Sylvia walked into class ten minutes late, soaked from head to toe.
Snape stopped mid sentence to watch her as she surveyed the classroom quickly before sitting down at the nearest empty seat, next to Fiona Belmont, who eyed the drops of water falling from her drenched hair. Fred wondered why she would be wet, it was completely cloudless outside. In fact, it was practically a heat-wave out there. Maybe she was profusely sweaty.
"Class starts at eight o'clock, Miss Callis."
She kept her eyes down as she pulled out her parchment and quill, sniffing.
"Yes, I'm aware." Sharp, quick, like everything she did was.
Snape stiffened and the whole of the Gryffindor side of the room drew in a collective breath, ready for the damage to be done.
"Well then you'd be aware that tardiness is not tolerated in this class. Ten points from Gryffindor."
Students groaned as the Hufflepuffs on the other side of the classroom but their tongues. But she wasn't finished.
"I'm sorry, but I'm not an idiot, Professor." She was jack knifed against her chair, hand curled around her quill like it was a stake. Even from behind, Fred noticed her jaw grinding and he thought he could see steam rising off her as her wet hair grew hot with anger.
Snape cast a glaring eye down at her, and what he said next came as no surprise.
"Talk like that will earn you detention, you know, Miss Callis."
Not even a beat passed.
"Yes I know. And I will be in your office at seven o'clock sharp to reorganize your chemistry sets."
Fred actually let out a guffaw, but quickly bit his lip when Snape turned his to him, like a vulture finding its next prey. Next to him, Lee shifted away, biting down on his palm to repress a laugh.
"Mr. Weasley, if you wish to avoid joining Miss Callis in detention this afternoon, I suggest you keep your reactions to yourself."
He snapped back to Sylvia, who was already throwing her inkwell back in her bag. He didn't even tell her to leave. She simply stood and threw her bag over her shoulder, leaving a puddle of water behind her as she left the classroom.
Fred got detention anyways. He put a firework in his cauldron, setting it off in Snape's face as he checked his potion at the end of class.
So, when seven o'clock came around, he found himself outside Snape's office. If you could even call it that. The door was closed but he tried the handle, and it opened to reveal the tiny library of jars and drawers. Dimly lit by the desk lamp, Sylvia was already stood at the fourth rung of the sliding ladder, placing a newly filled bottle of beetle eyes on a shelf. She glanced over at him in the doorway, barely acknowledging him as she climbed down, "You're late."
"It's seven," Fred closed the door behind him, dimming the room further until it was cast in the slightest orange glow, "Where's Snape?"
"It's seven-thirty and he doesn't come in, trusts us to do the job." She snapped back at him, deferring his gaze as she sat at the desk, opening one of the drawers to pull out an empty phial and a blank label.
"My watch is behind." He sat at the chair opposite her, kicking up his feet onto the desk, rattling the lamp slightly.
Her eyes flicked up to his momentarily, then she leaned down to scribble on the label, licking the back of it quickly before smoothing it over the tiny bottle.
"You don't have a watch."
"How would you know?"
She paused again, sniffing as she nodded at his bare wrist. She stood to grab one of the cauldrons sitting on the shelf to her left, pulling it down quickly, but with enough care that Fred recognized that she'd done this before.
"Know your way around the joint, do ya?" he said.
He settled in the chair, sinking into his shoulders as he flashed a grin at her. He decided then that he was going to see if he could make her laugh tonight. Or even just smile. He had two and a half hours to go and he wasn't going to waste it watching her label potions.
"You act like you haven't noticed." She spoke so matter of factly, like she was an open book. If Sylvia was a book, Fred thought, she'd be the Monster Book of Monsters, biting at you if you tried to open her up. Though he supposed she wasn't as ugly.
He shrugged at her response, watching her as she squeezed pipettes full of the potion from the cauldron and transferred them to the phial. She moved in quick, fluid motions, as if her muscle memory was taking over. Uncomfortable with the silence she always seemed to create, he cleared his throat, "Why were you all wet this morning? Thought you'd take a morning dip in the Black Lake?"
She stopped suddenly, but only for a millisecond. Her hand wavered over the phial and she blinked. It made Fred shudder. She recovered quickly though, and released a sharp breath.
"I fell in."
He couldn't contain the pure laugh that escaped his throat, "You fell in?"
She nodded, eyes back on her work. But Fred pushed further, loosening the tie around his neck and relaxing into the leather chair.
"And how, may I ask, did you manage to fall into the Black Lake at eight in the morning?"
Sylvia stiffened, her voice dropping to a murmur, "You don't manage to do things like accidentally fall into a lake."
"No of course not."
"But since you're so interested—"
"I am."
"I was pushed."
He laughed again, despite the hardness of her expression as she pressed a cork down on the phial. She stood and dragged the sliding ladder over a few feet closer to Fred and climbed up to the very top shelf.
"Who pushed you?"
He knew she wasn't going to answer, but he asked anyways to distract himself from looking at the birthmark on the back of her right thigh, just past the hem of her skirt. But when she set the bottle down in the drawer with a hard bang, he got the sudden feeling that she was gonna have another episode.
She stepped down the ladder and stared at the space in front of her before turning to face him. Her dark hair hung around her face like a mad woman's and her freckles burned red against her fair skin. She breathed heavily before spitting out the name quickly, "Quentin."
Hearing this from another mouth would have made Fred laugh. It would sound like harmless sibling play fighting if the name had been George. Or Ron. Or Parvati or Padma Patil. Or any other sibling of any other student. But it wasn't. It was Quentin. Evil fucking Slytherin, Quentin. Worse than Malfoy, wannabe Death Eater, Quentin. Avoid him in the hallways (if you've got any sense) because he's scary just to look at, Quentin. Sylvia's very own twin brother, Quentin.
He couldn't respond. Where he would usually come in with a fast quip to bring the mood up, he found only silence. And as Sylvia took a step in his direction, Fred found himself straightening up, as if standing at attention to a drill sergeant.
"Quentin pushed me into the lake." The sarcasm was thick in her voice, "He wanted me to show up to class late and soaking wet with lake water because why not."
Fred was pressing himself so hard into the back of his chair that it felt like his chest was going to cave in on itself. He couldn't tear his eyes away from hers. Those massive doe eyes, the color of slate stones, unblinking like a snake. Her breath came out in deep shaky bursts, chest rising and falling as if she had just been running. And then she blinked. The slow blink. The one that made Fred's skin itch because it seemed so inhuman, and she turned away, rounding back to Snape's desk where she sat down, the color in her cheeks subsiding back to their usual ruddiness. She pulled out a new, clean phial and blank label and continued her work as if nothing had happened.
It was an understatement to say that Fred had been put in his place. His hands gripped the arms of the chair, back still pressed against the worn leather. He forced himself to swallow the lump that had built up in his throat. Sylvia's eyes shifted up to his and back again, her face blank, "Come help me with this."
"Um," he cleared his throat, letting his muscles relax, one by one, "alright."
Leaning forward in his seat, he tentatively raised his eyebrows, ready to meet her needs like a little schoolboy to his teacher. Pulling out more blank labels, she slid them across the table, along with a pen, "My handwriting's rubbish."
It was. Fred looked at the label she had made. Calling it chicken scratch was too nice. It was hardly legible.
"Can you do the rest?" She started filling the next bottle with the oily liquid from the cauldron.
"Uh, sure. What's it supposed to say?" He squinted at her penmanship, tilting his head to the side.
And he could have sworn he saw the ghost of a smile cross her lips.
"Veritaserum." Her voice had softened now. It was almost a murmur as she watched him write, "V. E. R. I... T. A. Serum." She spoke as her eyes followed the small capital letters he wrote down neatly. "No, serum is with an E." It was like she was speaking her thoughts out loud, like no one else was really there and she was just letting her voice whisper what she was thinking. It was a stark difference to the sharp tongue he was used to hearing. She reached out a finger to point to his mistake, and Fred noticed her chipped, dark green nail polish and smiled.
He fixed his spelling error, drawing three little dashes off of the "I" he had written. And when he looked up for affirmation, she was turning back to her work, eyes still drawn to his writing as he finished the word.
They worked in silence for the next two hours, filling bottles and writing labels. Fred was amazed that he had gotten this far without getting bored. He hadn't even felt the need to utter a single word the entire time. In fact, he had fallen into a routine, writing and rewriting the complicated potion name over and over again, sliding the finished labels back over to Sylvia. And when the very last drop was added to a phial, she licked the back of the last label and smoothed it out over the bottle.
"Come on." She nodded her head to the crate of filled bottles next her and stood from the desk, signaling him to grab it. She stepped up the ladder and waited as Fred clamored up from his seat and retrieved the case of potions, holding it below her as she transferred them to a drawer on the highest shelf.
He finally spoke, his voice coming out in a croak, "You're good at this."
She blew a puff of air out her nose and raised an eyebrow down at him, "I'm good at restocking Snape's classroom supplies?"
He grinned, "No I mean working in here... in general."
Sylvia simply let out a little "Hm" sound, placing the last phial in the drawer before she pushed it back into place. She remained on the ladder, though, looking down at Fred as he spoke.
"You look like you've been doing this for a while."
She didn't reply, just let him talk.
"Why don't you do this as like a job or something?"
She snorted, unsmiling, "What, be Snape's little secretary?" She stepped down two rungs, standing just a few inches above Fred now.
"Well I'm sure he's got his eye out for a young female student to be alone with in his office into the late hours of the night." He grinned up at her.
"He's already got me doing that every week since third year."
He raised his eyebrows, amused, "Third year?"
She just nodded back at him, twisting her hand around the ladder, "Haven't you noticed I get detention every week?"
"Well yeah, but I assumed you weren't spending all your time in here."
She shrugged, running her eyes up and down Fred's body absentmindedly before wrinkling her nose in a sniff, "I think he actually likes me, Snape. He knows I'm good with this stuff." She waved her free hand loosely, gesturing to the room, "I just can't keep my mouth shut sometimes and it ruins things."
Fred found his eyes traveling over her face as she spoke, and still after her mouth closed, her lips tucking in on each other as she chewed the inside of them. Then her eyes met his again, unblinking.
"You're like that too." She said.
"Hm?" He blinked out of his trance.
Her eyes scanned up and down his body again, as if finalizing her decision, "You're like me. You can't keep your mouth shut."
He didn't mean to let out the scoff, but it happened without any pause, so he tried to make his laugh more friendly, noticing the way her jaw set.
"Like you?"
Sylvia merely raised her eyebrows, case in point, shifting her gaze to the emptiness beside him as she stepped down the final two rungs of the ladder and grabbed her bag from under the desk. "It's ten," was all she said before switching off the desk lamp with a flick of her wand, leaving them in complete darkness. But she didn't leave right away. She just stood there, watching Fred turn to her, empty case still in his arms. He could see her outline and the shine of her eyes, but that was it. The sound of her breath was amplified in the darkness.
And then she took a step, two steps, around the side of the desk to stand in front of it, thighs touching the grainy wood. He didn't realize he was stepping towards her until the empty phial crate was the only thing between them, and without thinking, he set it down on the desk behind her, leaning in to do so. He could hear her breath coming out in nervous shudders, hitching as he got closer and releasing as he leaned back.
"You don't think you're like me, but you are." Her voice was nearly a whisper, but he could feel it blow at the hair at his neck.
"I'm not like you." He didn't know why, but Fred felt the need to defend himself. He wasn't anything like her. Sylvia was solemn and stiff and strange and she never smiled or laughed. That wasn't him. If anything, they were total and complete opposites. But as he spoke, her shoulders straightened and her chin dipped down slightly, making her eyes all the more predatory as she blinked at him through heavy lashes. He felt his neck twitch at the slow close and open of her eyes and rolled his shoulder, nervously. But he kept his eyes on hers.
"No, I think we're very much alike." It was like her tongue was dripping with poison, each word heavy and almost painful, stinging, "I think we're exactly alike."
Somehow he understood, because the next thing he knew, he was leaning in to touch his lips to hers, and she was letting him do it, she was kissing him back. And one hand found her waist and the other her jaw and hers were at either side of his neck, pulling him in closer.
Except they weren't. Because they were stood there like statues, just looking at each other. Fred wondered why he was thinking that way, though if he imagined any other girl there in front of him, maybe he would have done just that. He would have kissed her into next week and maybe even screwed her right there on Snape's desk. At the thought of it, that would be a pretty good story to tell George. Suddenly he thought maybe he should make a bet with him on who could be the first to get with a girl in a professor's office. Though George would lose. It wouldn't be that hard for Fred to pull a fourth or fifth year.
But in front of him was Sylvia Callis, messy hair and orange freckles that appeared almost black in the dark, that intense stare keeping him right in his place. She was reading him, he could tell. Her eyes were making the slightest movement, not between his, but almost within his, like they were dissecting them, whites from irises from pupils. So he did something that caught her off guard. He blinked. And so did she, not noticeably taken aback by his assertion over the situation, but her eyebrows knitted enough for Fred to notice.
He laughed, not with much force, but with a breath of air, running a hand through his hair before backing up a step, "No, Sylvie. We're nothing alike."
And with that, he turned and found the door, exiting the office without looking back.