wanted at the beginning, wasn’t it? The restoration of some smug, careless order in which Fred Weasley was only ever a prankster and never a friend to Slytherins. He had wanted to make you see him clearly. And he had. Only now the sight of himself, reflected back through your pain, was uglier than he could stand.
He dragged a hand over his face and his palm came away shaking. At the end of the corridor, a draft moved through the castle, cold as winter, and Fred stood alone in it. He had finally become exactly what he had pretended to be.
———————————————————————
Fred lasted four days before it began to show. It wasn’t the same as the loud sort of misery he might once have performed for an audience which would have consisted of dramatic sprawling over tables in the Great Hall, a hand flung tragically to his brow, and exaggerated sighs until Angelina threatened him with bodily harm. This was quieter than that. It hollowed him out from the inside and left the edges standing.
He laughed when expected, but the sound came late. He forgot things. He burned a batch of Canary Cream prototypes so badly that even George shook his head. He went looking for you without meaning to and kept finding only the shape of your absence. That undid him more than anything because you were gone now. Of course you still existed in the castle, moved through its corridors, sat in its classrooms, breathed the same candle-thick air and crossed the same courtyards under the same winter sky. But you had become unreachable where once there had been pauses in which he could slip beside you and trade barbed remarks. You saw him and turned another way. If a lesson forced you into the same room, you didn’t look at him. If he entered the library, you left it. If he rounded a corridor and found you there, your face went smooth and unreadable and emptied itself of him completely.
The castle seemed built to torment him with memory. Every place held some version of you. The Potions classroom with its pewter light and simmering cauldrons, where your sleeves had brushed once over chopped valerian and turned his hands suddenly clumsy. The library table near the Restricted Section rope, where you had pushed books toward him and remembered every stray thing he said. The fourth-floor corridor washed in pale dawn, where you had handed him a sugar quill because he’d mentioned, weeks before, which ones he preferred. The courtyard arch by the Clock Tower, where you had looked at him in the snow and told him that he noticed things. He remembered that the most.
You say unkind things, but you usually notice something true first. Now all he could hear, over and over, was your voice in the corridor after. I know people think it means I’m stupid. I just didn’t realise you thought it too.
He had not known guilt could be physical before this, but it was. It sat in his chest like iron. It dragged behind every breath. It made food taste like paper and sleep feel impossible. His own thoughts had become a punishment cell he could not stop pacing in, each lap bringing him back to the same moment, the same look on your face, the same late and useless no clawing its way out of him long after the damage had been done.
By the fifth evening, George stopped pretending not to notice. The Gryffindor common room glowed red and gold around them. Rain had started outside, tapping softly at the windows, turning the black glass into streaked mirrors. Most of the room had settled into a post-dinner lull where students half-studied and half-dozed, limbs tucked beneath blankets, parchment spread over knees. Near the fire, Alicia and Katie were arguing over a Quidditch strategy diagram. Lee lay upside down on a sofa with his feet hanging over the back, humming tunelessly to himself.
Fred sat at the table by the window with a quill in his hand and a piece of parchment before him so blank it had begun to feel judgmental. George approached, took one look at the untouched parchment, and lowered himself into the chair opposite. “You’re not even pretending to work anymore,” he said.
Fred did not lift his head. “I am working.”
“On what?”
Fred turned the quill between his fingers. “On thinking.”
George snorted. “Dangerous.” He paused, then said in a soft voice, “You look awful.”
Fred laughed once without humour. “Thank you.”
“You know what I mean.”
Yes, he did. He looked awful because he felt awful. Because he hadn’t realised until you were gone just how much of his day had begun orienting itself around you in small, humiliating increments. Like a seat chosen because it gave him a line of sight to where you usually sat. Or a detour through a corridor because you sometimes passed there after Charms. Even a hand reaching automatically into his pocket when he saw something in Hogsmeade and thought, absurdly and immediately, that you would like it.
He missed your face. Not only its beauty, though there was that too in infuriating abundance. He missed the quiet intelligence of it and the way your expression changed by fractions. How your gaze focused fully when you listened, making the rest of the world feel thin and unimportant. He missed your almost-smiles, rare and slow and so hard-won they had felt like secrets entrusted to him. He missed the precise cadence of your voice. He missed the way you took words seriously, the way you turned them over as though language were a set of objects to be arranged carefully rather than flung carelessly into the air. He missed the feeling of being noticed by you.
And worse than that he missed the friendship he had not even understood he possessed until he shattered it. Because that was what it had been, alongside everything hotter and more confusing beneath it. Friendship, genuine and strange and precious. You had listened to him as though he were worth understanding. You had remembered him, shared things with him, and sat beside him in silences that never felt empty. You trusted him in that steady, unshowy way that had made him feel, for the first time in longer than he liked to admit, less like a performance and more like a person. He had found something real in you.
And then he had stamped on it with both feet. Lee’s voice drifted over from the sofa. “For the record,” he said without opening his eyes, “watching you mope is becoming genuinely upsetting.”
Fred looked over. “Then stop watching.”
Lee rolled off the sofa, landed in a heap of limbs, and wandered over to the table. He dropped into the chair beside George and squinted at Fred with the frankness of old friends who had long ago forfeited any claim to delicacy. “You haven’t hexed anyone all week,” Lee said. “You nearly cried into your shepherd’s pie yesterday.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did,” George said.
“That was gravy.” Fred corrected.
George raised his eyebrows and Lee leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Have you spoken to her?”
Fred let out a breath and looked back down at the parchment. “She won’t let me.”
“Well,” said Lee, “yes. I likely wouldn’t talk to you either.”
Fred’s jaw tightened. The warmth of the common room pressed in around him, but he felt none of it. He only felt the cold of that corridor, the way your tears had shone without sound, the way you had stepped back when he reached for you.
“I keep hearing it,” he said at last. Neither George nor Lee spoke. Fred swallowed. “What I said.” The words came harder now that he had begun, dragged up from somewhere raw. “I can’t stop hearing them, and every time I do, it sounds worse. Crueler. It sounds like…” He broke off, rubbed both hands over his face, then said into them, muffled and furious, “Well, it sounds like exactly what it was.”
George’s expression changed. The mockery left it first, then the ease. What remained was his brother stripped down to the bone of him, perceptive, protective, and unbearably direct when it mattered. “Fred,” he said quietly, “what you did was awful.”
Fred looked up. George held his gaze without flinching. “It was cruel, and it hit exactly where she was vulnerable, and you know that.”
Fred nodded once. He couldn’t argue against the pony and he didn’t want to. “I know,” he said. “I deserve to be just as miserable for it.”
Lee sighed through his nose and leaned back. “You’re being punished already.”
“I should be.” His punishment felt appropriate.
“Yes,” Lee said. “But that doesn’t mean you should give up.”
Fred laughed bitterly. “You think I can just stroll up and say sorry and that fixes it?”
“No,” George said. “You can’t go back or unsay it, and you probably can’t make her feel better right away. Some things don’t heal just because the person who caused them finally feels bad.”
Fred looked away. The rain had strengthened beyond the window now, silvering the dark. The glass reflected his own face faintly back at him. He looked drawn and tired.
George went on. “But you can tell her the truth.”
Fred’s gaze snapped back. “The real truth,” Lee added. “Not the ugly rubbish you threw at her because you panicked.”
George leaned forward, forearms on the table. “Tell her you lied.”
Lee nodded. “Tell her how it started.”
“And how it changed,” George said.
“And how you feel now,” Lee finished.
Fred stared at them both. The answer rose immediately in him. What good would that do? Why would you believe him? Why would you stay long enough to hear it? What right had he to put more words in your path after the ones he’d already used to wound you?
But beneath all that was something simpler. A need for you to know him. For you to know the truth. That he didn’t believe you stupid. That you weren’t stupid. That fact that you believed the worst thing he had ever said to you represented the whole of him ate away at him. You did not deserve to think you had been foolish for seeing something gentler in him because you had not been wrong. He had just been cowardly.
Fred looked down at the blank parchment between his hands. “What if she won’t listen?”
George’s voice softened. “Then at least she’ll know you tried.”
Lee gave him a sharp look. “And if she does listen, don’t be clever. Don’t joke. Just tell her the truth and let it be ugly.”
Fred almost smiled at that. “You make it sound easy.”
“It won’t be,” said Lee.
George reached over and stole the quill from his fingers. “Go before you lose your nerve.”
Fred sat there for a minute, and because George knew him too well, he stood, hauled Fred up by the arm, and shoved him toward the portrait hole. “Now,” George said.
Fred caught his balance. “You’re both unbearable.”
Lee saluted lazily from his chair. “Go grovel.”
Fred left before they could say anything else.
———————————————————————
He found you the next afternoon on the grounds. Winter had softened a little, enough that the snow no longer lay in clean, untouched sheets but had begun to melt in patches, exposing dark earth and flattened grass beneath. The sky hung pale and pearled above the castle, and a weak, watery sun pressed through the clouds without warmth. The air smelled of thawing stone, damp moss, and the lake. Bare branches scratched at the sky like black ink strokes.
You sat alone beneath a beech tree near the edge of the grounds, far enough from the main paths that few students wandered that way unless they meant to. A blanket had been spread beneath you over the still-damp grass. Your bag lay open at your side, one book stacked on top of another, and one rested in your hands, open across your lap. Your robes pooled dark around you. The wind stirred the ends of your hair across your cheek. From a distance you looked calm as you always did, but Fred knew better now than to mistake stillness for peace.
He slowed as he approached. Your posture shifted before he was close enough to speak. Perhaps you heard his steps through the brittle grass, or perhaps some instinct simply alerted you to being watched. You looked up and the second you recognised him, your face emptied. You lowered your eyes at once and began packing your things away. Each movement was neat and efficient.
Fred’s stomach dropped. “Wait,” he called.
You didn’t wait. You slid the bookmark into your page, shut the book, stacked it with the others, and reached for your bag. Panic rose in him swift and sharp. By the time he reached you, you were already halfway to your feet.
“Please,” he said.
Still you refused to look at him. You gathered the blanket with one hand, and that was when he reached out and caught your other hand in his. The contact stopped you both and your fingers went still in his grasp. Fred felt the shock of it all the way to his shoulders. Your hand was cold from the air. He had imagined touching you again so many times in the past week that the feel of it now was almost overwhelming.
You tried once, immediately, to pull away. He tightened his hold, not enough to hurt you and only enough to keep you there. The desperation in him finally broke free of pride. “Please stay,” he said, voice rough. “Please. Just for one minute.”
At that, you finally looked at him. Your eyes were guarded and tired. There were shadows beneath them he did not remember putting there but knew, in his bones, that he had. He hated himself afresh for that.
“I don’t want to do this again,” you said. The quietness of your voice frightened him more than anger would have.
“You won’t,” he said quickly. “I swear to Merlin, you won’t. I just…I need to tell you something.”
Your hand remained rigid in his. “What?”
He drew in a breath that felt too small for what he needed to say. “The truth.” Fred swallowed and forced himself not to look away. “I was the stupid one. Not you.” he said.
Your brows drew together almost imperceptibly.
“I was,” he said again, because the words had to be plain and whole and not dressed in any wit. “Not you. Me.”
You said nothing. The grounds had gone very still around you. Fred held your gaze and made himself continue. “When this started,” he said, “I was trying to be cruel.” The words tasted foul but he kept speaking. “I thought you were aloof and impossible and I hated that I couldn’t get a reaction out of you, so I made it into a game. I wanted to annoy you. Embarrass you. Prove I could get under your skin.”
Your expression changed by almost nothing, but he felt it anyway. There was a tiny flinch of old hurt. “I know,” you said, and the simplicity of it cut him.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I know you do. But that isn’t all of it.”
He let go of your hand then, not because he wanted to but because he had not earned the right to hold it through this. His fingers felt abruptly empty.
“The longer it went on, the harder it got,” he said. “Because you kept being…you. You took me seriously when no one else did. You listened when I spoke. You remembered things. You saw straight through the performance half the time, except not in the ways I expected. You made room for me when I hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”
Your eyes stayed fixed on him now, watchful and unreadable. Fred’s pulse pounded. “I liked talking to you,” he said. “I liked being around you. I liked that you saw things differently. I liked that you noticed details everyone else walked past. I liked your questions and your pauses and the way you think before you speak. I liked how you took things literally and still somehow understood truths other people miss entirely.”
The wind moved through the bare branches above you, making them (and you) shiver. Fred’s voice dropped lower. “I liked your quirks,” he said. “All of them. I liked the things you thought made you strange. I liked that your mind worked the way it did. I liked that you didn’t move through the world carelessly. I liked that you paid attention. I liked…” He broke off, looked at you helplessly, then forced the rest out. “I liked you.”
Your mouth parted slightly. Not from understanding, he thought at first, but from surprise that he was saying any of this aloud.
“I lied to you,” he said. “That day in the corridor. I lied because I was scared and proud and angry at myself for caring. You asked me if the girls were right, and instead of telling you the truth, I said the worst thing I could think of because it was easier than admitting that I’d changed.”
Your eyes had gone bright again, though not in quite the same way as before. There were tears there, yes, but held differently. Fred stepped closer, careful this time, like approaching something wounded that might yet bolt.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “Not in the useless way I said it before. I mean it properly. I’m sorry I made you feel stupid. I’m sorry I used the thing you were most afraid of against you. I’m sorry I made you think your way of seeing the world was something to laugh at.” His throat tightened. “It isn’t,” he said fiercely. “It never was.”
You looked down then, and the sight nearly undid him. Because your lashes lowered as though under too much weight, and your shoulders that were so often held with quiet dignity softened by a fraction. When you spoke, your voice was very small. “You said yes.”
Fred closed his eyes for one beat. “I know.”
“You said everyone was laughing.”
“I know.”
Your fingers worried at the edge of the folded blanket. “I believed you.”
“I know,” he said again, and this time it came out broken.
You were quiet for so long he began to fear you would simply walk away after all. That you would gather yourself and leave him standing there in the damp winter light with the truth too late in his mouth.
Then you asked, still not looking at him, “Why did you come now?”
The answer was immediate. “Because I missed you.”
Your chin lifted slightly. Fred let out a breath and gave up every last scrap of defensiveness.“I missed everything,” he said. “I missed talking to you. I missed you looking at me. I missed your face. I missed your strange little silences and the way you’d remember something I’d forgotten saying. I missed being your friend.”
That made you look at him. The word friend settled between you with quiet force. Fred met your gaze. “I was,” he said more softly, “wasn’t I? Your friend?”
Something in your expression wavered. Yes, he had been. In the odd, crooked, complicated shape your connection had taken, there had still been friendship there. Real enough to wound when broken. “I thought so,” you said.
The ache in those three words nearly doubled him over. “And I wrecked it,” he whispered.
Then, to his astonishment, you asked, “Did you mean any of the noticing?”
Fred frowned. “What?”
“When you said things about me.” Your eyes searched his, grave as ever. “About me being intimidating. Or observant. Or too trusting. Or…” You hesitated. “Different.”
“Yes,” he said at once. “Yes. All of that was true. The cruelty was real at the beginning,” he said, because he would not insult you with half-honesty now. “But the noticing was real too. And then the noticing became all of it.”
A tear slipped down your cheek. This time you wiped it away gently. “I hated thinking I’d imagined you,” you said.
Fred made a soft, wrecked sound. “You didn’t,” he said. “You didn’t imagine me. I just behaved like a coward.”
Something in your face loosened like frost beginning to melt from a windowpane, letting the shape beneath come slowly back into view. Your mouth trembled, then steadied. Your eyes remained damp, but they no longer looked shuttered. “I was so angry,” you admitted.
“You had every right to be.”
“I still am,” you said.
Fred nodded. “Also fair.”
That, unexpectedly, made the corner of your mouth twitch. It was not a smile, but it was the first trace of one he had seen since the corridor, and it struck him like sunrise.
“I don’t like being lied to,” you said. “And I don’t like being made to feel foolish.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
You studied him another long moment. Then, with the severe honesty that belonged only to you, you added, “You looked miserable all week.”
Fred barked out a startled laugh. “Thank you.”
“You did.”
“I was.”
Then you said, “Good.”
He laughed again, this time properly, and there it was. That tiny fracture in the ice, enough to let warmth through. You looked down at your books, then back at him, and something gentler entered your expression. “I forgive you,” you said.
Fred went still. The winter air vanished from his lungs. Perhaps you saw the shock of it on his face, because you added, very quietly, “I don’t think what you said was small. And don’t think it stops hurting immediately just because you’ve explained it. But I believe you’re telling the truth now.”
Fred stared at you as if he’d forgotten every language he knew. You forgave him. The relief that moved through him was so intense it bordered on exhilaration. He had not realised how tightly he had wound himself around the fear of losing you entirely until that fear loosened enough to let him breathe.
“Thank you,” he said.
You gave a slight nod. Then Fred, because apparently he had not yet exhausted his capacity for making a disaster of important moments, said in a rush, “And I do like you.”
You blinked. “Yes,” you said. “You already said that. That you like me and my quirks.”
He made a strangled sound of frustration. “Not just that.”
You frowned faintly, trying to sort the distinction. Fred looked at you with your hair stirred by winter wind and your books half-packed and your expression caught between confusion and dawning curiosity and he felt some last foolish fear give way beneath a stronger certainty.
Of course words were failing him. Words had failed him from the start with you, slipping and twisting under the weight of too much meaning. Maybe because you listened so intently to them, they always felt suddenly inadequate in your presence, too blunt for the truth they were meant to carry.
So he stepped closer, slowly enough that you could stop him if you wanted to. When you didn’t, he lifted one hand, touched your cheek with a care that made his own heart ache, and kissed you.
The world narrowed. The cold air, the lake, the distant castle, the damp winter grass…all of it fell away until there was only your breath catching softly against his mouth, and the cool silk of your skin beneath his thumb. He kissed you gently at first. When he pulled back, it was only enough to look at you.
Your eyes were wide with astonishment. Fred’s hand remained against your cheek, his thumb just beneath your eye, and he gave a shaky little smile that held more vulnerability than any expression he had ever shown you. “Do you understand me now?” he asked softly.
For one suspended beat, you only stared at him. Then the understanding arrived. He saw it happen when your face changed as the meaning finally settled into place. He hadn’t meant the friendly ‘I like you’, or the treasured-companion ‘I missed you’, but something warmer and deeper. It made your whole expression go luminous with startled feeling.
“Oh,” you gasped.
Fred laughed, helpless and breathless and half in love with the shape of your realisation.
“Yes,” he said.
A flush rose slowly into your cheeks, pink against the winter air. Your gaze dropped once to his mouth and then back to his eyes, and for the first time since he had known you, you looked almost shy.
“Yes,” you said again, softer now. “I do understand.”
And then you kissed him back. It was tentative but not for long. You reached for the front of his robes with one hand, fingers curling into the fabric as if to anchor yourself, and leaned up into him with a kind of thoughtful certainty that made his knees feel briefly unreliable. Your kiss felt deliberate, sincere, a little careful at first and then wholly unleashed. Fred made a soft sound against your mouth and drew you closer, one hand slipping to your waist, the other still cradling your face as though he could scarcely believe he was allowed to.
When you finally parted, the two of you stayed close enough to share breath. Your eyes searched his. “You should have just said that,” you murmured. “I might have understood sooner.”
Fred laughed under his breath. “I know.”
A tiny smile touched your mouth then, and he kissed it immediately. This time when you laughed, it was against his lips. Beneath the bare branches and the pale winter sky, with your books forgotten in the grass and the damp air turning your cheeks rose-bright, the truth settled between you at last. Fred rested his forehead against yours and closed his eyes for one brief, grateful second.
“You are not stupid,” he said quietly.
Your fingers tightened in his robes. “I know,” you answered after a moment. “But I’m glad you understand that now too.”
He kissed you again for that and when the two of you finally began gathering your things distractedly (with Fred repeatedly forgetting what he was meant to be holding because he couldn’t stop looking at you) the world felt changed as if something long-buried had finally begun to surface from the snow, green and living, beneath the thaw. You walked back toward the castle together. This time, when your hands brushed, neither of you pulled away or pretended not to notice.
Yesterday I answered an ask about the Hogwarts school system and if it might have been different in Tom’s time than it was in Harry’s time (you can find it here). I’ve been thinking about it for a day now and would like to add onto it.
I believe the Hogwarts education is catered to the purebloods to widen the gap between them and muggleborns. I say this because the school system is actually very poorly set up for people that didn’t grow up in the magical world.
The lovely anon had mentioned how ancient languages aren’t taught, which are important because many ancient texts would most likely be written in them (not to mention most spells are in Latin). This really caught my attention because throughout history people have used reading and writing to widen the gap between social classes. This was especially prevalent during Shakespeares time when those in poverty wouldn’t be taught and thus couldn’t rise in society because they didn’t have the skill.
It can be assumed that this could also be the case at Hogwarts. Purebloods would have grown up in the magical world while practically swimming in gold for most of them. This means purebloods would likely grow up being taught these languages and reading ancient texts considering their families most likely knew these languages and had the money to hire tutors and buy books.
This opens their field to the pure and unaltered history and records of the very world they live in while also knowing their worlds traditions through first hand accounts. Muggleborns and a lot of halfbloods won’t have this privilege, and if the ability to read these languages is common among purebloods (the people in charge of the government) then people who can’t will be considered unqualified. This also means most texts won’t be translated because why would they translate it if the important people already can read them?
There’s also only eight classes a student can take during Harry’s time (this doesn’t include flying in first year), and while there might have been more in the past we’re going to ignore it. These are far too few classes to properly educate people newly entering your world. There are no classes to introduce muggleborns to the magical world, not a word about how much their money is worth, holidays, just culture in general.
The classes also lack variety and specialization for certain subjects. In high school I had the opportunity to take very niche classes in science and social studies to deepen my understanding of the subjects while also exploring career options. We had classes like Cold War, Native American history, mythology, forensics, conceptual physical science, to name a few.
Hogwarts lacks these things, you only have one path you can take not to mention how when you pick an elective you must stick to it. This is a horrible strategy since they only start discussing career choices in fifth year and by that time you can’t change what you’re taking. Electives should also be more niche and odd to introduce students to new careers and opportunities. Hogwarts lacks this.
However, purebloods grow up in the magical world, so they have the knowledge of what paths can be taken and how to achieve them. They have the money for private tutors if they wish to have a deep dive into a certain subject.
The core classes are very straightforward too and don’t involve philosophical discussions or debates. This may seem small to you, but these things are essential to the development of a person. Don’t get me wrong, the facts are important, we must know them, but what about the grey area? This approach doesn’t teach kids to think for themselves, only to follow what they’re told.
My social studies and literature teachers always brought up several sides, often had us debate and also made us make educated guesses with limited information. My father had a sci fi fiction class and his teacher after a book and during would force them to try and understand how things like those dystopian futures had happened. This approach makes children learn to recognize patterns, make connections and also think for themselves.
When people can’t think for themselves and just follow what they’re blindly told it makes them easy to control. The government is controlled by the corrupt, money constantly going into the purebloods pockets not to mention they’re part of the Wizgomant is ran by purebloods and this is the high court. Nobody challenges them because they were never taught to look deeper, they only see the facts and whether these facts are real or not is irrelevant. This means the purebloods continue to enter high positions while muggleborns and many halfbloods are unable to.
I also want to mention how the history of magic class is ran by a ghost that can’t teach. They could’ve replaced him at any time, but they chose to keep him which means there’s a reason. I’m assuming firstly that enough students pass to say it’s not a teacher issue, and who are those students? The purebloods, people who grew up hearing about this history, have the resources. It’s also strategic to keep him because he keeps the “lesser” uneducated, and if someone doesn’t know history they’re doomed to repeat it/turn a blind eye as it’s repeated.
Finally, anon had mentioned how Hogwarts doesn’t teach subjects like math, science, geography, etc, and I also have a theory for this. While it may seem to put everyone in the magical world at a disadvantage it actually puts muggleborns into a horrible position.
The purebloods have the money and connections to do whatever they please and have a good life in the magical world, but the muggleborns don’t know how their own world works and it’s been rigged so that they will have a significantly hard time getting anywhere. The logical conclusion would be to leave the magical world but they can’t because nobody in the muggle world will hire someone who doesn’t know math, science and things like that. This means no matter what they do most are doomed to live in poverty and be exploited.
This is all theory, but I’ve been thinking about this for a whole day now and needed to write it down.
Do you think the schoolsystem was different back when Riddle was in Hogwarts?
One of the biggest pet peeves I have with Harry Potter is the lack of subjects. It seems like such a waldorf school tbh, but without the benefit of emotional intelligence and being content with your life.
You teach gardening and animal care but not old Greek, Latin, old Norse, old English or Sanskrit? (Most ancient spells and witchcraft would definitely be documented in one of these.) And don’t get me started on science. Why aren’t these kids taught math?!
I think it’s likely that there might have been more subjects during Tom’s time, but it’s highly unlikely they taught things like math and science.
The thing about education is that it’s closely related to the political climate no matter what. Harry Potter is based in Magical Britain where the rich are in control, the government is corrupt, there’s been two dark lords in under a century, and everyone is afraid of another one rising. This creates the perfect opportunity to begin to exert control over schools because a dumb population is a controllable population.
Dumbledore may be the Headmaster of Hogwarts, but the Board of Governors also hold a lot of control while the government likely funds the school to an extent. You must also remember that Dumbledore has been directly involved with the last two dark lords and is definitely a little paranoid. This is also post war and while it’s already been ten years they’re still affected.
War often makes the economy suffer greatly, and in order for schools to operate they need to get funding. Students and teachers are also often traumatized, there is usually a teacher shortage, and the curriculum will be disrupted (I’m not counting the destruction of the school since I’m not talking about the second war with Voldemort).
The first two points are self explanatory so I won’t add on to them. There will be a shortage of teachers because many can and will get killed while others will leave to help aid in the fight. The curriculum is often changed post-war to cater to the societies post-war needs. This could explain why there’s so few subjects because they’re focusing on the main subjects (potions, charms, transfiguration, etc.), and haven’t yet recovered enough to introduce more subjects outside the three electives.
Now, let’s move onto the control aspect. Dumbledore will not allow a subject like the dark arts into the school and any subject relating to it due to personal experience and the fact there’s already been a dark lord produced from the school. The government clearly is corrupt just from seeing Fudge at work so it can be assumed things like old languages won’t be taught because that means the population has access to ancient texts and I’m sure a lot ancient magic is considered dark.
The reason the government would want the population uneducated is because it’s what keeps people like Fudge in power. Good education means people can think for themselves, have been introduced to a wide variety of different ideas and topics while also being taught to recognize patterns. There’s a reason why they haven’t replaced Professor Binns, he keeps the students uneducated in history which means the government can do whatever the hell they want since nobody will see the patterns.
Theres also the fact this control will put purebloods on a pedestal since they’re more educated from growing up in the magical world and they have the money for more education. This method ensures that purebloods remain in power while halfbloods and muggleborns can’t rise too far up in society. It keeps the rich richer and the poor poorer. This is important especially after the war when many influential purebloods ruined their reputations making it harder to maintain control.
Now, muggle subjects would never be taught in Hogwarts during Tom’s time. It’s a well known fact that the magical world is very discriminatory towards the muggleborns and I can’t imagine what they think about muggles. Not teaching the population math, science, geography and other subjects creates a large barrier between the magical world and the muggle world. This means nobody taught in the magical world can thrive in the muggle world keeping them in the magical world. They also will look down on these subjects because muggles know them and magical folk are “above” them.
Tom would have likely had more subjects though since he was in school before a major war was waged in Britain. Now, he probably wasn’t taught ancient languages since I can see that being something only taught privately to purebloods to widen the gap. It makes it so mere muggleborns and halfbloods don’t have access to ancient texts that define the world they live in and makes them less reliable. In the end, it all has to do with power.
I hope this made sense, I’m not sure since it’s really hard to articulate my thoughts on this subject.
do you think it’s strange that the uk monarchy is, as far as i remember, never mentioned in the books? it seems so weird to me since, for better or worse, it’s such an integral part of the concept of “britishness” - even if wizarding society seems pretty removed from muggle society, the monarchy has such a long history that it seems weird for the two societies to not intermingle in it. has wizarding society cut ties with it after the issue of the statute of secrecy? how many of the crown jewels are actually magical items? how *noble* is the house of black, really? were there ever kings or queens who were wizards?
there’s so many questions i have about this! such a world building plot hole!
Ok, so there are a lot of questions here and I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability. I will note there are a bunch of my own headcanons in this post. They are based on what we know about Wizarding History and what I know about irl UK history but they are still headcanons.
So, we know the Ministry of Magic was founded in 1707 after the Statue of Secrecy was enacted in 1692. The ministry was an immediate response to said statute since wizards needed a more uniform government to enforce their secrecy and cover up any slip ups. This means that before the Statue of Secrecy, the muggle government or monarchy earlier was the governing force for wizards as well as muggles. Yes, the Wizengamot already existed, but it seemed to behave differently from how it does in the modern ministry.
I wrote about the Wizengamot and how I believe it works along with some of its history here although I learned more UK history since, so this post is more accurate on the history front.
Now, I hope you won't mind me going into some medieval history of the UK in general, since the monarchy has changed over time, and in the early Middle Ages, the UK was comprised of multiple smaller kingdoms. Wales had 3 big kingdoms, but also a bunch of smaller ones (there were also warlords that took over abandoned Roman fortresses after the Romans left Britain in eastern Wales), England had the Anglo-Saxons settling in after the Romans left and creating multiple Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (like Wessex and Marcia). Scotland and Ireland were similarly divided. There were the biking invasions and a whole Viking kingdom in north-east England that's referred to as "The Dane Law". England did unite under King Aethelstan eventually, but with all these fractured kingdoms and warlords, I'm sure there were some wizards among them. Then, of course, there is the Norman monarchy and nobility established after the Norman conquests, which officially settled in 1066.
My point with all of this history is that like muggle society, wizarding society changed and evolved and that the monarchy in Britain wasn't the same throughout the entirety of history. So, the status of wizards and wizard nobility changed based on the specific time period we are discussing. But let's look at post-normans pre-Statue of Secrecy wizarding high society, and for that the Pottermore article about the Malfoy family is incredibly helpful:
Like many other progenitors of noble English families, the wizard Armand Malfoy arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror as part of the invading Norman army. Having rendered unknown, shady (and almost certainly magical) services to King William I, Malfoy was given a prime piece of land in Wiltshire, seized from local landowners, upon which his descendants have lived for ten consecutive centuries.
(from Pottermore)
Most nobility in England after the conquest were normans close to William who arrived with him and were given muggle noble titles, lands, and status. irl, the first Peverell in England, William Peverell was similarly given lands as he was said to be a son of William the Conqueror. That being said, some Anglo-Saxon nobility (mostly from the south of England since the northern Anglo-Saxon nobility were mostly killed after their rebellion) were kept in place by William as long as they swore fealty to him. Families like the Blacks and Longbottoms (both having Anglo-Saxon surnames) are likely among this leftover Anglo-Saxon nobility.
Now besides the muggle nobility, which is very much aware of wizards and even includes wizards (like the Malfoys, Peverells, Lestranges, and the Gaunts) we have the Wizangamot. The Wizaengamot, which I wrote more about in the post I linked, have likely been around and acted as a council of wizard nobility alongside the muggle one before the Norman invasion since around when Hogwarts was founded (around 990). The Blacks and Longbottoms (and the Notts who also have a Germanic name dating to the Dane Law I referenced earlier and King Knut who ruled that portion of England) were probably in this council.
We also know the Malfoys aren't in the Wizengamot in the books, meaning the circles of nobility for each council were different. This is easily explained by the Wizengamot being there earlier and being Anglo-Saxon rather than Norman. The name Wizangamot is, in itself, from old English which supports this speculation.
Since the Wizengamot continued existing after the conquest, I assume William the Conquerer left it as it is, wanting to ally himself with the local wizarding community rather than going to war with them. Wizards are, after all, really fucking useful, and irl he did keep some of the Anglo-Saxon nobility, so that's in character.
I think, after the conquest the Wizengamot either grew in the number of families there or that the families that opposed William were replaced with Norman wizard nobles that William trusted to represent him in the magical community.
The same Pottermore article about the Malfoy family also notes:
Historically, the Malfoys drew a sharp distinction between poor Muggles and those with wealth and authority. Until the imposition of the Statute of Secrecy in 1692, the Malfoy family was active within high-born Muggle circles, and it is said that their fervent opposition to the imposition of the Statute was due, in part, to the fact that they would have to withdraw from this enjoyable sphere of social life. Though hotly denied by subsequent generations, there is ample evidence to suggest that the first Lucius Malfoy was an unsuccessful aspirant to the hand of Elizabeth I, and some wizarding historians allege that the Queen’s subsequent opposition to marriage was due to a jinx placed upon her by the thwarted Malfoy.
(from Pottermore)
This means the monarchy throughout history was well aware of wizards and that the magical nobility was also muggle nobility and allowed in the same circles, but not vice versa. It seems to me, that the Malfoys had a muggle noble title from William I, and once the Statue of Secrecy was enacted they lost their title since they weren't also Wizarding nobility (Wizengamot members). (The Malfoys did keep all their money though).
Considering what Pottermore implies, it seems to me, there is a high chance of some crown jewels being magical. I mean, Lucius Malfoy I proposed to Queen Elizabeth I, and in my headcanon the aforementioned Willaim Peverell is the father of the three brothers of the Deathly Hallows, and in this headcanon, William Peverell is a half-blood wizard. Point is, yeah, the monarchy was well aware of wizards and seemed to have been in an alliance with the Wizengamot and the magical community. Although, I'm sure attitudes changed over time and differed from monarch to monarch with some being closer to the Wizarding community than others, but in general the Wizengamot and the wizarding community as a whole were under the governance of the muggle monarch.
It's actually possible there were a few wizards who ruled the UK (or any of the earlier kingdoms that eventually united) across the Isles's history. I think it's even likely if we're being honest. Egbert the Egregious, for example, might've been a king of Kent or Wessex (two of the older kingdoms before England united) as kings of the same name are recorded in both.
Once the Statue of Secrecy was enacted the wizards drew away from muggle society and wizards who held muggle noble titles likely lost them. But we know some muggles are aware of wizards' existence. We see at the beginning of HBP that the muggle Prime Minister is informed of wizards' existence and obliviated when they leave office. If I had to bet, the monarch (and perhaps more in the royal family) are similarly aware that wizards exist but aren't really involved. Like, the monarch probably knows but is only informed when something in the Wizarding World spills out to the muggle one. So, the monarch knows wizards exist, but not much more than that.
As for how noble the House of Black really was, I mentioned I believe they were nobles of the Wizengamot and Anglo-Saxon nobility before the Normans. I think all magical families in the Wizengamot that were around before the Normans would be considered: "Noble and Ancient". We see the Blacks being referred to as "The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black" compared to the Gaunts who are just: "House of Gaunt" which is how wizard nobility from after the conquest would be titled in my headcanon.
The name Gaunt is one that arrived in Britain with the Normans as stated in a survey of England's land done by William after the conquest (this survey is known as the "Doomsday Book" and it essentially details which land belongs to which lord. The book names both Norman lords and Anglo-Saxon ones and is a super useful historical document. It occasionally even mentions which Anglo-Saxon lord was deposed for the sake of a new Norman one). Gilbert de Ghent (standardized spelling wasn't a thing yet), named in said survey was the nephew of King William I's wife and as such received lands. A lot of them, actually:
"Few among the Conqueror's companions of arms were so splendidly rewarded as Gilbert de Ghent, who held one hundred and seventy-two English manors."
(Manors refers to actual manors, but also the land surrounding them. Basically, it refers to a family seat)
As the Gaunts were so favored, it's likely William I placed his nephew's family (who I headcanon at least some are wizards) in the Wizengamot. I believe the Slytherins married into the Gaunt family around the same time to add legitimacy to the Gaunts' status in the wizarding community.
The Malfoy Family that doesn't have a magical noble title and lost their muggle one is just referred to as: "Malfoy Family" and never "House of Malfoy" which again, to me, suggests this is how these titles work.
The aforementioned Doomsday Book does mention a William Black with 5 manors in Devon. William Peverell, as a son of King William I is mentioned to have 153 manors given to him and another 75 to Ranulf Peverell (not sure of the familial relationship). Reginald Cnut (older spelling of Nott) is also mentioned in the Doomsday Book to have 26 manors. Malfoy is a name JKR made up and isn't mentioned in the Doomsday Book or any other survey of UK landowners done in the Middle Ages. I did read a legend about one Guy Le Strange who participated in a tournament at Castle Peverell around 1083 and won the hand of Mellette, the niece of William Peverell. Although the Lestranges are not mentioned in the Doomsday Book and this legend likely dates from the 13th century a good 200 years after the supposed events it details.
So, to summarise, wizards don't seem to have or ever had a royal family of their own but there were most likely wizard royals throughout the various kingdoms that existed in history. Some wizards do have a noble status that I headcanon/speculate is connected to their status as members of the Wizengamot. These Wizengamot titles were also muggle titles and there were wizards with muggle titles that weren't part of the Wizengamot. These wizards probably interacted very closely with the muggle nobility and even shared family trees and were all probably considered half-blooded if you asked a Death Eater. After the Statue of Secrecy, the muggle titles became irrelevant and stopped being used leaving only the Wizarding titles behind (I headcanon "Ancient and Noble houses" refers to Anglo-Saxon nobility, and just "noble houses" refers to Norman nobility among wizards). The UK monarch likely is informed about the wizarding world to a similar degree as we see the muggle prime minister is informed. Blood purity probably only became relevant after the Statue of Secrecy as before that we see intermarriages with muggle royalty and nobility being practiced (I talked a bit about the timing of the witch hunts and the Statue of Secrecy here).
Sorry for the nerdy history talk, but, I answered this after a few weeks of medieval UK research and I have so many thoughts about medieval wizarding society in Britain.
anyone know of or have any theories about the truth about the chamber of secrets and how it and the basilisk came about (eschewing the ridiculous idea that the legend is actually wholly true lol). making a post compiling some theories rn
The thing is - Rowling just has no fucking clue how history works. As in: She neither understands how historical societies functioned (and how they differed from the British Empire flavored turd she has in her head), nor does she understand how historical science work and evolve.
In the books, history is depicted as very static and unchanging. Unless something was never revealed in the first place, the historians know what happened and can just present it as an unchanging fact. There is no room for new discoveries or differing interpretations. There is definitively no room for errors or meddling.
And that's fucking stupid. It's fucking stupid in the context of real world history - in which primary sources get lost and destroyed and simply messed with all the time, and in which we have to contend with people being misinformed or simply lying. And it's just as stupid in the wizarding world - where wizards can use magic to alter history on top of everything else.
In my opinion, the whole founding myth of Hogwarts is bullshit. It just doesn't fit the time period it is set in.
So it was likely either:
heavily altered in the 1000 years the school has existed
or
simply a later creation
Like yeah - we have the sorting hat as a source, but it's completely possible that it was created hundreds of years after the founding and the creator(s) simply gave him fake memories. Even if it was created by Gryffindor and the other founders, it would still be possible that someone else fucked with its memories somewhere down the line. (And similar stuff is true for ghosts.)
To bring this back to Slytherin and the Chamber of Secrets, I prefer two options:
Salazar Slytherin wasn't involved at all. The chamber was build much later, probably during the construction of the sewage system. It was either build by the same people who installed the pipes and channels, or it was someone who used the construction work for their own goals, unbeknownst to the workers.
or
Salazar Slytherin did build the chamber, but for a completely different purpose. Maybe as safe room for experiments or for magical/religious rituals. Or as some kind of medieval bunker as a precaution against attacks of other wizards.
In this case, the basilisk would've come a lot later, probably after the statute of secrecy.
Either way, I'd say it was probably a Gaunt who did it and who restricted access to the camber to members of their family. (Which would also explain why Tom was able to gain access to the chamber.)
The story about how Slytherin built a secret chamber and hid a monster in it could either be younger or older than the chamber itself. It's completely possible that the Gaunts came up with that story to legitimate their usage of the camber (especially if there was already a room in place and they just modified it). It's also possible that it started out as a rumor/legend and the Gaunts used it as inspiration.
thinking about it, not enough is said about how vulnerable percy was when working under fudge
Think about the terrifying implications of a NINETEEN year old, being pressured politically using his family, now being completely isolated from a potential support system.
Completely at the mercy of his own boss. Surrounded by quite literally, the worst of the worst (corrupt officials, closeted death eaters) who praise him for leaving his family, yet curse his origins in the same breath.
He doesn’t have anyone to confide in (at least safely) about work, and nobody to support him if he’s mistreated, or tell him that he is.
Thinking about it, I refuse to believe that even in canon, that Percy wasn’t at least being in some form manipulated. Think about it— his family has shunned him and implicitly accused him of wanting to spy on them, as if they expect him to betray them for Fudge on principle. With everyone around him having a negative sentiment of his family, the likely emotionally insensitive/angry attempts to get him to come back, to someone emotionally vulnerable, it basically makes him free pickings to those who want to take advantage of him.
Think about it..
He’s now emotionally, physically and financially vulnerable from the break with his family. His livelihood depends on his boss’ whims, and it’s the only thing he has left. He is likely feeling lost, upset, and starving for praise or some form of stability because his life has been upended. Knowing what the ministry was, knowing about politics and what people will leverage, the idea of Percy being in that situation is literally chilling. He quite literally is vulnerable to coercion, manipulation, pressuring etc etc.. and with rising tensions in the ministry..
It’s definitely true that Harry would consider a lot of people his friends or at least say that he likes a fair bit of people, but it’s so interesting to me that Harry liking them isn’t enough for him to really be invested in them. He likes Dean and Seamus, likes Ernie, likes Luna, but he’s never made much of an effort to be involved with them and their lives, and this is true for his other peers too.
Outside of Quidditch I can’t think of many times Harry decided to spend time with someone when he’s not forced to, and especially when Ron & Hermione aren’t there
Meanwhile he’s so incredibly attached to Ron & Hermione. He’s worried they’ll abandon him, he feels a lot of pain at the thought that they might not like him, he pictures their reactions to things, he describes his conscience as sounding like them (mainly Hermione), on multiple occasions they are his happiest thought as he’s conjuring a patronus— not a memory of them but just the concept of them, the image of their faces in his head. He loves them so fucking much and when you consider his relationship with them vs the rest of his peers it really puts it into perspective.
Harry likes people but he’s never liked anyone as much as he likes Ron & Hermione
i don't know if it's been asked before so forgive me but how poor do you think the weasleys are? are they more lower middle class? cause ron didn't get his broken wand replaced immediately in the second year but got a new broomstick in the fifth?
and on a related note do you think arthur weasley is selfish for not going for a higher paying job? " i assume it would depend on how well of they are and if the family's needs are met?"
looove all your posts btw keep up the good work.
First of all, thank you! 💕
The Weasleys and money are interesting for sure.
See, they have enough money to always have food and clothes (second-hand, but all kids are dressed, fed, and well cared for). They have a house with 6 bedrooms:
Master bedroom
Fred & George's room
Ginny's room
Ron's room
Bill's room (which Charlie uses too when he comes over)
Percy's room
And a very large yard:
The garden was large, and in Harry’s eyes, exactly what a garden should be. The Dursleys wouldn’t have liked it — there were plenty of weeds, and the grass needed cutting — but there were gnarled trees all around the walls, plants Harry had never seen spilling from every flower bed, and a big green pond full of frogs.
(CoS, Ch3)
The Weasleys read like a family that used to have money. They have land, they have many cousins and aunts and uncles who seem to be living well. The parents don't act like they grew up lacking in anything. And even now that the money has dried up, they still don't live badly. They seem to be poor, not because Arthur's job doesn't pay enough, but because both Arthur and Molly have no idea how to budget or handle money. They both act like people who grew up with plenty of money they can throw around, and therefore, don't know how to save it.
The fact that they don't have money to replace Ron's wand is proof that they don't know how to handle money. The smart thing to do when you struggle economically is save up surplus money you don't immediately need when you have it, so you'll have emergency funds. You will put some money aside for future hard times, but the Weasleys don't do that:
I couldn’t believe it when Dad won the Daily Prophet Draw. Seven hundred galleons! Most of it’s gone on this trip, but they’re going to buy me a new wand for next year.
(PoA, Ch1)
They win 700 galleons, spend 7 of them on a new wand for Ron and "most of it" on a long family trip to Egypt. Sure, I can understand wanting to visit Bill, but if they're strapped for cash, I'd expect they won't go all out on the trip, go for slightly cheaper lodging, or stay there for fewer days, maybe go to fewer restaurants — there are ways to go on a budget vacation. This economic decision makes no sense.
But what this shows us is that the Weasleys live paycheck to paycheck, not because Arthur isn't paid enough — they don't know how to save money.
Bill & Charlie don't live at home, and since CoS, all their other kids are at Hogwarts all year. The amount of money Arthur & Molly would need to pay for food during the year is much lower compared to when all their kids are there. So, I assume, they would have leftover money since they aren't feeding as many heads. Even since Bill & Charlie left home, they should have had more money to put aside, even just a few sickles a month, that, over time, can become a magnificent amount of money — and yet, they don't. Their vault is near empty when we see it.
They have land they can farm and sell products from (they have an orchard, they own):
“Come and have a game of Quidditch in the orchard, Harry,” said Ron. “Come on — three on three, Bill and Charlie and Fred and George will play. . . . You can try out the Wronski Feint. . . .”
(GoF, Ch10)
He spent most of his days playing two-a-side Quidditch in the Weasleys’ orchard
(HBP, Ch6)
They can rent out parts of their yard, and Arthur gets plenty of other perks from his job besides his salary (bribery):
“I like Ludo,” said Mr. Weasley mildly. “He was the one who got
us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favor: His
brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with un-
natural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over.”
(GoF, Ch5)
And seems to be well-connected within the Ministry. Enough that everyone important knows him by name, and he is in a position to write laws:
“Well, dear, I think you’ll find that he would be quite within the law to do that, even if — er — he maybe would have done better to, um, tell his wife the truth. . . . There’s a loophole in the law, you’ll find. . . . As long as he wasn’t intending to fly the car, the fact that the car could fly wouldn’t—”
“Arthur Weasley, you made sure there was a loophole when you wrote that law!” shouted Mrs. Weasley. “Just so you could carry on tinkering with all that Muggle rubbish in your shed! And for your information, Harry arrived this morning in the car you weren’t intending to fly!”
(CoS, Ch3)
Arthur's position in the ministry is clearly more influential than the books lead us to believe. (I have some headcanons about that, but that's maybe for a different post). They have avenues they can earn money from, and would reasonably be able to save at least a little every month, especially after Bill and Charlie left home. We see Fred and George can save up much more than the Weasleys seem to have over a few years without having a stable job like their dad:
“We’ll bet thirty-seven Galleons, fifteen Sickles, three Knuts,”
said Fred as he and George quickly pooled all their money
[...]
“Boys,” said Mr. Weasley under his breath, “I don’t want you
betting. . . . That’s all your savings. . . . Your mother —”
(GoF, Ch7)
But the Weasleys have an empty bank vault:
Harry enjoyed the breakneck journey down to the Weasleys’ vault, but felt dreadful, far worse than he had in Knockturn Alley, when it was opened. There was a very small pile of silver Sickles inside, and just one gold Galleon.
(CoS, Ch4)
This is a vault of people who don't know how to save money, but more than that, this, to me, looks like a vault of people who are used to operating in debt.
When they go shopping, Molly takes everything out of the vault:
Mrs. Weasley felt right into the corners before sweeping the whole lot into her bag.
(CoS, Ch4)
And it's enough to buy everything 4 kids need for school for a whole year, btw. Sure, the robes are second-hand, but Harry always takes out a bunch of galleons. It's either everything is really cheap, way cheaper than it should be, and Harry carries around way too much money, or the Weasleys just always operate on debt.
As in, the single galleon is not have enough to actually buy everything, and Molly had to basically promise shops she'd pay them back later, basically paying with money she doesn't have. This could explain the Weasleys not having any emergency funds, since they're always running after various debts they owe.
And we know the Wizarding World allows people to make promises over debts, even the goblins:
A gang of them [goblins] cornered him [Bagman] in the woods after the World Cup and took all the gold he had, and it still wasn’t enough to cover all his debts. They followed him all the way to Hogwarts to keep an eye on him. He’s lost everything gambling. Hasn’t got two Galleons to rub together. And you know how the idiot tried to pay the goblins back?”
“How?” said Harry.
“He put a bet on you, mate,” said Fred. “Put a big bet on you to win the tournament. Bet against the goblins.”
(GoF, Ch37)
The goblins were willing to take Bagman's word he'd pay them back with his bet on Harry — it's very possible shops allow this too, especially if not everyone is carrying galleons everywhere. Say, even if you have money in your vault, but you only took out enough for X you wanted to buy, the shop could write your name down and what yoy owe for you to come by and pay them later (It makes sense for their society, that is very small and getting away with such a debt is hard and seems to be a very trusting of promises and other's words. The whole betting with Ludo thing was solely based on slips of paper and Bagman's word, so I can see something like this being common for them. After all, Wizarding Britain has the population of a very small town).
I still think they're bad with money, since, if debts are the problem, I'd use some of the 700 galleon prize money to get a headstart on that, but I think the Wealseys are comfortable living with a certain amount of debt. They're used to it.
As for the broom, that might've been on a day they got the salary/didn't have many debts to pay that month. The food at Grimmauld the summer before fifth year might not have been paid for by Arthur, which allowed them to have fewer debts and therefore the money for a broom.
At least, that's my headcanon/theory about it. They are poor not because of Arthur’s job, they could've made it work better — they are just bad at managing the funds and other resources at their disposal + got into a bunch of debts due to this tendency to not manage their funds properly.
I like this, especially because "broke aristocratic family buying things on credit" is SUCH a common trope in British literature (and history.) The Weasleys only seem to *really* struggle financially when they have an expected extra to pay for - like Lockhart's books, or Ron's dress robes. These could honestly just be instances where they are dealing with a vendor they don't have a relationship with, and who won't take their credit.
I also think that the wand thing is mostly down to Ron's embarrassment/general relationship with his parents. His parents don't know his wand is broken, because he doesn't tell them, and he doesn't tell them because he feels bad about the flying car incident, and doesn't want to make things worse. I'm guessing that if Ron wrote home for a new wand - they probably would be able to pull it together.
I think there is also a lot of pride in the Weasley/Prewett family. They're willing to borrow Aunt Muriel's tiara, but either she's never been willing to give them money, or they are unwilling to ask her for money. I think it's the latter. I don't have the quotes in front of me, but I'm almost certain there are instances of the Weasleys (especially Ron) refusing money from Harry.
I wonder how far the Weasley's money problems go. If I had to guess (or headcanon) they started losing money during Arthur's childhood, maybe brought on by Black Family scheming. Arthur's mother was Cedrella Black, and was disowned because she married Septimus Weasley, a blood traitor (which means their blood traitor status goes back at least to him).
And we know Uncle Bilius was an alcoholic...
I'd be really interested in seeing a fic that explores the Weasley's money trouble and where they stem from.
blinded by imperfect form [fred weasley x oc] -> ao3 link
summary: In her last year at Hogwarts, Claire Culpepper — Ravenclaw prefect, former prodigy and golden child — struggles with her sexuality and gender identity, the impending divorce of her parents, her sister's love life, choosing a carrer, and navigating whatever the hell she and Fred Weasley have going on after a drunken night of passion. So, not a very fun year all around.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
--
some notes before starting: i changed cho chang's name in the one used in the chinese translation, qiu zhang. the original name will still be used from time to time — i once read a fanfic, cant find it for the life of me, where cho is the name the white folks chose for her because it was easier for them. while its not the central point of the fanfic, this kind of racism is going to be discussed between the characters
warnings: hangovers, references to sexual activity, a bit more details about said activities at the end, slight panic attack
--
Consciousness came slowly and heavily over her. The smooth sheets soothed her aching muscles, though their coolness made her shiver and curl into herself. Her head started pounding at the movement, and the groan that tried escaping her throat got stuck in the roughness of it.
She didn't remember going to bed last night. Honestly, she didn't remember much of anything from last night. Trying to recall anything past — maybe — midnight sent a splitting pain through her temples. Her eyes were stuck together from the makeup she apparently forgot to take off. She was in the room Davis assigned to her, Ailbhe Faherty and Qiu Zhang, with the curtains drawn, only a silver of light escaping past them, a blissful mercy on her tired eyes.
She rolled onto her back with difficulty, making the blanket shift over her, exposing her chest. A violent shiver overtook her. It was in that moment that she realized she didn't have a shirt, or pants for a matter of fact. Panicked, Claire forced her muscle to work on sitting her up, but in her movement she noticed the figure sleeping soundly next to her, remarkably not Qiu Zhang nor Ailbhe Faherty. Instead of a short and light frame or a lanky one, a muscled back full of freckles was facing her, with a mop of tangled red hair. Was her hair just as much of a mess?
She slapped herself mentally. She had bigger problems than whether or not her hair was a bird's nest.
She felt her throat closing up, and each inhale got stuck somewhere in the middle, barely reaching her lungs. Despite the chillness of the room, sweat made its way down her neck and back, breaking her in shivers.
She slept with someone while absolutely sloshed. She slept with a Weasley. And she didn't even remember anything.
Maybe we didn't actually shag, she thought, getting lightheaded. Just because they were both naked didn't mean they did it.
The pain from her thighs and pelvis as she stood up from the bed ruined all her hopes of having kept her virginity.
Stumbling on her feet, she started searching the room up and down for her clothes. As she dressed, she dared a look at her paramour in hopes of identifying him.
If she didn't know at which half of a pair she was looking at she would've said he looked like a little angel while sleeping. He wasn't particularly pretty, with drool trickling from his mouth and the — oh, Merlin — hickeys on his neck and chest, but the peacefulness on his face soothed her anxieties for a brief moment.
(She quickly did a once over, checking if she had her own hickeys. One on her hip, another two on her inner thighs. She got back to panicking.)
She never bothered telling Fred and George apart; for Claire, they were just "Weasley" — rolled off the tongue just fine, no need for that given name nonsense. She didn't need to know which one was causing trouble to give them detention. Not even his strewn about clothes could help her — she hadn't cared enough last night to play spot the difference. Hopefully, she would be gone by the time he woke up and he wouldn't even remember he got laid. That way she didn't have to worry about knowing which twin whisked her away the previous night, and she could simply pretend it never happened.
She left the room on wobbly feet.
The hallway was littered with wrappers, crumbs, balloons and other rubbish. At the entrance of the common room was shattered glass, and just a little further a knocked over pot. One of the couches was stained red and blue as a result of the colorful charms used by the twins to entertain the guests, and a muggle portrait of a very grumpy old man was doodled all over. A bit of magic was all it would take to clean the mess, so she wouldn't feel any guilt if she sneaked out now. Besides, Davis was probably still sleeping, right?
Wrong.
Davis was trying to make a cup of coffee while also keeping his eyes open in the kitchen. Unfortunately, he heard the heavy sound of her boots, and motioned with his eyebrows to join him.
"Mornin'," he slurred with a husky voice.
"Happy birthday," she greeted, taking a seat at the window.
"Bloody hell, my noggin's killing me," he rubbed at his head. He took his mug and slumped himself in the seat opposite of her. "You're looking dandy compared to me."
"Want me to make you something? My mum told me a cure for hangovers before heading here."
"Please."
As she started looking for barley, cheese, honey and wine, she felt Davis' eyes following her movements. The sweat was returning in full force, as was the anxiety. She felt as if he could tell what she did — and with who — just by the way she was moving about.
"How was last night? I know this isn't usually your sort of stuff."
"Alright, I guess. Could've gone without the hangover though."
"First time?" he lets out a small smile, clearly amused at her inexperience despite being older than him. "What did you do for your 17th?"
"Not drink, that's for sure." Her birthday had been spent at Hogwarts, taking an exam and then sneaking into her best friend's common room, staying up late.
Another figure entered the kitchen as she started cooking up the cure, a stocky and freckled redhead that sent her heart flying in panic. The two of them made eye contact, and Weasley noticed her wide eyes. For a second he looked confused, but then he smirked and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively at her. In that moment, she realized his neck was free of any marks, and sent him a seething look.
"I think I'm going to leave soon, Davis," she turned towards their host, choosing to ignore The Other Weasley.
"Not gonna help with the clean-up, Culpepper?" The Other Weasley butted in with a clearly taunting voice. "After all the mess you helped make last night?"
"Yeah, you're one of the only ones allowed to use magic, and I can bet you know some cleaning spells," said Davis, apparently set on ruining her life, despite her being a nice classmate and making him kykeon.
"I'm shit at them." Her sister made sure she didn't forget that every time she tried cleaning their room. She almost slammed the plate in front of Davis, but settled on stealing a spoonful of the kykeon while sending arrows from her eyes. He scoffed, but began eating with fervor after tasting a little bit of it.
She wanted to ask them if they saw the girls who were supposed to be rooming with her. Since that would be sure to give away that she hadn't been with them when the party ended, she sut her mouth and started looking for her wand. If she messed up the house, she could blame it on Davis — she did warn him, and it was his responsibility to hand over the keys to the owner.
"Is anybody else awake?" she asked after finally fishing her wand out of the jacket left on a table in the hallway.
"I walked in on Ewing at the loo," said Weasley cheerfully. At Claire and Davis' stares, he added with a slight frown, "What? He was making weird noises. Couldn't let him defile the bathroom or something."
At that, Claire promptly left the kitchen and started cleaning with a few clumsy spells. I defiled a room for sure, she thought, ashamed of herself. Oh, god, did they even use condoms? She would have to stop at a pharmacy or apothecary. She didn't even know what to buy. Damn the lack of safe sex talk at Hogwarts, and damn my celibate friend group.
Weasley and Davis continued talking in the kitchen about which guest woke up and what they did the prior night, thankfully not mentioning her or the other twin.
She was trying to get the stains out of the couch when Lee Jordan walked in the living room, still in pajamas and barefoot — she forgot to clean up the glass, what if he stepped in it? — scratching his arse and yawning to hell and back. Angelina Johnson, looking just as disoriented, was behind him, thankfully wearing slippers. The moment they made eye contact, though, she saw the cogs moving in tandem in their heads, she felt panic raising in her throat, and shouted "Gotta go, you can finish by yourselves!" Claire slammed the front door behind her and ran as fast as her boots let her, reaching a more populated area of the town.
Despite the late summer, the air was still freezing, something she could only attribute on the mountainous region Davis chose for his coming of age party. The streets were still coming to life, townsfolk still rubbing the sleep from their eyes. When a secluded alleyway finally showed itself, she almost cried from relief, and in her sprint to hide her presence, she apparated away.
Apparating while hangover was probably the worst feeling in the world. She'd never been fond of it anyway, but the nausea it added to her pounding head made her want to curl in on herself. She first stopped at Diagon Alley, and had a very embarrassing conversation with the grumpy apothecary on contraceptive methods, then apparated again, this time to her new residence.
The house was quiet. For once, Josephine was nowhere to be seen, and Mr Lupin was passed out on the couch, despite having his own room in the mansion. The air no longer bit her lungs, her muscles started relaxing. She was finally safe.
She tiptoed around the sleeping pictures hanging around the stairwell, and slowly opened the creaking door of her mother's room. Her heart swelled seeing her still in her nightgown, sprawled in bed with a book and a cup of coffee on the bedside table. She couldn't remember the last time she saw mum doing something for herself.
Her green eyes lifted from her book. Claire could tell she was a bit confused, a little amused, but she still motioned for her to climb in with her, which she did with as much enthusiasm as she could muster after the morning she's had.
"How was the party?" mum asked as Claire put her head on her shoulder, hugging her arm close to her chest.
"Alright, I guess," she replied, already feeling her eyelids dropping. "Lee Jordan knows how to make cocktails, so we all got absolutely smashed. I can barely remember what happened."
Mum tugged at her hair to get her attention, and looked at her with worry. "Are you ok? Do you need some meds? Did you eat? I hope you drank lots of water in between all that alcohol."
Claire gave her a small smile. "Yeah, mum, don't worry. I stopped by Diagon Alley before coming home." She settled back over her chest and sighed. "I didn't even realize how much I drank. Those bloody things were so sweet I couldn't even tell."
"Yes, you don't like alcohol usually," mum hummed, returning to her book. "Glad you're back in one piece." She kissed her forehead and started combining gently through her knotted hair. The tugging hurt a little, but she couldn't help but be swayed asleep.
————
She remembered all the laughter and the hushed giggles they shared in the corner of the living room, glued to each other. They whispered in each other's ears, talking about the other guests and saying crude jokes. If she tried hard enough, she could still feel the warmth of his hand on her thigh, and the burn of her hand at the small of his back as he climbed in her lap. She didn't even need to try to replace her mother's fingers in her hair with his, flirtatiously playing with the tips.
Somehow, they slowly migrated to sitting at the base of the staircase, to leaning against the walls of the upper floor, to slamming the door of her room. Their mouths were clumsy from the alcohol, and their kisses full of teeth as they couldn't stop smiling and giggling. She still remembered the shape of his waist and the rough drag of his belt loops against her fingers. He pushed her into the bed and started stripping almost seductively if not for his bouts of dizziness when she tried taking his clothes off. She didn't dare take hers off out of fear of missing out his show.
They spent a good while just grinding over their underwear, moaning and panting in each other's mouth. She couldn't help the tentation of sucking on the freckles marring his skin, lavishing the marks with her hot tongue. She wanted to swallow up all the sounds he made as she bit on his Adam's apple.
Each took a turn at paying attention to each other's crotches. She tugged at his cock lazily but firmly, and continued to suck on the skin of his hips. He pulled on her hair playfully, and she couldn't help the gasps that escaped her. He took revenge by being similarly cruel to her thighs, detaching his lips from them with crude sounds every time, and played with her folds and her clit with curiosity while talking her ear off. Oh, how much he rattled. She thought she would hate the sound of his voice, but he sounded choked off and whiny. She couldn't help but enjoy his — admittedly awkward and cringy — dirty talk.
The actual penetration came much later in the night. They took their time with it, both laying on their side, so much so that the lull in pace and pleasure almost made the two of them fall asleep in each other's arms. Once he was fully in, though, it was like they couldn't stop moving. A heady push and pull, an equal give and take. He barely had time to pull out to cum on her hip. The white liquid dripped slowly down to her mound, hot and dirty. A fire overtook her, and she pulled him back in by his ass. Her hand stayed there the whole time, guiding his movements while she nibbled on his neck.
She remembered the lazy clean up and the breathy laughs they shared. She remembered falling asleep with a smile on her face, facing her lover in a similar position, with their legs tangled and their pinkies touching softly by their sides.
blinded by imperfect form [fred wealsey x oc] -> ao3 link
summary: In her last year at Hogwarts, Claire Culpepper — Ravenclaw prefect, former prodigy and golden child — struggles with her sexuality and gender identity, the impending divorce of her parents, her sister's love life, choosing a carrer, and navigating whatever the hell she and Fred Weasley have going on after a drunken night of passion. So, not a very fun year all around.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
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some notes before starting: this is one of the many harry potter fanfics that have been living in my notes since 2020. obviously its been rewritten and a lot has changed in the plot. for more info check out this post
warnings: talk of divorce, running away from home from one parent with the other, slight panic attack
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The manor was nothing short of terrifying, but somehow still reminiscent of Hogwarts. The dark probably didn't help. The entire structure seemed to be made of black stone. Despite its gothic style, the manor seemed well taken care of, with plenty of — maybe misshapen, like the person taking care of them couldn't quite grasp the task — bushes and little trees. The grounds were littered with gravestones and tombs in a fairly orderly fashion, and plenty of them had fresh flowers from what she could gather. The path leading to the front door was interrupted by a large statue of a woman wearing robes that looked to be a few centuries out of fashion, and strangely enough, she could swear she saw her move, her eyes following their movements.
Claire knew not to speak, not to ask where or why they were there so late in the night. When her mother woke her up just an hour earlier, she had just managed to fall asleep after trying to exhaust herself with homework. She told her and her sister to pack their trunks and get out of the house quietly, and they did so with little hesitation. They've already danced this tune before.
Mum was looking cautiously around, like this was the first time she'd ever been there. She looked like she was starting to regret her decision to run away, but what was done was done, and they continued to walk the path until they reached the door. Mum took a deep breath and knocked lightly, and despite the silence residing over the entire valley, it barely made a sound.
Even so, not a second later, the door slammed open, revealing a frantic woman, who threw herself at mum, knocking the breath out of her.
"Eithne! Oh, Merlin, it's been so long!" The woman squeezed mum tight, who patted her awkwardly on the back.
Claire shared a look with Valerie, and from the face she was making, she figured they thought the same — they didn't think their mother had friends, at least not ones she would stay in touch with for long.
"Please, come in!" she let mum go, motioning for them to enter. With a flick of her wand, their trunks levitated inside over their heads, and Claire ducked cautiously, even if they were a good distance above her head. She didn't want to take any chances with the flighty woman's magic. "You have children! I know you wrote to me about them, but I didn't think they were so big, honestly." Her voice was loud, and she spoke hastily, with no care for the stillness of the night.
The interior of the manor was much brighter than its outside. The light was warm, casting soft shadows over the clutter decorating the entrance. The furniture was mismatched — none from the same type of wood or carved in the same style — and old but well taken care of. Now that she was inside, she could see that the curtains were also different from each other, some longer than others, some patterned, some dark.
"Would anyone like some tea? The woman was just as ridiculous as her house. She wore a green silk victorian teagown over a ruffled nightgown, her black hair was long and braided over her shoulder, her skin was pale but healthily flushed. Her movements were airy and absent-minded, but they held a unique elegance. The only logical conclusion she could come to was that she was a pure-blood, maybe not part of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, but definitely old-money.
"Yes, please," mum responded stiffly. She, too, looked around what Claire assumed to be their new residence with a nervous sort of awe.
Her friend practically floated to the kitchen, which was just as big as everything else in the damn house, and started up making tea by hand instead of using magic.
"Oh, I guess I should introduce myself. I've never been good at this, I'm sorry. I'm Josie, an old friend of your mum's. We went to Hogwarts together." She looked at them over her shoulder, still busy with the tea. "I'm sorry if I seem loopy, I took my medication a bit too early tonight, given the circumstances."
Mum motioned for them to take a seat at the small table in the corner. She didn't sit down with them, instead choosing to hover close by.
From the corner of her eye, Claire tried reading Valerie's mood. Her sister looked almost bored, but the tension in her shoulders spoke of hostility. Valerie knew why they ran away. She knew it would boil over sooner or later — sooner if she knew Valerie — and she would explode, most likely at her. Valerie wasn't in the habit of bottling her feelings up like her.
Their mum presented them, and began making small talk with her old friend about their children. Apparently, Josie had a son two years her senior, living in France with her father since he had attended Beauxbatons. They talked about what they were like in school and the professors they shared with the girls from their old days.
At some point, Claire zoned out, sipping on the tea Josie had prepared. She would have thought the woman would've had a house elf; she certainly looked rich enough for it. When the two women remembered they were still there, Josie made sure to give them directions for their new rooms, and then went back to whisper with mum.
The stairs creaked like all hell, waking up the portraits on the walls — somehow, they slept through all the ruckus made by Josie. Just like the gravestones, they were numerous and placed all over, seemingly never-ending. Their rooms were opposite each other, just at the head of the stairs of the second story. Valerie didn't even glance at her as she forced one of the doors open and slammed it behind her. Letting out a deep sigh, Claire opened the remaining door. The room was small, with a twin bed in the nook of the window. The curtains were drawn, so she had to rely on the light coming from the hallway to stumble across the walls, searching for a switch, if it even existed in this ancient house. The room was overall barren and clean, with little sign of dust, but the air was heavy and left a slightly metallic taste in the back of her mouth, a sign that it was maintained with magic help.
She looked at her trunk sitting near the door. A sense of imminent dread began filling her lungs, building up beside the dense air of the room, at the thought of unpacking. It could wait for later.
Just before she burst in her sister's new room, she paused, and then knocked softly. There was no answer, but Claire cracked the door open anyway. Valerie was sprawled on her bed, staring at the ceiling with dead eyes.
"Tired?"
"Piss off. Who said you could come in?"
Slowly, Claire made her way to the bed and sat down at the edge of it. Valerie made no more movement to acknowledge her, so she assumed it was safe to continue bothering her.
Valerie's room, compared to hers, was not empty. The bedsheet was a warm yellow and the pillows spotted with polkadots, the walls were full with Quidditch posters, here and there some muggle lights and trinkets. On the nightstand were photographs and what she could recognize as A History of Magic.
"Hm, your room's different from mine."
"It's bloody awful," moaned Valerie. "It's like a Hufflepuff barfed all over it."
"It might be someone else's room if it has this much personality," she mused. "Maybe Mrs Josie gave you the wrong one. Nonetheless, there's nothing wrong with sleeping here for one night."
She remained silent. Claire scooted closer and let herself fall beside her.
Oh.
Valerie wasn't staring at an empty ceiling. It was instead full of old, lifeless fluorescent stars. What pure-blood permitted that many muggle objects in their home? And to use them so familiarly... Claire wondered who was the former inhabitant of the room.
"Do you think he'll try coming after us? Again?" she asked timidly, feeling oh so vulnerable without her sister's judgemental and cold stare.
"Hope not. I hope mum obliviated him," Valerie said just as softly. There was bitterness in her voice, and Claire was sure it would linger for a long time in her. She didn't know if it would ever leave.
"Then she would have had to erase the entire town's memory of us, and that would've raised plenty of suspicion at the Ministry."
Valerie hummed, clearly not pleased.
"Beth broke up with Lister," she mumbled, still staring at the ceiling. That must've been the newest gossip she got a few hours ago, when she woke Claire up with gasps and giggles as she read her letter.
"I didn't know Beth had a boyfriend." She didn't know a lot about any of her friends, as they never stayed for long.
"Me neither! If I did, I wouldn't have helped Erin get together with him. Now Beth is gonna bitch at me when she finds out."
"Who's Erin?" she asked bewildered, already lost in the conversation. She didn't really care to know who Lister was unless he was directly involved with her sister.
"Erin Atkins, pea-brain! The girl from my year in Gryffindor!" Valerie sounded very exasperated, as she always was when trying to educate her on who attended their school.
"Well, I don't really care about the younger folk. Also, since when do you help Gryffindors?"
"Oh, yes, I forgot you only pay attention to the older students! Perfect Weasley kiss-arse!"
"I just really admire his ethics!"
Now they were sitting facing each other, staring daggers as they continued to bicker for the next hour. When Claire returned to her new room, the good mood seeped out of her body, leaving her just as grim as the moment she decided to step away.
Sleep escaped her relentlessly. It was too dark and too quiet, too cold to be able to put her thoughts at rest. She missed the body warmth of her sister and the strange sounds she would make in the dead of night, when she woke up thirsty. The irony of the desire to have her own room for most of her life did not escape her, and it left her terribly annoyed at finding out that after spending the entirety of her life sleeping in the same room with multiple people left her mind dependent on the lack of space and silence.
For the rest of the night, Claire cursed her roommates at Hogwarts and Valerie every time she startled awake, each time more difficult to keep her eyes closed.
The first few minutes of sunrise were spent trying to figure out whether or not to go downstairs when she had no guarantee her mum was there. She didn't want to make awkward conversation at the ass crack of dawn in a strange place with an even stranger woman — though, the more she thought about it, Josie could probably entertain a conversation all by herself with no problem. By the time she decided to get out of bed, the sun had completely risen, quelling some of her anxiety.
Some of the portraits were up and chatting, greeting her loudly. She simply nodded, trying not to make eye contact with any of them, and increased her speed down the stairs.
Mum wasn't in the kitchen, but that was not to say it was empty. Josie was just as chipper as the previous night, yapping at two men who looked half dead — a normal thing to be at that hour. While she would usually hide away and wait for familiar people to arrive downstairs, it was just the sight of familiar faces that made her want to bolt out of the kitchen.
Her DADA professor from last year was cocooned in a big, soft blanket, despite the heat that was already beginning to accumulate from the summer sun. Professor Lupin was nursing a mug of coffee that spread its smell through the whole kitchen.
Despite not following the Prophet as closely as her roommates, the other man looked eerily like the criminal who ruined their year by escaping from prison, if not for the distinct lack of tattoos and the much shorter hair. He was dressed just as lavishly as Josie, and was following her movements lazily from his spot next to Lupin.
Unfortunately, her presence was noticed before she could sneak away.
"Ah, Claire! You're Claire, right? How did you sleep? I, personally, dozed off as soon as my head hit the pillow, which hasn't happened in years. Your mum must've really tired me out last night — if only Reg had that ability," she laughed cheekily as "Reg" stomped on her foot. Claire could do nothing but stare like a deer in the headlights at her rapid fire questions, but managed to get out a meek "Good morning."
She couldn't help but wonder if it would be rude to just walk away.
"Good morning, miss Culpepper," professor Lupin — well, he wasn't a professor anymore, was he — greeted her. She was pleasantly surprised to find that the man remembered her. Knowing she wasn't the most vocal or talented in the subject he taught, she was aware of the fact that she wasn't a memorable person.
Claire was soothed by the discomfort visible on his face. Clearly, he was just as thrilled to be in new company.
Josie invited her to sit down and went about preparing breakfast. The four of them ate quietly. The sun was already strong and hot, making hair stick to the back of her neck and sweat gather lightly over her forehead. As she munched on her piece of toast, she started twirling a strand around her fingers. Cutting it would be a wise decision, but she could no longer go to her usual hairdresser. Getting used to someone else sounded deeply unpleasant. Maybe mum would be willing to cut it for her, though she wasn't sure she entirely trusted her abilities.
Professor — Mister Lupin was pushing his food around pathetically, sometimes taking small bites when Josie caught his eye. He reluctantly mustered up a conversation in order to keep her distracted from his lack of appetite, talking about this and that, most likely bits of articles from the Prophet. She hadn't read one since she got home from Hogwarts.
"Such a shame we won't be able to go to the World Cup," Josie sighed. "I remember when we went with our families to the World Cup from '86 in France, Reg was so embarrassed to see me there," she giggled. "Such a disappointing match, though, it only lasted half an hour. The Americans dusted the place with Brazil."
"They got their revenge in the next edition, though," “Reg” spoke for the first time. His voice was low and velvety, and his hands twitched as he started recalling the game.
Claire spent the rest of her morning listening to the three talking to each other, sometimes trying to include her, not demoralized by her short and quiet answers. Her mum came in just as Josie finished washing the dishes. She didn't look sleepy, more like she woke up hours ago and was just now joining them, though her eyes were a bit red, and her dark circles more pronounced than usual. Last night had been stressful for everyone.
Mum halted as her eyes met the dark haired man, shock and confusion washing over her face. She threw Josie a short glance, and then continued ogling him. "Regulus Black? I thought you were dead..."
"You and the whole wizarding world," murmured Mr Black.
"Ah, yes, a little detail I forgot to mention to you. Reggie's alive!" Josie made jazz hands towards him. "He's kind of in hiding."
"Have been for the last 15 years," he interjected. "Would really appreciate it if that remained a secret," he paused, as if trying to remember something, but he still sounded unsure as he said, "Culppeper."
Keane, Claire's mind supplied. Her maiden name's Keane. She learned it when she actually looked at her birth certificate in primary school, when she had to hand in a copy to her teacher. She wondered if mum would change it from Culpepper — if them running away would be something permanent.
"Sit down, sit down, it's a long story," she gestured towards mum. "Regulus would have been dead, honestly, if it wasn't for me. After the war ended, my father and I left for France to live with my aunt, and we smuggled Reggie over the border. We only came back, like, five years ago? Give or take. We had to make sure the trials for You-Know-Who's associates were truly over."
"We also acquired a child, so, uh, kinda hard to just leave," Mr Black added awkwardly.
"Yes, so I've been told..." Mum was looking through them, trying to process the new information.
Mum then took a seat beside her, still looking pretty dazed, though she doubted it was because of the ensemble in front of her. Mr Lupin tried striking a stiff conversation with her. Worry overtook her chest once again, and she didn't even try to hide it as she looked at her mother. She knew she didn't even notice her eyes on her. Claire waved at Josie goodbye, the only one who noticed her, and slipped back up the stairs to her room.
She pulled out a piece of parchment and began drafting letters to her best friends. She didn't know if she would be able to even send before the start of the school year, seeing as it might compromise their hiding spot — after all, Innogen's mail could be watched by her father considering the only letters her family received were about work matters. Yulianni, though, maybe she would be able to send her a little something to reassure her she was fine, totally not holed up in her room.
There was also the matter of whether or not father would go to the muggle or wizard authorities in order to get his daughters back. In the wizarding society, she was officially an adult, and thus had every right to move out of her parents' care, but in his world, the muggle one, what her mother did constituted as kidnapping. She didn't know what would happen to her mum if he managed to track them.
She didn't want to burden the girls with these things, and she hoped Innogen, who lived across from her childhood home, would understand her silence as soon as she found out they were gone for good.
SYN: Fred's girl knows how to handle business better than he does. At least that's what he thinks. He doesn't really care otherwise. He thinks she's the dopest of the ropest, she thinks he's the funniest bloke there ever was. It just works.
— A mailbox request by @drkaysapothecary
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
"Freddie," she tugged on the hem of his work pants.
Her red-haired lover hummed in acknowledgement, his brown eyes lighting up like lanterns on the sight of her. He restocked piles of new products on the very top shelf quicker than before, his stature providing a great amount of aid to prevent himself from toppling over had he instructed the other employees to do so. His lover stood by him giddily, herself as involved in the business as he was, moreso ever since he and his twin made a deal to give more than 15% of their shares of income for whichever "lucky ladies" were designated to date them.
Corny as it was, she never once doubted his devotion to her. A day after they announced the deal, she joined their Muggle Arts class with other, fellow Ravenclaws. Safe to say, her works enamored him to no end; her arrow-sharp wit dazzling him quicker than he could begin to say 'hello.'
And here they were, an evening at the busiest market in all of the English Wizarding World — having each other, their own little family in the strange circumstances of the war impending on every witch and wizard's lives at the time.
Fred looked below through the box of stocks he was holding, "Just put them on the carrier, love."
"What, these?" she replied, meeting his eyes as she held onto the carrier full of joke candies designed to incite incessant drooling to whoever ate them. She carded along the packages of them, packed in papers dyed in green and blue.
"Oi, you lovers," George emerged from upstairs of the joke shop and swung his jacket around his shoulder, "clocking out in a bit."
Fred tossed him a smirk, "Off to steal a bit of thunder?"
George responded with giving him air kisses, freeing himself from his brother's teasing towards the streets outside. The shop bell rang as he walked out.
"Strange," Fred came down the ladder, handing the empty box to her, "it's the only time I've no idea where my brother's off to."
"He's seeing a girl," she replied in nonchalance, rechecking the shop's list of income, "do you reckon we'll get more check next month?"
Fred frowned in thought, "We're already good as we are. Need for more?"
She shrugged, putting the paper on the counter and began scribbling with her pocket quill. Fred peeked over, only to see her planning for better prospects; budgeting fees, advertising money. Fred thought he and his brother had nerve; he just hadn't expected his woman to have one tenfold.
Fred kissed her cheek softly, just the way she liked. She chuckled ticklishly, wiping it away in good nature.
"Bugger off me, will you?" she chastised, but pulled him nearer by his collar.
"Feisty woman," he muttered, still close to her.
She resumed her drafting, glancing over to the entrance to check if any customers required their attention. It had turned to evening already, and most who visited Diagon Alley had gone home.
He then slid his arm around her shoulder, his chin on top of her head. Even then, he still had to slouch quite a bit. She stifled a grin, abandoning her writing to kiss the hand dangling above her collarbone. He nuzzled her hair, closing his eyes as they began to sway. There was no music, no tune playing but from the ballerina-bear music boxes sitting by the display upfront.
Us two; he thought, that's all there ever was. Nothing else. Nothing happening. Just us.
George could take his luck for all he cared. Fred knew he had his own down pat, and she sure wasn't going away any time sooner.
+some info not mentioned in the character profile from below: claire's a prefect who loves making fred's life hell just as much as he enjoys making theirs. they did not get along until her last year at hogwarts, when they had a drunken night of passion djdhsjd. that did not solve their problems (maybe even worsened them) but it opened the possibility of developing feelings for each other. getting out of school certainly helped in mending their relationship
this is one of the oldest drawings i have of them. back then they had a very bridgerton s2 love story (never even finished s1 btw) and it's the reason their last name is culppeper (yk being in love with their little sister's crush/bf)
another oldie but goodie. i really wanted to explore wizarding fashion (still do tbh)
so wrt lily dealing with snape's bigotry while they were still friends, i think she tried to rationalize away the things he would say and essentially delude herself bc the other option was too painful. she wasn't just ignoring it.
to people on the outside it seemed like she just didn't care. this is why in my head her friendship w mary isn't super strong, she rationalized to mary until things got threatening/physical. mary isn't a super confrontational person, so they never work it out, and mary never really trusts lily.
other muggleborns probably would not see her as a safe person bc of her relationship w snape. and this leaves her so isolated, possibly without any super deep friendships her 5th/6th year. but lily's internal experience is much more complex than not caring, even if it seems that way (understandably) externally
also, her pride would get in the way of admitting she's wrong. even when she's starting to come to terms with it & distance herself (pre SWM) she wasn't saying to people she may've hurt, oh, i was wrong, i'm sorry for rationalizing bigotry away, even if that would be the right way to repair the relationships.
but what 16 year old could do that.
so yes, i think to the muggleborn population of hogwarts lily probably seemed like a striver, uppity, and apart from other muggleborns. only people who got to know her a bit more saw how kind she was
