Forget-Or-Not? (Michael/Astoria)
Title: Forget-Or-Not?
Pairing: Michael Corner/Astoria Greengrass
Prompt: rarepair_shorts Challenge #8 "Hole In The Wall" photo
Rating/Word Count: PG-13 / ~920 words
Summary: “Why?” Astoria ducked under the wall’s remains and into the bathroom. “It’s not exactly a real boys’ bathroom, is it?”
Author's Notes: Have been on a Michael Corner kick lately for some reason.
“How am I supposed to pee when there’s a bloody hole in the wall?” Michael asked. He bent down to peek through the waist-tall hole and into what had once been the fourth floor boys’ bathroom.
He stopped talking though when he noticed that the bathroom looked less like a functioning bathroom and more like the remains of a nuclear bomb explosion-charred walls, no discernable sinks, and dusty tiles laying cracked and scattered across the ground.
“It’s going to be a long year if all the bathrooms look like this,” he muttered as he stepped through the hole. Michael didn’t really have to pee, but it had seemed like a good excuse when Terry had run up to him in the middle of lunch and exclaimed that they “had a lot to do today!” and started to pull him up halfway through a fishstick. Michael had professed an urgent need to use the bathroom, and now that he’d found one-destroyed or no-he was going to waste as much time as possible.
He glanced at the wall that used to hold the mirror. Most of it was gone, except for a bit that had stayed glued to the corner. He had to stand on his tiptoes to see his face reflected back at him, but what did reflect back was mostly just blurred and dusty and scratched. It made him look menacing and monstrous. He bared his teeth and growled to see what would happen.
“Practicing your charm, Corner?”
The voice made him jump quickly away from the piece of glass. His foot crunched into a pile of tile rubble, which caused him to stumble against the wall.
The face that peeked at him from the hole in the wall grinned and snorted.
“Wasn’t expecting to see you here, Greengrass,” Michael spat as he dusted his robes off.
“Why?” Astoria ducked under the wall’s remains and into the bathroom. “It’s not exactly a real boys’ bathroom, is it?”
“I meant at Hogwarts.”
“Why? Because only Ravenclaws and Gryffindors are noble enough to come back and fix up their school?” She placed her hands on her hips and raised both eyebrows at him. The way her lips subsequently curled around her gums reminded Michael of the rottweiler that had chased him up a tree when he was nine.
“You’re forgetting the Hufflepuffs,” Michael crossed his arms smugly.
“Oh, and you’re not forgetting anything yourself?”
“Well, hm…” He feigned contemplation-scrunched his eyebrows together, tilted his head to the side, bit his lip. He stood like that for several silent seconds before vehemently shaking his head. “Actually no-nothing or nobody that matters, anyway.”
She rolled her eyes and shoved past him in order to examine her face in the mirror. But unlike he had, she did not use it to make silly faces. She instead adjusted some loose brown hair.
“You seem to have forgotten a few things, actually,” she commented idly.
“Like what, exactly, Professor Know It All?”
“Well,” she drawled, “First of all, you never were that smart anyway.”
“-And you were never very pretty,” he shot back.
Her scratched and dusty reflection once again raised its eyebrows at him. This time the lips formed something of a skeptic smile that challenged his assertion. For some reason this expression made him want to climb up a tree more than the last one had.
“And second of all,” she continued as she turned and stepped toward him. He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. She continued to slink closer, and he continued to lift his chin up at her until they stood toe to toe, and he was sneering down at her from the bridge of his nose.
“Second of all,” she breathed into his face from parted lips, turning her head slightly to get a better view of him. Her fingers toyed with the hair that curled out just behind his ear. He tried to maintain his glare, but with difficulty.
She kissed him.
His lips remained firm and immobile-
-for a total of three seconds. Before he knew it he’d grabbed her cheeks and was making a deliberate point to kiss her harder. A tiny, sensible portion of his mind cursed him for being weak, but who was he to resist temptation? She had started it; he was merely playing at her own game.
She stepped away more quickly than he had anticipated, leaving his hands grasping thin air and his lips kissing at ghosts.
Astoria smirked at him. “Well, maybe you haven’t forgotten something.”
“I never forget anything, baby,” he wiped his lips off on the back of his hand before he nonchalantly reached for his pockets. “I just choose to ignore certain things.” It was his turn to smirk, even if it was at her back.
She stepped through the hole in the wall, and he let her go. He’d see her again, he always did.
(Even if he didn’t really want to.)
“Hey, Greengrass!” he did shout, on impulse. He watched her legs pause on the other side of the wall. Her head appeared framed by broken plaster a moment later.
“What?”
“You’re a bit rusty.”
“And you sound like an idiot when you say ‘baby’.”
“Fair enough.” He watched her legs disappear down the hall before he let his shoulders slump and he sighed at the empty wall where the mirror would have once frowned back at him. “This is going to be a long year,” he grumbled, “whether or not all the bathrooms look like this.”