"Really, Miss Weasley? I thought I was the Headmistress of this school; not you," Professor McGonagall said.
Wincing, I waited for her to continue her rage about how being the headmistress meant she would decide whether to revoke our Prefect's duties or not, but none came. Looking up, I saw her glancing between the two of us.
"This is your second warning. If I hear any rumor of this happening again, you'll both lose your positions"
"Thank you!" I exclaimed. "We won't let you down, I promise. It won't happen ag-"
"-If you'd let me finish, Miss Weasley," Professor McGonagall interrupted. "That is not to say that there won't be consequences for this disrespect of the school prefects' duties. As of now you are both on probation and will serve your future rounds with Mr Filch until I think necessary"
"With Filch?" Scorpius complained.
"What is with you two and your disrespectful interrupting?" Professor McGonagall wearily asked us.
Scorpius and I shrugged.
"As I said, you will be completing your prefect's rounds with Filch to ensure you don't drop your duties and encourage other students to sneak off for acts of love. From this point onwards, you are banned from other house common rooms and I shall be conversing with your teachers over your seating arrangements."
"We can't sit together?" Scorpius asked in a hollow voice.
"I'll leave that decision up to your teachers, but I shall be making them aware of the...dangers," she said, hovering over the word, "of you being around each other."
My mouth was open in horror but no words would come out.
Nodding at the two of us, she turned on her heel and went back the way she came, clearly forgetting why she'd been going along the 1st floor corridor anyway.
"We're doing rounds with Filch?" Scorpius asked again, as if he couldn't get over the fact.
I nodded, just as shocked as he was.
"Filch?" I looked at him just as he exclaimed, "He's going to dwell over this so much! It'll be, 'how the mighty have fallen' and 'can't say the Headmistress isn't wrong, but in the old days you'd have had a boot up the butt for this.'"
Secretly, I agreed with him, but there was no time for me to say anything because Peeves chose that moment to float around the corner. Catching sight of Scorpius and me, he swooped down and spit on us before disappearing again. Knowing him, it wouldn't take long for him to return with a supply of dungbombs or stinkpellets.
Scorpius took my hand and hurried further down the corridor. There wasn't much else to say for the remainder of our rounds. We finished patrolling the castle and went our separate ways to our common rooms, though we probably spent a good five minutes, if not longer, lip-locked, trying to savor the feeling since it would be a while before we'd get to kiss one another.
"See you tomorrow," he said gloomily.
I nodded, squeezed his hand and then let go, continuing up to the seventh floor but I felt just as miserable as he looked.
Everybody was asleep by the time I got back to my dorm. And I wasn't surprised. By the time, Professor McGonagall had finished with us; we were delayed in our coverage of the castle. It had taken us another three hours to work our way through the floors and even then another fifteen minutes had been added when we found one of the third year Slytherins in the Restricted Section of the Library and had to escort him to his common room. Even with the various secret passages of the school, it was impossible to complete rounds without taking longer than four hours. There were always students out of bed and in the wrong parts of the castle. I just thanked Merlin that we didn't have to check the Forbidden Forest as well because there was- ugh spiders.
Feeling tired, I changed out my robes in a daze and the moment my head hit the pillow I was asleep.
The next morning I found out just how quickly Professor McGonagall was able to talk to the other teachers about Scorpius and me. The moment he passed me on his way to the Ravenclaw table, all the teachers turned and stared at us, Professor Lofting being the one who glared disapprovingly more so than the rest.
Sighing, I ate my toast and stared into my cup of tea until people started moving. Dom, Al and Lucy lead the way to Potions while I followed behind, wrapped in my own thoughts. Would Professor Slughorn be nice enough to allow Scorpius and me to continue to sit next to each other? He was known for being one of the more lenient teachers, so if he didn't what hope did we have for the others?
When I walked into the room, I found out. Where the desks were normally arranged in rows of four, they had been moved so that everyone was forced to sit at an individual desk. Dom, Al and Lucy all shrugged and took a seat, while I stared sadly at Scorpius stranded on the other side of the room, all the seats near him already taken by Ravenclaw students. As students filed in past me, I blinked and found that I would have to sit in the back of the room.
Professor Slughorn entered and looked at us, "Excuse the moved seats, class. It's temporary, I assure you."
Scorpius turned and smiled at me.
"That is until we find something more appropriate, of course."
His smile shrank and he turned back to face the front of the classroom as Professor Slughorn waved his wand and made the instructions for our lesson appear on the board. We would be brewing a Taste Perfector Potion. I opened my book to the right page while everyone else started setting up their cauldrons. Sitting at the back, there was no way I could read the small, wobbly print Professor Slughorn used to write out the ingredients.
Silently, I worked my way through the steps, pulverizing the horned snail's shells with my pestle and mortar. By the time Slughorn passed by my cauldron, it was simmering at the right shade of lilac the book described and was even emitting sparks, just as it should have been.
"It seems without Mr Malfoy's distractions you are once again going to be getting top marks, Miss Weasley," Professor Slughorn commented, almost in an aside just to make sure no-one else heard.
I glanced at Scorpius, only seeing the back of his head as he worked to make his cauldron hotter, jabbing his wand at the flames. He was stuck at the fourth step, unable to bring his potion to the boil for some reason. Everyone else was one step behind me, adding their sugared mice.
Slughorn returned to my cauldron with his mark sheet five minutes before the end of the lesson. He had already marked the rest of the class, added their potion to a bottle of Pumpkin Juice to test how well it worked, and they were packing up their things. Scorpius had received his lowest mark ever in potions, a P. He smiled and ladled a spoonful of my potion into his cup, smelling it appreciatively before taking a sip, which he then immediately spit it out, retching and turning green in the face.
Confused, I looked at my potion.
It looked completely normal and I could have sworn I'd done everything I was supposed to.
"I don't understand..." I murmured.
"You must have stirred clockwise, not counter-clockwise, Miss Weasley," Professor Slughorn told me, holding his stomach and breathing deeply through his nose.
I frowned; sure I wouldn't have made a mistake like that. It wasn't something I usually did. I always read each line of the book three times.
He wobbled back up to the front of the classroom and poured something out of the tall jug on his desk into his cup and took a large drink, his face turning back to the right color.
"I'm afraid I'll have to fail you, Rose," he said quietly, marking a zero onto his sheet.
I nodded, feeling disappointed, and packed my things away, using a spell to clear my cauldron.
Scorpius was waiting for me outside the door, cheering me up slightly. At least we were together in our poor performance in Potions.
Taking my hand and backing into a recess in the wall beside the potions room, Scorpius pulled me to him, eagerly pressing his lips to mine.
"I've missed you," he said against my lips. Despite the fact that we'd been in a room together for the past two hours, I completely understood what he meant. Since we'd got together we'd become used to sitting together and being around each other virtually all the time. Not sitting together in Potions, and not being able to talk to each other, felt more like being on opposite sides of the world.
"I've missed you," I whispered, leaning up on my tiptoes and kissing his cheek and then his lips.
"I don't think I can bear this," Scorpius said, holding onto me tightly.
We both quietened as Professor Slughorn came out of his classroom, humming to himself.
"We should probably go or we'll be late..."
"I don't want to," Scorpius replied, but he did push himself off from the stone wall and walk alongside me out into the center of the corridor, letting go of my hand though when we made it out of the dungeons. We didn't want to make things worse for ourselves by letting the teachers see us.
When we got to charms, it became obvious that Slughorn had set the standard about on our prospects of sitting together. Professor Richards too had rearranged her room, creating tables for five, requesting that we sit with our house mates.
"Wonder what's going on with all the seating changes," Albus muttered, looking confused.
Dom and Lucy both shrugged and opened their textbooks. Of course they didn't know why the tables and seating appeared to be changing in all of our lessons, I hadn't told anyone. Judging from the Ravenclaw student's facial expressions, and hushed comments, it appeared Scorpius hadn't told anyone either.
"You can probably blame me for that," I told Albus.
He frowned at me.
Sighing, I explained.
Dom and Lucy looked at me, their expressions showing pity.
"At least you're still both prefects," Lucy told me.
"There is that," Dom agreed.
"I guess," I replied, picking up my quill and dipping it in ink, beginning to copy down the essay title Professor Richards was writing in chalk on the board. Luckily it was long enough that we were able to continue our conversation before we had to write the essay in exam conditions.
"I wonder why Professor McGonagall didn't take away your positions..." Al mumbled. "It's what she did to Simon last year..."
I shrugged. It wasn't something I really wanted to figure out. I was just glad that we still had our positions.
"Really? That's what happened to Simon?" Dom asked excitedly, beginning to gossip.
"Yeah, didn't you hear?" Al answered. "He got caught with his girlfriend-"
"-But Daisy isn't a prefect," butted in Dom.
"Exactly. He bent the rules so he could spend time with her outside of school hours. Professor Lofting found them and reported them straight away to Professor McGonagall."
"Maybe that's why you're both still prefects then, Rose," Lucy said. "You were both prefects so you had a right to be up in the castle.
"Could be," Al remarked, looking up from his parchment deep in thought.
"But Professor McGonagall loves Rose, though," Dom pointed out.
"She does not," I asserted.
"You're a Weasley, Rose. Your family helped save the wizarding world, remember? Everybody loves your family," Scorpius said in my ear, suddenly behind me. "I've used up all my parchment, can I borrow some of yours?"
I nodded and handed him a roll, which he took before heading back to his seat before Professor Richards could accuse us of anything. She did watch him closely for the rest of the lesson though, as we did our timed-essay.
I wrote down everything I remembered, but I couldn't help being distracted. Was it true that Professor McGonagall had been more lenient because she liked my family? Sometimes, I did get the feeling that my mother and Professor McGonagall were in correspondence, as my mum always seemed to know what was happening at school and which days our letters were going to arrive. Ordinary Ministry workers didn't know that. I'd always assumed that Neville passed the information on my parents, and Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny often met him for lunch in Hogsmeade during term time but what if I was wrong about that?
We had forty minutes to write our answer, but as I laid down my pen when Professor Richards called time and I looked over at Al, I realized I'd only managed a page and a half compared to his five sides.
I didn't have time to worry about it though, as Professor Richards used the summoning charm to collect our papers and sent us to lunch.
"How do you think it went?" Scorpius asked as we left the classroom.
"Awful. I only wrote a page and a half. What about you?"
"I managed to write three pages," he said before tacking on the end, "of the wrong thing though."
When we returned the charms after lunch, Professor Richard's had somehow managed to mark all of our papers and was handing them out.
"Better luck next time, Rose," she said, looking worried as she handed me my 'acceptable' piece of work.
I nodded, beginning to accept that it was not going to be a good day.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of more bad marks in Professor Vector's quiz and wrong answers to Professor Harris' astronomy questions. Scorpius didn't fare much better than I. When we sat down for dinner at our respective tables, I'd just picked up two roast potatoes and put them on my plate when Professor McGonagall, followed by Scorpius, asked to see me in her office. Abandoning my dinner, I got up and trailed after her with Scorpius at my side. I shot him a confused glance, but he seemed just as perplexed by why she wanted to talk to us.
"Well?" Professor McGonagall asked, sitting on one side of her desk.
I shrugged.
"Why have I been getting reports from all of your teachers of poor performance in lessons? Neither of you have been attentive, your marks have suspiciously dropped down, you're both distracted and staring into space every minute, so there must be some plan between you here. If this is a plot to get me to drop the restrictions upon you both, it won't work." When neither of us spoke and continued to stare blankly at her, she released us for dinner.
Not feeling hungry, I said goodnight to Scorpius and began my walk up the Grand Staircase, wrapped up in my thoughts. Were the teachers feeling sympathy for Scorpius and I? Would we finally be allowed to sit together again? We hadn't purposefully done badly, but we were used to working together. Scorpius presence had become comforting, and if I had him distracting me, at least I would be thinking about how annoying that was and trying to concentrate on my work rather than thinking about things other than my work. Without him, I had nothing to stop me.
Feeling positive about the next day, I got started on my homework. Halfway through my astronomy homework, I thought again about Scorpius and tore off a section of my parchment, scribbled a quick 'I love you' and headed to the Owlery. If I couldn't see him alone, I would write to him and steal quick moments with him between lessons whenever I could.
📝📝📝📝📝📝📝📝📝📝