Hey guys! Sorry for the delay on this one - Mom and Grandma are visiting and my life is a bit more chaotic than usual (and my writing time has been eaten up with other stuff). These next 8 chapters or so are also a chunk that I needed to outline / figure out before I could really write any of them. Hopefully these next chapters will go a bit quicker now that I have a better idea of what's going to happen. :-)
Saturday, October 14, 2017
"Really?"
"Yes!" Tilly said, exasperated, waving her fork in the air for emphasis. Scorpius leaned back as she suddenly jabbed it toward him. "Your dads were here, well actually it was your dad, Scorp, and then your dad," she turned to Al, waving the fork menacingly at him, "yelled at him across the room and tossed an apple at him."
Al gasped in mock horror. "An apple? No!"
Sasha's fork came down suddenly like a judgment from above, stabbing into the table beside Al's hand and then standing there, quivering. Al stared, wide-eyed. "What the hell, Sasha?" he yelped.
She smiled at him - a smile with far too many teeth to be friendly. "Don't say stupid things, and I won't stab you."
"Are... are you serious?"
She raised one shoulder in a languid half shrug, studying her nails - black, today, with tiny silver half-moons. "Shall we find out?"
Scorpius reached out with one finger to still the fork, then moved his hand to cover Al's. "Let's not. You're kinda scary, you know?"
"Mmm. I've been talking to Enid."
Al frowned, looking pointedly up and down the otherwise empty table. "Who the hell is Enid?"
Sasha nodded at a familiar girl straddling a bench at the Slytherin table, a pastry in one hand and a book in the other.
"That's Enid?" Scorpius gasped.
Al looked horrified. "Scary chick is Enid?"
Tilly snorted. "Scary chick?"
Al and Scorpius shared a glance. "You didn't hear her offer her... services as a model," Al said grimly.
Scorpius shuddered. "A nude model."
Tilly frowned thoughtfully over her teacup at Enid, studying her. "Well. She's gorgeous with clothes on. I imagine she'd be even better with them off. Are you going to paint her, then?"
Scorpius spluttered. "Ew," he managed, eventually.
"Ew," Al agreed
Tilly turned her bright eyes back on them, cocking her head and studying them curiously. "Interesting. Don't you agree, Sasha, dear?"
Sasha smirked. "Interesting, indeed."
Ivan cleared his throat, fingers busy shredding his napkin into tiny pieces. "I think we're getting off topic," he said quietly.
Sasha sighed, but Tilly nodded . "You're right," she said, smiling at Ivan, "we are. At this rate we'll never find out what they're up to."
"Why do they have to be up to anything?" Scorpius asked, still off-balance and feeling oddly disgruntled after their earlier conversation.
Tilly smiled mysteriously. "Oh, they are. Why else would Mister Potter have invited Mister Malfoy on a picnic? More importantly, why would he accept?"
Scorpius frowned, but didn't have an answer for that. It didn't sound like something his dad would do.
"OK, fine," Al said. "Let's say you're right. What do you suggest we do about it?"
Tilly grinned. "Ah. Now you're asking the right question. Sasha?"
Sasha held up a set of extendable ears. "We follow them, of course. Get these close enough that we can hear them." She held the ears out to Scorpius.
Scorpius hesitated. "I dunno, guys. This feels weird, spying on my dad..."
Sasha rolled her eyes. "Do you want to get them together or not?"
Scorpius took the ears.
"Come on, then!" Tilly grabbed Scorpius' arm, steering him out of the Great Hall and out the front doors.
"How do you know where they're going?" Al asked, falling into step beside Scorpius.
"I put a tracing spell on the basket when they were preoccupied," Sasha said. "But we'll have to hurry - my tracing spells are only accurate at short range, and they're nearing the edge of it."
---
In the end, the extendable ears weren't all that helpful. They couldn't get them close enough to pierce the privacy wards set around their professors. They watched the friendly banter, the way their faces suddenly closed off. Harry seemed frustrated; Draco looked sad and lonely.
Scorpius' jaw dropped as his father clambered up into the tree. He'd never seen his father do such a thing. He hadn't known his father knew how to climb trees. And he looked so... ridiculously elegant up there, like one of the absurd peacocks that dotted the Malfoy lawn back home.
And then Harry looked up and laughed, and the expressions on their faces... well.
---
They didn't really need to see much more after that. They shared a significant glance, then Sasha cancelled her tracing spell. Ivan recalled the extendable ears - he'd proved to be the most adept with them - and, as they trekked back to the castle, explained sheepishly that he was a huge fan of Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes and he and his younger brothers had an extensive collection of their products. Sasha greeted this announcement with enthusiasm, and the mad light in her eye told Scorpius that she was already planning how they could use this unexpected resource.
They nodded to the older students, who tended to sleep later on weekends, as they passed them on the way to Al and Scorp's "room." The older students, already used to the girls coming and going, nodded their bleary greetings.
"It's weird, you know?" Tilly said as she took a running start and launched herself at one of their extra beds. "Who puts first years in the same dorm as older students?"
"Er," said Al, "Hufflepuff, apparently."
Scorpius nodded. He still wasn't sure how he felt about sharing a dorm with second-, third-, and fourth-years, but so far it hadn't been so bad. He hadn't realized, at first, because they'd already claimed and sectioned off their spaces before the first-years had gotten into the dorms that first night. The various curtains and walls and privacy spells broke up the cavernous space so it felt more like a warren of cozy burrows instead of one large cave. He'd been nervous at first, but now he found he rather liked it. It felt... friendly. Certainly, it sounded better than what Tilly had told them of the Slytherin dorms – cold, damp, and impersonal.
Tilly shook her head. "Whatever. It's not important I guess. Just weird. Scorpius!" she added, exasperated, "what are you doing?"
"Hmm?" He turned, puzzled, to find the others already draped over the beds. "Oh." He must have been zoning out again. It had been awhile since he'd done that. Having Al - and the others - around all the time seemed to help. "I don't understand," he said, frowning, as he flopped backwards onto his bed and stared up at the stars that dotted their ceiling. "He's never looked so..."
"Happy," Al supplied, from his comfortable sprawl beside him. "I know. Mine either."
"Well," Sasha said thoughtfully, from her usual pose on what she'd claimed as her bed, "there was clearly something between them. More than the standard rivals / enemies story they always give, anyway. The way they look at one another - that's not how enemies or rivals look at each other."
Scorpius propped himself up on his elbows so he could see her expression. "But, that's how they've always looked at each other. Well, since school started, anyway. But..." Some of the perplexing things his mother had said over the years suddenly clicked into place. "No. No, I'm pretty sure that's how they've always looked at each other."
Ivan blinked up at them from where he was idly flicking the pages of one of Scorpius' art books. His eyes shone bright and naïve behind his unruly fringe. "How do they look at each other, then? If it's not as rivals?"
Tilly, sprawled next to Sasha with her own art book, glanced at him pityingly. "Like a man dying of thirst looks at an ocean," she said. "Like a blind man turns toward the light. Like Icarus looked at the sun."
"Like a squib looks at someone who can do magic," Sasha added quietly.
The room was bathed in a thoughtful silence as they digested this.
"That... that doesn't sound like love to me," Scorpius offered.
"No," Sasha said quietly. "And yes. Love and despair go hand in hand, sometimes."
Al spoke then, so softly they all had to lean in to hear. "Like you look at someone you once loved - someone you still love - but that you know you can never have again."