Universally Acknowledged (PG-13) (2/2)
Title: Universally Acknowledged (2/2)
Author: realmer06
Prompt: "May I ask to what these questions tend?"
"Merely to the illustration of your character," said she, endeavouring to shake off her gravity. "I am trying to make it out."
"And what is your success?"
She shook her head. "I do not get on at all. I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly." - Pride and Prejudice
Summary: Rose and Scorpius can’t seem to stop meeting each other - but what exactly is it that keeps pulling them together?
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: References to sexual activity, mild cursing
Word Count: (if applicable) ~18,500 altogether
A/N: I’m a huge fan of Pride and Prejudice, so I was so excited to write for this prompt! I hope I did the references justice, and I hope you enjoy this monster of a fic! Huge thanks, as ever, to M, my beta, who not only kept me on track with this beast, she also let me write her into the story as Shanti, the thoroughly unromantic best friend.
IV.
The Phoenix’s Nest was a fairly expensive high-end restaurant, relatively new, and nearly impossible to get reservations for. And that’s where Rose Weasley had been sitting alone, for an hour and a half, on her 26th birthday. Sighing, she sipped her water and tried to force down her growing irritation as she waved the waiter away one more time and scanned the restaurant yet again for her illusive date.
“Rose?”
She turned at the sound of her name, but instead of seeing the man she was supposed to be eating with, Scorpius Malfoy was standing behind her.
“Scorpius,” she said, feeling strangely pleased to see him.
“You all alone?” he asked, taking in the table for two, still-folded napkin, and upside-down water glass.
“Yes, I am,” Rose said, and a hint of her irritation crept into her voice. “Not supposed to be, mind you, but I am.” Scorpius’s eyes narrowed.
“Are you supposed to be on a date?” he asked, and Rose lifted her glass in an affirmative reply. “And who had the audacity to stand Rose Weasley up?” The way he said it made her breath catch in her throat momentarily, though there was no good reason for it. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice.
“Broderick Townsend, up in Processing,” Rose said, trying to be dismissive, but not quite managing it. Scorpius was right, she was realizing - it did take a certain amount of audacity to stand her up on a date he’d arranged - and on her birthday, no less! Unless - “I just hope nothing as happened to him” she said with a sigh, torn between irritation now and worry.
“Broderick Townsend?” Scorpius asked darkly. “No, sadly, this piggish behavior is not atypical for him. He sets up a lavish date, bails, and sees how the girl reacts. Then if he thinks she’s worth it, he spins some sad tale about a friend in St. Mungo’s, with massive apologies, of course, and tries to earn himself “you’re so sympathetic” sex. So, you may make free with your annoyance.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about his MO,” Rose observed, and Scorpius grinned.
“I am an ever-present observer,” he said, and Rose laughed at that.
Then, impulsively, she said, “Join me.” Scorpius looked surprised at the request, and Rose belatedly realized that he might have been there for a meeting, or even on a date of his own. “Unless, of course, you can’t,” she said in a rush. “If you’re here with someone else, of course, don’t let me-”
“No,” Scorpius interrupted with a laugh. “No, I’m not, you just caught me off guard, is all.”
“Will wonders never cease,” Rose said with a raised eyebrow. “Have I finally managed to stun the unsurpriseable Scorpius Malfoy?” He ducked his head slightly in amused confession.
“I believe you have,” he conceded. “Very well, I will join you. But - what if Townsend shows up?”
“He’s an hour and a half late,” Rose said bluntly. “If he shows up now, he deserves to see me with someone else. Besides, to be honest, I think an evening with you with be far more pleasurable than anything he had in store.” Scorpius’s eyebrows rose at that, and Rose realized too late how the words had sounded. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it,” she said with a laugh. “Now, are you joining me or not?”
“How could I possibly refuse such an elegant invitation?” he asked with a smirk and slid into the seat across from her as the waiter headed over to the table.
“So,” she said, once their orders had been placed. “It’s been, what? Almost a year? What have you been up to?”
He gave her a look, one that clearly said, You know I’m not going to answer that, and Rose rolled her eyes.
“Come on,” she said. “I wasn’t asking about work, I wasn’t asking you to divulge DoM secrets. I was asking about life. Surely you have one of those.”
“Outside of work? Not really,” he quipped, but Rose had a feeling it wasn’t far from the truth. “The most interesting things that have happened in the past year have been directly related to work.”
“Okay, then we’ll make it a game,” Rose said with a twinkle. “You be vaguer than vague about your job, and I’ll fill in the blanks. And if I guess right, you have to tell me.” Scorpius laughed.
“I don’t think I’ll be agreeing to the last part of that, but sure. We can play that game.”
Rose was taken aback. “Really?” she said, and he nodded.
“Sure. So, let’s see. I took a trip to Germany.”
“Hmm . . . recovering WWII era artifacts that are decidedly more magical than Muggles believe?”
Scorpius chuckled and shook his head. “Not my department.” Rose thought for a moment.
“Okay, then,” she said slowly. “My next guess . . . recovering information on Dumbledore’s defeat of Grindlewald.”
“Not even close,” Scorpius said. “Get your mind out of the mid-20th century.”
This game took them through most of dinner, and served to provide one of the most entertaining evenings that Rose could remember having in a long time. She found herself wondering why she didn’t do this more often, why so much time always seemed to elapse between the times when she and Scorpius saw each other. And she decided the time had come to really get some answers from him.
“Since we’re in a truth-sharing mood,” she said over dessert, “I have to ask - did you mean what you said last Christmas? That you’d answer personal questions if I asked them of you?”
“Well, I don’t think that’s actually what I said, but . . .” He gazed at her for a long moment, as if measuring, considering, and Rose felt very exposed. But then he blinked, and the look was gone, and he said, “Ask away. I don’t promise to answer, but I do promise not to lie.” Rose rolled her eyes.
“That’s no kind of promise,” she said, bordering on petulant. “How about this one - you have to answer unless it a direct matter of secrecy for your job.”
“And how will you know? I could lie and tell you it’s secret just to get out of answering.”
“Except that you already said you wouldn’t lie,” she pointed out with a smile. “Also, I am choosing to trust you.”
Her words brought a strange, intense look to his face, one she couldn’t read, but again, it was there for only a moment before he said, “All right. Ask your worst.”
“Okay.” She thought carefully, then smiled slowly. “Were you the Anonymous Valentine?” He stared at her for a moment, then groaned and buried his face in his hands. Rose’s eyes went wide in gleeful surprise. “Oh my God, you were!” she exclaimed.
“No,” he said emphatically, pointing. “I want to be absolutely clear. I was not. Except . . .” He sighed. “Sort of. Yes.” Rose laughed, elated.
“Spill it, Malfoy!” she demanded. Scorpius sighed again and ran a hand through his hair.
“Okay,” he said good-naturedly. “No, I was not. I didn’t originate the Anonymous Valentine, it was a thing that had been going on for a good five years before we even got to Hogwarts. But fourth year, I had the cursed bad luck to find Bobby Engle in the Owlery sending out all those valentines to the single female population, and he said that since I found him, the mantle passed to me. So, yes, for three years I sent out the damned things, but I did it under duress. It was not my idea.”
“So Bobby Engle was the Anonymous Valentine?” Rose asked, genuinely curious now.
“No, it was someone before him. I don’t know who.”
“But you passed it on when you left?”
Scorpius nodded. “Yes. So two people officially know it was ever me, and I’d like to know who you heard it from, because if those two are blabbing-”
Rose laughed. “It was Anna Pensworth,” she said.
“Oh, that’s all right then,” Scorpius said, waving a dismissive hand. “She’s a conspiracy theorist; no one takes her seriously.”
“Why do you care if people find out?” Rose asked then.
“I don’t want people painting a picture of me based on a single piece of information taken out of context,” he said then. “They do that enough as it is.”
He’d said it casually, matter-of-factly, but Rose could tell there was something driving the words. “Is it true you turned down Prefect?” she asked softly then.
He hesitated for only a moment before saying, “No,” but Rose caught it.
“That’s a half-truth,” she said, no longer teasing or joking or cajoling, just pointing it out as a reminder that he’d promised to be honest. He sighed and looked down at his empty plate.
“I owled the Headmaster and my Head of House at the end of fourth year and asked them not to include my name in consideration for Prefect. I didn’t turn it down because I didn’t give them the chance to offer it to me.”
“Do you think they would have?”
“I don’t know,” Scorpius said with a slight frown. “Maybe not, but I think Professor Eldritch might have tried.”
“Because he knew your secret?” Rose asked, and Scorpius fixed her with a level gaze.
“What secret is that?” he asked, but he knew what she meant, and he knew she knew. He was just forcing her to say it.
“That you purposefully got bad grades. That you consistently dumbed yourself and your work down.”
“First of all,” he said, “I got mediocre grades, not bad ones. And I dumbed my work down, but never myself.”
“So it’s true then?” Even though she had asked, even though she’d heard the rumor, there was a part of her that still hadn’t really believed that he had done such a thing, that anyone would really do such a thing, and to hear him confirm it . . . it still stunned her, even though she had known the answer.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Why?”
He smiled softly, inwardly, and then said, “I didn’t want the attention. The truth is . . . well, the truth is I can’t say this without sounding arrogant, so I’m just going to say it, and trust you to understand that it isn’t said with arrogance, but . . . I’m brilliant, Rose.” He said it almost apologetically, like he wasn’t proud of it, like it was embarrassing, and Rose didn’t, couldn’t, understand that. “I’ve been brilliant my whole life. I remember things after seeing or reading or doing them once, I make connections with lightning speed. I am brilliant, and if I’d ever given my all at school, I would have been top of the class without even trying, and noticeably so. I want to say you’d have given me a run for my money, to be polite, but the truth is . . . not even you, Rose. There’s no way I would have escaped notice, and the notice wouldn’t have been positive. And I didn’t want it. So, yes, I got questions wrong on tests. I prepared mediocre homework for the teachers. I did twice the work, once for myself, and once for them. Because I never asked to be a Malfoy and ten times smarter than everyone else, and I wasn’t going to let it define me.”
“I guess,” Rose said slowly, “that I can understand that.” Scorpius smiled, and it seemed genuine.
“I’m glad,” he said, and that seemed genuine, too. “This mindset . . . it’s why I pursued the DoM. I figured out a long time ago I wanted to be an Unspeakable. Because they, more than anyone else in the world, really, understand that a person’s aptitude has nothing to do with blood or family name. It’s the one place I could apply and be confident that, accepted or rejected, it would be entirely on my own merit that I’d have been judged. Not my name, not my family, me. What I’m capable of. And the people who work with me know it, too. They may not like me as a person, but they know that if I’m there, I’ve earned my spot, just as they have, and they know I’ll do my job. That’s really the best scenario I could have hoped for.”
There was a long silence as Rose searched for something appropriate to say to that. But all she came up with in the end was, “I really don’t know you at all, do I?”
And she was filled with a deep and sudden sadness when he replied, “No. You don’t.” The sadness was only slightly lessened when he added, “But no one does, really, and you know me better than most.”
He wished her a happy birthday and he thanked her for dinner, and she watched him walk away, wondering how long it would be this time before she’d seen him again, and how it was possible that on this night when she’d learned so much about him, he walked away more of a mystery unsolved than ever.
V.
Rose never lost her temper where people could see. She’d always had a bad one, and there had been some unfortunate incidents in the past, but over the years, she’d learned to control it, and at 27, she was well able, when she got mad, to suppress it and keep it in check and wait until she was completely alone to let it all out.
And so, at 27, it was rare that anyone caught even the slightest hint of Rose Weasley’s temper. The exception, of course, happened when Rose mistakenly thought she was alone during one such release of temper, the result being that she punched the wall of a Ministry corridor in front of none other than Scorpius Malfoy.
“Rose!” he exclaimed with no small amount of concern, hurrying over. “Are you all right?”
Now far more embarrassed than angry, especially as he took her now-bruised and bloody hand in his and began healing it, she choked out, “I’m fine,” utterly mortified, pulling away from him, wanting to disappear on the spot. “Really. And I’m sorry you saw that, that was completely inappropriate.” She knew she was babbling, but the thought and remembrance of losing her cool in front of Scorpius, of all people, filled her with shame, and talking was her only way of staving that off.
“Rose,” Scorpius interrupted, gently but firmly, “Everyone gets mad and loses their temper sometimes. I’m not going to hold that against you. I’m more concerned with what led you to punch a wall than the fact that you did.”
He took her hand again, to continue his ministrations, and Rose could feel the anger and hurt and overwhelming sense of unfairness that had led her to the point rising up in her again.
“I -” she started, and, infuriatingly, she felt tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “I just got cut from the Iceland trip,” she said as calmly as she could. She felt him pause and glance at her. “The big one,” she went on. “The one I’ve been helping plan for months. They one we’re hoping is going to lead us to the first magical link, the discovery I have wanted to be a part of for years. I just got cut.”
“How did that happen?” she asked, his voice and face unreadable.
“People are starting to lose interest in our department,” Rose said, forcing herself to say it all. “With the DoM and the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office and others that have been around far longer, they see us as redundant. We’ve been having funding problems for the last year, and our funding for the trip just took a huge blow. They either had to shorten the trip from three weeks to two, or cut the team from seven to six. And I completely agree with the choice to cut the team down,” she stressed.
“But you just wish the outcome had been different,” Scorpius finished for her.
“Something like that,” Rose said quietly, subdued somehow how that she’d revealed this to him, and had been reassured that he understood.
“So how’d you draw the short straw?” he asked, and Rose had to laugh, though it came out halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“By literally drawing the short straw,” she said, and he winced in sympathy and apology. “Sonya and Pieter have to go,” she explained. “They know the language and the terrain. And this is Anabel and George’s pet project. So that left me and Shanti and Katrin vying for the last two spots. And we’ve all put in the same amount of work, and we all have the same seniority, so this was the fairest way, but . . .” She trailed off, feeling just miserable now.
“It still sucks?” Scorpius supplied helpfully, and to hear him speak so informally won a more genuine smile out of her.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. I can’t say I wanted it more than they did because you can’t prove something like that, and I wouldn’t want to. They’re my friends, and I want to be happy for them. It’s just so unfair, and it’s no one’s fault, there’s no one to be mad at, and I know that, but it doesn’t make me less mad. It just makes me feel guilty over still being mad. And . . . yeah. It sucks. It really sucks.”
At some point during the speech, Scorpius had led her to a low stone bench, and she sat there now, staring at her hands, feeling despondent and pathetic and fell of self-pity that she knew was beneath her.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, cutting through the whirlwind in her mind. She waved her hand in a half-hearted gesture of dismissal.
“It’s not like you cut our funding,” she said bitterly.
“No,” he replied, still in that calm, quiet voice. “But you’re my friend, and I can still be sorry for what you’re going through.”
She felt another wave of guilt at that, combined with a twinge of pleasure over the fact that he’d called her his friend. “Thank you,” she said to her hands. “I just . . . I wanted this more than anything.” She knew she sounded pathetic and whiny and very young, but in that moment, she didn’t care. She felt as though, if she was alone, she’d have been crying, but she wasn’t about to cry in front of him.
They sat in silence for a few more moments, then suddenly, Scorpius stood. “Come with me,” he said, holding his hand out to her. Rose stared at it.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because there’s something you need to see,” he said, and because she trusted him, she put her hand in his and let him lead her through the darkened and empty Ministry. She wasn’t entirely surprised when they stopped outside the entrance to the Department of Mysteries. She closed her eyes expectantly. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“You have to blindfold me, don’t you?” she asked, peeking one eye open.
“No,” he said, taking her by surprise. “Not this time. It’s okay.” She looked at him and smiled softly.
“I’ll keep my eyes closed,” she said gently. “I’m not getting you in trouble.” For a moment, he looked almost disappointed, but in the next, she was certain she’d imagined it.
She closed her eyes, and he took her hand, and a long while later, through a path of corridors she almost remembered, he positioned her carefully, stood behind her, and said, “You can open your eyes now,” in her ear. The feeling of his voice in her ear sent shivers down her spine, though she elected not to think about why.
When she opened her eyes, she was in the same gallery he’d brought her to two years before, standing in front of a large, ornate mirror that she recognized immediately from her dad and uncle’s stories, to say nothing of the writing engraved around the top. Her eyebrows raised.
“The Mirror of Erised?” she asked, staring at their reflection, pale in the gallery’s soft light.
“You said the Iceland trip was what you wanted more than anything else in the world,” he said softly, still in her ear, still sending shivers down her spine. “I want to prove to you that’s not true. I want to give you the chance to look in the mirror.”
“Why?” she asked, and he hesitated for a long time before he answered.
“Because your happiness, Rose Weasley, shouldn’t be so dependent on something so fleeting,” he said softly.
“And if it is?” she asked then. “If you’re wrong?”
“If you see Iceland in that Mirror,” he said with confidence, “then I will personally fund your part of the expedition.”
Rose turned to stare at him. “I can’t let you do that,” she said in all seriousness. “The trip is incredibly expensive; there’s no way you can afford it.”
“You’re right, I can’t afford it in the slightest,” he said with a bit of a smile. “I’m not a gambling man, Rose. I don’t make deals that aren’t sure things. This is how confident I am that you are going to see something much bigger in than Mirror than a three-week trip to Iceland.” She smiled at him, suddenly shy for reasons she couldn’t place or understand.
“And how do you know I won’t lie and say I see Iceland just to get you to pay for my trip?” she asked, trying to banter, to feel more like herself again. He gave her the old smile.
“I’m trusting you,” he said, and that didn’t help her feel any more like herself. “Now,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders and turning her back to their reflections. “Look in the Mirror, and see for yourself.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, steeling herself. But when she opened her eyes to look, the image in the Mirror hadn’t changed. She stood there, with Scorpius slightly behind her. She waited a moment or two for him to move away from the Mirror’s line of sight, but when those moments passed and he was still right behind her, she let out a breath of a laugh and said, turning toward him, “Scorpius, if you want this to work, you’re going to have to m-”
He wasn’t there. The space behind her was empty. Without her realizing it, Scorpius had stepped away and was now nowhere in sight. Rose whipped back to the Mirror, heart pounding in shock, but the view still hadn’t changed. There she stood, with Scorpius behind her, and as she watched, the Mirror-Scorpius stepped beside her, and took her hand, and looked down at her with a gaze of such intensity that it made the real Rose go weak at the knees, her breath catching in her throat.
It’s not possible, she thought faintly. It can’t be.
“Rose?”
His voice startled her, and she whirled. “Sorry,” he said gently. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” In his hand, he held a spyglass, and the sight of it filled her with panic.
“Did you see?” she asked in a voice shriller than her usually was. He held out his hands immediately.
“Of course not,” he said. “I would never. Not without permission.”
Swallowing hard, she nodded, turning her gaze back to the Mirror, but it had gone back to being no more than an ordinary mirror, showing the reflection of just what was in front of it - or so she assumed, but she was no longer quite sure.
“It can be a little overwhelming,” he said sympathetically, coming to stand behind her, but it was too much like the image she’d seen, and she found herself having to swallow hard again.
“Yeah,” she said faintly. “Not what I was expecting.”
“Not Iceland, then?” he asked with a smile, and she tried to return it.
“No,” she said. “Um, why do you have the spyglass?” she asked, trying to direct her attention anywhere else.”
“Because,” he said, now sounding as shy and hesitant as she’d felt moments before, “I want to share my view with you.”
She stared at him. “Why?” she asked when she could speak again past her shock. The ghost of a smile graced his face.
“I’m going to answer that question after you look,” he said. He offered the glass to her, and she took it, but she didn’t raise it or move at all.
“Do you know what you’ll see?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I mean, I have a pretty good idea, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Seems like a pretty big risk,” she said, stalling now, putting off the moment when she had to move away. “For someone who doesn’t gamble.”
“I told you,” he said. “I have a pretty good idea what’s going to be there.”
There was nothing else for her to say, so she moved away, out of the Mirror’s range. She watched him turn to the glass, watched him take in the sight before him, watched him relax and exhale slightly, and look on the sight before him with Of course, written clearly in his eyes.
“I don’t have to look,” she said. “If you don’t want me too.”
“I want you to,” he said, his eyes never leaving the Mirror. Nervous and uncertain but with no real arguments left, Rose lifted the spyglass to her eye.
And saw herself, reflected in the Mirror. And as she watched, Scorpius came into view, and Rose watched as her own heart’s desire played itself out again in Scorpius’s place. And she could no longer pretend she hadn’t known this was true.
Without thinking about it, without debating, without a single pause, Rose set down the spyglass and went to Scorpius. She stood before him for a heartbeat or two, and he looked down at her with that look of intensity, except now it was real, and Rose did what was the most natural thing in the world for her to do - she kissed him.
For the first time in her life that night, Rose acted impulsively, trusting her instincts and her heart rather than stopping to deliberate the merits of each individual course of action. And she regretted nothing that happened.
Until the next morning.
The morning after Rose glimpsed Scorpius Malfoy’s innermost desire in the Mirror of Erised, she woke up in his bed, knowing immediately where she was and how she’d gotten there, and feeling a wave of shame for her so out-of-character behavior the night before. She didn’t need the warm weight of the sleeping man beside her as a reminder, nor the sight of her clothes strewn haphazardly across the otherwise spartan bedroom.
Biting her lip and moving as slowly and smoothly as possible, Rose slipped out of Scorpius’s bed and crept across the room, gathering her clothing and putting it on, determined to slip away without waking him and think about how to deal with this new reality later. Her mind was a whirlwind, arguing voices taking sides against and for her actions, and she let both rage as she tiptoed carefully, praying Scorpius wouldn’t wake and catch her in the act.
She didn’t realize that she was already caught until she turned to collect her shoes and discovered that he was lying in bed, watching her quietly. She froze. “I wasn’t sneaking away,” was all she could think to say, and damn it, but she already sounded defensive.
“I didn’t think you were,” he said quietly.
“I have work,” she said, and it sounded pathetic to her already. “I didn’t know when you had to be up, and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I know.”
“But I wasn’t trying to make an escape or anything.” Scorpius frowned, and Rose knew she wasn’t pulling this off.
“I didn’t think that,” he said again. “Although, I have to admit, I kind of do now. You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and she wanted to sound dismissive, but she knew before she’d finished the word that she hadn’t succeeded.
“Rose,” was all he said, but it was enough. She closed her eyes briefly and steeled herself. He’d understand, she tried to tell herself. He’d understand that last night . . . that it hadn’t meant anything permanent. That it couldn’t. He’d get that. He had to.
“Last night was lovely,” she said, because she couldn’t bring herself to lie and tell him it had been a mistake, not something that had felt so right. She saw him start to smile, and she couldn’t let him think that was all, and so, in a rush, she finished, “But it probably shouldn’t happen again.” Scorpius’s face froze in an unreadable look.
“May I ask why not?” he said after an interminably long pause.
“Because we don’t have a future,” she said, reaching for her earrings so she didn’t have to meet his eye as she said it. “And at our ages, we’re really too old to play around.”
She believed that. She did. She couldn’t have just a “hop into bed” relationship with him, but no other relationship was possible, despite what she had believed last night when she’d kissed him.
“Too old to play around?” he repeated, and she didn’t want to identify the emotions in his voice. “What’s the line of demarcation for that, Rose? Because I’m 27, and last time I checked, we weren’t living in Jane Austen’s England where being 21 and single meant you were doomed to a life of spinsterhood. So, how old exactly is too old to play around?”
He was angry; she could deal with that. She could do anger; she’d just meet it with her own. That was easy. “I’m well aware we don’t live in Jane Austen’s England, thanks,” she snapped. “And I don’t believe I said anything about believing myself doomed to a life of spinsterhood. And it’s mind-boggling to me that this is what you’re focusing on, rather than the point about us having no future.”
“Oh, I’m getting to that,” he said, finally climbing out of bed and crossing to her, forcing her to stop her frantic movement around his room, which wasn’t good. She needed that. She needed a reason to avoid looking him in the eye. He stood right in front of her and removed it, and all it took was her name. She met his eye and hated what she saw there. “You want to tell me why we don’t have a future?” he asked, and she laughed.
“Because we don’t, Scorpius!” she said. “A Weasley and a Malfoy? How could we?”
She saw his jaw tighten at her words. “I don’t care about that,” he said, but she cut him off.
“Yes, you do,” she said. “Of course you do. Because you’ve spent your life avoiding negative attention, but you aren’t going to be able to do that if we’re together. With my family? With yours? It wouldn’t work, and you can argue the point all you like. Just because you see something in the Mirror of Erised, just because you want something with your whole heart, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. We don’t have a future, Scorpius, and I’m willing to acknowledge that even if you aren’t.”
She turned to go, an inner war fiercer than any she’d ever known raging inside her. She believed everything she’d just said, with her whole heart. And yet, as she walked away, she couldn’t help but hope that he wouldn’t make it that easy, that he’d call her back, that he’d find exactly the right thing to say, pull some mystery out of his seemingly infinite knowledge that would convince her. Never in her life had she wanted so badly to be proven wrong.
And then, he did call her back, and she turned perhaps too quickly to face him, heart pounding in fretful anticipation.
But in the end, after a long look charged with emotions they weren’t acknowledging, he just said, “Fine,” and turned away.
It felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Fine?” she repeated, and she wanted to argue, wanted to call him out, but she couldn’t find the words. So she just shook her head and repeated, bitterly, “Fine.” And then, in a rush, “Although, you know, one might wonder - ” No, she interrupted herself forcefully. Because it won’t make any difference. “Never mind. Forget it. Whatever.” And she picked up her bag and strode toward the door.
“Might wonder what?” he called after her in a hard voice, and she could tell he was as angry as she was, and that infuriated her further. So she turned on him and let it out.
“Might wonder why you’re not trying a little bit harder to keep me from walking through that door, if you’re so convinced we really have a future together!” she accused.
“And one might also wonder how you can be simultaneously angry with me for letting you walk out that door and for thinking that you shouldn’t,” he shot back, and she felt herself coloring.
“Do you think we have any sort of a future together?” she demanded.
“Yes, I do!”
“Then why aren’t you stopping me?” She didn’t know why this was so important, couldn’t muddle through the mess in her mind, but she had to know his answer. She had to know why he wasn’t fighting harder for something that had been proven last night to be his greatest desire.
Scorpius closed his eyes, and for one moment, he looked so tired, so exhausted, so nearly broken that Rose almost let him off the hook. But, as was so very him, in the next moment, it was gone, his cool facade back up in place, and there was only a touch of weariness in his voice as he said, “Two reasons. One, you do need to leave because if you don’t leave now, you are going to be late for work. And two . . .” There was a long pause in which he seemed to debate how best to proceed. “Two, I know you’ll be back.”
Rose bristled at that. “That’s an awful lot of faith to put in someone who just told you-”
“I don’t mean today,” Scorpius interrupted, “or tomorrow or even any time soon, necessarily. But I know that if you walk out that door and away from me, it won’t matter. We will see each other again. We can’t not.” Rose stared at him, searching for anything, really, to say to that. But before she could come up with anything, Scorpius lost his composure, growled slightly, and ran his hands through his hair saying, “I’m not explaining this well. I wasn’t supposed to have to -” He took a deep breath and crossed to Rose, more intense than she had ever seen him.
“Rose,” he said, his eyes boring into hers, then he said, “Rose,” again, seeming to change tracks without ever having really started. Rose had never seen him like this before, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. “People assume,” he said, never losing that intensity, “that if you work in the Department of Mysteries, you’re assigned a single room and you stay there for your whole career, but that’s not how it works. You have ideas or problems or questions you’re trying to figure out, and you go from room to from as the research leads you. I started with Magic, and Magic led me to Written Word, which led me to Thought, then to Fate and Destiny, then to Love, then back to Magic again.”
“You can’t tell me this,” she broke in. “You could lose your job for telling me this.”
“I’m not going to lose my job,” he said with conviction. “I’m too good. And you need to know this. You need to know that one of the things that I uncovered is that there are souls in the world that are drawn to each other. They can’t help it. Their paths will cross, again and again. No matter how many times they part ways, the universe will spin them back into one another, until one of the souls expires or the paths converge. We don’t have an explanation, we have no idea how or why it happens, but I know that it does. I have seen it with my own eyes, and you and I, Rose, are two of those souls.”
“Are you-” she started, trying to wrap her head around all of this, “Are you saying we’re - soulmates? That we’re - destined to be together or something? Because I gotta tell you, that’s -”
“No,” he interrupted, clearly frustrated. “It’s not romantic, or, it doesn’t have to be, it’s just - a connection. An inevitable, inescapable connection. Your uncle and Tom Riddle had one. And so do we. We’re - inevitable, Rose. It doesn’t mean anything, not on its own, but it’s the reality of you and I.”
She shook her head and couldn’t seem to stop. It was too much, too much to take on top of everything else. Her life was spinning suddenly out of control because this was what happened when she acted without thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she said, backing away from him. “This is . . . I can’t, Scorpius. I really can’t. I’m not going to stand here while you try and convince me that the end of my life is inevitably linked to yours. I barely know you, when all is said and done, and I’m not letting you put that on my shoulders.”
His look darkened. “That isn’t what I meant, and you know that. You are willfully misunderstanding me.”
She didn’t know if he’d done it on purpose or not, but the comment relit her temper and her anger at him. “Well, how very Elizabeth Bennet of me,” she snapped. “But sharing a single trait doesn’t make me her any more than your prideful aloofness makes you Mr. Darcy. And we are not storybook characters with our ending already written for us. We’re not inevitable, we’re impossible. You’ve shut yourself up so long in that Department, surrounded by the idea of people, but I’ve spent my life with the real thing, and you and I?” She shook her head. “We’re never going to work.”
“So, what?” he asked then. “What are you going to do? Walk out that door and pretend that none of this ever happened? Go back to the way things were before, paths crossing by coincidence, no meaning attached? You can’t ignore last night. Whatever you might think, I know you, and it won’t happen.”
“Watch me,” she snarled. He held her gaze fiercely for a long moment, then looked away.
“Go,” he said softly then, not looking at her.
“I will,” she snapped, “and I don’t need your permission.”
She turned on her heel and made for the door. She had just placed her hand on the knob when he said, “I will see you again, Rose.” She looked back one last time over her shoulder.
“Don’t count on it.” She slammed the door behind her, and left him, wishing he’d stop her, and hating herself for wanting that so badly.
VI.
The Iceland trip went off without a hitch, and though the team didn’t find the magical link, they found enough artifacts and collected enough local folklore to keep the team and Rose busy for months after.
After the incident with Scorpius, Rose had thrown herself into work, determined to forget about him. Every other time she’d run into him, the next day, she’d moved on and barely thought about him until their next encounter. And even if that wasn’t strictly true, she was choosing to remember it that way, and determined that this time should be the same.
But it wasn’t, and she couldn’t escape that fact, though she tried her hardest. But if she let her mind wander, it always went back to him, and not to the angry words they’d exchanged. She caught herself again and again remembering the night they’d shared together, and how right it had felt, how like a culmination, as if every meeting they’d had before that point had just been leading up to the moment she looked in the Mirror and saw a heart’s desire that mirror so exactly her own.
And then she’d catch herself, scold herself, and remind herself fiercely that she hadn’t seen or heard from Scorpius since that awful morning, despite what he’d said as she’d left, and if that wasn’t a message, then she didn’t know what was, and it was time to focus on her work and move on with her life.
Except that her life had now become about avoiding him. She didn’t want to prove him right, didn’t want to run into him at the apothecary or a Ministry event or walking down the streets of London, and have to think thoughts about souls and inevitability and other huge ideas that made her decidedly uncomfortable.
So she kept to the office, or she kept to her flat, and she was decidedly miserable.
And none of it went unnoticed.
Four months after the Iceland trip returned, Rose was working overtime at the office when Shanti came striding up to her desk and perched on the edge. “Okay, Rose,” she said in a no-nonsense voice. “We need to talk.”
“About what?” Rose said, distracted, not looking up from her inventory list. Shanti sighed.
“About you, so could you spare the time to look at me, please?”
“Sorry,” Rose said, setting her quill aside and turning to her best friend. “What is it?”
“Rose, are you angry with us?”
The question came as a huge shock. “What?” she asked, bewildered. “No. Why would you think that?”
Shanti lifted an eyebrow. “Because ever since you got cut from the Iceland trip, you’ve been withdrawn and moody, and every time we ask you to come out with us after work, you give us the brush-off. You’re my best friend, and I’ve barely seen you since I got back, and that was four months ago. What am I supposed to think?”
Rose immediately felt guilty for not realizing the effect her preoccupation with Scorpius was having on the rest of the team. “I’m sorry,” she said. “No, it’s not you, and it’s not Iceland, I promise. I - something happened, at about the same time, but it’s not connected. I’m sorry I haven’t been - I’m sorry.”
Shanti moved from the desktop to a vacant chair so she was on Rose’s level. “Rose, talk to me,” she said gently. “What’s going on?”
Rose sighed and looked away, as conflicted as she’d been for months now, keeping all that had happened from Shanti. The time had come to come clean, she decided, though she wasn’t much looking forward to the conversation.
“I . . .” She took a deep breath. “I slept with Scorpius Malfoy,” she said in a rush, looking at her hands, but that didn’t keep her from feeling Shanti’s stare.
“What?” Shanti asked in shock. Rose glanced up.
“I slept with Scorpius,” she repeated, bracing herself for the reaction once the news had set in.
“When did this happen?” Shanti demanded.
“Six months ago. It was right after I found out about Iceland, I was upset-”
“Did he take advantage of you?” Shanti interrupted, looking furious. “Because I don’t care if he’s an Unspeakable, if he took advantage of you, I’ll end him.”
Rose laughed, and then realized belatedly that she hadn’t done that in months. “No,” she said, sobering. “He didn’t take advantage, I wanted it, but . . . I regretted it the next morning. We got into a big fight, and . . . I haven’t seen him or talked to him since.” Shanti looked at her with some concern.
“Why don’t you tell me everything?” she suggested gently, and so Rose did. She relived not just the night six months ago, but everything that had led to it, and everything that had been said the morning after. Shanti sat silent through the telling, just listening, and when Rose had wrapped everything up, she sat for a long moment without speaking.
“Well?” Rose finally asked in a small voice.
“I think,” Shanti said slowly, “that there are three things you have to acknowledge, and that you can’t get mad at me for suggesting them unless you can prove I’m wrong.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going,” Rose groaned.
“And I’m sure you don’t, knowing you as I do,” Shanti said. “But the first thing you have to acknowledge is that Scorpius has a point.”
“About what?” Rose demanded angrily. “His ridiculous inevitability theory?”
“It’s not so ridiculous,” Shanti argued. “Not when you think about it. Answer me this - of the, we’ll say, thousand students you went to school with over our seven years at Hogwarts, what percentage would you say you knew beyond a passing acquaintance?”
“I don’t know, maybe ten percent, what does it matter?”
“It matters because how many of them have you seen more than once or twice since we graduated?” Now Rose was sure she didn’t like where this was going. “Rose, if you exchanged more than three words with Scorpius during school, it was about a homework assignment, and it probably only happened once. But since you’ve left school? You run into him all the time. Him, specifically. Without seeking him out. At some point, it stops being coincidence, so yeah, he’s got a point.”
Rose scowled at her best friend, but Shanti was unfazed. “Second,” she said, “you have to acknowledge that you’re in love with him.”
“What?” Rose sputtered, but she could feel her cheeks burning. “I’m not -” Shanti silenced her with a look, and she closed her eyes. “I barely know him,” she whispered.
“Well, that’s not true,” Shanti argued, “and even if it was, knowing someone well is not a prerequisite for loving them. Can you deny that you love him?”
Rose was silent for a long time, eyes still closed against the mental war being waged inside her. She felt suddenly close to tears as she whispered, “No.”
Because she did. And that’s where the real struggle had come from in the past six months. She loved him. She’d known it since before the Mirror of Erised, but the Mirror had forced it to the forefront. The image had haunted her dreams, their night together had haunted her waking days. Because despite what she’d said to him, being together had felt so right, and that scared her. And then he’d talked about inevitability and souls and scared her even more. So she’d fled, waiting for him to come after her - but he hadn’t. She hadn’t seen him in six months. And she missed him, and she was angry with him, and she was worried about him, and she was stubborn even yet in her resolve to not be the one to seek him out.
“And what’s the third?” Rose asked around the lump in her throat, more to move on than anything else. “That I have to talk to him?”
“Well, you probably should do that at some point, yes, but no. Thing number three is that you should stop being a hermit and come out with me tonight.”
“Shanti,” Rose said on sigh, “I’m exhausted and not really up for it.”
“Which is exactly why you have to,” Shanti insisted. “Rose, when was the last time you went out and saw anyone?” Rose could not immediately answer. “Let me guess; you’ve been avoiding public places as much as possible because you didn’t want to risk running into Scorpius?” This time, Rose chose not to answer. “That’s what I thought. So come on. You need to get out of your flat and out of your head. It’s my cousin’s birthday. Come have a drink with me.”
“All right,” Rose said, giving in.
“Excellent,” Shanti said with a grin, and started to walk away, but then she stopped and turned back. “Oh, and one more thing you have to do.” Rose almost rolled her eyes.
“What?” she asked tiredly. Shanti’s grin was wicked.
“You have to tell me if Scorpius Malfoy is as good a shag as I imagine he is.” Rose colored immediately.
“Shanti!” she exclaimed, shocked and embarrassed.
“What?” Shanti asked, all innocence. “Scorpius is fit and very good-looking. He’s got to be a good shag.”
“I am - not answering that question,” Rose said as they walked out, trying to maintain some dignity. Shanti examined her sidelong.
“Best shag of your life?” she asked, and Rose looked down.
“Yes,” she admitted, then shoved Shanti into the wall when she smirked. Rose was still mortified, but she had to admit, she felt a little more like her old self.
Shanti’s cousin, it turned out, was a Muggle, so her birthday celebration was in a Muggle pub in Muggle London, the very last place Rose would expect to run into Scorpius Malfoy. And so, of course, there he was.
She didn’t see him immediately. She got a drink at the bar while Shanti greeted her cousin, and she had just taken her first sip when she glanced up, and her eyes met his from across the room. She stared at him, glass halfway to her lips, and he looked scarcely less shocked to see her. The room seemed to freeze around them, and then Rose blindly set her drink on the counter top and strode to where he stood.
“Are you following me?” she demanded. He shook his head, still looking stunned
.
“No,” he said.
“Did Shanti put you up to this? Did she tell you we’d be here?”
“No.”
Rose shook her head, overwhelmed and feeling the need to sit down. “What are you doing here?” she asked then.
“I just finished an undercover assignment,” he said haltingly, still looking at her intensely as if trying to determine whether or not she was really there. “As a Muggle. I got the assignment the day we - that’s why I haven’t been in touch. I couldn’t. Rotten timing, I was so angry I couldn’t tell you - but we got the information tonight, and my contact suggested a drink here. I had no idea you’d - why are you here?”
“Shanti’s cousin, birthday party,” she said, and they continued to stare at one another for a long moment. Eventually, Rose asked, “Inevitable?” in a helpless voice, and Scorpius shrugged, almost an apology.
“Yeah,” he said, and the apology was definitely in the word. Rose shook her head.
“I don’t know if I can handle living in a world where things like this happen,” she told him. “Going six months without hearing from you, not one word, then running into you in Muggle London, of all places. I’m not sure I can take it.”
“Well, if we part ways after tonight, it’s just going to keep happening,” he said softly. “I wasn’t trying to pressure you, you know, six months ago, by telling you that. I was just telling you what I’d learned to be true. It’s just going to keep happening. But there’s an alternative.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.
“Our paths can converge,” he said. “We can go forward together from here on out, and not worry about it anymore.”
He looked nervous as he said it, and it struck Rose that she had never seen him look nervous before, not once. And somehow, that made all the arguments she’d had six months ago seem less important. Standing here in front of him again, she couldn’t remember any of them. “You know,” she said carefully, “you never said anything about loving me. Six months ago, when you were saying all those big scary things about souls and being inevitable. You never said anything about being in love with me.”
“To be honest . . . I was trying not to scare you off,” he admitted with an apologetic smile. Rose stared for a moment, then laughed.
“Well, well done,” she said sarcastically. “That worked wonderfully.” And he laughed, too, and then they were better.
“Also,” he said, “I . . . thought it went without saying.” And he looked at her then just as he’d looked at her in the gallery, that look that took her breath away.
“Oh,” was all she could think to say.
“But I’ll say it now,” he offered, “if it needs to be said. If hearing it won’t scare you away. But I have to warn you, Rose, I’ve been patient for a long time. I know how terrifying this is, loving someone so seemingly unknown, so seemingly ill-suited. I know the struggle you’re battling with because I went through the same battle. And I know I have to give you time, but . . .” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “It is becoming much harder to keep waiting,” he admitted. “And if I say this, then you have to know that I’m committing to a future with you. And if you say it back, you’re committing to one with me. Because if this night ends with you in my bed again, I don’t want to be faced with you trying to sneak away tomorrow morning.”
Her cheeks flushed with shame, and she looked away. He reached forward gently and touched her chin, lifting her face back to his. “Do you want me to say it?” he asked gently.
One might have thought the question would be a difficult one for Rose to answer. But seeing him again, being with him again, she felt once more that rightness, and maybe for the first time, a hint of what Scorpius had felt that first led him to investigate fate and love. Because he was here. It was impossible, but he was here, and she couldn’t call it coincidence anymore. She’d trusted him before. It was time to do so again. And just like that, all her misgivings were gone.
“I love you,” she said, taking the leap. He looked surprised for a moment, but then a slow smile spread across his face.
“Why, Miss Weasley,” he said. “Look at you.”
“Your turn,” she said coyly, and he took her hand in his in an exaggerated gesture.
“Miss Weasley,” he said. “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire-”
“I’ll hit you,” she said, and he laughed.
“Rose,” he said more seriously, “I have loved you for so long now. Someday I’ll tell you just how long. But at this moment, I want to look to the future. The future I get to spend with you. The future I’ve been worked toward for so long.”
“You are laying it on really thick.”
“I’m trying to see if I can get Shanti to roll her eyes at us from all the way across the room,” he confessed.
“Keep on in that vein, and I have no doubt you’ll succeed.” He smiled.
“You want to get out of here?” he asked, and she nodded. As he gathered his coat, Rose caught Shanti’s eye from across the room. Shanti raised her eyebrows and nodded in Scorpius’s direction, a question clear in her eyes. Rose shrugged and nodded, and Shanti smiled. Then Scorpius came up behind Rose and reached for her hand. Rose took it, and smiled up at him, lost in the intensity of his gaze. After a self-indulgent moment, she turned back to find Shanti again, who was gagging in Rose’s general direction.
“Success,” Scorpius said in her ear, and Rose grinned.
“Come on,” she said, and together, they headed out into the night.
Fin
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Author: realmer06
Prompt: "May I ask to what these questions tend?"
"Merely to the illustration of your character," said she, endeavouring to shake off her gravity. "I am trying to make it out."
"And what is your success?"
She shook her head. "I do not get on at all. I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly." - Pride and Prejudice
Summary: Rose and Scorpius can’t seem to stop meeting each other - but what exactly is it that keeps pulling them together?
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: References to sexual activity, mild cursing
Word Count: (if applicable) ~18,500 altogether
A/N: I’m a huge fan of Pride and Prejudice, so I was so excited to write for this prompt! I hope I did the references justice, and I hope you enjoy this monster of a fic! Huge thanks, as ever, to M, my beta, who not only kept me on track with this beast, she also let me write her into the story as Shanti, the thoroughly unromantic best friend.
IV.
The Phoenix’s Nest was a fairly expensive high-end restaurant, relatively new, and nearly impossible to get reservations for. And that’s where Rose Weasley had been sitting alone, for an hour and a half, on her 26th birthday. Sighing, she sipped her water and tried to force down her growing irritation as she waved the waiter away one more time and scanned the restaurant yet again for her illusive date.
“Rose?”
She turned at the sound of her name, but instead of seeing the man she was supposed to be eating with, Scorpius Malfoy was standing behind her.
“Scorpius,” she said, feeling strangely pleased to see him.
“You all alone?” he asked, taking in the table for two, still-folded napkin, and upside-down water glass.
“Yes, I am,” Rose said, and a hint of her irritation crept into her voice. “Not supposed to be, mind you, but I am.” Scorpius’s eyes narrowed.
“Are you supposed to be on a date?” he asked, and Rose lifted her glass in an affirmative reply. “And who had the audacity to stand Rose Weasley up?” The way he said it made her breath catch in her throat momentarily, though there was no good reason for it. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice.
“Broderick Townsend, up in Processing,” Rose said, trying to be dismissive, but not quite managing it. Scorpius was right, she was realizing - it did take a certain amount of audacity to stand her up on a date he’d arranged - and on her birthday, no less! Unless - “I just hope nothing as happened to him” she said with a sigh, torn between irritation now and worry.
“Broderick Townsend?” Scorpius asked darkly. “No, sadly, this piggish behavior is not atypical for him. He sets up a lavish date, bails, and sees how the girl reacts. Then if he thinks she’s worth it, he spins some sad tale about a friend in St. Mungo’s, with massive apologies, of course, and tries to earn himself “you’re so sympathetic” sex. So, you may make free with your annoyance.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about his MO,” Rose observed, and Scorpius grinned.
“I am an ever-present observer,” he said, and Rose laughed at that.
Then, impulsively, she said, “Join me.” Scorpius looked surprised at the request, and Rose belatedly realized that he might have been there for a meeting, or even on a date of his own. “Unless, of course, you can’t,” she said in a rush. “If you’re here with someone else, of course, don’t let me-”
“No,” Scorpius interrupted with a laugh. “No, I’m not, you just caught me off guard, is all.”
“Will wonders never cease,” Rose said with a raised eyebrow. “Have I finally managed to stun the unsurpriseable Scorpius Malfoy?” He ducked his head slightly in amused confession.
“I believe you have,” he conceded. “Very well, I will join you. But - what if Townsend shows up?”
“He’s an hour and a half late,” Rose said bluntly. “If he shows up now, he deserves to see me with someone else. Besides, to be honest, I think an evening with you with be far more pleasurable than anything he had in store.” Scorpius’s eyebrows rose at that, and Rose realized too late how the words had sounded. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it,” she said with a laugh. “Now, are you joining me or not?”
“How could I possibly refuse such an elegant invitation?” he asked with a smirk and slid into the seat across from her as the waiter headed over to the table.
“So,” she said, once their orders had been placed. “It’s been, what? Almost a year? What have you been up to?”
He gave her a look, one that clearly said, You know I’m not going to answer that, and Rose rolled her eyes.
“Come on,” she said. “I wasn’t asking about work, I wasn’t asking you to divulge DoM secrets. I was asking about life. Surely you have one of those.”
“Outside of work? Not really,” he quipped, but Rose had a feeling it wasn’t far from the truth. “The most interesting things that have happened in the past year have been directly related to work.”
“Okay, then we’ll make it a game,” Rose said with a twinkle. “You be vaguer than vague about your job, and I’ll fill in the blanks. And if I guess right, you have to tell me.” Scorpius laughed.
“I don’t think I’ll be agreeing to the last part of that, but sure. We can play that game.”
Rose was taken aback. “Really?” she said, and he nodded.
“Sure. So, let’s see. I took a trip to Germany.”
“Hmm . . . recovering WWII era artifacts that are decidedly more magical than Muggles believe?”
Scorpius chuckled and shook his head. “Not my department.” Rose thought for a moment.
“Okay, then,” she said slowly. “My next guess . . . recovering information on Dumbledore’s defeat of Grindlewald.”
“Not even close,” Scorpius said. “Get your mind out of the mid-20th century.”
This game took them through most of dinner, and served to provide one of the most entertaining evenings that Rose could remember having in a long time. She found herself wondering why she didn’t do this more often, why so much time always seemed to elapse between the times when she and Scorpius saw each other. And she decided the time had come to really get some answers from him.
“Since we’re in a truth-sharing mood,” she said over dessert, “I have to ask - did you mean what you said last Christmas? That you’d answer personal questions if I asked them of you?”
“Well, I don’t think that’s actually what I said, but . . .” He gazed at her for a long moment, as if measuring, considering, and Rose felt very exposed. But then he blinked, and the look was gone, and he said, “Ask away. I don’t promise to answer, but I do promise not to lie.” Rose rolled her eyes.
“That’s no kind of promise,” she said, bordering on petulant. “How about this one - you have to answer unless it a direct matter of secrecy for your job.”
“And how will you know? I could lie and tell you it’s secret just to get out of answering.”
“Except that you already said you wouldn’t lie,” she pointed out with a smile. “Also, I am choosing to trust you.”
Her words brought a strange, intense look to his face, one she couldn’t read, but again, it was there for only a moment before he said, “All right. Ask your worst.”
“Okay.” She thought carefully, then smiled slowly. “Were you the Anonymous Valentine?” He stared at her for a moment, then groaned and buried his face in his hands. Rose’s eyes went wide in gleeful surprise. “Oh my God, you were!” she exclaimed.
“No,” he said emphatically, pointing. “I want to be absolutely clear. I was not. Except . . .” He sighed. “Sort of. Yes.” Rose laughed, elated.
“Spill it, Malfoy!” she demanded. Scorpius sighed again and ran a hand through his hair.
“Okay,” he said good-naturedly. “No, I was not. I didn’t originate the Anonymous Valentine, it was a thing that had been going on for a good five years before we even got to Hogwarts. But fourth year, I had the cursed bad luck to find Bobby Engle in the Owlery sending out all those valentines to the single female population, and he said that since I found him, the mantle passed to me. So, yes, for three years I sent out the damned things, but I did it under duress. It was not my idea.”
“So Bobby Engle was the Anonymous Valentine?” Rose asked, genuinely curious now.
“No, it was someone before him. I don’t know who.”
“But you passed it on when you left?”
Scorpius nodded. “Yes. So two people officially know it was ever me, and I’d like to know who you heard it from, because if those two are blabbing-”
Rose laughed. “It was Anna Pensworth,” she said.
“Oh, that’s all right then,” Scorpius said, waving a dismissive hand. “She’s a conspiracy theorist; no one takes her seriously.”
“Why do you care if people find out?” Rose asked then.
“I don’t want people painting a picture of me based on a single piece of information taken out of context,” he said then. “They do that enough as it is.”
He’d said it casually, matter-of-factly, but Rose could tell there was something driving the words. “Is it true you turned down Prefect?” she asked softly then.
He hesitated for only a moment before saying, “No,” but Rose caught it.
“That’s a half-truth,” she said, no longer teasing or joking or cajoling, just pointing it out as a reminder that he’d promised to be honest. He sighed and looked down at his empty plate.
“I owled the Headmaster and my Head of House at the end of fourth year and asked them not to include my name in consideration for Prefect. I didn’t turn it down because I didn’t give them the chance to offer it to me.”
“Do you think they would have?”
“I don’t know,” Scorpius said with a slight frown. “Maybe not, but I think Professor Eldritch might have tried.”
“Because he knew your secret?” Rose asked, and Scorpius fixed her with a level gaze.
“What secret is that?” he asked, but he knew what she meant, and he knew she knew. He was just forcing her to say it.
“That you purposefully got bad grades. That you consistently dumbed yourself and your work down.”
“First of all,” he said, “I got mediocre grades, not bad ones. And I dumbed my work down, but never myself.”
“So it’s true then?” Even though she had asked, even though she’d heard the rumor, there was a part of her that still hadn’t really believed that he had done such a thing, that anyone would really do such a thing, and to hear him confirm it . . . it still stunned her, even though she had known the answer.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Why?”
He smiled softly, inwardly, and then said, “I didn’t want the attention. The truth is . . . well, the truth is I can’t say this without sounding arrogant, so I’m just going to say it, and trust you to understand that it isn’t said with arrogance, but . . . I’m brilliant, Rose.” He said it almost apologetically, like he wasn’t proud of it, like it was embarrassing, and Rose didn’t, couldn’t, understand that. “I’ve been brilliant my whole life. I remember things after seeing or reading or doing them once, I make connections with lightning speed. I am brilliant, and if I’d ever given my all at school, I would have been top of the class without even trying, and noticeably so. I want to say you’d have given me a run for my money, to be polite, but the truth is . . . not even you, Rose. There’s no way I would have escaped notice, and the notice wouldn’t have been positive. And I didn’t want it. So, yes, I got questions wrong on tests. I prepared mediocre homework for the teachers. I did twice the work, once for myself, and once for them. Because I never asked to be a Malfoy and ten times smarter than everyone else, and I wasn’t going to let it define me.”
“I guess,” Rose said slowly, “that I can understand that.” Scorpius smiled, and it seemed genuine.
“I’m glad,” he said, and that seemed genuine, too. “This mindset . . . it’s why I pursued the DoM. I figured out a long time ago I wanted to be an Unspeakable. Because they, more than anyone else in the world, really, understand that a person’s aptitude has nothing to do with blood or family name. It’s the one place I could apply and be confident that, accepted or rejected, it would be entirely on my own merit that I’d have been judged. Not my name, not my family, me. What I’m capable of. And the people who work with me know it, too. They may not like me as a person, but they know that if I’m there, I’ve earned my spot, just as they have, and they know I’ll do my job. That’s really the best scenario I could have hoped for.”
There was a long silence as Rose searched for something appropriate to say to that. But all she came up with in the end was, “I really don’t know you at all, do I?”
And she was filled with a deep and sudden sadness when he replied, “No. You don’t.” The sadness was only slightly lessened when he added, “But no one does, really, and you know me better than most.”
He wished her a happy birthday and he thanked her for dinner, and she watched him walk away, wondering how long it would be this time before she’d seen him again, and how it was possible that on this night when she’d learned so much about him, he walked away more of a mystery unsolved than ever.
V.
Rose never lost her temper where people could see. She’d always had a bad one, and there had been some unfortunate incidents in the past, but over the years, she’d learned to control it, and at 27, she was well able, when she got mad, to suppress it and keep it in check and wait until she was completely alone to let it all out.
And so, at 27, it was rare that anyone caught even the slightest hint of Rose Weasley’s temper. The exception, of course, happened when Rose mistakenly thought she was alone during one such release of temper, the result being that she punched the wall of a Ministry corridor in front of none other than Scorpius Malfoy.
“Rose!” he exclaimed with no small amount of concern, hurrying over. “Are you all right?”
Now far more embarrassed than angry, especially as he took her now-bruised and bloody hand in his and began healing it, she choked out, “I’m fine,” utterly mortified, pulling away from him, wanting to disappear on the spot. “Really. And I’m sorry you saw that, that was completely inappropriate.” She knew she was babbling, but the thought and remembrance of losing her cool in front of Scorpius, of all people, filled her with shame, and talking was her only way of staving that off.
“Rose,” Scorpius interrupted, gently but firmly, “Everyone gets mad and loses their temper sometimes. I’m not going to hold that against you. I’m more concerned with what led you to punch a wall than the fact that you did.”
He took her hand again, to continue his ministrations, and Rose could feel the anger and hurt and overwhelming sense of unfairness that had led her to the point rising up in her again.
“I -” she started, and, infuriatingly, she felt tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “I just got cut from the Iceland trip,” she said as calmly as she could. She felt him pause and glance at her. “The big one,” she went on. “The one I’ve been helping plan for months. They one we’re hoping is going to lead us to the first magical link, the discovery I have wanted to be a part of for years. I just got cut.”
“How did that happen?” she asked, his voice and face unreadable.
“People are starting to lose interest in our department,” Rose said, forcing herself to say it all. “With the DoM and the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office and others that have been around far longer, they see us as redundant. We’ve been having funding problems for the last year, and our funding for the trip just took a huge blow. They either had to shorten the trip from three weeks to two, or cut the team from seven to six. And I completely agree with the choice to cut the team down,” she stressed.
“But you just wish the outcome had been different,” Scorpius finished for her.
“Something like that,” Rose said quietly, subdued somehow how that she’d revealed this to him, and had been reassured that he understood.
“So how’d you draw the short straw?” he asked, and Rose had to laugh, though it came out halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“By literally drawing the short straw,” she said, and he winced in sympathy and apology. “Sonya and Pieter have to go,” she explained. “They know the language and the terrain. And this is Anabel and George’s pet project. So that left me and Shanti and Katrin vying for the last two spots. And we’ve all put in the same amount of work, and we all have the same seniority, so this was the fairest way, but . . .” She trailed off, feeling just miserable now.
“It still sucks?” Scorpius supplied helpfully, and to hear him speak so informally won a more genuine smile out of her.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. I can’t say I wanted it more than they did because you can’t prove something like that, and I wouldn’t want to. They’re my friends, and I want to be happy for them. It’s just so unfair, and it’s no one’s fault, there’s no one to be mad at, and I know that, but it doesn’t make me less mad. It just makes me feel guilty over still being mad. And . . . yeah. It sucks. It really sucks.”
At some point during the speech, Scorpius had led her to a low stone bench, and she sat there now, staring at her hands, feeling despondent and pathetic and fell of self-pity that she knew was beneath her.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, cutting through the whirlwind in her mind. She waved her hand in a half-hearted gesture of dismissal.
“It’s not like you cut our funding,” she said bitterly.
“No,” he replied, still in that calm, quiet voice. “But you’re my friend, and I can still be sorry for what you’re going through.”
She felt another wave of guilt at that, combined with a twinge of pleasure over the fact that he’d called her his friend. “Thank you,” she said to her hands. “I just . . . I wanted this more than anything.” She knew she sounded pathetic and whiny and very young, but in that moment, she didn’t care. She felt as though, if she was alone, she’d have been crying, but she wasn’t about to cry in front of him.
They sat in silence for a few more moments, then suddenly, Scorpius stood. “Come with me,” he said, holding his hand out to her. Rose stared at it.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because there’s something you need to see,” he said, and because she trusted him, she put her hand in his and let him lead her through the darkened and empty Ministry. She wasn’t entirely surprised when they stopped outside the entrance to the Department of Mysteries. She closed her eyes expectantly. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“You have to blindfold me, don’t you?” she asked, peeking one eye open.
“No,” he said, taking her by surprise. “Not this time. It’s okay.” She looked at him and smiled softly.
“I’ll keep my eyes closed,” she said gently. “I’m not getting you in trouble.” For a moment, he looked almost disappointed, but in the next, she was certain she’d imagined it.
She closed her eyes, and he took her hand, and a long while later, through a path of corridors she almost remembered, he positioned her carefully, stood behind her, and said, “You can open your eyes now,” in her ear. The feeling of his voice in her ear sent shivers down her spine, though she elected not to think about why.
When she opened her eyes, she was in the same gallery he’d brought her to two years before, standing in front of a large, ornate mirror that she recognized immediately from her dad and uncle’s stories, to say nothing of the writing engraved around the top. Her eyebrows raised.
“The Mirror of Erised?” she asked, staring at their reflection, pale in the gallery’s soft light.
“You said the Iceland trip was what you wanted more than anything else in the world,” he said softly, still in her ear, still sending shivers down her spine. “I want to prove to you that’s not true. I want to give you the chance to look in the mirror.”
“Why?” she asked, and he hesitated for a long time before he answered.
“Because your happiness, Rose Weasley, shouldn’t be so dependent on something so fleeting,” he said softly.
“And if it is?” she asked then. “If you’re wrong?”
“If you see Iceland in that Mirror,” he said with confidence, “then I will personally fund your part of the expedition.”
Rose turned to stare at him. “I can’t let you do that,” she said in all seriousness. “The trip is incredibly expensive; there’s no way you can afford it.”
“You’re right, I can’t afford it in the slightest,” he said with a bit of a smile. “I’m not a gambling man, Rose. I don’t make deals that aren’t sure things. This is how confident I am that you are going to see something much bigger in than Mirror than a three-week trip to Iceland.” She smiled at him, suddenly shy for reasons she couldn’t place or understand.
“And how do you know I won’t lie and say I see Iceland just to get you to pay for my trip?” she asked, trying to banter, to feel more like herself again. He gave her the old smile.
“I’m trusting you,” he said, and that didn’t help her feel any more like herself. “Now,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders and turning her back to their reflections. “Look in the Mirror, and see for yourself.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, steeling herself. But when she opened her eyes to look, the image in the Mirror hadn’t changed. She stood there, with Scorpius slightly behind her. She waited a moment or two for him to move away from the Mirror’s line of sight, but when those moments passed and he was still right behind her, she let out a breath of a laugh and said, turning toward him, “Scorpius, if you want this to work, you’re going to have to m-”
He wasn’t there. The space behind her was empty. Without her realizing it, Scorpius had stepped away and was now nowhere in sight. Rose whipped back to the Mirror, heart pounding in shock, but the view still hadn’t changed. There she stood, with Scorpius behind her, and as she watched, the Mirror-Scorpius stepped beside her, and took her hand, and looked down at her with a gaze of such intensity that it made the real Rose go weak at the knees, her breath catching in her throat.
It’s not possible, she thought faintly. It can’t be.
“Rose?”
His voice startled her, and she whirled. “Sorry,” he said gently. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” In his hand, he held a spyglass, and the sight of it filled her with panic.
“Did you see?” she asked in a voice shriller than her usually was. He held out his hands immediately.
“Of course not,” he said. “I would never. Not without permission.”
Swallowing hard, she nodded, turning her gaze back to the Mirror, but it had gone back to being no more than an ordinary mirror, showing the reflection of just what was in front of it - or so she assumed, but she was no longer quite sure.
“It can be a little overwhelming,” he said sympathetically, coming to stand behind her, but it was too much like the image she’d seen, and she found herself having to swallow hard again.
“Yeah,” she said faintly. “Not what I was expecting.”
“Not Iceland, then?” he asked with a smile, and she tried to return it.
“No,” she said. “Um, why do you have the spyglass?” she asked, trying to direct her attention anywhere else.”
“Because,” he said, now sounding as shy and hesitant as she’d felt moments before, “I want to share my view with you.”
She stared at him. “Why?” she asked when she could speak again past her shock. The ghost of a smile graced his face.
“I’m going to answer that question after you look,” he said. He offered the glass to her, and she took it, but she didn’t raise it or move at all.
“Do you know what you’ll see?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I mean, I have a pretty good idea, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Seems like a pretty big risk,” she said, stalling now, putting off the moment when she had to move away. “For someone who doesn’t gamble.”
“I told you,” he said. “I have a pretty good idea what’s going to be there.”
There was nothing else for her to say, so she moved away, out of the Mirror’s range. She watched him turn to the glass, watched him take in the sight before him, watched him relax and exhale slightly, and look on the sight before him with Of course, written clearly in his eyes.
“I don’t have to look,” she said. “If you don’t want me too.”
“I want you to,” he said, his eyes never leaving the Mirror. Nervous and uncertain but with no real arguments left, Rose lifted the spyglass to her eye.
And saw herself, reflected in the Mirror. And as she watched, Scorpius came into view, and Rose watched as her own heart’s desire played itself out again in Scorpius’s place. And she could no longer pretend she hadn’t known this was true.
Without thinking about it, without debating, without a single pause, Rose set down the spyglass and went to Scorpius. She stood before him for a heartbeat or two, and he looked down at her with that look of intensity, except now it was real, and Rose did what was the most natural thing in the world for her to do - she kissed him.
For the first time in her life that night, Rose acted impulsively, trusting her instincts and her heart rather than stopping to deliberate the merits of each individual course of action. And she regretted nothing that happened.
Until the next morning.
The morning after Rose glimpsed Scorpius Malfoy’s innermost desire in the Mirror of Erised, she woke up in his bed, knowing immediately where she was and how she’d gotten there, and feeling a wave of shame for her so out-of-character behavior the night before. She didn’t need the warm weight of the sleeping man beside her as a reminder, nor the sight of her clothes strewn haphazardly across the otherwise spartan bedroom.
Biting her lip and moving as slowly and smoothly as possible, Rose slipped out of Scorpius’s bed and crept across the room, gathering her clothing and putting it on, determined to slip away without waking him and think about how to deal with this new reality later. Her mind was a whirlwind, arguing voices taking sides against and for her actions, and she let both rage as she tiptoed carefully, praying Scorpius wouldn’t wake and catch her in the act.
She didn’t realize that she was already caught until she turned to collect her shoes and discovered that he was lying in bed, watching her quietly. She froze. “I wasn’t sneaking away,” was all she could think to say, and damn it, but she already sounded defensive.
“I didn’t think you were,” he said quietly.
“I have work,” she said, and it sounded pathetic to her already. “I didn’t know when you had to be up, and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I know.”
“But I wasn’t trying to make an escape or anything.” Scorpius frowned, and Rose knew she wasn’t pulling this off.
“I didn’t think that,” he said again. “Although, I have to admit, I kind of do now. You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and she wanted to sound dismissive, but she knew before she’d finished the word that she hadn’t succeeded.
“Rose,” was all he said, but it was enough. She closed her eyes briefly and steeled herself. He’d understand, she tried to tell herself. He’d understand that last night . . . that it hadn’t meant anything permanent. That it couldn’t. He’d get that. He had to.
“Last night was lovely,” she said, because she couldn’t bring herself to lie and tell him it had been a mistake, not something that had felt so right. She saw him start to smile, and she couldn’t let him think that was all, and so, in a rush, she finished, “But it probably shouldn’t happen again.” Scorpius’s face froze in an unreadable look.
“May I ask why not?” he said after an interminably long pause.
“Because we don’t have a future,” she said, reaching for her earrings so she didn’t have to meet his eye as she said it. “And at our ages, we’re really too old to play around.”
She believed that. She did. She couldn’t have just a “hop into bed” relationship with him, but no other relationship was possible, despite what she had believed last night when she’d kissed him.
“Too old to play around?” he repeated, and she didn’t want to identify the emotions in his voice. “What’s the line of demarcation for that, Rose? Because I’m 27, and last time I checked, we weren’t living in Jane Austen’s England where being 21 and single meant you were doomed to a life of spinsterhood. So, how old exactly is too old to play around?”
He was angry; she could deal with that. She could do anger; she’d just meet it with her own. That was easy. “I’m well aware we don’t live in Jane Austen’s England, thanks,” she snapped. “And I don’t believe I said anything about believing myself doomed to a life of spinsterhood. And it’s mind-boggling to me that this is what you’re focusing on, rather than the point about us having no future.”
“Oh, I’m getting to that,” he said, finally climbing out of bed and crossing to her, forcing her to stop her frantic movement around his room, which wasn’t good. She needed that. She needed a reason to avoid looking him in the eye. He stood right in front of her and removed it, and all it took was her name. She met his eye and hated what she saw there. “You want to tell me why we don’t have a future?” he asked, and she laughed.
“Because we don’t, Scorpius!” she said. “A Weasley and a Malfoy? How could we?”
She saw his jaw tighten at her words. “I don’t care about that,” he said, but she cut him off.
“Yes, you do,” she said. “Of course you do. Because you’ve spent your life avoiding negative attention, but you aren’t going to be able to do that if we’re together. With my family? With yours? It wouldn’t work, and you can argue the point all you like. Just because you see something in the Mirror of Erised, just because you want something with your whole heart, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. We don’t have a future, Scorpius, and I’m willing to acknowledge that even if you aren’t.”
She turned to go, an inner war fiercer than any she’d ever known raging inside her. She believed everything she’d just said, with her whole heart. And yet, as she walked away, she couldn’t help but hope that he wouldn’t make it that easy, that he’d call her back, that he’d find exactly the right thing to say, pull some mystery out of his seemingly infinite knowledge that would convince her. Never in her life had she wanted so badly to be proven wrong.
And then, he did call her back, and she turned perhaps too quickly to face him, heart pounding in fretful anticipation.
But in the end, after a long look charged with emotions they weren’t acknowledging, he just said, “Fine,” and turned away.
It felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Fine?” she repeated, and she wanted to argue, wanted to call him out, but she couldn’t find the words. So she just shook her head and repeated, bitterly, “Fine.” And then, in a rush, “Although, you know, one might wonder - ” No, she interrupted herself forcefully. Because it won’t make any difference. “Never mind. Forget it. Whatever.” And she picked up her bag and strode toward the door.
“Might wonder what?” he called after her in a hard voice, and she could tell he was as angry as she was, and that infuriated her further. So she turned on him and let it out.
“Might wonder why you’re not trying a little bit harder to keep me from walking through that door, if you’re so convinced we really have a future together!” she accused.
“And one might also wonder how you can be simultaneously angry with me for letting you walk out that door and for thinking that you shouldn’t,” he shot back, and she felt herself coloring.
“Do you think we have any sort of a future together?” she demanded.
“Yes, I do!”
“Then why aren’t you stopping me?” She didn’t know why this was so important, couldn’t muddle through the mess in her mind, but she had to know his answer. She had to know why he wasn’t fighting harder for something that had been proven last night to be his greatest desire.
Scorpius closed his eyes, and for one moment, he looked so tired, so exhausted, so nearly broken that Rose almost let him off the hook. But, as was so very him, in the next moment, it was gone, his cool facade back up in place, and there was only a touch of weariness in his voice as he said, “Two reasons. One, you do need to leave because if you don’t leave now, you are going to be late for work. And two . . .” There was a long pause in which he seemed to debate how best to proceed. “Two, I know you’ll be back.”
Rose bristled at that. “That’s an awful lot of faith to put in someone who just told you-”
“I don’t mean today,” Scorpius interrupted, “or tomorrow or even any time soon, necessarily. But I know that if you walk out that door and away from me, it won’t matter. We will see each other again. We can’t not.” Rose stared at him, searching for anything, really, to say to that. But before she could come up with anything, Scorpius lost his composure, growled slightly, and ran his hands through his hair saying, “I’m not explaining this well. I wasn’t supposed to have to -” He took a deep breath and crossed to Rose, more intense than she had ever seen him.
“Rose,” he said, his eyes boring into hers, then he said, “Rose,” again, seeming to change tracks without ever having really started. Rose had never seen him like this before, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. “People assume,” he said, never losing that intensity, “that if you work in the Department of Mysteries, you’re assigned a single room and you stay there for your whole career, but that’s not how it works. You have ideas or problems or questions you’re trying to figure out, and you go from room to from as the research leads you. I started with Magic, and Magic led me to Written Word, which led me to Thought, then to Fate and Destiny, then to Love, then back to Magic again.”
“You can’t tell me this,” she broke in. “You could lose your job for telling me this.”
“I’m not going to lose my job,” he said with conviction. “I’m too good. And you need to know this. You need to know that one of the things that I uncovered is that there are souls in the world that are drawn to each other. They can’t help it. Their paths will cross, again and again. No matter how many times they part ways, the universe will spin them back into one another, until one of the souls expires or the paths converge. We don’t have an explanation, we have no idea how or why it happens, but I know that it does. I have seen it with my own eyes, and you and I, Rose, are two of those souls.”
“Are you-” she started, trying to wrap her head around all of this, “Are you saying we’re - soulmates? That we’re - destined to be together or something? Because I gotta tell you, that’s -”
“No,” he interrupted, clearly frustrated. “It’s not romantic, or, it doesn’t have to be, it’s just - a connection. An inevitable, inescapable connection. Your uncle and Tom Riddle had one. And so do we. We’re - inevitable, Rose. It doesn’t mean anything, not on its own, but it’s the reality of you and I.”
She shook her head and couldn’t seem to stop. It was too much, too much to take on top of everything else. Her life was spinning suddenly out of control because this was what happened when she acted without thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she said, backing away from him. “This is . . . I can’t, Scorpius. I really can’t. I’m not going to stand here while you try and convince me that the end of my life is inevitably linked to yours. I barely know you, when all is said and done, and I’m not letting you put that on my shoulders.”
His look darkened. “That isn’t what I meant, and you know that. You are willfully misunderstanding me.”
She didn’t know if he’d done it on purpose or not, but the comment relit her temper and her anger at him. “Well, how very Elizabeth Bennet of me,” she snapped. “But sharing a single trait doesn’t make me her any more than your prideful aloofness makes you Mr. Darcy. And we are not storybook characters with our ending already written for us. We’re not inevitable, we’re impossible. You’ve shut yourself up so long in that Department, surrounded by the idea of people, but I’ve spent my life with the real thing, and you and I?” She shook her head. “We’re never going to work.”
“So, what?” he asked then. “What are you going to do? Walk out that door and pretend that none of this ever happened? Go back to the way things were before, paths crossing by coincidence, no meaning attached? You can’t ignore last night. Whatever you might think, I know you, and it won’t happen.”
“Watch me,” she snarled. He held her gaze fiercely for a long moment, then looked away.
“Go,” he said softly then, not looking at her.
“I will,” she snapped, “and I don’t need your permission.”
She turned on her heel and made for the door. She had just placed her hand on the knob when he said, “I will see you again, Rose.” She looked back one last time over her shoulder.
“Don’t count on it.” She slammed the door behind her, and left him, wishing he’d stop her, and hating herself for wanting that so badly.
VI.
The Iceland trip went off without a hitch, and though the team didn’t find the magical link, they found enough artifacts and collected enough local folklore to keep the team and Rose busy for months after.
After the incident with Scorpius, Rose had thrown herself into work, determined to forget about him. Every other time she’d run into him, the next day, she’d moved on and barely thought about him until their next encounter. And even if that wasn’t strictly true, she was choosing to remember it that way, and determined that this time should be the same.
But it wasn’t, and she couldn’t escape that fact, though she tried her hardest. But if she let her mind wander, it always went back to him, and not to the angry words they’d exchanged. She caught herself again and again remembering the night they’d shared together, and how right it had felt, how like a culmination, as if every meeting they’d had before that point had just been leading up to the moment she looked in the Mirror and saw a heart’s desire that mirror so exactly her own.
And then she’d catch herself, scold herself, and remind herself fiercely that she hadn’t seen or heard from Scorpius since that awful morning, despite what he’d said as she’d left, and if that wasn’t a message, then she didn’t know what was, and it was time to focus on her work and move on with her life.
Except that her life had now become about avoiding him. She didn’t want to prove him right, didn’t want to run into him at the apothecary or a Ministry event or walking down the streets of London, and have to think thoughts about souls and inevitability and other huge ideas that made her decidedly uncomfortable.
So she kept to the office, or she kept to her flat, and she was decidedly miserable.
And none of it went unnoticed.
Four months after the Iceland trip returned, Rose was working overtime at the office when Shanti came striding up to her desk and perched on the edge. “Okay, Rose,” she said in a no-nonsense voice. “We need to talk.”
“About what?” Rose said, distracted, not looking up from her inventory list. Shanti sighed.
“About you, so could you spare the time to look at me, please?”
“Sorry,” Rose said, setting her quill aside and turning to her best friend. “What is it?”
“Rose, are you angry with us?”
The question came as a huge shock. “What?” she asked, bewildered. “No. Why would you think that?”
Shanti lifted an eyebrow. “Because ever since you got cut from the Iceland trip, you’ve been withdrawn and moody, and every time we ask you to come out with us after work, you give us the brush-off. You’re my best friend, and I’ve barely seen you since I got back, and that was four months ago. What am I supposed to think?”
Rose immediately felt guilty for not realizing the effect her preoccupation with Scorpius was having on the rest of the team. “I’m sorry,” she said. “No, it’s not you, and it’s not Iceland, I promise. I - something happened, at about the same time, but it’s not connected. I’m sorry I haven’t been - I’m sorry.”
Shanti moved from the desktop to a vacant chair so she was on Rose’s level. “Rose, talk to me,” she said gently. “What’s going on?”
Rose sighed and looked away, as conflicted as she’d been for months now, keeping all that had happened from Shanti. The time had come to come clean, she decided, though she wasn’t much looking forward to the conversation.
“I . . .” She took a deep breath. “I slept with Scorpius Malfoy,” she said in a rush, looking at her hands, but that didn’t keep her from feeling Shanti’s stare.
“What?” Shanti asked in shock. Rose glanced up.
“I slept with Scorpius,” she repeated, bracing herself for the reaction once the news had set in.
“When did this happen?” Shanti demanded.
“Six months ago. It was right after I found out about Iceland, I was upset-”
“Did he take advantage of you?” Shanti interrupted, looking furious. “Because I don’t care if he’s an Unspeakable, if he took advantage of you, I’ll end him.”
Rose laughed, and then realized belatedly that she hadn’t done that in months. “No,” she said, sobering. “He didn’t take advantage, I wanted it, but . . . I regretted it the next morning. We got into a big fight, and . . . I haven’t seen him or talked to him since.” Shanti looked at her with some concern.
“Why don’t you tell me everything?” she suggested gently, and so Rose did. She relived not just the night six months ago, but everything that had led to it, and everything that had been said the morning after. Shanti sat silent through the telling, just listening, and when Rose had wrapped everything up, she sat for a long moment without speaking.
“Well?” Rose finally asked in a small voice.
“I think,” Shanti said slowly, “that there are three things you have to acknowledge, and that you can’t get mad at me for suggesting them unless you can prove I’m wrong.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going,” Rose groaned.
“And I’m sure you don’t, knowing you as I do,” Shanti said. “But the first thing you have to acknowledge is that Scorpius has a point.”
“About what?” Rose demanded angrily. “His ridiculous inevitability theory?”
“It’s not so ridiculous,” Shanti argued. “Not when you think about it. Answer me this - of the, we’ll say, thousand students you went to school with over our seven years at Hogwarts, what percentage would you say you knew beyond a passing acquaintance?”
“I don’t know, maybe ten percent, what does it matter?”
“It matters because how many of them have you seen more than once or twice since we graduated?” Now Rose was sure she didn’t like where this was going. “Rose, if you exchanged more than three words with Scorpius during school, it was about a homework assignment, and it probably only happened once. But since you’ve left school? You run into him all the time. Him, specifically. Without seeking him out. At some point, it stops being coincidence, so yeah, he’s got a point.”
Rose scowled at her best friend, but Shanti was unfazed. “Second,” she said, “you have to acknowledge that you’re in love with him.”
“What?” Rose sputtered, but she could feel her cheeks burning. “I’m not -” Shanti silenced her with a look, and she closed her eyes. “I barely know him,” she whispered.
“Well, that’s not true,” Shanti argued, “and even if it was, knowing someone well is not a prerequisite for loving them. Can you deny that you love him?”
Rose was silent for a long time, eyes still closed against the mental war being waged inside her. She felt suddenly close to tears as she whispered, “No.”
Because she did. And that’s where the real struggle had come from in the past six months. She loved him. She’d known it since before the Mirror of Erised, but the Mirror had forced it to the forefront. The image had haunted her dreams, their night together had haunted her waking days. Because despite what she’d said to him, being together had felt so right, and that scared her. And then he’d talked about inevitability and souls and scared her even more. So she’d fled, waiting for him to come after her - but he hadn’t. She hadn’t seen him in six months. And she missed him, and she was angry with him, and she was worried about him, and she was stubborn even yet in her resolve to not be the one to seek him out.
“And what’s the third?” Rose asked around the lump in her throat, more to move on than anything else. “That I have to talk to him?”
“Well, you probably should do that at some point, yes, but no. Thing number three is that you should stop being a hermit and come out with me tonight.”
“Shanti,” Rose said on sigh, “I’m exhausted and not really up for it.”
“Which is exactly why you have to,” Shanti insisted. “Rose, when was the last time you went out and saw anyone?” Rose could not immediately answer. “Let me guess; you’ve been avoiding public places as much as possible because you didn’t want to risk running into Scorpius?” This time, Rose chose not to answer. “That’s what I thought. So come on. You need to get out of your flat and out of your head. It’s my cousin’s birthday. Come have a drink with me.”
“All right,” Rose said, giving in.
“Excellent,” Shanti said with a grin, and started to walk away, but then she stopped and turned back. “Oh, and one more thing you have to do.” Rose almost rolled her eyes.
“What?” she asked tiredly. Shanti’s grin was wicked.
“You have to tell me if Scorpius Malfoy is as good a shag as I imagine he is.” Rose colored immediately.
“Shanti!” she exclaimed, shocked and embarrassed.
“What?” Shanti asked, all innocence. “Scorpius is fit and very good-looking. He’s got to be a good shag.”
“I am - not answering that question,” Rose said as they walked out, trying to maintain some dignity. Shanti examined her sidelong.
“Best shag of your life?” she asked, and Rose looked down.
“Yes,” she admitted, then shoved Shanti into the wall when she smirked. Rose was still mortified, but she had to admit, she felt a little more like her old self.
Shanti’s cousin, it turned out, was a Muggle, so her birthday celebration was in a Muggle pub in Muggle London, the very last place Rose would expect to run into Scorpius Malfoy. And so, of course, there he was.
She didn’t see him immediately. She got a drink at the bar while Shanti greeted her cousin, and she had just taken her first sip when she glanced up, and her eyes met his from across the room. She stared at him, glass halfway to her lips, and he looked scarcely less shocked to see her. The room seemed to freeze around them, and then Rose blindly set her drink on the counter top and strode to where he stood.
“Are you following me?” she demanded. He shook his head, still looking stunned
.
“No,” he said.
“Did Shanti put you up to this? Did she tell you we’d be here?”
“No.”
Rose shook her head, overwhelmed and feeling the need to sit down. “What are you doing here?” she asked then.
“I just finished an undercover assignment,” he said haltingly, still looking at her intensely as if trying to determine whether or not she was really there. “As a Muggle. I got the assignment the day we - that’s why I haven’t been in touch. I couldn’t. Rotten timing, I was so angry I couldn’t tell you - but we got the information tonight, and my contact suggested a drink here. I had no idea you’d - why are you here?”
“Shanti’s cousin, birthday party,” she said, and they continued to stare at one another for a long moment. Eventually, Rose asked, “Inevitable?” in a helpless voice, and Scorpius shrugged, almost an apology.
“Yeah,” he said, and the apology was definitely in the word. Rose shook her head.
“I don’t know if I can handle living in a world where things like this happen,” she told him. “Going six months without hearing from you, not one word, then running into you in Muggle London, of all places. I’m not sure I can take it.”
“Well, if we part ways after tonight, it’s just going to keep happening,” he said softly. “I wasn’t trying to pressure you, you know, six months ago, by telling you that. I was just telling you what I’d learned to be true. It’s just going to keep happening. But there’s an alternative.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.
“Our paths can converge,” he said. “We can go forward together from here on out, and not worry about it anymore.”
He looked nervous as he said it, and it struck Rose that she had never seen him look nervous before, not once. And somehow, that made all the arguments she’d had six months ago seem less important. Standing here in front of him again, she couldn’t remember any of them. “You know,” she said carefully, “you never said anything about loving me. Six months ago, when you were saying all those big scary things about souls and being inevitable. You never said anything about being in love with me.”
“To be honest . . . I was trying not to scare you off,” he admitted with an apologetic smile. Rose stared for a moment, then laughed.
“Well, well done,” she said sarcastically. “That worked wonderfully.” And he laughed, too, and then they were better.
“Also,” he said, “I . . . thought it went without saying.” And he looked at her then just as he’d looked at her in the gallery, that look that took her breath away.
“Oh,” was all she could think to say.
“But I’ll say it now,” he offered, “if it needs to be said. If hearing it won’t scare you away. But I have to warn you, Rose, I’ve been patient for a long time. I know how terrifying this is, loving someone so seemingly unknown, so seemingly ill-suited. I know the struggle you’re battling with because I went through the same battle. And I know I have to give you time, but . . .” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “It is becoming much harder to keep waiting,” he admitted. “And if I say this, then you have to know that I’m committing to a future with you. And if you say it back, you’re committing to one with me. Because if this night ends with you in my bed again, I don’t want to be faced with you trying to sneak away tomorrow morning.”
Her cheeks flushed with shame, and she looked away. He reached forward gently and touched her chin, lifting her face back to his. “Do you want me to say it?” he asked gently.
One might have thought the question would be a difficult one for Rose to answer. But seeing him again, being with him again, she felt once more that rightness, and maybe for the first time, a hint of what Scorpius had felt that first led him to investigate fate and love. Because he was here. It was impossible, but he was here, and she couldn’t call it coincidence anymore. She’d trusted him before. It was time to do so again. And just like that, all her misgivings were gone.
“I love you,” she said, taking the leap. He looked surprised for a moment, but then a slow smile spread across his face.
“Why, Miss Weasley,” he said. “Look at you.”
“Your turn,” she said coyly, and he took her hand in his in an exaggerated gesture.
“Miss Weasley,” he said. “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire-”
“I’ll hit you,” she said, and he laughed.
“Rose,” he said more seriously, “I have loved you for so long now. Someday I’ll tell you just how long. But at this moment, I want to look to the future. The future I get to spend with you. The future I’ve been worked toward for so long.”
“You are laying it on really thick.”
“I’m trying to see if I can get Shanti to roll her eyes at us from all the way across the room,” he confessed.
“Keep on in that vein, and I have no doubt you’ll succeed.” He smiled.
“You want to get out of here?” he asked, and she nodded. As he gathered his coat, Rose caught Shanti’s eye from across the room. Shanti raised her eyebrows and nodded in Scorpius’s direction, a question clear in her eyes. Rose shrugged and nodded, and Shanti smiled. Then Scorpius came up behind Rose and reached for her hand. Rose took it, and smiled up at him, lost in the intensity of his gaze. After a self-indulgent moment, she turned back to find Shanti again, who was gagging in Rose’s general direction.
“Success,” Scorpius said in her ear, and Rose grinned.
“Come on,” she said, and together, they headed out into the night.
Fin
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