#Because I Could Not Stop for Death fic

[writingmyselfout]

Language: English

Rating: Teen+

Pairing: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter

Tags: AU - Canon Divergence, Reptilia28′s Don’t Fear the Reaper Challenge, Manipulative Dumbledore, Black Hermione Granger, Slight Ron Weasley Bashing, Actually Redeemed Snape

Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Chapter Thirteen: Everybody Make a Scene

Summary: Harry's first Quidditch match has arrived.

PERCY Weasley, the newly minted Hero of Gryffindor, is not really used to being the center of attention. He’s a decent public speaker, he thinks, and is certainly capable of addressing a group of his fellow students. That isn’t quite the same, however, as being popular. 

He finds after only a weekend of it that he doesn’t particularly like it. Draco Malfoy had insisted they not tell anyone he was involved in the evening’s events, and now Percy rather wishes he’d thought to do the same.

Certainly, it is nice to have the younger students in his House look at him with a newfound respect, and he definitely enjoys that his peers are impressed to learn that he isn’t simply booksmart. Goodness knows he’s heard how he’d be better suited to Ravenclaw than Gryffindor more times than he cares to even attempt to count.

But when it means constant interruptions when he’s trying to study or do homework to ask yet again about the troll–or saving the Boy Who Lived, or whatever else they want to talk about–the novelty wears off. When he snaps at the twins to stop announcing his arrival, further drawing attention to him whenever possible, Harry assures him that eventually the attention will die down. It reminds him that the younger boy has been dealing with some degree of this since he walked into the school.

It’s strange, really, to find himself relating to kids his youngest brother’s age, and he doesn’t simply mean this sudden attention that makes him understand Harry Potter more. After all, he also understands Neville’s anxiety, although Percy is proud to say he’s much better able to manage his own.

In truth, part of what propelled him to take action on Halloween directly rather than go looking for a teacher is a deep sense of guilt towards Hermione Granger specifically. It isn’t just because it was his brother who bullied her, or that despite being told what was happening he didn’t immediately go to Professor McGonagall, although those things certainly played a part. It is because if anyone in Gryffindor can understand the trouble the girl is having fitting in, it would be one Percival Ignatius Weasley. At least, he partly can anyway.

After all, he has also always had a voracious appetite for knowledge. Unlike his peers or even his siblings, he’s always enjoyed learning just about anything and everything. While he may not necessarily approve of his father’s penchant for tinkering with Muggle items, he can acknowledge that it stems from a never-ending well of curiosity that Arthur Weasley has passed on to varying degrees to his children. For instance, Bill has always been fascinated by the intricacies of curses and ancient spells which has lead to his career as a Curse-Breaker for Gringotts; for Charlie, it is a fascination with magical creatures that has lead to his working with his favorite, dragons; meanwhile, curiosity can definitely explain some of the trouble the four youngest Weasley children get into at every given opportunity. For Percy, well, he simply wants to know everything. There isn’t a thing about the magical world he lives in that he isn’t interested in knowing about, for even when it is something he later finds he has no particular passion for–such as flying, hence his being the first Weasley sibling to not be on the Quidditch team–he enjoys the knowing. So he knows not only how to fly a broom–an important piece of knowledge for any witch or wizard, really–but also that the history of broomsticks dates back to 962 AD, the many improvements made to flying on brooms over the centuries, and that the Cleansweep Broom Company was the first of its kind.

That studious nature, however, does not necessarily translate well into social settings. He knows this on a deep, personal level from his own experiences. In truth, Percy had been extremely fortunate to have older siblings already established at Hogwarts. The Sorting Hat had considered putting him in Ravenclaw, had made very compelling arguments for why that House would suit him best, and even now he can admit that he sometimes wonders if he wouldn’t have been better off. Except he was from a family of Gryffindors, and that was where his brothers were, so that was where he had wanted to be. It had made his first year infinitely easier than it could have been, because first-year Percy had been pretty much exactly like Hermione is now, down to the eagerness that some saw as arrogance, or a need to show off and be a know-it-all. Any annoyance he caused, however, rarely led to more than a few exasperated comments and snarky remarks, which had stung sure, but it never led to more for one simple reason. Who would dare to tease the younger brother of popular Gryffindor prefect Bill Weasley, a sixth year with a glowing reputation, or the talented Gryffindor Seeker Charlie Weasley? Both of whom, upon witnessing their more socially inept younger brother spending most of his time alone with his nose in a book, went out of their way to occasionally force him to sit with them at mealtimes or at least join their table to do his homework and study, ensuring that many of the older students got to know him as well. Even now, he often has more to talk about with the sixth and seventh year students, although his relationships with his own year-mates has improved as they’ve matured.

Hermione’s plight of being an only child, and a Muggle-born one at that, gives him a picture of what his first year might have been like without the benefit of older siblings easing his way. It makes him examine himself in a way that frankly, he’s never bothered doing, and maybe it isn’t simply his fellow fifth years maturing that has improved, but that he’s also learned their personalities well enough after all these years. He’s come to recognize who might appreciate his reminders that a test is coming up or a piece of homework is due (Oliver Wood, who was notorious for forgetting any and everything not related to Quidditch, especially in the lead-up to a match), and who best to leave alone lest they take his well-intentioned advice as a personal attack (Peter Jones, who he is now realizing reminds him a lot of Ron). 

Perhaps he can’t necessarily advise her on how to be popular with her Housemates, or even how to cultivate close friendships, but did he not have experience on how well-intentioned but unasked for advice can be misconstrued? He’s had plenty of experience with that not just here at Hogwarts, but with his own siblings at home.

If nothing else, he thinks back to how reassuring it had been to know he had a spot for him waiting with Bill and Charlie at any table they were at in the common room, the library, or the cafeteria. To have an older student watching your back, easing your way if not with your classmates, at least with the other stresses that come with being in a new environment, away from home, responsible for managing your own responsibilities for the first time.

Surely even Percy, socially awkward though he might be, can manage that much?

Still, maybe he’ll write to Bill before he goes to bed this evening…

~~~

THE first week of November, aside from being the first week after the troll incident, also happens to be the last week before the first Quidditch match. Thus far, they have succeeded in keeping Harry’s position a secret, mostly by having Percy pretend to be doing one-on-one study sessions with Harry during the time he’s really down at the Quidditch pitch. This is put into jeopardy in light of his new status as school celebrity, but the rekindled friendship with Hermione actually helps them. Upon hearing some second-years asking if they can join in, Hermione purposely goes over to ask Percy if they’ll have time to go over some of the theoretical aspects of spellcasting they haven’t yet touched on in Theory of Magic in the next study session. Percy’s response in the affirmative, followed by his admitting it’s complicated enough it may take more than one session for her to understand, works to kill interest instantly at the reminder that Percy is, in fact, extremely studious and they’d be expected to actually study and not pester him to regale them with the story of the troll again.

The study sessions do happen, of course, since it means that Percy and Hermione can’t be seen around the school without Harry during his practice. Neville ends up joining them, usually in McGonagall’s empty classroom, while they study and do homework. Percy and Hermione end up alternating between helping Neville with his classwork while the other reviews whatever homework Harry’s managed to finish between classes, mealtimes, and practice so that he can get to any corrections after practice before bed. If he’s not too tired to get to it.

Frankly, he thinks that if he didn’t have Hermione to help him, he might not have managed to get as much done as he does. Slytherin has purposely booked the pitch every evening for their own practices, which would be fine since Oliver insists on their own being later to avoid people seeing Harry, but time and again the other team attempts to linger or have someone hide out to try and catch sight of the new Seeker. Harry typically stops in to see Hagrid first, specifically to wait until any non-Gryffindor team members have left, and by Wednesday their attempts stop as a fight breaks out in the locker room and Madam Hooch reminds them playing is a privilege she will revoke, regardless of when the match takes place and how much time that leaves the teams to find replacement players. Then she escorts the entire Slytherin team up to the castle, telling them their options are practice and leave under her supervision, or they forfeit the pitch altogether the last two days before the match. Only once they’ve left does Oliver use his wand to signal Harry to come down.

Harry hears the story of the fight from the twins as they get ready for practice, but about Madam Hooch’s threat to Slytherin from Draco, who complains about how blatantly the teachers favor Gryffindor over Slytherin. Hermione remarks that it isn’t favoritism if the Slytherins are actively antagonizing the Gryffindor team, and then they’re off arguing about it. The events of Halloween served to illustrate to Draco that Hermione is just as important a friend to Harry as himself or Neville while demonstrating to Hermione that Draco isn’t all bad, but they still don’t like each other. If anything they are both simply putting more effort into tolerating the other when necessary, and while they can mostly manage civil conversation, arguments like this one still break out between them.

Which would be annoying, except that Harry is too stressed out and nervous about the upcoming match to really be anything else at the moment. He’s started having dreams of humiliating himself in front of the entire school by being unable to fly, or letting all of Gryffindor down by proving to be the worst Seeker in the school’s history. He’s taken to re-reading Quidditch Through the Ages, but it hardly helps as it simply reminds him that most serious accidents in Quidditch happen to the Seeker. 

Friday before the match finds them taking advantage of the courtyard once their free afternoon begins, as the freezing cold has kept most others inside, allowing them the freedom to talk without the risk of being overheard. Draco gives Harry some last minute pointers on making sharp turns, as well as falling, his way of supporting his friend while maintaining House loyalty, as he’s been very vocal about cheering for Slytherin to win. Admittedly, while also hoping that the Weasley twins manage to catch Flint with the Bludger once or twice. Hermione has conjured a small blue flame that she can keep in a jam jar, one that Harry isn’t sure is strictly permitted, but he’s hardly the one to gripe about the rules considering how he got the Seeker position. So he neither asks about or comments on the possible rule breaking except to say it’s an impressive and useful bit of magic. Neville is simply there for moral support, offering his assurances that Harry will surely do fine, considering how well he flew his first day on a broom without the benefit of any kind of practice. Which, surprisingly, does remind Harry that if nothing else, it won’t be as bad as his nightmares of being unable to fly because he has already proven he can do that much at least.

“S-S-Students!”

There’s the crunching of snow underfoot and Harry turns to see Professor Quirrell coming into the courtyard. Draco half turns as well, serving to block Hermione from view as she scoops her little blue flame up into the aforementioned jam jar. 

“B-B-Bit cold to b-b-be outside, w-w-wouldn’t you say?” 

“We were just about to head inside, professor,” Harry replies, wondering if the stutter is getting worse due to the cold, or if he’s simply imagining it.

From behind him, Hermione has straightened and adds, “Are you all right, Professor Quirrell? You seem to be limping.”

Their professor waves a hand dismissively, a small shy smile on his face. “J-J-Just a minor sp-sprain, nothing to b-b-be worried about. Th-thank you, Miss Granger, for y-y-your concern.”

She wishes Professor Quirrell a speedy recovery, and then the lot of them head inside. With the afternoon free, most of their classmates are also roaming about, meaning any further talk of Quidditch has to be curtailed lest someone overhear. It would be a shame if after all this time it gets out the night before, and not only because Oliver Wood has been over the moon to have managed to fool everyone. Instead, Hermione suggests they get to any homework they had pending, since they’d all be watching the Quidditch game come Saturday, and win or lose, she was certain the day would be a wash when it came to schoolwork. Draco takes that as his cue to go hang out with his housemates.

They see him again later in the library when Draco deliberately comes over, but rather than join them, he remains standing as he not-so-subtly tilts his head towards the shelves as he asks the trio of Gryffindors if they’ve figured out who in their house might be the new Gryffindor Seeker. 

They’ve practiced this, specifically for Neville’s benefit, and Hermione sets them off with an annoyed sigh as she tells Draco matter-of-factly that they do not, and she can’t wait until Saturday’s game reveals it because she’s sick of being pestered about it. With a huff, she goes back to the book she’d been working out of, which isn’t an act itself as she really does go back to doing her homework. Harry and Neville, meanwhile, admit that they’ve been debating and start running down a list of possible contenders. By the third name, Draco cuts them off, rolling his eyes as he tells them that if they don’t know, they should just say so. Then he walks off, going around the bookshelf he’d previously nodded towards. A few minutes later, they see him with Blaise Zabini and Theodore Nott as they three leave the library.

Time the rest of that afternoon feels strange to Harry, both dragging at a snail’s pace but also moving way faster than he’d like, ever closer to the match’s start. Before he knows it, it’s evening in the Gryffindor common room, and he’s finding himself too restless to read or work on homework. Ron is pestering the twins to tell him who the new Seeker is, or at least to give him a hint. They’re having a ball refusing him in ways that actually do hint at it being Harry–such as “We can’t quite remember–” George would start, only for Fred to interject, “All those bludgers to the head, ya know?”, or “We can scar-cely tell you a team secret, Ronniekins”–but it seems no one else is picking up on it except those already aware. Still, Harry is relieved when Oliver marches over and tells the twins they should probably turn in early. 

Of course, there are still whispers as people speculate, and the team’s Chasers–Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, and Alicia Spinnet–are also getting questioned by some of the older students. Needing to just move, Harry stands up and mutters about needing to talk to McGonagall. He doesn’t wait for Neville or Hermione to respond before he’s heading out of the portrait and down towards his Head of House’s first floor office.

After the last practice, he’d brought his Nimbus back up to her office but if he’s to get down to the Quidditch pitch without drawing attention to himself tomorrow morning, he can’t exactly be walking around with a broom in hand. Hopefully, she’ll let him take it down himself. At this time, and with how chilly the day has been, he’s pretty sure no one will be outside to see him. Maybe he can get in a few laps around the pitch before he heads back upstairs, tire himself out enough that he can go straight to bed.

When he gets there, however, he finds that his knocks go unanswered. Testing the door, he finds that it’s locked, so he assumes that she’s out of her office completely. There are any number of places she could be, considering her position both as a Head of House as well as Deputy Headmistress, but Harry figures the next best place to check would be the staff room. At least if she’s not there either, he can possibly find someone who can point him in the right direction. It’s down on the ground floor, so it won’t take him long to get there either.

The door of the staffroom is slightly ajar and Harry is about to knock when the sound of familiar voices causes him to hesitate, just long enough to hear, “--think much when Hagrid brought him in, but judging by the blood we found, the blasted thing did the job.” It was Filch.

“Yes, well, with three heads to keep track of, they were bound to lose track of one,” is the response. From Snape, who Harry is certain will not be pleased to find him eavesdropping behind the door. 

So Harry knocks, at the same time that a meow comes from below, and he looks down to find that Mrs. Norris is peering up at him from the other side of the door. If he hadn’t thought to knock, she’d have given him away.

The door swings open and the Potions Master looks down at him, then back up to look quickly around as if to see if anyone else might have been lingering within listening distance. “Mr. Potter, what brings you here at this hour?”

“Is Professor McGonagall here?” Harry asks. “She wasn’t in her office, so I thought I might find her here.” 

“No, she is not. Head back to your common room, Potter, and I will inform her that you were looking for her,” Professor Snape advises.

Harry agrees, bids the man goodnight, and then turns to retrace his steps back up towards Gryffindor. He wishes he could have listened to at least a little more of the conversation, but he’s at least heard enough to reignite his interest into what the three-headed dog is guarding. Because if he’s understanding what he did hear correctly, Filch has discovered evidence that someone has tried to get past the beast. If they were willing to risk injury for it, the item being guarded has to be pretty impressive. He’s so engulfed in thinking about it that when Professor McGonagall catches up to him en route, it takes him a moment to remember why he’d been looking for her in the first place. When he remembers, she informs him that she’s already taken his broom down to the pitch. 

“You will do fine tomorrow, Harry,” McGonagall adds, putting a hand on his shoulder gently. “Just be sure to get plenty of sleep tonight.”

Harry thanks her, appreciating her kind words, but also eager to discuss what he overheard with Hermione and Neville.

The night passes quickly while he, Neville, and Hermione talk about who might possibly have tried to get past the three-headed dog. Had any of them heard any rumors of another student getting badly injured lately? Harry points out that Neville’s broken wrist was healed in no time, so surely if they got treated quickly enough, whoever the would-be trespasser was could have gone unnoticed completely. Except, Hermione informs him, wounds from magical creatures are often resistant to healing magics, which is why they often require potions to aid in the healing process. She shakes her head, adding that if they’d bothered to finish reading their Potions book, they’d have known that information as well. It meant that student or teacher, that person was likely still sporting their injury, unless the blood wasn’t recent. 

“What if the troll getting into Hogwarts was a distraction?” Harry speaks the thought as soon as it pops into his head, eyes wide as he looks between Neville and Hermione.

“But who would do that?” Neville asks, looking around nervously, as if that person might be watching them at this very moment.

“Who could do that?” Hermione challenges. “Trolls aren’t exactly known to take orders well, based on my readings.” Because of course Hermione had started reading up on trolls after the Halloween incident. 

“So we rule out any of the students,” Harry counters. “It must be one of the professors.”

Neville’s eyes widen. “A p-p-professor?” 

“Do you really think a professor is going to betray the Albus Dumbledore?” Hermione raises an eyebrow, skeptical.

“I don’t know,” Harry admits. “But who else would have the access to even try?” The train station they’d arrived at was on the outskirts of a village apparently, but at the time of night they’d arrived, Harry hadn’t noticed it. Regardless, as far as he knew, the denizens of the village were witches and wizards themselves, but they rarely if ever ventured up to the castle according to the older students.

By the time Oliver Wood loudly declares he’s turning in, his not-so-subtle sign to Harry that he should go to bed, they’ve talked in circles and come up empty-handed on suspects. Hermione won’t entertain the thought that a professor could be behind the attempt, while Neville convinces himself that surely that person must be missing because the dog ate him completely. Harry opens his mouth to argue when he realizes that he doesn’t actually know where the blood was spotted, and whether or not there was any other evidence to indicate that the intruder survived their encounter with the guard dog.

He goes to bed pondering the question, wondering if they would even bother informing the students should someone perish while attempting to break into the forbidden corridor. Surely if a student or professor suddenly went missing, they would? 

The next thing Harry knows, he’s sitting bolt upright in bed, convinced that he’s overslept and the Quidditch match is over. He scrambles to put his glasses on only to find that he’s the only one awake, and Neville in fact is snoring loudly in the bed next to his. It’s ridiculous to think he’d miss the match, someone would surely wake him before that could happen, but now he’s paranoid and unable to go back to sleep.

Hoping to hide the fact that he’s nervous, he waits until he hears others starting to get up to get ready for the day. The others are still debating on who is going to be Seeker, while others are now starting to question if Gryffindor even has a Seeker. Maybe they couldn’t find anyone good enough, and instead they’re going without? It would be nearly impossible to win a season like that, but it could be done if the Chasers consistently made 15 more goals than their opponents before the Snitch was caught in every match.

Harry muttered a response when it was expected of him, but he wasn’t in the mood for idle chatter. Dean Thomas mentions he looks a little pale, and Harry makes an excuse about not feeling well. He gets ready quickly, glad that he’ll be putting on the slightly more time-consuming Quidditch gear down at the pitch, and slips out ahead of everyone else.

In the Great Hall, there’s a spattering of students already having breakfast. They’re whispering excitedly amongst themselves, and Harry assumes they too are making match predictions or swapping rumors about the Gryffindor Seeker. Would he be more or less nervous having all these people actually whispering about him? 

Just thinking about that makes him queasy and he finds his appetite is completely shot. Neville and Hermione come down to find him sitting in front of a plate on which is piled the remains of what had once been toast before he’d nervously shred it to pieces. They try to coax him to put something in his stomach, but he waves them off, pointing out that their fussing is just going to draw attention to him as more people start filling out the tables. It works to curb their fussing, although Hermione continues to frown at him over her own breakfast until he makes an excuse about not feeling well and needing to go up to see Madam Pomfrey. Seamus and Ron call out to him to hurry up or he’ll miss the start of the match, and he nods his head absently.

Once he steps out of the Great Hall, Harry lingers by the front doors. There are already students walking out, and he’s debating on whether he can head down on his own without drawing attention when a group of older Gryffindor students pass him. Harry follows after them, hanging just far enough back that he’s not intruding on them, but close enough that from a distance it looks like he’s coming down as part of their group. At the last moment, he slips away and into the Gryffindor locker room, where he is the first person. In the silence afforded to him, he puts on his Quidditch gear. 

By the time the rest of the team joins him, he’s calmed down. At least, enough that he’s pretty sure he won’t throw up after all. Katie Bell, a second year and the only other new member to the team besides Harry, gives him a grin. “Ready to win the first match of our Quidditch careers, Potter?” 

“That’s the spirit!” Oliver agrees eagerly.

When he goes to give a rousing pep talk, it’s interrupted by the Weasley twins picking it up for him and alternating, whispering to Harry that having been on the team the previous year, they’d already heard Oliver’s little speech. He’d used the same one as Vice Captain at the beginning of every match.

“Shut up, you two.” Oliver glared at the twins. “All I want to say is that this is hands down the best team Gryffindor’s put together in years. We can win this.” He says it like a threat, like they had better win this after all their hard work, punctuated by the look he gives each of them. “Right, it should be time. Let’s go.”

They headed for the doors leading out to the pitch, the sound of Lee Jordan’s announcing getting louder as they got closer. “--and rounding out the Slytherin team, Chaser and Team Captain, Marcus Flint!” He pauses as a mixture of cheers, jeers, and boos erupts from the stands and then Jordan is speaking again. “And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the Gryffindor Quidditch Team! Starting with Keeper and Captain Oliver Wood; the terrible twosome, Beaters Fred and George Weasley; the talented ladies of Gryffindor, Chasers Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, and Alicia Spinnet; and, introducing, the new Seeker Professor McGonagall has kept secret from me until just now–” there’s a pause and then a “--what? HARRY POTTER?”

The team walks out as they’re introduced, and there’s a moment of silence at his name as Harry walks out. He is suddenly sure that his heart has stopped, as if to not interrupt the silence, and then a loud cheer goes up from Gryffindor, picked up by a lot of the rest of the school. In seconds, a banner unfurls in on the Gryffindor side that reads “Go for Gold.” After a while, the words move and it appears someone has enchanted the banner so the letters reform to read “Go Potter!” for a few minutes before reverting back to its original message. 

Madam Hooch calls the captains forward, reminding them that she expects both teams to play a clean, fair game and then she instructs them all to mount their brooms. With a sharp blow on her whistle, she signals them all to take their places, and fifteen broomsticks–all fourteen players, and Madam Hooch herself–move up into the air. The Keepers move back behind their teams, closer to the goals, while the Chasers all move forward. The Beaters and Seekers linger in the middle, eyes darting between the Quaffle in Madam Hooch’s arms and the ground below where the chest containing the Bludgers and Snitch sat, awaiting their release.

Another whistle blow from her whistle and the action starts. The Quaffle is tossed high above before Madam Hooch drops a few feet, watching as the Chasers either surge forward towards the ball or veer off, ready to receive the ball should their team get possession first. The Weasley twins move simultaneously in opposite directions, each following the trajectory of a different Bludger, while Harry watches the glint of gold that is the Snitch hover for a split second above the chest before it takes off.

Once he loses sight of it, he flies up higher to be as far out of the action as possible. Oliver’s plan was for him to keep out of sight, make the Slytherins forget he’s even around, so as to not make himself a target to their attacks. The longer they underestimate him, the better, especially if he can catch sight of the Snitch before Terrence Higgs, the Slytherin Seeker. This being Harry’s first Quidditch match ever, as both player and spectator, he’s tempted to watch the action play out instead of relying on Jordan’s commentating. Only the worry that the moment he isn’t looking for it being the exact moment Higgs spots the Snitch before him keeps Harry focused. 

When he finally spots it, his heart leaps into his throat in the same movement as he dips his broom into a dive to go for it. Higgs has seen it too, likely in the same instance, and they are neck and neck until Flint fouls Harry. He veers off course, and there’s noise coming from the stands but the adrenaline coursing through him makes it so all Harry can hear is the rush of his own blood. 

It lasts for only a second, and then he can hear how unhappy the crowd is, reflected in both the lingering shouts and Lee Jordan’s griping at the mic. Harry, however, can’t be upset. Not when he came so close to getting the Snitch. He knows now that he can, in fact, beat the older, more experienced Seeker to the little golden ball, and the last of his nerves fall away with that knowledge. The fact that they can win settles on him, then becomes a certainty: they will win.

Flint’s move seems to signal to the Slytherin Beaters to make more of an effort to take Harry out, and he finds himself needing to dodge out of the way more often now. Then partway through a dodge maneuver to avoid an iron ball to the face, Harry feels his broom lurch unpredictably. There’s a brief moment of uncertainty in which he wonders if he can regain his balance, and then his knees tighten around the broom and he grips the handle with both hands. In no time, he’s steady once more, but his heart is pounding not with the same exhilaration as when he’d nearly caught the Snitch, but with a level of fear he’s not sure he’s ever felt before. 

He’s only just starting to relax when it happens again, this time dipping in the front suddenly at the same time that the rear of the broom comes up. For a time, Dudley had been really into Westerns, and Harry is reminded of one in which a wild horse is caught and, refusing to be tamed, bucks off any who dare try to ride him. His broom is doing a grand imitation of that bucking now, in starts and stops, until Harry attempts to turn it around. He wants to get to Oliver, ask the captain if he can call a timeout while they check Harry’s broom, but it isn’t listening to him at all. Instead, the broom starts moving to and fro, occasionally jolting sideways in a sudden sweeping motion, often coming close to unseating him. 

Harry can hear Jordan still, but the words don’t seem to penetrate his brain as he tries to remember every single piece of advice he’s been given regarding flying. All of Draco’s pointers on making sharp turns don’t account for when the turns are being dictated by a wild broom. With his Nimbus steadily gaining height, Harry’s also pretty sure that the advice from the twins on how to minimize damage from taking a fall won’t apply when that fall is from thousands of feet up in the air. 

It is at some point between his broom spinning like a top while going straight up, and doing barrel rolls while Harry clings for dear life, that others seem to notice that something is going on. The excited murmuring of the crowd changes tone, but Harry is beyond the point of noticing. He can scarcely tell up from down, knowing only that he cannot let go of this broom no matter what. The barrel rolls stop, but there is no time for relief or even a deep breath as there’s another violent jerk and despite his best efforts, the wood is jerked out of his left hand. 

Time seems to slow as his legs slip off, and there’s a split second in which it seems like the broom will slip away and then his brain catches up and his right hand closes tightly around the handle of his Nimbus Two Thousand. The collective gasp that goes up from the crowd reaches him and Harry looks towards it, his mind taking a moment to make sense of the image before his eyes. Then it all comes into focus, the Quidditch pitch and the tower stands filled with students, while below him players fly. His heart is racing, and Harry can feel every muscle in his arm straining as he holds on. There is yelling from below, though he can make none of it out, and he watches as two figures fly closer. He can make out the bright red hair of the Weasley twins before his broom is moving farther up into the air again, continuing to do so until the twins fall back. 

The broom’s movements are still jerky, and Harry’s grip remains tight as he anticipates another violent jerking motion. Just one more as strong as before and he’s certain his strength will fail him, and man, does he hope someone has a spell ready or a net. Dying two months into his new life in the wizarding world just isn’t the way he wants to go.

Just as suddenly as the broom’s erratic movements started, so too do they stop. Harry is out of breath, staring at his broom like the wild, unpredictable horse he’s likened its behavior to in his mind this whole time. He might have waited for someone to fly up to help him, except that while he was looking up at his broom, a bit of gold flashed for a brief moment above him, and then the Snitch was flying down past him. Adrenaline pumping, Harry swings himself back onto his broom, then takes off after the Snitch. 

The questions and fear that filled his mind moments ago are gone now, replaced with a single-minded sense of purpose. He doesn’t know what the score is, doesn’t know for how long the game went on before his erratic broom drew attention. Had they even had time to call a time-out? Harry doesn’t know, but the fact that the Snitch is flying right before his eyes tells him things aren’t over yet.

Beyond the glinting of silver and gold from the Snitch, the ground is fast approaching. Harry pulls up just as the Snitch levels out, moving almost as one with it, and then he’s jumping forward off of his broom. It goes flying over end somewhere beyond him as he rolls across the ground two, three times before getting up onto his hands and knees. How did he catch the Snitch in his mouth? Who cares? He spits it out into his hands, struggles to his feel, and holds it aloft triumphantly. He’s fairly certain that there isn’t a rule against it, or so he hopes because he can feel how shaky his legs are and Harry’s pretty sure there’s no way he could possibly get back on his broom today.

There’s utter confusion as Madam Hooch lands nearby, followed shortly by both teams. Lee Jordan is happily announcing the results–170 points to 60, Gryffindor–while the Gryffindor team swarms Harry and Flint tries to argue the results with Madam Hooch. Harry’s knees nearly give out under the weight of Hagrid’s hand when it lands suddenly on his shoulder, but he’s grateful when moments later the large man has steered him clear of the crowd, announcing that Harry needs a spot of tea after that bit of flying.

Leaving the crowd behind and making his way up to Hagrid’s is all a blur, Harry seemingly only coming to when a mug of hot tea is set before him on Hagrid’s table and the big man is asking him if he’s all right and what exactly happened out on the field. Before Harry can answer, Draco, Hermione, and Neville are all talking over each other. He doesn’t remember them coming up with them.

“I believe Snape–”

“It was not, you are simply making assumptions!”

“I s-s-saw P-P-Professor–”

“--may have been using some kind of dark magic–”

“Funny how you jump straight to accusing the Slytherin teacher!”

“--Q-Quirrell w-w-was also–”

“That’s enough now!” Hagrid smacked a heavy palm on the wood surface of his table, and the resulting sound instantly quieted the three of them. With it quiet again, he turned to Harry, “Now, ‘ow yeh feelin’ there, Harry? Gave us quite a scare there.”

Harry couldn’t make sense of anything his friends had been trying to say, so he takes a bracing sip of tea before he responds. “I’m okay, Hagrid. What are you guys talking about? What do you think happened?”

“I’ll explain,” Hermione responds immediately, glaring at Draco to keep his mouth shut while she’s speaking, “because someone didn’t even notice what was happening right next to him.”

“Ye’ll ‘ave yer turn, Malfoy.” Draco, who had been about to interrupt again, closes his mouth with a frown and crosses his arms.

“Thank you,” Hermione says primly. “Now, when your broom started acting up Harry, some of the boys started asking if Flint could have done something to your broom, and Hagrid said it would require powerful, Dark magic–” 

“Which while true, does not automatically mean someone from Slytherin was behind this.” Harry is less surprised by Draco’s interruption than he is by how long it took him to interrupt. He’d uncrossed his arms and now stands facing off with Hermione, hands on his hips.

“I’ve read all about jinxes, I’ll have you know, and one of the requirements to casting a jinx is maintaining constant eye contact while casting.” It’s her turn to cross her arms now as she faces Draco, challenging him. “Professor Snape was muttering something, I could see his lips moving, and the whole time his eyes were on Harry and his broom. If he wasn’t jinxing Harry’s broom, what was he doing?”

Draco throws his hands up in the air. “How should I know? But frankly?” He matches her glare. “He’s a Potions master; if he wanted to take Harry out there are simpler, more subtle ways to do it.”

“Oh, yes, that’s the way to convince us he’s innocent.” Hermione matches her sarcastic tone with a roll of her eyes.

Neville’s been looking back and forth between them, and he suddenly speaks up, surprising them all. “Professor Quirrell was doing it too!” They all turn to look at him, and his cheeks color as Hermione asks what he means. “Wh-When you ran off. I kept looking, and…he was staring too. At Harry, I mean. And his mouth was moving…” Neville trailed off.

“Well, there you have it,” Draco declares triumphantly.

“Then why did Harry’s broom go back to normal after I set Snape’s robes on fire?” Hermione challenges, and both Harry and Hagrid look at her wide-eyed.

“You mean when you barrelled through the Slytherin stands, knocking nearly everyone over, including Professor Quirrell?” Draco spits back.

Hermione raises an eyebrow at him. “Are you saying Professor Quirrell tried to kill Harry?”

Asked aloud, it seems to hit Draco how exactly that sounds, because he frowns. “Well, no. That sounds even more ridiculous–”

“Exactly.”

“Rubbish.”

Hermione and Hagrid both speak up simultaneously, but Hagrid is the one who continues. “Snape and Quirrell are Hogwarts teachers, and ye think they’d try to hurt Harry? They’d do nothin’ o’ the sort.”

“What reason could Professor Snape possibly have to try to kill a student?” Draco adds.

“Harry overheard Filch telling him he found evidence of blood by the three-headed dog,” Hermione began, but the sound of Hagrid dropping his teapot makes them all jump.

“How do ye know bout Fluffy?” 

“Fluffy?” The name is echoed by the four students, who share a look of disbelief, which Draco’s disgusted, “Who would name that thing Fluffy?”

“What’s wrong wit’ Fluffy?” Hagrid sounds defensive. “He likes it.”

“Hagrid, is…is Fluffy yours?” Hermione asks.

“Yep,” he confirms proudly. “Got ‘im off a Greek chappie in a pub last year. Let Dumbledore borrow ‘im ta guard the-” He stops abruptly, realizing the room has gone silent as they listen attentively. 

“Yes?” Harry prompts after a silent beat.

“Never ye mind,” Hagrid rebuffs gruffly. “Ye shouldn’t even know bout Fluffy.”

“But someone is trying to steal whatever it is,” Harry says.

Hermione nods. “Possibly Snape. Or,” she adds looking over at Draco, “Professor Quirrell.” 

“Nonsense.” Hagrid refuses to even entertain the idea.

“Someone is,” Harry corrects, staring back at Hermione.

“Harry, you didn’t hear the whole conversation,” she reminds him.

“What if Filch was warning Professor Snape he was almost caught?” Neville’s eyes are wide. “What if they’re working together?” In his mind, someone as mean as Filch could absolutely be a bad guy.

Hermione seems to suddenly remember something. “But Professor Quirrell was walking with a limp,” she reminds them. “In the courtyard yesterday, remember?”

“Yer wrong!” Hagrid declares hotly, putting an end to their debate. “No Hogwarts teacher is tryin’ ter kill any students, least of all Harry. Now the four of ye listen ter me, once n’ fer all; ye’ve no business meddlin’ in dangerous things. Ye forget ‘bout that dog’n what it’s guardin', ye hear me? That’s between Professor Dumbledore n’ Nicolas Flamel–”

“Who is Nicolas Flamel?” Neville asks.

Draco looks pensive. “The name sounds vaguely familiar…”

Hagrid looks absolutely furious with himself and refuses to say another word.

[triglycercule]

nightmare viewing the murder time three as little toys but more in like a little spoiled kid kinda way. because it would be funny and if you take into the account that he was like 6 before getting corrupted and do some mental loopholes it would be even funnier. like these are his dolls (killer dust and horror) and this is their barbie dreamhouse (his castle). they all have to stay in one room because nightmare needs to keep his toys in a toy box. the toys only ever come out when he wants to play but oh damn it they keep on breaking out!! silly toys,,, and then he locks them into the room again.

nightmare serves them food with plastic tea cups and plastic plates and there is no food. there is no tea. they have to imagine the food because dolls can't literally eat. there are food containers and stuff in the house but its all just a bunch of empty boxes. horror starts tweaking out after he scavenges the kitchen and finds a cereal box and milk carton that have NOTHING in it (why keep empty boxes?????)

they have to go where he wants them to go. nightmare gets to dress them up in whatever he wants because theyre his dolls they can wear anything he wants. it gets incredibly embarrassing when the trio is forced to wear pink pretty dresses and fight like that. or they have to go around the castle doing stupid fucking roleplays and it gets weird because theyre being forced to reenact a bullying scene and nightmare's giving them the death stare if they don't get it right (is this projection. this must be some form of coping mechanism dust theorizes)

and then you know nightmare's not exactly the best toy owner so he loses a few of his dolls here and there. maybe they get destroyed when he was playing a bit too rough with them! (killer dies in battle for like the 29th time) but its okay because he can just go back on down to the store (something new) and buy. wait no. steal another doll and then put it back in his dreamhouse and BOOM he has a full set again!! so sweet so cute. his dolls don't have consciousness what are you talking about theyre begging to be let go?? that's all just your imagination. what do you mean you're asking about the several slowly dying bodies with removed arms or legs in his dungeon. oh that's just where the broken but not yet destroyed toys go dw theyre fine its humane

[maulfucker]

This song is making me want to start yet another fic to never finish,, "Tell me... Where is your hideout? Who are we running from? I'm starting to think that you were right, and now I'm afraid of letting go of your hand...." Maul giving up on his Mandalore plan and deciding to just stalk Kenobi to tell him about his vision. Staying illegally in Obi-Wan's room because I love putting these guys in situations (and because Maul would NOT leave him alone until Obi-Wan actually accepted Maul is right, which he won't). Following Obi-Wan to Utapau and helping him escape after the clones attack, feeling equal parts vindicated and enraged (because he was proved right but Sidious still won). Them being on the run together....

[astrabear]

My labor, and my leisure too (pt. 1)

I've been poking around some ideas lately, about the difference between what feels like a happy (or at least satisfying) ending to a character and what feels like a happy (or at least satisfying) ending to the audience.

This is unedited, un-beta'd, and incomplete. I've already started working on the next bit; I just didn't want to wait to yeet it out into the universe.

********

If Nile hadn’t been frustrated nearly to tears by the time the rest of the team came in, she might have noticed that Nicky and Joe seemed oddly subdued and distracted. But she was, so she didn’t – all she could see was the endless array of charts and computer displays swimming before her eyes.

“I have run so many simulations I feel like I’m stuck in a time loop,” she said as they all gathered around the output table. “I’ve recalculated all the parameters to the limits of possibility, sometimes beyond. And I can’t find any way we pull this off.”

“But the intel we just got – “ Gert was new, had been with them for less than twenty years, and hadn’t quite let go of the idea of being a superhero.

“That intel is what makes it so hard.” Gert frowned, and Nile quickly added, “Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic you were able to track it down. If you hadn’t, we’d be totally screwed.”

“So what’s the problem?” Lijie asked. She ran her finger along one of the infiltration routes in the display. “This looks straightforward to me.”

“The problem,” Nile said, “is the timing. Whoever lays those charges, they’re not getting out. Any delay long enough for exfil is long enough for them to be detected and disarmed by the security system.”

“But we’re shutting down the security system. I walked you through that just the other day. I’m telling you, it’s foolproof.” Jerrah, over 1600 years old, hated that Nile still referred to him as one of “the kids,” but his temper and defensiveness had not mellowed with age and at times like this she felt entirely justified.

She heroically resisted banging her head against the table. It would only scramble the schematics. “Your plan for shutting the system down is foolproof. It’s great. It will absolutely work. But what we didn’t know until recently is that it’s on an automatic reset timer that will boot it back up after a set amount of time. You’re welcome to review the programming,” she ran her gaze around the team, addressing them all, “in fact I’d love it if you’d all review the scenarios I’ve run. Just to be sure. But I’m telling you – the numbers just don’t work. The support team will be fine, but the one with the charges is not getting out alive.”

Gert laughed. “I thought that was the point of us. We don’t have to get out alive.” They looked around and noticed no one else shared their amusement. “What am I missing?”

Jerrah answered while scrolling through Nile’s calculations. “An explosion this size isn’t just going to take out the complex, it’s going to wipe out the whole atmo dome. Anything not secured will get blasted out of the gravity well. You remember about Quỳnh? This would be infinitely worse. Literally.”

“But what about – “

Step by step, Nile walked them through it. How any equipment robust enough to survive the explosion would make it impossible to complete the mission to cause the explosion in the first place. How fast the debris and bodies would be moving with no inertia to slow them down. The number of bodies there would be, and the limits of their ship’s sensors. All of it. The inescapable physics, and the impossibility of making that choice.

“We have to scrap the plan,” she said, “start over from scratch. We’ll find another way, somehow, to – “ Joe and Nicky had withdrawn a bit from the group and were having their own private conversation. This, too, should have been a sign: they didn’t do cross-talk during mission briefings, and through all the months of planning they’d taken this mission particularly seriously.

But Nile was too frazzled and distracted for this to register, so she just barked out, “Hey guys! Are we boring you? Or do you have something you’d like to share?”

Her friends, mentors, brothers, exchanged a final loaded glance and then refocused on the group. Nicky put his arm around Joe’s shoulders, and as he did so his sleeve rode up, just a little, showing an odd patch of dirt on the inside of his upper arm. She found herself staring at it without knowing why.

“Joe and I will lay the charges,” Nicky said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Lijie snapped. “Nile’s right. Do you really think we’re going to just let you guys float around in vacuum forever?”

Three things happened simultaneously in an instant that felt to Nile like a lifetime:

…Nile noticed that the knuckles on Joe’s right hand were also weirdly dirty.

…and Joe said, “Of course not. We’re not asking you to.”

…and Nile thought Bruises. Not dirt. Bruises.

Then time slammed back into place and she cried out from the force of it.

And the room erupted into chaos.

[lem-argentum]

it took me until dt to change rudy's hairstyle, but i ACTUALLY think he would've cut it back in post-stb when he became a reaper. the trope of "character cuts hair to feel more in control of their life" is cliché but REAL. and also the visual of him cutting it with his scythe is fun

[coldflasher]

the flash should have ended with barry quitting his job at ccpd to become a stay-at-home husband and that's on that

[thetimelordbatgirl]

With all the mystery around who Ruby is and who her mom is, I really, really hope it isn't actually the Trickster like others have been saying, because while yes it would be nice to see something from SJA appear in current DW, it also would just feel weird at this point as the Trickster was such a Sarah Jane villain that it just feels wrong to give him to the Doctor as an enemy just because Sarah Jane is gone.

[bookwyrminspiration]

you guys dont' understannd Im' literally losing my min dover this secret santa i am losing it I am going to scream I need you to promise me you'll scream with me when I post it you'll lose your minds too promise me okay because oh my GOD they're SO

[gender-snatched]

You could not make me immortal because even if I faked my own death and left I would not be able to stop using ao3. Ao3 going back 100 years with 5k fics or something

[absolute-flaming-trash]

Oh I'm fucking SICK

Horrorfest: The Formula for Life [Yandere Mahito x Reader]

Title: The Formula for Life [Yandere Mahito x Reader]

Synopsis: Mahito is your creator, and you ought to listen to his rules. But something inside you wants more.

For Horrorfest request: I got two different requests for Mahito + creating a Frankenstein-monster style of reader, so this is for those!

Word count: 5400ish

notes: yandere, very dubious consent, power dynamic abuse, non-graphic descriptions of sex; violence and death (not against reader); Mahito in general is a warning

You are perfectly imperfect. 

Mahito is not entirely sure where he heard the phrase before –a women’s magazine, maybe, or some 1960s British film with upbeat, witty dialogue and blonde starlet at the helm–but as he stares down at your prone, sleeping body, he decides that it’s a phrase which suits you well.

You are a perfectly imperfect human, naked as the day he made you. Something in him puffs up at the thought, a hot sensation that makes his chest tingle. Yes, he made you, didn’t he? He is your… creator. Or as close to a creator as you will ever get in this world or the next, because whatever came before no longer matters. 

There is no before-you. There is only the you-of-now, resting with your eyes closed and your mouth slack and ah, here, now, finally–

You wake up.

Limbs jerk and your neck twitches and he wonders how much it hurts–the stitches criss-crossing your body like his own, keeping the various parts of you held together. The skin and muscle and sinew, bold black stitches sewn across your hands and arms and legs and chest and every single part of you. There is even, and he finds it a delightful detail, a stitch across one of your ears. It’s cute. 

Like you, he thinks. Cute.

Cute as you sit up on his makeshift operating table, testing out your newfound limbs. Cute as your eyes squint, as your pupils adjust to the dim lighting, as your gaze steadies on the only other living thing in the near vicinity–him.

Cute as you try to say your first words. 

“Ah…” You say, or try to say, and he wonders just how much of speech your soul remembers, and whether or not that connection will extend to the way your body works. No matter. He’ll just teach you, if necessary. 

He grins, and puts his fingers on either side of your lips, squishing them together.

“Hel-lo,” he says, slow, moving your mouth with the words. “Can you say that? Hel-lo?”

You blink at him, awareness and confusion seeping into your expression. The stitches that cross your face, going from the corner of your scalp across the top of your nose and landing around the curve of your neck, scrunch in with the effort.

Your mouth opens, and closes; he can hear the spittle in your mouth working, can see the way your cheeks move, the pink of your tongue testing out its boundaries.

And then–

Then, you lean forward, and he grins, eager to hear you try; but ah, you surprise him. Cute, ugly thing that you are. Your hand extends, wobbling, and your fingers loosely grip his own lips like they’ve never held anything before. 

“Hel-lo,” you mimic, slow, warbled, the word coming out almost foreign. “Hel-lo?”

He grins, and can’t help the croon of pure, unadulterated delight that follows. 

–

He has a lot to teach you. You, dear pet, are a lot of work. Not that he minds. Not that he views it as a chore. No, teaching you is some grand, extended hobby. More fun than reading, more fun than experimenting, even, because isn’t that what you are? A complex experiment.

A beautifully awfully blank creature that belongs to him: that’s what you are, and that’s the first thing he teaches you. That you are his, wholly, and everything you should know and do will come from him.

You accept it so easily that he laughs until he cries, and then laughs some more, when you reach up to touch his tears and ask him what they are, and why they come from his eyes, and why your own eyes don’t leak like that.

“Don’t worry,” he told you, catching his breath, adoring the way your recycled callused fingers felt on his cheeks. “You’ll get some of your own eventually.”

And you did, of course. At the most stupid time, which was frustrating, but something he could work with.

The first time you cried was the first time he brought a human home to experiment on. Some salaryman he’d fetched on his late night walk home, exhausted, barely able to hold up his briefcase.  Mahito had set you on the ground (you never complained about it being hard, and maybe soon he would give you something soft to sit on, sweet thing that you are) and told you to watch, excited to see how you’d react. Would you be confused? Scared? Or simply feel nothing, and watch blankly as the man died?

But ah, how disappointing. You’d cried, of all things. Your hands had flown to your cheeks, feeling the wetness; your skin had gone all splotchy–”My head hurts, I feel warm,” you’d told him–and your lips curled into a nasty frown.

“Why are my eyes leaking?” You asked, and Mahito had to think about it. Because he wasn’t quite sure. He decided to root around in your soul for the answer, and it was so strikingly simple that he imagined slapping himself for it. You felt empathy for the man. You thought he was like you. And if you were being hurt, well, you’d feel downright awful, too. 

Silly thing. So that was the next thing he taught you: that the people he brought down into the sewer were simply experiments. Not living beings, not like you, and certainly not like himself. Nothing for you to worry about at all.

And you simple, sweet thing, what do you do after he tells you this? You listen. You’re so good for him that when he pats you on the head and says, ah, silly goose, this is not a person, it doesn’t matter if it gets hurt, if it dies, if it screams until its mouth bleeds…. You believe him.

And now, you simply watch–or don’t, if he says it’s okay to go about your simple day–as he goes about torturing countless living souls. Stretching, twisting, bending, hurting. None of it makes a difference, because Mahito told you it didn’t. The most you react is sometimes covering your ears–”Why does sound hurt, sometimes?”--and curling up on the nest of blankets he’s seen fit to give you.

You’re a bit like clay, he muses. To be molded and shaped in just the right way. And if something doesn’t work out, well, he can simply squish you in and start over. 

There’s something freeing, something altogether delightful, in the fact that you learn what he teaches you, you know what he gives you. 

He does not teach the concept of freedom–why should he?--or the outside world. 

There shouldn’t be an outside world for a creature like you, only the world he creates for you; this damp, dim world where he is the only thing you need to care about.

-

You do come with some surprises. Some things, it seems, came along with your soul.

“I know what this means!” You blurt out, beaming, looking to him for approval as you grip the well-worn cover of one of his stolen books. You read the title slowly, carefully, but there’s that flicker of recognition in the way your mouth sounds the words, understands the connection between the printed text and its meaning. 

You know something he hasn’t taught you. 

He frowns–and you frown just as easily, setting the book down like it burned your precious fingers. Your eyes get wide and your mouth gets slack and you stammer out an apology, even if you don’t know why.

It is one of your most endearing qualities, this readiness to understand that what he thinks is bad is bad, and the uneasiness in him flickers away, just a bit. You’re still his clay, his creature, his pet. 

He reaches out and runs his fingers into your hair, gripping your scalp hard until you grunt. 

“Well,” he says, when you look up at him with those confused doe eyes. “I suppose you could read my notes back to me, when I do my work.”

If you had a tail, it would be wagging.

And oh, he almost drools on you, from the way your expression shifts from that confused worry to unadulterated delight despite the pain that must be radiating through your scalp–

It feels good, sometimes, to make you look this way. It’s a strange notion, one he doesn’t want to think too hard about. It’s only natural that you should feel pleasure when he is pleased with you, but why should he feel the same? 

It’s a conundrum. Something to write about in his notes–the private ones you’ll never see, of course. The notes about you, and himself, plans and plots, theories and guesses. 

It wouldn’t do, really it wouldn’t, if you saw his scribbles about making sure you didn’t learn something that annoyed him. A something that would make you want to leave, or know other people, or comprehend that you were your own individual being.

Ignorance is bliss, or so he’s read, and he intends to keep you that way. 

–

Oh, oh, oh–your breath comes out in wispy pitter-patters that almost match the rapid beating of your heart. 

This… This is not allowed. It is not allowed because Mahito, your master, your creator, said so. And what your master tells you, you obey, because that is how the world works. He’s told you so many times, and it makes perfect sense.

He knows what’s best, because he’s smarter, and stronger, and you’re just a simple person. You’re supposed to make him happy, and would it make him happy, to break this rule? No, is what he would say.

And yet–you wonder. He likes it when you learn, when he teaches and you actually get it and can repeat it for him on demand. 

Like when you learned to walk without falling down, or when he taught you to stay still while he squeezed and touched and tickled your various body parts to see if they still worked. That was difficult, and it took many tries, but when you finally did it right, he praised you. Even if it made your stomach flutter in strange ways, and you were sometimes sore afterwards.

Would doing this make him praise you? Or would it make him angry?

Your fingers ghost over the covers, some of them all cracked and worn, others looking fresh and shiny. Books. His books. They’re all over the world, in stacks and stacks. On his hammock, on the floor, on the stacked table he said was a “book shelf.”

He said you weren’t allowed to touch any of his books or papers. Only what he gave you, when he gave you, and sometimes he even pointed to a line and said don’t you read past that, little pet, and you didn’t.

But he wants you to learn, doesn’t he? And you can learn from these books. Maybe you’ll learn something that makes you better, helps you avoid those stumbles that sometimes make him frown. Like when you first remembered how to read, or the time you tried to talk to one of his experiments.

Oh, you didn’t mean anything by it! You were just–bored. And while Mahito hadn’t been as sore once you told him why you tried to talk to it, he’d still punished you (rightfully so, you had been bad) and told you never to do it again. Unless he said so. 

So–so yes. He said not to read these books. But. If reading these books helps you be better, and being better means you’ll make your master mad less often, then reading these books is the right thing to do.

You just won’t tell him, and he won’t have any reason to be mad about it.

It’s so simple, you can’t believe you hadn’t thought of it before. Well–you can believe that. You aren’t very smart, or so your master says, and he knows everything. 

This will help then, won’t it? He knows what’s in these books, but now you will, too. 

With a lurching feeling in your stomach, you pick up the first book, a hard one with a shiny glossy cover that says HUMAN BIOLOGY, and flip to the first page.

–

You read about lots of things, and every one of them makes you wonder. 

The biology books make you wonder why your body looks like this, but all of the pictures of people (inside and out) look like that. You had never wondered before; you looked like your creator, and that seemed normal enough. But… none of these other people were all mismatched and jumbled. None of these other people had scars everywhere, patched together by black stitches that sometimes itched. 

The romance books are nice, even if they make you feel a bit funny. Your master touches you like the people in these books touch each other, but it’s not quite the same. He never says the same words, “I love you,” or asking, “Do you want me?” before he touches. You’re not sure exactly what love is just yet, but you’re sure one of these books will explain it properly.

One thing you learn is that the world is not actually the world. The world, you thought–you were taught–was just… here. With Mahito. In these walls, within the damp stone. But there is a whole entire world out there with things you’ve never seen before. 

Things you’ve never seen or done. Things that make you wonder why you live one way, and the people in the books another. People seem to live in houses, but this place does not match the descriptions in the book at all. People get married–you’re not sure what it means, really, except they are together, so maybe you and Mahito are married, after all? He does kiss you, and more besides. 

People have children, and these seem to be tiny people that grow up. But you don’t have any children that walk down a staircase–you have seen these in photos, and patch them into your images of houses–in the morning and complain about being tired. You don’t have a yard with a garden to tend to; you wouldn’t mind it, actually, from the pictures of flowers you’ve seen. They could be pretty.

You wonder how they smell. The books tell you most of them smell quite nice. 

It is this sort of wondering that gives you the strongest itch to tell your master that you’ve been reading, so that you can ask him to take you outside. Sometimes you even mouth the word to yourself, when you’re alone. “Outside.” It feels wonderful on your tongue, all tingly. But then your stomach hurts and you think he would be mad about the reading, so you don’t ask at all.

Not everything you read makes your stomach curl. You read about lots of things, things that make you smile, make you laugh. Things that make you forget the reason you started reading was to make Mahito proud of you, to learn how to be better. Things that have nothing to do with being better at all.

Even you realize that learning about the world outside isn’t going to help you in here. But the world outside sounds so… so… big. Big and full of things to see and do and experience. Full of people, trees, buildings and even animals. 

Oh, you really do love the idea of animals. One of your favorite books is a well-worn guide book to birds. Birds. What a wonderful thing they must be, all pretty colors, flying around in the sky; in the outside. 

What would it be like to fly? To have feathers with so many different colors? To make what the book calls “chirps” and “calls”? You’ve tried to imagine what they must sound like, but it’s hard, with no frame of reference.

And you can’t exactly ask your master to mimic them, either.

Sometimes, in your dreams, you turn into a bird. Feathers sprouting from your stitches and taking you up in the air. Birds, the books say, use their chest and supracoracoideus muscles to fly, flapping their wings in just the right way. You don’t think you have supracoracoideus muscles, except in your dreams, and you’re too afraid to ask. 

You’re glad Mahito hasn’t asked you about your dreams in a while. 

–

You are being so good today. So good, in fact, that Mahito has told you to sit quietly on your nest while he works on his latest experiment. You didn’t even have to read him his notes–you didn’t mind, and told him so, but he’d simply patted your head and said it wasn’t necessary today. 

So instead, you watched quietly, legs pulled up to your chest. It was harder to watch, ever since you started reading, because sometimes–

Sometimes you wondered if it was true, that the experiments were not people after all. They certainly look like the people in your master’s books. They talk like the people, sometimes, when they’re not screaming. 

But if your master says they aren’t people, well, he must be right. It does get a little frustrating when they beg you for help, because most of them can’t even see your master at all. That makes you feel a little sorry for them, sometimes, if they haven’t been screaming too loudly. If they could see your master, they might know he’s not doing anything wrong when he hurts them. 

He’s just learning.

Today, the experiment seems to be going well. Your master is smiling, humming, writing down his notes. You hope you’ll get to read these ones, eventually, but he doesn’t always let you. 

(He’s even got a private book, you’ve seen him scribbling in it sometimes. It is, however, the one thing you dare never to read. Not even to learn.)

And then the experiment does the silliest thing! When your master touches him, elongating his arms into a strange shape, he tries to run. Silly experiments, they never get far; but this one tries. He screams–ouch–and begins to run, flapping his arms like they’re on fire. No, flapping them like he’s a–

“Oh,” you say, leaning forward, a delighted smile on your face. “Like a bird!”

The man does not last long. Whatever your master did takes full effect, and he’s misshappen, no legs, a wiggling blob. Not like a bird at all, anymore, but it was nice while it lasted.

Nothing happens, for a moment. And in that moment you realize that something is wrong. It’s suddenly quiet, suddenly heavy.

Mahito, your master, your creator, slowly turns his head towards you with an expression you’ve never seen before. His pupils are too small, his mouth open in something like surprise. “A bird?”

“Yes,” you say, slowly, not knowing yet, not catching on. “It’s–his arms, you see? The way they moved.” You sit up on your knees and mimic the way you’ve seen birds flying in still photographs, the way you sometimes try to fly in your dreams. “When birds fly, they use…” But you stop, because Mahito is frowning. And when Mahito is frowning, you are doing something wrong.

But what, and when, and…

“How would you know what a bird is, pet?”

Oh, no.

The realization makes your guts clench so hard that you almost think you wet yourself, and you throw your hands over your stomach at the strange new sensation. An awful stomach-churning feeling. 

You don’t quite know what it is, but a memory from a book you read comes wafting back; a book about a woman who lives alone and a man tries to break into her house and kill her. She’s scared. Is that what this is? Are you scared? 

There’s no time to really wonder about this, because Mahito stalks over and grabs you by the hair, yanking you up until you’re on your feet, reflexive tears in your eyes. 

You don’t struggle, because he has explained to you that when you’re bad, he’s meant to treat you like this. And sometimes when you’re good, too. You’ve never figured out if there is a difference. 

“You’ve been reading my books.” Not a question, and you don’t answer. “What else have you been reading about?”

“Nothing,” you say, your voice hoarse. You scrunch your eyebrows together: that wasn’t what you should have said. You have read about lots of things. He asked, and you should have told him. That’s the rule he gave you. Simple and easy.

“I’ve read about lots of things,” you correct, confusion spilling from your mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say nothing. I don’t know why I did.”

His eyes widen, and you don’t know what he’s thinking, but there’s that small-pupiled look of surprise again. “You lied,” he says.

Something in you wants to struggle against the tight grip on your hair. It hurts. You don’t like it, when it hurts, that something says. Even though your master says it’s okay for things to hurt. Which is right, your master, or that something-inside-you that has only gotten louder in the last few weeks. 

“I didn’t,” you say, some instinct pulled from deep inside you to deny, deny, deny. Then you pause. “What is a lie?” 

His expression never loses its own sense of almost horrified wonder, even as his other hand comes to caress your face, catching against your stitches. 

“When something isn’t true. And it’s not true, is it, that you haven’t read about anything else?”

“Yes–no.” Your little head is confused, and the sting in your scalp doesn’t help. “I did read other things. Lots of things.” You swallow hard. “I just wanted to know… to know…” 

But how do you explain it, this desire to know? The desire to know that went beyond pleasing him, making yourself better for him?

“Know what?” He murmurs, almost not a question, releasing your hair. You take the opportunity to put your hands in your lap, holding them tightly together, as all of the knowing you’ve been doing in the past few weeks catches up with you.

The questions come like bubbles in the water, one after another, having been crammed inside your head for far too long without a proper outlet.

“Why don’t I ever talk to other people? Why do I look like this, when they don’t? Why don’t we go outside? I want to see, I want to know–” Your fingers hurt from how hard you wring your hands together. “About the sky and the animals and the birds and what music is and how a train sounds and how many wheels do they have, and there’s more, there’s more, I just can’t say it all–”

You can see his expression shifting, but you’re so steeped in your own release of the knowing that you don’t heed it as a warning. Instead, you ask something that has been bothering you a bit. A lot, if you were honest, and you were supposed to be honest, weren’t you?

“What are we?”

His gaze narrows as he looks down at you, and you don’t want him to look at you like that. Not with the question you want to ask. 

“What are we?” He repeats, a hint of something in it that makes you feel ashamed. A joke–no, that’s not the proper word. Mockery, you think. Mimicry. Birds can do that, but, you’re not wanting to stay on the topic of birds just now.

“Are we…” Your brain fumbles for the word, flipping through the figurative pages you’ve read and read and read. “Married?” Yes, that was it. Many of the people in the story books you read had marriages. And other things, too, that you don’t have, and he hasn’t talked about giving you. 

“Do you love me?” You say, voice rising in pitch. “What is love, exactly? And why don’t we live in a house, in a neighborhood, with a street and a fence? Why don’t we have children? Why don’t I have a job or a dog or parents or ride an airplane–” 

He shoves a palm over your mouth and you do finally heed the warning: Stop. Talking.

Your breath comes out your nose against the top of his palm, and your stomach hurts, and all of this feels so awful that it’s a relief when he speaks, even if he’s not happy with you.

Mahito’s eyebrows furrow and he frowns and his mouth twitches before he smiles, but it’s not a smile that makes you feel better. It almost looks–like a lie, you think, the connections falling into place. He’s smiling, but he’s not happy, and that makes it a lie.

“Why do humans always want more,” he asks lowly, and you almost try to answer before he presses harder against your mouth, making your teeth ache. 

“Even broken ones, remade ones,” he continues, “always seek out more.”

If his hand wasn’t on your mouth, you would ask what he meant. You try to think about an answer, and maybe when he pulls his hand away, he’ll be happy that you came up with one. But it’s hard to get your mind around the question.

It’s too slippery, too vague. Are you the broken one? If so, he should fix you. And what was wrong with seeking out more? Isn’t that why he taught you things? Maybe you learned the wrong things from the books; but he should have read them to you, and corrected you, if he was worried about that.

It’s all too much, too confusing, and before you can stop them, tears are leaking from your eyes. Hot ones that make your eyes scrunch and you cry openly against his hand, wanting the confusion to stop, wanting the ache in your chest to go away.

Instinctively, your hands reach for his arm, holding him like you sometimes hold your blankets.

His eyebrows raise again, and there’s a flash of surprise before he smiles. This time, it doesn’t look like a lie.

“You poor thing,” he says, crouching down and bringing you to your knees with him. His hand leaves your palm and your little sobs come out openly, almost barking into the air. “You’re so confused, aren’t you?”

You nod, and it’s true, and you resolve to never lie again. Lying hurts. 

“I-I don’t know what I did wrong or why I did it wrong and you’re mad,” you tell him, open, honest, like you should be. The words come out fast and stumbled.  “I thought I could read books to be better but now I know about birds and I don’t know what they sound like or why I don’t have things and why I’m so… so…”

The word doesn’t come and that only makes you cry harder. 

He coos, and pulls you against his chest. It’s familiar, this soothing, and it makes you feel warm even as those confusing thoughts stay stuck to your brain.

“Want to know a secret about the two of us, pet?” He asks, speaking against your hair. “A secret about you?” Every syllable is soaked in the promise of knowledge.

“No,” you breathe out, and it’s that buried-deep-down instinct again, pushing the word through your lips for you. You’re glad, though, because you realize this wasn’t a lie at all. You don’t want to know a secret. If the books you’ve read are to be believed (and are they?) then secrets always lead to trouble.

You don’t want any more trouble. Not now. 

He presses a kiss to the top of your head.

“Really? I thought you wanted to know everything.” A touch of amusement in his face, and you cling to it like a lifeline. You remember this side of your master; the side that smiles and pats your head. It’s much better than the side that smiles when he’s not happy at all. 

Your arms latch around him, snuggling as close as you can get, your face pressed against his chest. “Can we go to bed?” Your words are muffled against him, but you’re sure he understands. “I’m so confused.” And tired, and worried, and scared. All these awful feelings swirling around in your guts, making you want to be sick. 

Mahito pulls away from you, and there’s a brief snatch of fear before he begins to wipe at your tears with his fingers. He wipes too harshly, and his nails catch on the lid of your eye, making it sting. You don’t pull away. You remind yourself, if he thinks this is how he ought to stop your crying, it’s the best option.

Is it really? says that deep-deep-deep-down voice, and you tell it to be quiet, you’re tired, you aren’t thinking right, and it should stay buried with whatever secret your master knows. 

“Poor pet,” he whispers, cooing. “It’s all too much, isn’t it?” You nod, chin wobbling. His hands go from your cheeks to your head again, petting you on both sides, snarling in your hair. “I could make it go away, if you want.” Sticky words that you want to reach for.

His hands smooth all around your head now, and it’s almost like he’s trying to feel something inside. Like your brain, like your thoughts, like everything that makes you tick. 

Your eyes get wide and all you know is that when your master says something, it’s true. 

Is it really? repeats that voice.

“You could?” is what you say, because it’s simpler that way. Simpler to remember the way things were before the world had birds, when what he said was exactly so. 

“If you’ll be agreeable to it,” he tells you. 

His hands trail from your head down your shoulders, your neck, your chest, down and down and down, tracing each stitch on your body. And something in you–that deep-deep-deep-down part of you–says this is wrong. He shouldn’t touch you, you should be screaming, clawing at him, getting out of here. 

But you push that something down, with the birds and the children and the stories of courtship, with the way your hands trembled as they flipped each page, with the way you felt proud of yourself for finishing each book. 

Those things were nice, until they were not so nice; until they upset the very creator of your being, and made you too confused and hurt to think about them. What good was knowing about the more when the more made him upset? 

It feels better, not to think too much. Not to know so much. And if he can fix you–if he’s willing to fix you ,then it’s what you want, too. You think. Maybe. Yes? 

“Of course I will,” you stay, trying on a smile.

You can’t tell, even as his hands go from touches to gropes, if it’s a lie or not. 

–

You’re finally sleeping now, and he doesn’t mind sighing, sprawling out on the floor and watching with his chin propped into his elbow.

What an awful human trait, this desire for more-out-there-in-the-world. What good is creating your own little creature if it always wants to find out its place in some grander scheme of things? The only world you should know is here, and him, and yet you had to get your grubby little hands on his books and read about ridiculous notions.

You probably didn’t even understand some of them, maybe most of them. That is fascinating, in its own right. He wonders what you would do, if you saw a pretty little robin hopping on the ground, about to get pounced on by some neighborhood cat.

Would your expression of delight turn to horror as the bird was mangled in the cat's jaws? Or would you not process it as horror at all, but simply an experience to learn about? Could he touch you to overlook it, as he has his experiments?

It’s tempting, sometimes, to see what you would do with more outside stimuli. But that temptation doesn’t go too far, because the whole point of your being was to shape you for himself. And that does not include this damned human desire to explore the inside and outside, forever expanding your knowledge of whos and whats and whens. 

Well. At least you didn’t put up a fight at the notion of being fixed. At least you seemed properly subdued, once he made it clear he wasn’t pleased. He’d brought you up well enough, after all. 

He’s not sure he can really pull it out of you. There are many ways to reshape the soul, and the soul he pulled into that cobbled-together body has certainly been–well, changed, by the experience. 

Could he change it further? Wipe out your memory of those books? Maybe he could reach further down, deep down into your soul, and yank out the offending desires like weeds from a garden.

Maybe so.

For his own pleasure, he’s willing to try again and again, until you are just right. 

He owes it to himself, after all, to never give up on his most thrilling experiment. 

[archaeren]

How I learned to write smarter, not harder

(aka, how to write when you're hella ADHD lol)

A reader commented on my current long fic asking how I write so well. I replied with an essay of my honestly pretty non-standard writing advice (that they probably didn't actually want lol) Now I'm gonna share it with you guys and hopefully there's a few of you out there who will benefit from my past mistakes and find some useful advice in here. XD Since I started doing this stuff, which are all pretty easy changes to absorb into your process if you want to try them, I now almost never get writer's block.

The text of the original reply is indented, and I've added some additional commentary to expand upon and clarify some of the concepts.

As for writing well, I usually attribute it to the fact that I spent roughly four years in my late teens/early 20s writing text roleplay with a friend for hours every single day. Aside from the constant practice that provided, having a live audience immediately reacting to everything I wrote made me think a lot about how to make as many sentences as possible have maximum impact so that I could get that kind of fun reaction. (Which is another reason why comments like yours are so valuable to fanfic writers! <3) The other factors that have improved my writing are thus: 1. Writing nonlinearly. I used to write a whole story in order, from the first sentence onward. If there was a part I was excited to write, I slogged through everything to get there, thinking that it would be my reward once I finished everything that led up to that. It never worked. XD It was miserable. By the time I got to the part I wanted to write, I had beaten the scene to death in my head imagining all the ways I could write it, and it a) no longer interested me and b) could not live up to my expectations because I couldn't remember all my ideas I'd had for writing it. The scene came out mediocre and so did everything leading up to it. Since then, I learned through working on VN writing (I co-own a game studio and we have some visual novels that I write for) that I don't have to write linearly. If I'm inspired to write a scene, I just write it immediately. It usually comes out pretty good even in a first draft! But then I also have it for if I get more ideas for that scene later, and I can just edit them in. The scenes come out MUCH stronger because of this. And you know what else I discovered? Those scenes I slogged through before weren't scenes I had no inspiration for, I just didn't have any inspiration for them in that moment! I can't tell you how many times there was a scene I had no interest in writing, and then a week later I'd get struck by the perfect inspiration for it! Those are scenes I would have done a very mediocre job on, and now they can be some of the most powerful scenes because I gave them time to marinate. Inspiration isn't always linear, so writing doesn't have to be either!

Some people are the type that joyfully write linearly. I have a friend like this--she picks up the characters and just continues playing out the next scene. Her story progresses through the entire day-by-day lives of the characters; it never timeskips more than a few hours. She started writing and posting just eight months ago, she's about an eighth of the way through her planned fic timeline, and the content she has so far posted to AO3 for it is already 450,000 words long. But most of us are normal humans. We're not, for the most part, wired to create linearly. We consume linearly, we experience linearly, so we assume we must also create linearly. But actually, a lot of us really suffer from trying to force ourselves to create this way, and we might not even realize it. If you're the kind of person who thinks you need to carrot-on-a-stick yourself into writing by saving the fun part for when you finally write everything that happens before it: Stop. You're probably not a linear writer. You're making yourself suffer for no reason and your writing is probably suffering for it. At least give nonlinear writing a try before you assume you can't write if you're not baiting or forcing yourself into it!! Remember: Writing is fun. You do this because it's fun, because it's your hobby. If you're miserable 80% of the time you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong!

2. Rereading my own work. I used to hate reading my own work. I wouldn't even edit it usually. I would write it and slap it online and try not to look at it again. XD Writing nonlinearly forced me to start rereading because I needed to make sure scenes connected together naturally and it also made it easier to get into the headspace of the story to keep writing and fill in the blanks and get new inspiration. Doing this built the editing process into my writing process--I would read a scene to get back in the headspace, dislike what I had written, and just clean it up on the fly. I still never ever sit down to 'edit' my work. I just reread it to prep for writing and it ends up editing itself. Many many scenes in this fic I have read probably a dozen times or more! (And now, I can actually reread my own work for enjoyment!) Another thing I found from doing this that it became easy to see patterns and themes in my work and strengthen them. Foreshadowing became easy. Setting up for jokes or plot points became easy. I didn't have to plan out my story in advance or write an outline, because the scenes themselves because a sort of living outline on their own. (Yes, despite all the foreshadowing and recurring thematic elements and secret hidden meanings sprinkled throughout this story, it actually never had an outline or a plan for any of that. It's all a natural byproduct of writing nonlinearly and rereading.)

Unpopular writing opinion time: You don't need to make a detailed outline.

Some people thrive on having an outline and planning out every detail before they sit down to write. But I know for a lot of us, we don't know how to write an outline or how to use it once we've written it. The idea of making one is daunting, and the advice that it's the only way to write or beat writer's block is demoralizing. So let me explain how I approach "outlining" which isn't really outlining at all.

I write in a Notion table, where every scene is a separate table entry and the scene is written in the page inside that entry. I do this because it makes writing nonlinearly VASTLY more intuitive and straightforward than writing in a single document. (If you're familiar with Notion, this probably makes perfect sense to you. If you're not, imagine something a little like a more contained Google Sheets, but every row has a title cell that opens into a unique Google Doc when you click on it. And it's not as slow and clunky as the Google suite lol) (Edit from the future: I answered an ask with more explanation on how I use Notion for non-linear writing here.) When I sit down to begin a new fic idea, I make a quick entry in the table for every scene I already know I'll want or need, with the entries titled with a couple words or a sentence that describes what will be in that scene so I'll remember it later. Basically, it's the most absolute bare-bones skeleton of what I vaguely know will probably happen in the story.

Then I start writing, wherever I want in the list. As I write, ideas for new scenes and new connections and themes will emerge over time, and I'll just slot them in between the original entries wherever they naturally fit, rearranging as necessary, so that I won't forget about them later when I'm ready to write them. As an example, my current long fic started with a list of roughly 35 scenes that I knew I wanted or needed, for a fic that will probably be around 100k words (which I didn't know at the time haha). As of this writing, it has expanded to 129 scenes. And since I write them directly in the page entries for the table, the fic is actually its own outline, without any additional effort on my part. As I said in the comment reply--a living outline!

This also made it easier to let go of the notion that I had to write something exactly right the first time. (People always say you should do this, but how many of us do? It's harder than it sounds! I didn't want to commit to editing later! I didn't want to reread my work! XD) I know I'm going to edit it naturally anyway, so I can feel okay giving myself permission to just write it approximately right and I can fix it later. And what I found from that was that sometimes what I believed was kind of meh when I wrote it was actually totally fine when I read it later! Sometimes the internal critic is actually wrong. 3. Marinating in the headspace of the story. For the first two months I worked on [fic], I did not consume any media other than [fandom the fic is in]. I didn't watch, read, or play anything else. Not even mobile games. (And there wasn't really much fan content for [fandom] to consume either. Still isn't, really. XD) This basically forced me to treat writing my story as my only source of entertainment, and kept me from getting distracted or inspired to write other ideas and abandon this one.

As an aside, I don't think this is a necessary step for writing, but if you really want to be productive in a short burst, I do highly recommend going on a media consumption hiatus. Not forever, obviously! Consuming media is a valuable tool for new inspiration, and reading other's work (both good and bad, as long as you think critically to identify the differences!) is an invaluable resource for improving your writing.

When I write, I usually lay down, close my eyes, and play the scene I'm interested in writing in my head. I even take a ten-minute nap now and then during this process. (I find being in a state of partial drowsiness, but not outright sleepiness, makes writing easier and better. Sleep helps the brain process and make connections!) Then I roll over to the laptop next to me and type up whatever I felt like worked for the scene. This may mean I write half a sentence at a time between intervals of closed-eye-time XD

People always say if you're stuck, you need to outline.

What they actually mean by that (whether they realize it or not) is that if you're stuck, you need to brainstorm. You need to marinate. You don't need to plan what you're doing, you just need to give yourself time to think about it!

What's another framing for brainstorming for your fic? Fantasizing about it! Planning is work, but fantasizing isn't.

You're already fantasizing about it, right? That's why you're writing it. Just direct that effort toward the scenes you're trying to write next! Close your eyes, lay back, and fantasize what the characters do and how they react.

And then quickly note down your inspirations so you don't forget, haha.

And if a scene is so boring to you that even fantasizing about it sucks--it's probably a bad scene.

If it's boring to write, it's going to be boring to read. Ask yourself why you wanted that scene. Is it even necessary? Can you cut it? Can you replace it with a different scene that serves the same purpose but approaches the problem from a different angle? If you can't remove the troublesome scene, what can you change about it that would make it interesting or exciting for you to write?

And I can't write sitting up to save my damn life. It's like my brain just stops working if I have to sit in a chair and stare at a computer screen. I need to be able to lie down, even if I don't use it! Talking walks and swinging in a hammock are also fantastic places to get scene ideas worked out, because the rhythmic motion also helps our brain process. It's just a little harder to work on a laptop in those scenarios. XD

In conclusion: Writing nonlinearly is an amazing tool for kicking writer's block to the curb. There's almost always some scene you'll want to write. If there isn't, you need to re-read or marinate.

Or you need to use the bathroom, eat something, or sleep. XD Seriously, if you're that stuck, assess your current physical condition. You might just be unable to focus because you're uncomfortable and you haven't realized it yet.

Anyway! I hope that was helpful, or at least interesting! XD Sorry again for the text wall. (I think this is the longest comment reply I've ever written!)

And same to you guys on tumblr--I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. XD Reblogs appreciated if so! (Maybe it'll help someone else!)

[writingmyselfout]

Because I Could Not Stop for Death - Chapter Twelve

Language: English

Rating: Teen+

Pairing: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter

Tags: AU - Canon Divergence, Reptilia28′s Don’t Fear the Reaper Challenge, Manipulative Dumbledore, Black Hermione Granger, Slight Ron Weasley Bashing, Actually Redeemed Snape

Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Chapter Twelve: Everybody Make a Scene

Summary: Even inner House friendships are hard.

DRACO is burning with curiosity all the way to Professor Snape’s office, wondering what Harry could have meant about “officially” getting detention as well. Madam Hooch, upon her return, had asked for Potter’s whereabouts and with the students all speaking over each other to explain, she had dismissed them all before informing him, Ron Weasley, and Tobias O’Bannion that she would be speaking with Professor McGonagall to get a clearer picture of what had transpired while she was gone, so they were going to have detention and if the need for additional punishment was determined, they would be informed at a later date. They would also lose 5 points each per House, which Draco was unhappy about for all of a moment before realizing that it meant Gryffindor lost more points than Slytherin anyway.

He supposes that this meeting with Snape is in regards to this detention. He likes his Head of House and thinks the students from other Houses simply don’t like that he takes Slytherin’s side over theirs the way many other professors do. That being said, everyone knows how much he dislikes hearing they’ve been caught misbehaving, particularly in classes with the other Houses, as he wishes for them to always maintain the dignity of their House. If anything is going to get him in trouble, it is misbehaving in a class with Gryffindor and losing House points as a result.

When he reaches the professor’s study, he knocks and is told to come in. Professor Snape is seated at his desk, writing, but he puts his quill down as Draco enters. He motions for him to come over and sit, and only once he has, does he ask for an explanation of the day’s events. Draco obediently explains the events that transpired, ensuring he is being brief as, based on the way their Potions class is conducted, he’s determined that Professor Snape can be much like his father in these instances. He does not want excuses or explanations, he wants the important points, and nothing more.

“Getting onto your broom, against Madam Hooch’s explicit instructions to keep your feet firmly planted on the ground, was a lapse in judgment on your part that I hope to not see you repeat,” Professor Snape lectures once Draco is finished recounting the events. “However, as it was in response to Mr. Weasley’s clear instigation, I find myself not particularly inclined to punish you to the same degree. Your loss of points is punishment enough. I am changing your detention to a study hall session, to be served with me, where I expect you to do the homework you would otherwise be doing in your dorm.”

“Understood, Professor. Thank you, sir.” Draco tries to stifle a grin, knowing full well that Professor McGonagall is much stricter than the Potions master with her own students, so it is highly unlikely that Weasley and O’Bannion will get out of detention. Which reminds him that Potter somehow may have, and reignites his curiosity. “Will that be all, sir?”

“Yes. I will escort you back to your dorm, Malfoy. Would not want Filch to think you are wandering about without permission.”

He has a point. The first years are discouraged from being out after dinner unless they are serving detention or, like this, with a professor as their curfew is the earliest of all the years. It is frustrating, but even if he were to refuse, the professor’s own quarters are somewhere down in the dungeons so he’s likely going in that direction anyway. At least this way, Draco can be sure he won’t run into the professor on his way back from the library, as he’ll have already turned in for the evening.

En route, the professor asks after his parents, and he imparts what he has gleaned from their letters. He takes the opportunity to ask some questions about Potions, as well as Defense Against the Dark Arts, as Professor Quirrell is a disaster of a teacher. All of Slytherin knows that their Head of House appreciates intelligent students who take advantage that their Head of House is knowledgeable in multiple fields, especially if it is likely to improve their ability to answer questions and complete work in class. As his mother would say, it never hurts to keep on the good side of those who would best assist his growth here at Hogwarts.

“You have a good evening, Draco. I trust that I shall not hear you have lost us more House points again.”

“No, sir,” Draco promises. “Have a good night.” 

Snape nods his head and turns to go further into the dungeons. Draco provides the password required to get the stone wall to open and allow him into the Slytherin common room. He steps in, allowing it to close behind him, and then steps to the side. He makes a show of looking through his bag, in reality wanting only to allow enough time to be sure the professor is no longer in the hall, then he asks Theodore to drop his school bag on his desk while he returns to the professor’s office to grab something he’d left behind. 

Harry is being shooed out of the library and told to get back to his dorm by Madam Pince when Draco finally arrives. “There you are!”

“Sorry, Professor Snape insisted on taking me back to the dorm,” Draco explains, trying to catch his breath. “Now, what did you want to tell me?”

“Right, but you have to promise not to say a word to anyone,” Harry says gravely. “If Professor McGonagall finds out I’ve told anyone, she’ll definitely rethink punishing me for today.” He then goes on to explain how rather than scold him, she had taken him to meet the Gryffindor Quidditch Captain and he’d been allowed to try-out for the Seeker position they are trying to fill.

“Good thing you gave me that Quidditch book,” Harry finishes with a grin. “If I get the spot, I won’t seem completely out of place.” 

“Yes, well, you’re welcome,” responds Draco with a grunt, obviously jealous. “Ugh, if only Slytherin’s team had an opening, I could use this to get them to let me try out too. You have to admit, my flying today was pretty amazing, right?”

Harry agreed, admitting he’d been impressed with Draco’s ability to maneuver around Weasley and O’Bannion. They had all done their bit of bragging, and while it had been clear that none of them were new to being on a broom, the Gryffindors had been visibly clumsier than the Slytherin. Draco’s pride was not misplaced, and it made Harry wonder how his own abilities might compare. It would be fun to figure out one day.

“Where are we going, by the way?” Draco asks.

“I wanted to see if Neville was still in the Hospital Wing,” Harry says. “Sides, you have to head back down anyway.”

“True. Are you going to get your own broom, or are they going to make you use the garbage school ones?”

They start talking about possible brooms the rest of the way, getting so engrossed that Harry has walked halfway down the marble staircase to the ground floor before he realizes he needs to go back to the first to get to the Hospital Wing. He stops there with Draco, reminding him he needs to go to the Hospital Wing before promising that he’ll try to remember to talk to McGonagall about trying to get the new Nimbus, if possible, even if it means pulling from his vault at Gringotts. He doesn’t remember what they cost, but he’s confident he has more than enough to get one in there. They are getting ready to say goodbye when the doors from outside open and in comes a group of Slytherin students all holding brooms. 

Harry realizes this must be the Slytherin Quidditch team, and he looks them over, wondering who among them is the Seeker for the team. They all glance over at the two of them, but ignore them as they head for the dungeon entrance, with the exception of a tall, muscular boy who raises an eyebrow and comes over in their direction. His dark brow is prominent, even more so with the scowl on his face, as it closes the very small gap between his hairy eyebrows so it appears as one big unibrow, and his teeth are distractingly crooked.

“On a date, Malfoy?” he asks. “You would do well to keep away from the likes of Potter and his lot. Wouldn’t want to turn into a blood traitor, now would we?”

Harry isn’t sure what exactly a “blood traitor” is supposed to be, but it’s obviously an insult based on the way this boy says it, and by the scowl it elicits out of Draco, who responds with an anger-filled, “Watch what you say, Flint.”

“Or what? Li’l first year’s gonna go running to mummy and daddy?” Flint mocks, laughing. 

Next to him, Draco’s eyes narrow, and he looks like he’s about to go down the stairs towards the older boy, but Harry grabs his arm. The boy is easily twice their size, so even without the possibility of magic they have yet to learn, he could probably easily trounce them. 

“How long do you think it took him to come up with that, Draco?” Harry asks instead, falling back on the one thing he always had over his more physically intimidating cousin. If this kid was anything like Dudley, he was probably as dumb as he was strong. “He clearly couldn’t wait to share it with you.”

It works to at least give Draco a moment to come to his senses, who takes a breath as if to calm himself down before he says, “Good question, but I’ve a better one. Hey Flint, after meeting your mother, I’ve always wondered: what is it like?”

“What?” Flint scowls, eyes narrowing at the question.

“What is it like being a half troll? After all, it doesn’t seem to have done you any good in looks or intelligence.”

“Why you little-”

They don’t stick around to hear the rest, or for Flint to come up the stairs. Harry and Draco take off running back up the stairs and down the first floor hall, Draco laughing uproariously at having made his housemate so angry. They head for the stairs to continue up to the second floor, the sounds of Flint yelling still behind them, so that they try to pick up speed hoping they can get far enough away to slip out of view.

Harry is just thinking that they should have tried to get to the Hospital Wing, where they might have been able to get safely under the watchful eye of a staff member, when he spots two familiar figures ahead. Hermione and Neville seem to be heading up to Gryffindor Tower, and when the sound of quick footsteps reach them, they turn around and share similarly shocked faces at seeing the two boys barreling towards them. 

“Harry? Wha-” Hermione starts. 

“No time!” Harry interrupts, grabbing her arm to pull her along.

“Move it, Longbottom!” Draco calls out.

“GET BACK HERE!”

The sound of Flint yelling down the hall gets the other two moving as well, and soon the four of them are running together up to the third floor. Harry starts to turn in the direction of the stairs to the fourth floor when he spots Mrs. Norris and he makes an abrupt about face. They can’t afford to have her following them, giving them away to Flint or worse, going off to find Filch. Everyone knew that the caretaker and his cat had an understanding, and she was his partner in crime when it came to catching students being in places or doing things that they shouldn’t. If they were lucky, Flint would run into her instead.

When they reach the Trophy Room, they duck inside and stop, all of them doubling over to catch their breaths. Harry stays near the entryway, keeping an ear out in case he hears the sounds of Flint heading in their direction.

“Wh-Wh-WHAT was that all about?” Hermione demands between breaths. “Shouldn’t you two be in the dorms already, especially after all the trouble you got in earlier? Are you trying to get expelled?”

“Oh, quiet, Granger,” Draco responds, straightening though his chest is still heaving. “Harry didn’t get in trouble at all; he was allowed to try out for the Quidditch team.”

She blinks at this information, surprised, while Neville gives his breathless congratulations. She recovers quickly enough, though, as she then says, “So that’s reason enough to be out after curfew? It’s very selfish of you, both of you, to just do as you please without regards to the rest of your Housemates.”

“Who-”

Harry cuts Draco off with a shush, emphasizing it with a wave of his hand, indicating that he can hear someone just outside. The voices are muffled, though, and he can’t tell if it’s Flint or someone else, but they seem to be getting gradually closer. He motions for them to go through the Trophy Room, into the adjacent room, which turns out to be an Armor Gallery. They make their way through quietly, occasionally looking over their shoulders and listening out for the possibility that the voices have gone into the Trophy Room, when Neville knocks into an armor. He tries, desperately, to keep it from falling over but only manages to hold onto a gauntlet as the rest topples over.

There’s a shocked silence as they all jump, staring at where it has fallen, and then they clearly hear not a student, but Filch yell out for them to stay where they are. 

“Run!” Draco hisses, taking the lead and making a beeline for the opposite door from whence they came. 

Neville drops the gauntlet and all three Gryffindors are hot on Draco’s heels, running as far away as they can from the Hogwarts caretaker. Harry quickly catches up to Draco as they hurl down one corridor after another, coming across a tapestry that they tear through to find themselves in a hidden passageway that spits them out not far from the Charms classroom. It’s pretty far from the Trophy Room, and so they all stop again to catch their breath. 

“I think–” Harry finally manages to say, though his chest is still heaving with the effort to catch his breath, “--we finally lost ‘em.”

Neville is sputtering and wheezing, and it’s only now that Harry notices that the wrist he’d injured in class seems to be fine. He points it out, and Neville tells him between gasps that Madam Pomfrey, the Hogwarts matron, had fixed him up in no time but kept him resting in the Hospital Wing due to his anxiety. 

“Glad you’re feeling better, mate,” Harry says. He straightens and looks around, getting his bearings before he starts to head down the corridor. “Think we should try to get back to the dorms before we’re caught.”

“Finally, a sensible plan,” Hermione mutters, but they’ve barely started walking again when they hear the sounds of voices at the end of the hall.

“Now what?” Draco whines. 

At first, they think it might be Filch, as he often talks aloud to Mrs. Norris while he patrols. The second voice is clearly Peeves, his teasing sing-song voice easily distinguishable. When the first voice is raised in anger, Draco and Harry immediately recognize it as Flint, though they can only make out his yelling at the poltergeist to get out of his way. As always, antagonizing Peeves is never the right move, and his response to being yelled at is to raise the alarm that a student is out of bed. It is guaranteed to bring Mrs. Norris, with or without Filch, to investigate, and the group immediately backtracks to find somewhere to hide lest they get caught up in the trouble. 

The need to hide becomes more urgent when they hear running footsteps that seem to be getting closer, and it occurs to all of them that Flint may also be looking for somewhere to hide from the caretaker. They pick up the pace, trying to remain quiet, but come upon a locked door. Harry, who is in front, pulls at it uselessly before Hermione shoves him aside, pulling her wand out to cast the Unlocking Charm they’d just learned that day. They tumble in, Harry pushing the door closed and twisting the lock on it as soon as Neville is through, and then he leans against it to try and listen. Hermione leans against it next to him to listen, forcing Draco to crouch down in front of Harry to do the same.

It means that when someone–surely Flint–throws themselves against it to try and open it, they all jump back in surprise, Hermione bringing her hands up to cover the yelp she nearly lets out. There’s a moment of fear, wondering if like they had just done, the older boy will use the Unlocking Charm to try to get in and find them, except it never happens. Harry tentatively leans back against the door, just in time to hear Filch’s voice. There’s a tug on his sleeve, but Harry shakes the hand off, trying to listen.

“Marcus Flint, think the Headmaster’s rules don’t apply to you, eh? Well, we’ll see what Professor Snape thinks about you being in the forbidden corridor.”

Harry’s eyes go wide with surprise, and this time when he feels the tug on his sleeve, he looks over to find Neville is the one pulling at his robe. His face is pale, eyes wide, but he’s looking at something behind Harry. He turns to look, and finds himself looking at an impossible creature: a dog with three heads, towering over them all, all three bearing their teeth as they growl. Harry thinks they must have caught it by surprise, perhaps it had been sleeping before they had so abruptly come barging in, but regardless it was clear that it was not welcoming their presence. 

Without taking his eyes off of them, his hand gropes along the door trying to find the lock so he can undo it and let them out. Sure, Filch taking them to Professor McGonagall would definitely lead to punishment, maybe even to her revoking his recruitment to the Quidditch team. Maybe he’d even be expelled! At least he would be alive and in one piece.

While it feels like forever, in truth it takes him mere seconds to find and undo the lock, then he’s pulling the door open and the four of them are collectively falling over each other to get out of the room. Draco, who manages to not fall over when Neville topples out and knocks into Harry, slams the door shut. He pulls his wand out with a shaking hand, but then stands there staring at the door without doing anything. It’s as if he is waiting for the dog to somehow open the door to follow them, but although it had been clearly growling when they were inside, from outside no noise can be heard. 

“W-W-We should g-g-go,” Neville stammers, scrambling to his feet, and the others nod.

Harry bids Draco good night, and then they all take off running, wanting to put distance between themselves and the three-headed dog as well as avoid the possibility of running into Filch once he is done dragging Marcus Flint to Snape.

Back in the Gryffindor Tower, Harry, Neville, and Hermione get into the common room and collapse into the chairs in front of the fire. It’s still early enough that there are still people sitting at tables, talking, playing games, and working on homework, but although they draw attention to themselves by bursting into the room, sweaty and out of breath, they are quickly forgotten in favor of other activities. 

“What could they be thinking, keeping a dog like that in a school ?” Harry asks once he’s caught his breath, though he keeps his voice low to avoid being overheard.

“N-N-No idea,” Neville responds. “M-Maybe it’s why i-it’s f-f-forbidden to go th-there?”

Hermione huffs, annoyance clear in every line of her body. ““You don’t use your eyes, either of you, do you?” she snaps. “Did you not see what it was standing on?”

Harry, who finds himself at the end of his patience with her, replies sarcastically, “I don’t know, the floor ? I was a little busy watching its three heads , in case you didn’t notice.”

“ No , not the floor ,” she says witheringly, glaring at him. “It was standing on a trap door; it’s guarding something, clearly.” She stands up, giving him a withering look. “I hope you’re happy. You could have gotten us killed, or worse–expelled. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed. Good night.”

The last is said in such a way that Harry is sure she means quite the opposite, but he doesn’t respond as he watches her stomp away. Sure, maybe he and Draco could have ignored them and kept going on their own, but he didn’t know if Marcus Flint would have seen them and demanded they tell him in which direction they’d seen them go. Or if he would have instead taken out his anger and frustration on them. Not that she seems to care about that possibility; she was too busy being judgemental and calling him selfish. Well, he wasn’t going to apologize for trying to protect his friends.

~~~

Things are noticeably frosty between Harry and Hermione beginning immediately the next day. In fact, Hermione refuses to even look at him or acknowledge his presence in any way. She greets Neville like normal, but otherwise pretends Harry isn’t there, and sits elsewhere for breakfast. Harry doesn’t care, taking the first opportunity to instead talk to Draco about the trapdoor.

He reminds him and Neville of their conversation following their visit to Hagrid’s hut, regarding his birthday trip to Diagon Alley. If the three-headed dog was guarding something, chances were high that it was whatever Hagrid had pulled from the vault he’d emptied. It made perfect sense, but now begged the question of what it might be that required such a creature to stand guard over it, quite literally! Neville was less keen to find out, stating he rather hoped to never go near the dog again. Draco rather agreed, except he too was as curious as Harry.

For a week, most of their conversations center around the many possibilities regarding this treasure worth guarding. It serves to distract Harry from the try-outs that take place over the course of that week, which he’d been allowed to watch under the guise of serving one of his detention. In actuality, it had more or less been a real detention as Madam Hooch had made him help her clean and trim the school brooms. But he doesn’t want to admit he’s nervous about possibly not getting the spot to an older student, all of whom to his inexperience eyes had seemed just as qualified if not more so, with few exceptions. So instead, he encourages Neville and Draco to consider what is being hidden in the school, so that they spend countless conversations throwing out and discarding various ideas, until they ultimately decide that something as mundane as jewels and expensive magic items that can easily be bought wouldn’t warrant someone attempting to steal it from Gringotts. By the Friday the following week, they’ve exhausted all possibilities they can think of, and if it weren’t for the fact that they still are not speaking, Harry would ask Hermione for her thoughts on the matter.

That morning, however, gives them something new to think over. The morning mail delivery begins as usual, except for a large package carried by six owls, drawing the attention of everyone in the Great Hall. Harry watches it, intrigued, as surprised as everyone else when it’s brought directly to him. He blinks in surprise, staring at it as another owl brings a letter that it unceremoniously drops on top of the package before flying off again. He tears it open to find a professionally typed letter, the letterhead for which reads “Quality Quidditch Supplies”, which read:

Mr. Harry Potter,   Please find enclosed the Nimbus Two-Thousand ordered by your guardian, Hogwarts Deputy Headmistress Professor Minerva McGonagall, on your behalf. She requested the following message be included with your purchase:   Congratulations on becoming the Gryffindor Quidditch Team’s new Seeker. Please be sure to keep your new broom out of sight; wouldn’t want your classmates getting jealous. Speak with Oliver Wood when you receive this for the practice schedule.   We at Quality Quidditch Supplies thank you for your business. We humbly request you and your guardian review our endorsement proposal, enclosed with this letter, and get back to us at your earliest convenience.

Neville, who had been reading over his shoulder, gasps. “A Ni-”

“Shh,” Harry hisses, slapping a hand over the boy’s mouth. “Not here. Let’s go.” Harry doesn’t bother skimming the rest of the letter before shoving it into his bag. Chances are high that Professor McGonagall already turned their offer down on his behalf, and she was likely to be very displeased that they’d sent him the package to arrive with the morning post, as it seemed she would have preferred it be kept secret. He had seen others receive things from their owls in their dorms after classes, in the afternoons before dinner, or even in the evenings afterwards. Nothing for it now, though, except to get out of the Great Hall as soon as possible.

Snatching it up, he gets up with the other boy scrambling behind him to follow. Across the hall, he catches Draco watching them, an eyebrow raised in question. Jerking his head towards the doors, he heads out the door expecting the blonde to follow suit. 

“You get the position? Is that your broom?” Draco asks, as soon as he catches up to them outside of the Great Hall.

“It’s a Nimbus Two-Thousand!” Neville declares as Harry nods yes to both questions, impressed despite his own continued fear of flying. 

The previous day’s class, for example, had seen him much too afraid of back on the broom, much less re-attempting the kick off he’d botched the week before. Harry had tried to help him, explaining as best he can what to do, but as Madam Hooch had declared him among those not needing further lessons, he can only help outside of class now. Hermione had looked annoyed to be told that she would benefit from another lesson, but Harry thinks that at least it means Neville will have her around the next class to help. After all, she’s not mad at him , so it’s only Harry she’s giving the cold shoulder to right now.

“Nice! What are you waiting for? Open it!” 

Harry looks around, but makes no move to remove the wrapping around the broom. “Professor McGonagall’s note said she didn’t want others seeing the broom just yet,” he explains. 

“Tsk.” Draco huffs, making it clear how he feels about it. “Would have been nice seeing Flint’s reaction. I overheard him and some of the Slytherins talking about how good of a broom it seems.”

Harry was sure that anything that might annoy the other Slytherin would make his friend happy. From his understanding, Marcus Flint had started attempting to bully Malfoy when their Head of House wasn’t around, but upon realizing how much the younger Slytherin enjoyed Quidditch, had gone instead to talking about how he would never put him on the team. It had crushed Draco realizing that he would either have to appease the fifth year student the rest of the year and into the next, when a position would open up with this year’s seventh year Seeker graduating, or give up on getting recruited until after Flint has graduated himself. 

“Anyway, you had better go put it away quickly, if you’re going to,” he says, waving Harry on. “If you’re late to Potions, Professor Snape will have your head.”

“Good point,” Harry concedes. 

He tells them both to go back and finish breakfast, and that if anyone asks, to tell them that he refused to open it and so they aren’t sure what it is and give whatever wild speculation they think might throw people off. Neville opts instead to go with Harry, explaining as they go that he doesn’t think he can handle it if everyone bombards him with questions.

In his own words, “I think I would get too flustered and I might let out that you’re the new Seeker, or that you’ve gotten a broom.”

They’ve just reached the first floor when they run into Professor Flitwick, who notes the package and congratulates Harry, as he’s been made aware of the special circumstances regarding his recruitment from Professor McGonagall. He asks after what type of broom he’s gotten, and seems genuinely pleased with hearing Harry’s gotten the best on the market. With no one else around by the two Gryffindor, he confides in a low voice that he looks forward to a team giving Slytherin a run for the Quidditch Cup this year. Harry thanks him, beaming with pride.

Saying goodbye to the Charms teacher, they’re caught off-guard when someone asks, “I suppose you’re pleased with yourself, getting rewarded for breaking the rules?”

Harry turns to find Hermione approaching, scowling at the package in his hand. It’s clear she heard at least some of the exchange with Professor Flitwick and knows what he’s holding. “I thought you weren’t speaking to me,” Harry reminds her, frowning. He takes her comment to mean his getting the position of Seeker, which he wasn’t just given . He’d been a nervous wreck all week, and the fact that she can’t even offer a congratulations hurts.

“Um, guys, d-don’t fight.” Neville looks nervously between them. He’s uncomfortable with them fighting, and feels helpless as to how he can help them make up with each other.

Not that Hermione gives him a chance to say anything, as she turns her nose up and walks away from both of them, heading down the stairs they just ascended. Harry huffs, annoyed at her inability to be happy for him, and goes to put his broom away. He hides it under the pillows of his bed, not wanting to risk the curiosity of any of his dorm mates getting the best of them so that they try to peek at what’s inside. Then, both boys take off running to ensure they arrive at the Potions classroom on time, albeit out of breath.

It’s a struggle for Harry to actually pay attention. Much as he likes Snape and wants to do well in the subject, his mind keeps wandering. He’s likened Potions in his mind to cooking back at home at the Dursleys’ place, only with much stricter recipes and cooking instructions. He thinks someone like Professor Snape, a master in the field, is probably much like a chef, who can make adjustments on the fly to get the desired result, but a novice like him had better pay attention. And he tries, he really does, but he still finds himself daydreaming about the broom upstairs enough that he adds the ingredients in the wrong order not once, but twice, so that he’s instructed to come back after lunch to redo his potion from scratch, and given an extra assignment of writing an essay to explain why the order of ingredients for this particular potion is necessary.

Neville at lunch tries to use the essay as a nudge for Harry to try to make amends with Hermione, with the reasoning that if anyone can help him with the explanation, it would be her, but he refuses to entertain the idea. She’ll want an apology or for him to admit she was right about his behavior the week prior, and he refuses to do either. He says he’ll talk to Percy and ask for his help instead, and then tells Neville to drop it. 

The only bonus is that having to essentially do an extra two hours of Potion after lunch makes the afternoon go by much quicker. Oliver Wood caught him on his way back to the dungeons to explain that their practice would be late as Hufflepuff’s team was using the pitch in the afternoon for their practice, and so they wanted to avoid them seeing Harry coming down. He would be their secret weapon, and as such, the goal was to keep anyone from finding out about him for as long as possible.

To that end, the twins end up serving as a distraction, playing a prank on Percy that has the common room in an uproar. Harry uses that time to sneak out with his new broom, Neville following as he’d promised Draco not to open it until the three of them were together. They meet outside the castle, and by the light of their wands, he unwraps the Nimbus Two-Thousand. They gush over it, with Draco explaining in much finer detail than either Harry or Neville could on all the ways the broom is an innovation over its predecessors, and then he extracts a promise from him to let him try it out for himself at some point in the future, once all the secrecy of his position is over and done with. 

Harry had worried that Draco’s loyalty to his House would mean him telling them about Gryffindor’s new Seeker, but Draco had said that while it was tempting, because he does want his House to win both the Quidditch Cup and the House Cup, he also rather liked the idea of Marcus Flint losing face in front of everyone. After all, if he tries to get mad that Draco hasn’t said anything, he can point to the fact that even those in Gryffindor weren’t aware of their new Seeker, and he can’t possibly expect Draco to magically know something that Harry has managed to keep from his own Housemates. 

It’s a perfect excuse, considering that keeping the secret turns out to be the hardest thing Harry’s ever done. Oliver suggests after practice that he hide the broom in McGonagall’s office, considering the difficulty of hiding it in a shared dorm, and Harry’s glad upon his return to Gryffindor that he’d agreed. His roommates all want to know what the package was, some even speculating that it was a broom, but he quickly denies it, saying instead that it was a series of things that he’d bought for his Muggle relatives back home. It’s a lie none of them can possibly refute, considering that he never speaks of his family, and so none of them are aware of his actual relationship with them. Or the fact that they would never accept anything from the wizarding world. 

The next few weeks are a whirlwind of classes, homework, and practices. They never practice before seven, as by then nearly everyone is busy with schoolwork and studying so they are not out and about. If anyone asks about his whereabouts, he lies and says that due to his actions during the first Flying Class, he has multiple detentions with Professor McGonagall, to be served either with her or Hagrid, and as both Ron and Tobias were vocal about how miserable it was, no one questions it. In fact, they seem sympathetic, which seems to further annoy Hermione, although she never disabuses anyone of the lie.

Sometimes, particularly when he’s struggling with some of their reading assignments, Harry wishes they were still speaking. Hermione’s ability to explain things so they are easier to understand, and he thinks he would have a much easier time getting the work done so he can get more sleep each night, but he’s too stubborn and prideful to make the first move. Even if he does miss her company. Instead, he relies more on Percy, who is smart but not necessarily the most engaging tutor.

Turns out that as a fellow fifth year, he and Oliver are friends. When the Quidditch Captain catches Harry falling asleep over an assignment, he talks to the prefect, letting him in on the secret of their newest recruit and requesting that he try and help the first year so he doesn’t fall behind due to the practices. Much as Professor McGonagall may want the team to do well, their studies would always take precedence, and he fears that she would pull the new Seeker off the team if his grades seem at all affected by the constant practices.

Still, Harry finds that for the first time in his life, he’s genuinely happy. Classes are challenging, but he can study and put his all without having to worry that he might upstage Dudley by doing well. Perhaps he’s not the best student–that is undoubtedly Hermione, who never seems stumped by the material–but he’s certainly not the worst. Plus, overall, he likes his Housemates even if he’s not particularly friends with the other half of the boys of his year. His friendship with Draco has them believing he’d be better off in Slytherin, but he thinks they’ll change their tunes once the first Quidditch match comes around. 

Before he knows it, Halloween is upon them, marking two months since term began. The older students are abuzz with excitement, telling the first years all about the feast to come that evening. Most teachers also have a tendency of either teaching something tied to Halloween, or something fun to match the mood of the students. Professor Quirrel, in Defense Against the Dark Arts, uses his lesson to stutteringly explain how Eastern European wizards of the late seventeenth century helped the spread vampire lore among Muggles so as to allow them to find ways to protect themselves after a noticeable uptick in vampire killings among the Muggle population was noticed. Much of what modern-day Muggles knew of vampires was still fairly accurate, although they no longer actually believe in them. As far as Defense classes, it’s one of the more interesting, at least for the Muggle-born among them.

It only gets better when in Charms, Professor Flitwick announces that he feels they are ready to learn the Levitation Charm. As they all remember the way he made Neville’s toad fly about the classroom, they are all excited to get to it. Although the professor tends to pick their partners for them, which Percy once explained was his way of ensuring that students mingled outside of their direct friend groups, in a rare move he tells them he’ll allow them to pair themselves up. Due to the uneven number of students in their year–ten boys and nine girls for a total of nineteen Gryffindor first years–there is usually a group of three, which has allowed Hermione to stay with some of the girls. Today, however, Amos in his dorm woke up so sick that after one look at him, Percy had personally marched him to the Hospital Wing to see Madam Pomfrey. He had yet to make an appearance, meaning that when the girls paired up like normal, Hermione was left to be paired with the one boy also left without a partner today: Ron Weasley.

No one else in their year butted heads more than the two of them, and Harry is tempted to offer to switch except he doesn’t think Hermione will appreciate it since they still aren’t talking. So despite feeling bad for her, he turns his attention back to the professor, who is reminding them of the wrist motion they’ve been practicing, as well as the fact that like many other spells, pronunciation and enunciation were key to performing the spell correctly. Then there is a chorus of Wingardium Leviosa as everyone begins attempting the spell.

Seamus, not unexpectedly, manages to set his and Dean Thomas’s feather on fire, to the laughter of those around them. It keeps Neville from prodding theirs with his wand lest he do the same, and the two struggle to get the combination of wand motion and pronunciation right. While they take turns trying and failing, Harry can overhear Ron and Hermione arguing as she tries to correct his pronunciation.

“You’re saying it wrong ,” he hears Hermione snap, not for the first time. “It’s Wing- gar -dium Levi- o -sa, not Levi-o- sa .”

Ron snarls at her, “If you’re so clever, then, you do it.”

Harry turns around to watch, trusting that if anyone can get this right and therefore give him a clue as to what he and Neville are doing wrong, it’s Hermione. He watches her roll up her sleeves, perform the flick and swish movement the professor has had them practice countless times by now, and recite confidently, “ Wingardium Leviosa .” Unsurprisingly, the feather does as intended and begins to float up into the air accordingly with the movement of her wand, until it is nearly four feet above their head.

Professor Flitwick is over the moon at how quickly she’s understood and executed the spell, bringing the attention of the class to it, as if they hadn’t already noticed the only feather floating about. Hermione is undoubtedly pleased with the praise, but Harry thinks that judging by the scowl on Ron’s face, it may have been better for the professor to not have singled her out.

Eventually, a few others manage it as well, to varying degrees of success. When class is done, they are all excused to go. Neville tells Harry to go on ahead, as he wants to get some pointers from Hermione as he had only managed to get the feather to float for a few seconds just before the end, and he wanted to understand what he was doing wrong. 

Harry agrees, offering to take his DADA book with him. After lunch they have History of Magic, and while Neville will only need that as he’s still taking the Flying class, Harry will also need his book for Magical Theory and he’d rather grab it now and then take his time eating, then have to wolf lunch down in order to run up to the dorms before History.

As a result though, he ends up going in the complete opposite direction of everyone else in class, so he misses out completely on the drama that ensues. When he gets to lunch and sees Neville, sans Hermione, he asks what happens and Neville fills him in on them overhearing Ron bad-mouthing Hermione to other boys in their House, calling her a nightmare no one could stand to be around, with even Harry being fed up with her. When she stormed off and someone pointed out she must have overheard, he had doubled down, saying she must have noticed she had no friends.

“That bloody arsehole,” Harry starts, moving to get up out of his seat to see where the offending git was seated. Neville grabs his arm and pulls him back down, pointing out that Harry can’t afford to get in trouble and end up with detention when he’s got practices to attend. 

“I’ll talk to Percy later,” Neville says. “H-He’ll say something to his brother. We should try to find Hermione.”

Harry agrees. He’d never intended to spend this long not talking to Hermione, and really, it was stupid that he hadn’t tried to make amends sooner. His previous desire to take his time with lunch is forgotten as the two boys eat quickly, and then attempt to find Hermione in the short amount of time they have left before class. Unfortunately, she isn’t in the Gryffindor common room, they can’t check the girls’ dorms, and the library also yields no results. They resign themselves to having to talk to her after History class, only to find that she isn’t there. When they point out her absence to Professor Bins, he tells them she was not feeling well and received permission to go to the Hospital Wing.

They rush there after class, but it’s to no avail. All they get is scolded for running in the halls by Madam Pomfrey, who tells them the only Gryffindor she has is Amos, who is currently sleeping. They’re baffled by this news, and go off to their respective classes, both deciding they’ll ask around. Draco seems not at all concerned, going so far as saying that he’s surprised no one has told her she’s insufferable before. It angers Harry, he makes a point of telling Draco that he’s disappointed to find he and Ron might be more alike than he thought. He’s well aware doing so will make Draco mad, but he doesn’t care in the moment, wanting only to lash out. Having been bullied by his own cousin for years, he knows all too well that no matter how much you don’t want it to, hearing mean things being said about you hurts. 

With neither one of them having any luck in locating Hermione, Neville goes to speak to Percy about their missing friend, Harry in tow. He’s gratified to see the prefect get visibly upset at hearing that his youngest brother was acting like a bully, but the feeling is short lived when he speaks to Annalena Murk–the other Gryffindor prefect–and she informs them that Hermione is not in the girls’ dorm. She tells them that chances are she’ll show up for the Halloween feast, especially if she skipped out on lunch. Neither is happy with this, but Percy assures them that if she doesn’t show up, he’ll personally speak with Professor McGonagall to inform her of what’s happened, leaving them with nothing to do except kill time until dinner.

They both give up fairly quickly on getting any homework done. They’re too worried and distracted. In fact, their worry over Hermione’s absence puts such a damper on their mood that everyone else’s growing excitement as the hour for the Halloween feast draws near is incapable of lifting. When it’s time to go down to the Great Hall, they trudge downstairs along with everyone else, Harry visibly annoyed at seeing Ron laughing it up like nothing’s wrong.

There is a moment of surprise and wonder at seeing the transformation that has taken place in the Great Hall, with the normal candles replaced entirely with floating jack-o’-lanterns that shine brighter than any Harry has ever seen before. Besides the pumpkins, live bats fly about the room, in large clouds that make the candles flicker, and singularly as they move between the walls and the unseen ceiling beyond the enchanted sky. All other meals since the start of term had plates along the center that seem to magically refill themselves without any discernible change to the quantity on them. Now, like that previous feast, the food appears on golden plates before their eyes once they have all been seated. 

The novelty is lost on Harry, though, when he looks up and down the row of students and fails to see Hermione among their numbers. Parvati Patil, coming over from Ravenclaw where she was presumably speaking with her sister, sees him looking around and comes over.

“Are you still looking for Hermione, Harry?” 

He blinks up at her, and then nods his head. “Yeah, have you seen her?”

“Lavender and I stopped at the girls’ lavatory on the second floor and heard her crying,” she tells him. “We told her the feast was starting, but she asked to be left alone.”

“All right, thanks.” Harry and Neville frown at each other, unsure of what they can do now. It wasn’t as if they could go marching into the girls’ restroom to go find her. “We should let Murk know.”

Neville nods, and they get up to do just that. She tells them she’ll go check on her once she’s finished eating, and encourages them to enjoy the feast in the meantime. Reluctantly, they sit back down, Neville commenting that perhaps they should try to grab some food to take up with them for Hermione. 

They’re only just settling in to eat when Professor Quirrell comes sprinting into the Great Hall. “Troll!” he yells as he goes, stopping only when he’s reached the staff table, where he leans heavily. He’s standing in front of Dumbledore, gasping for air as he says, loud enough for most of the room to hear in the silence that has fallen upon his entrance. “Troll–in the dungeons–thought you ought to know.” Then he falls over in a dead faint.

Immediately, the room erupts into a roar of sound, as multiple students begin screaming. It isn’t until multiple purple firecrackers get shot into the air by Dumbledore that it quiets down, the headmaster speaking into the silence immediately.

“Prefects,” he calls out. “Please lead your Houses back to their dorms.” Then he turns to instruct the teachers.

Professor Snape stands and adds smoothly, “Slytherin, as the troll is in the dungeons, you will head up to the Hospital Wing until we can be sure the way to the Slytherin dorms has been cleared.”

Percy is in his element, calling for order and instructing the sixth and fifth years to take the lead with the fourth through first years following, and the seventh years–and therefore the most magically experienced–taking up the rear to ensure the safety of the first years. The only other House as organized turns out to be Slytherin, and so the two Houses depart the Great Hall almost simultaneously, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff close on their heels. The prefects take turns calling to the students in their House to try to maintain some semblance of a line so they can ensure no one accidentally follows the wrong House in all the confusion.

There is still some mixing up of students, as some practically jog in an attempt to get away from the Great Hall and the nearby entrances to the dungeons quickly, while others have trouble keeping up in their panic. Harry and Neville find themselves not far from Draco, who looks paler even for him, and it’s clear that the thought of a troll in the dungeons is as terrifying to him as it is to Neville. 

Taking pity on his friend, Harry sidles up next to him and asks, “How do you think a troll got into the school?”

Draco looks over at him, surprised, and admits, “I have no bloody idea, but wait until my father hears about this. If I get even close to being injured, he will have that old coot’s head for certain.”

Harry thinks that it would be warranted. He may not have Hogwarts history memorized, but he was pretty sure that a troll getting into the school was rare, if not completely unheard of until now. He rather wishes Hermione were here so he could ask her, as she would definitely remember such a thing being mentioned in Hogwarts, A History . 

Suddenly, he grabs both Neville and Draco by the arm as he stops, realizing that at least one person is still unaware of the danger. Some students who walk into them complain about their being in the way, and Harry comes to his senses enough to pull them both aside.

“What are you doing?” Draco demands, watching as his Housemates go by.

“Hermione. She’s in the girls’ loo on the second floor. She doesn’t know about the troll.”

“Oh no,” Neville moans. “W-We should tell Percy.”

They look around but there are simply too many students for three eleven-year olds, none of them particularly tall, to spot one specific student. Even with the Weasleys’ distinctive red hair, all they can see is a mass of bodies jostling each other to get to their destinations quickly. 

“They said it’s in the dungeons,” Draco reasons. “She should be fine on the second floor.”

“What if she decides to go to the Great Hall?” Neville asks, already thinking of the worst case scenarios. “Or worse, what if the troll doesn’t stay in the dungeons? Oh no, oh no, this is bad.”

He’s starting to panic, and Harry’s grip on his arm tightens. “Calm down. Let’s go try to find a prefect, any prefect. It doesn’t have to be Percy. One of them can find a teacher for us.”

“Wh-What i-i-i-if we don’t find one on ti-ti-time?” Neville asks worriedly, his anxiety making him stutter.

Harry, who had already started pulling the other two boys along down the hall, stumbles to a stop. What if they couldn’t find someone on time? They were only on the first floor right now, just past the stairs, but already he couldn’t see any of the Hufflepuff students. They must have already broken off to get to their dorm, meaning there were two prefects they were guaranteed not to find. The Gryffindors were headed up to the seventh floor, but they might be too late if they have to climb all the way up there and then come back. He has no idea where Ravenclaws are going, so they would have to grab those prefects before they broke off from the crowd as well, with no knowledge of what they even look like. 

“Hurry, let’s see if we can find someone,” Harry says, practically sprinting. The Slytherins are heading for the Hospital Wing, so if he can’t find the Gryffindor or Ravenclaw prefects, that might be their best bet. “We at least know where the Slytherins are going.”

He’s running up the steps, jostling other students and calling quick apologies as he does, with Neville and Draco on his heels. Draco keeps calling him, but Harry doesn’t stop until they reach the third floor. Once there, he breaks off from the crowd of now mostly Ravenclaw and Gryffindor students to catch his breath. Neville follows suit, breathlessly asking a Ravenclaw girl for her prefect, but she either doesn’t understand or she doesn’t know, as she shrugs and quickly pulls away to keep going. Harry tries again while Neville catches his breath, but once again there’s a shrug as the boy he’s asked waves vaguely ahead of him. A Gryffindor seventh year, bringing up the tail end of the Gryffindor students, spots them and tells them to move along and not get left behind, but she doesn’t wait to see if they follow her. 

Harry looks down the hall where he can see a few Slytherin students heading towards the Hospital Wing, but Draco grabs him and shakes his head. “Look, I guarantee the Slytherin prefects aren’t going to leave the Hospital Wing with a troll on the loose,” he tells him. He thinks, but does not say aloud, that they aren’t stupid enough to endanger themselves for some Muggleborn first year.

“Bloody hell,” Harry mutters. He seems to have an internal debate, looking towards the Hospital Wing, the stairs back down to the second floor, and then in the direction of the stairs leading up to the fourth where the other students have disappeared. He’s quiet for a beat before he finally makes a decision and declares, “Fine, then I’m going to go get Hermione.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Draco argues. “She’ll be fine . You expect a troll to come up to the second floor from the dungeons ? Let’s say you’re right, and you do: what can you do against a troll ?”

It’s a valid question, but truthfully? “I don’t care,” Harry replies. “We can’t just leave her there.”

“I-I-I’m c-c-c-coming with you,” Neville announces, though he’s visibly shaking.

Draco scoffs. “ You ? Some backup. Well, I’m going to the Hospital Wing, with the rest of my House, like I’m supposed to. Good luck and try not to get yourselves killed.”

He turns on his heels and marches away from them in the direction of the Hospital Wing. Harry’s disappointed, but he can’t say he doesn’t understand where Draco is coming from. He really doesn’t know what he’ll do if the troll is down there, but he’s sure the same goes for Hermione, and he kind of blames himself that she’s spent the afternoon crying alone. If only he hadn’t been so stubborn, she might have felt they were good enough friends for her to come to him– them , him and Neville–instead of crying by herself.

“Come on, Neville.” They head for the stairs, and are barely halfway down when he hears steps behind them and he turns to find Draco has run back.

“Ugh, if you get me killed, Potter, I will haunt you for all eternity,” he declares. Then he grabs Neville and shoves him back up the stairs. “You go find one of your prefects. They’re more likely to listen to you than me.”

Neville nods his head and takes off at a stumbling run. He is more likely to find Percy or Annalena, knowing the direction to their dorms, Harry thinks. But more importantly, he rather appreciates that his best friend is willing to have his back in this, when he very clearly would rather they not do this at all.

“Thanks,” he says, before taking the lead.

They rather hope to run into a teacher along the way, even if it means getting in trouble for not doing as they’re told. A sense of foreboding seems to follow them with every step, so that every little sound–real or imagined–makes them practically jump out of their skins. When they reach the girls’ restroom on the second floor what feels like an eternity later without incident, they are too relieved for words. Instead, Harry knocks on the door before opening it slightly and calling to Hermione within.

“Go away.” Comes the sniffled reply from within.

Glad to hear her voice, he opens the door all the way and steps in. “Hermione, you are here. Come on, we’ve got to go.”

“I already told Parvati and Lavender I’m not hungry,” she says, audibly annoyed. Her voice seems to be coming from the last stall, which is confirmed by it being the only closed stall door. “And what are you doing here? Do you just think none of the rules apply to you?”

Draco, who had been lingering in the open doorway, follows Harry into the room. “Move it, Granger! We don’t have time for this.”

“ Malfoy ?” Hermione pulls the stall door open.

“Please, you can scold me on the way upstairs,” Harry reasons, coming forward to grab her now that she’s come out of the stall. “There’s a troll loose in the dungeons; we can’t stay here.”

“What? A troll ?” Hermione is trying to pull her arm away as he manages to pull her halfway across the room, clearly not believing them. “What are you talking about?”

Before Harry can respond, they all freeze at the sound of grunting and shuffling footsteps. Draco moves away from the restroom door, trying not to make a sound as he backs up towards the other two, and then a foul stench hits them. Draco gags while Harry coughs and tries to cover his nose and mouth with one arm, still holding onto Hermione with the other while she tries to use both hands to cover her own face. They all look up almost simultaneously and watch in horror as the ugliest creature they’ve ever seen comes shuffling through the doorway.

The ceiling over the door breaks from the sheer size of the troll, who straightens once inside to his full, towering height. Harry can’t tell exactly how tall it is, but he wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was over ten feet tall, possibly much bigger than that. It certainly looked to be the size of a house, with its head appearing only just shy of the vaulted castle ceilings above it. Everything about it, from the dull, granite color and lumpy appearance of its skin made it seem like a walking boulder someone had attached tree trunks to in order to give it limbs. Its head, by contrast, was ridiculously small, like a tiny gumball set atop a football. Its long arms hung low, almost ape-like, along its side with one large hand gripping a large club nearly two-thirds the length of its arm. 

It wore rags that seemed to be some semblance of clothes, and the smell coming off of either them or the creature itself was bad enough to make Harry’s eyes water. But he did not dare blink as the troll’s mean little eyes took them in, and it lumbered ever closer. The club it was dragging knocked into the sinks along the wall, causing them to break, one of the pipes bursting and shooting water everywhere.

“What do we do, what we do, what do we do?” Draco demands, backing away from the troll.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Any ideas?”

He can see Draco shake his head from the corner of his eye, but Hermione is behind him and he can’t see her. He can, however, hear how heavily she’s breathing and he thinks she might be having a panic attack right now. He hopes Neville has managed to find someone, anyone, but even if he does, they have to stay alive long enough to be rescued. Harry’s eyes move from the troll, to the door behind it. The castle’s many lavatories are all fairly big, meant to accommodate many students, but the troll’s size makes it seem so much smaller than it is. There is no space underneath the stalls for them to try to crawl underneath the partitions, and with it destroying the sinks, they can’t crawl underneath those either.

Frankly, it seems like their best bet may be to try to run around either side of the creature, and attempt to get around it. It’s unlikely they’ll all manage it, but if even one of them can, they can try to lure it out into the corridor where there’s more room, assuming it doesn’t just decide to go for the easier targets still trapped inside.

“I think we’re going to have to try to get around it,” Harry says. The only saving grace is that the thing is moving at a steady, fairly slow pace, possibly due to its size. “One or two of us go left, the other goes right, and if someone manages it, try to get it to follow out into the corridor maybe?” Actually, Harry thinks maybe he can try to slide between the thing’s disgusting, horned feet, as the floor is now slick with water.

“Are you insane?” Draco practically yells, causing the troll’s glance to move over towards him. 

“Do you have a better idea?” Harry demands. The troll swings its gaze back to him, all the time moving steadily forward, while the three of them continue to move back. Hermione has still not said a word, but when her back hits the wall, she lets out a small squeak of surprise, and Harry finally looks back at her.

She’s clearly terrified, eyes wide and focused on the troll. He looks at it himself, then turns around completely to face her, shaking her a little. “Hermione, when I say go, you have to try to get around the troll on its left side,” he explains. She shakes her again until she looks at him, and asks, “Do you understand? On my signal, move along the stalls and try to get around it.”

“I guess we’ll go right?” Draco asks, eyes moving towards the sinks. He realizes that although getting over the broken pieces may be tricky, the fact that it has destroyed a lot of them means there’s slightly more space between it and the wall, if they can just safely get around the club its dragging along.

“Yeah,” Harry says, thinking it best to not say what he’s really planning. Last thing he wants is for them to argue about it. “All right, everyone ready? Ready…set…”

Before he says go, he takes off running at the troll, causing Hermione to gasp and Draco to demand what he’s doing. He does not answer, simply yelling “Go!” as planned, as loudly as he can, to draw the trolls attention onto himself. Harry doesn’t look up, hoping to not psych himself out, certain that if he hesitates, he’ll surely end up dead.

Draco takes a moment to get over his shock, and then he’s shoving Hermione to prompt her to move towards the left while he goes right. His hesitation turns out to work in his favor, as it prevents him from being close as the troll drags its club forward, breaking more sinks as it moves to swing it at Harry, who never slows down.

The troll swings the club downwards, causing Hermione to scream, certain that it’s going to manage to catch the other boy, but at the last second Harry dives forward and ends up sliding across the floor right between its legs. Draco takes advantage of the trolls surprise to clamber over the broken sink pieces, managing to get around it, but his feeling of triumph is short-lived. Behind them, the troll’s focus has moved back to Hermione due to her scream. She’s trapped herself inside a stall, and it moves to lift the club.

“Oh no, Hermione!” Harry is standing next to Draco, frantically looking around for something he can use to draw the troll’s attention. He grabs one of the broken faucets and lobs it at the creature, yelling loudly for its attention. “Oy! Pea-brain! Over here!” 

Draco thinks that the yelling is what does it, as it doesn’t seem at all phased by the piece of metal that hits it. He thinks this is undoubtedly the stupidest thing he has ever done in his entire life, but still, he grabs another broken off piece of sink and throws it at the troll, adding his yells to Harry’s to cause it to lumber towards them. Slowly, they backup towards the door, hoping to draw it out of the bathroom completely before it remembers that there’s another person still trapped inside.

It’s working, and Harry dares to hope that they’ll actually get it out into the corridor before his hopes are dashed. The floor is still wet, and he is soaked through from his slide across the floor. It gets tangled in his feet, and he falls backwards with a loud, wet flop . The troll seems to sense his opportunity, as it draws the club over its head, ready to swing it down towards him. Draco tries to draw its attention, but it does not look away from where Harry is scrambling to get back on his feet. 

Then from behind them, someone yells, “ Oppugno !” Draco turns, and the relief he feels at seeing Percy, a Weasley of all people, has his knees buckling as his legs lose all strength to support the rest of his body.

Harry watches as the spell hits the troll’s club, yanking it from its grasp as it roars in surprise. He feels a hand wrap around his arm and yank him to his feet, and then Percy is shoving him out into the corridor towards Draco. They watch, astonished, as the troll tries to grab at the club before there is an audible crack as it connects solidly with the creature's head, and then it’s lumbering forward like a fallen tree, and crashing into the floor. Silence reigns with the exception of the sound of water still bubbling out of a broken pipe, and then Percy is calling into the restroom in a strangled voice. 

“Hermione?”

Timidly and shaking, Hermione comes out from the stall she’d been trapped in. “I-I’m here. Is it dead?”

With a sigh, he says, “I don’t think so. Come on out of there.” He directs her to come around the thing, reaching out a hand to help her once she’s close enough to grab it. 

Percy’s so pale that the freckles on his face visibly stand out. Harry thinks that from this day forward, if he ever hears the twins ragging on their studious older brother, he’ll tell them they should hope to be half as brave or smart as he is. Without hesitation, he had single-handedly taken down a troll , and saved all three of their lives. At the very least, he had saved Harry’s. 

Loud footsteps draw all of their attention  down the corridor, and they all look over to see Professor McGonagall running towards them. Not far behind her is Professor Snape, with Professor Quirrell bringing up the rear. They slow down as they catch sight of the four of them, Professor McGonagall’s gaze seeming to assess them quickly before moving on to the bathroom beyond them and the destruction within, surrounding a clearly unconscious troll. When he spots it, Professor Quirrell faints dead away again, and Harry can’t help thinking that he makes a poor Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher if he can’t handle even seeing a troll, and an unconscious one at that.

“What is going on here?” McGonagall demands, oblivious to her colleague lying unconscious behind her. Snape, for his part, goes around all of them to inspect the troll inside. “What were all of you thinking? You could have been killed! I want an explanation this instant !”

They all look at each other, none of them seeming to know where to start, when both Hermione and Percy speak up at once. 

“Please, Professor–they were looking for me.”

“I can explain, Professor; this was my fault.”

The two look at each other, as McGonagall glances from one to the other, before she opts to listen to her prefect. “Explain, Mr. Weasley.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Percy says. “I was made aware prior to the Halloween feast that Miss Granger had not been seen for some hours. I meant to inform you of this if she failed to show up, but forgot in trying to get all the other students upstairs. Mr. Longbottom made me aware of the fact that she was done here, and that Mr. Potter and Mr. Malfoy had come in search of her, and I found them cornered by the troll.”

“Did it not occur to you two to go with Mr. Longbottom in search of a prefect?” Professor McGonagall asked, looking from Harry to Draco.

“We tried,” Draco insists, crossing his arms. Of course they were going to get in trouble for trying to do something nice.

“There were just so many people,” Harry adds, “and when we asked, no one could point anyone out. We thought we should try to come get Hermione before she could wander down to the Great Hall on her own while Neville went looking for Percy.” Then, thinking that if any prefect is going to get in trouble, it shouldn’t be Percy he adds, “We’d told Annalena about Hermione being here during the feast.”

This information causes McGonagall to press her lips in a tight line before she looks over at Hermione. “And why, Miss Granger, were you not with the rest of the students earlier?”

“Well.” She hesitates, and looks over at Percy briefly, and she seems torn on whether to tell the truth or not.

Percy saves her the trouble. “It appears that my youngest brother may have been bullying Miss Granger earlier today.” This doesn’t seem to improve McGonagall’s mood, as she lets out a sigh. Professor Snape comes back at that moment, asking Percy if he is the one who took the troll out. “Yes,” he admits sheepishly. “I cast the Oppugno Jinx when I saw it was trying to swing its club at Harry.”

“While I admire the fact that you both thought of Miss Granger’s safety,” McGonagall says, looking from Draco to Harry. “You should not have come down here yourselves. If Mr. Longbottom had not informed Mr. Weasley of your whereabouts, all three of you may have been killed. And Miss Granger, if you are having trouble with your Housemates, I expect you to reach out to the prefects or myself–that is what we are here for.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the three first years chorus together. 

The remorse they feel is clear, and standing in a line just in front of Percy, they look in a sad state indeed, especially Harry, who is still visibly drenched. She eyes them for another quiet moment, before looking over at Snape. They seem to come to a silent agreement before she speaks again.

“You all were very lucky. I hope you learn from this,” she tells them. “That being said, I am very proud of you for looking out for each other in such a situation. I will be awarding five points to each of you, Mr. Potter and Mr. Malfoy, for coming to assist Miss Granger. As well as to Mr. Longbottom, for his assistance in notifying a prefect.

“As for you, Mr. Weasley, not many fifth year students would have the knowledge or presence of mind to take on a mountain troll on their own to come to the rescue of three younger students.” There is no mistaking the pride in her voice as she says this, and she does manage to smile at him. “For that, you will earn an additional 20 points for Gryffindor. I will be sure to notify Molly and Arthur of what an upstanding Gryffindor they have managed to raise.”

Percy looks shocked, as if he’d been expecting punishment instead of the praise being heaped on him. “If none of you are injured, you may go to your respective Houses as they will be finishing their feasts in their dorms, and classes tomorrow will be canceled,” she tells them. It is now that she looks around, spots Professor Quirrell and lets out yet another sigh. “We will attend to things here.”

“Mr. Malfoy, please let your Housemates know I shall be at the Hospital Wing shortly to escort you all back to the Slytherin dorms,” Professor Snape says. Then he steps aside to speak to a portrait that has up to this point been watching them intently. After a moment, the gentleman in the painting nods his head, then scurries off into the other paintings.

Percy thanks the professors, then instructs the three of them to come along. They’re all quiet as they walk to the stairs and climb up to the third floor, the Gryffindors escorting the sole Slytherin among them by silent agreement. When they are close enough to see the doors of the Hospital Wing, though, Draco stops, causing the others to stop as well. They all share awkward looks, then all three first years speak up together, looking at Percy.

“Thanks.”

The prefect flushes red in embarrassment. “It was nothing,” he says. “It’s my duty as a prefect to ensure the safety of all students, especially first years.”

“Thanks to both of you too,” Hermione adds, looking from Harry to Draco. “I…would’ve been in real trouble if you hadn’t come…”

It’s Draco’s turn to look embarrassed, a visible pink tinge creeping into his cheeks. “Yeah, well. Don’t let it get to your head.” He bids them a goodnight, then rushes off to the Hospital Wing doors to pass on his Head of House’s message to the rest of the Slytherins. 

Percy, Harry, and Hermione continue on up to Gryffindor, where they are greeted by the loud sounds of their Housemates enjoying the feast that had been cut short below. No one seems to notice their return except for Neville, who looks relieved upon sighting them as he rushes over and pulls Harry and Hermione into a tight hug. Over his head, they smile at each other, glad to be back in the safety of their common room, surrounded by their classmates.

Soon, they’ll regale everyone with the night’s events, testing the limits of just how red in the face Percy Weasley can get in one night as they dramatically recount his arrival at the most crucial moment. It will give the twins a new way to embarrass their older brother, as they spend the weekend announcing the arrival of the Hero of Gryffindor, Percy Weasley, Savior of the Boy Who Lived wherever he goes until he threatens to feed them both to the next troll he finds. But it will not change the fact that he is a hero, and that his relationship with a small group of first years, as their relationship with each other, has irrevocably been changed.

[obsesssedblerd]

"Who's your new teacher?"

Synopsis: Toji meets Megumi's new preschool teacher and immediately develops a crush.

Pairings: single dad! toji x f! reader

Wc: 2.3K

Contains: plenty of fluff, crack, a tiny bit of angst, megumi is four, tsumiki is seven, toji is still toji (but like he's soft for his kids and he takes care of them), reader is a preschool teacher, reader and toji are around the same age, toji being soft, mentions of shiu, shiu and toji work together, shiu being an idiot (lol sorry he'll get love in another fic) , everyone is happy bc I said so

a/n: omg, first fic, we made it! barely proofread, sorry for mistakes. also, tysm for 1,000 followers here! the other two fics that were on that poll will be coming soon!

update: pt 2 here

-------------

Toji’s Fushiguro’s muscles ache. The job he took was harder than he anticipated, and it took way longer than it was supposed to. After confirming that the payment from the job is in his account, he calls Shiu Kong so he could check in on the kids. “About damn time,” Shiu scoffs when the line connects. “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you until sunrise.” 

“Job’s done,” Toji says as he gets into his car, settling into the drivers’ seat with an exhausted sigh. “I hear the TV in the background. Better be cartoons or something age-appropriate.” 

Shiu laughs. “Of course, what else? ‘M not getting cussed out by you. Anyway, you comin’ back with Megumi? Can’t believe you took him on the job with you. Once you’re back, I can get out of here.” 

Toji’s heart nearly stops. He sits up in his seat, gripping the phone so hard that the screen nearly cracks from his strength. “The fuck did you just say?” 

“Huh?” 

“Megumi isn’t with you?!” Toji’s voice booms in the car. On the other line, he hears Shiu gulp. “I… I thought he was with you.” 

“You idiot! I asked you to pick him up from preschool around the same time you pick up Tsumiki from her school because I knew this would take a while!” 

“You did?!” Shiu asks, and then it goes quiet; him more than likely flipping through his messages to double check. “...Shit,” he breathes out. 

Toji inhales sharply, then exhales shakily in an attempt to calm the rage, and even the fear that pools in his gut. “If anything has happened to my fucking son, Kong, I will murder you and make your death look like an accident. Keep an eye on Tsumiki.” 

“Fushiguro, I swear, I-” Toji hangs up before Shiu can explain himself further, then he starts the car. 

He grips the steering wheel hard, and his breathing picks up as his mind spins with every horrific scenario possible. The preschool closes at six thirty. It was close to nine. He didn’t see any missed calls from them. On a normal day, he’d be done before work with plenty of time to pick up his four year-old son, but today’s job was far more difficult and required more time. 

The car speeds down the street leading to his destination. He’s half-expecting to see Megumi sitting outside with his backpack, clinging to his dog plushie and crying. Or worse, he’s not there at all; because this world is full of terrible people, and they won’t hesitate to steal a small, unsupervised boy. His heart aches at the thought, and he shoves it away before he feels the need to throw up. He’ll be okay, he thinks to himself. Everything is going to be fine. 

—

When Toji arrives at the preschool, he rushedly parks lopsidedly in the lot, then exits the car. His eyes scan the steps leading up to the front, and when he doesn’t see Megumi outside, he rushes to the door. 

He sees a security guard in a booth, and before Toji can even ask any questions, the guard gives him a small smile and nod, pressing a button that unlocks the door to the preschool with a click. Toji’s shoulders slump in relief. They were expecting him. That meant Megumi is still here and safe. 

Toji nods back at the guard in thanks, and rushes down the dimly-lit hallway. He sees a light coming from a classroom that still has its door open, and he slows his steps when he hears a child giggling. His child. 

Then it’s followed up by a beautiful, melodic laugh that makes him stop in his tracks. It’s a lovely sound; one that his heart skips to, and one that gently rings in his ears even plenty of seconds after it stops. 

Toji peeks into the classroom to see Megumi comfortably resting in a pillow fort, and you, kneeling beside a lamp and using your hands to make shadow puppets on the wall to entertain him. “Alright,” you say softly as you rearrange your hands and fingers. “What’s this one?” 

You smile as you watch Megumi hum thoughtfully, and Toji is transfixed by you. Who are you? Where did you come from? Since when did Megumi get a new teacher? Why is your smile so bright and so beautiful that the sun would envy? Why is his heart beating wildly in his chest at the sight of you? Fuck, why is he staring? 

“Ooh!” Megumi gasps as he figures out the animal you made with your hands. “Rabbit!” 

“Correct, great job!” You reach forward and give him a high-five. “I think you’ll really like this next one,” you say, and Megumi giggles again as he sits up, completely focused and ready to guess. “Ready?” You ask, and the boy nods. 

Toji crosses his arms, quietly leans against the door of the classroom, and watches, unaware of the soft smile that creeps onto his face. When you put your hands in front of the light, and the shape of the animal displays in front of Megumi, he squeals excitedly and stands up. “Doggy!” He shouts with a wide grin and pulls up his favorite dog plushie that he takes with him everywhere, imitating the sounds a dog would make. You break out into laughter, and Toji nearly stops breathing so he can fully take in the sound of it again.

Beautiful, he thinks. You’re so fucking beautiful. 

Megumi’s eyes flicker towards the door, and he gasps before running as fast as he can towards Toji. “Papa!” 

“Hey, Megs.” Toji kneels down, hugs the small boy against his chest before picking him up in his strong arms, sighing in relief as he runs a hand through his dark hair. He’s okay, and he doesn’t look too upset that he was here for this long. “I’m so sorry I’m late. Are you alright?” 

“Yeah!” Megumi pulls away, then gestures towards you, who watched the tender reunion with a sweet smile. “Ms. [Y/L/N] played so many fun games with me!” 

“Aw, I’m so happy you had fun, Megumi.” You take a step closer so you’re standing in front of Toji, slightly lifting your head upward to meet his eyes due to his height. “We tried calling you, but your phone went straight to voicemail. Megumi said that it does that sometimes. He took a nap earlier, but I’m sure he’ll be sleepy soon after all of those games. I also gave him dinner earlier.” 

“That’s… I just-” Toji struggles to find words, especially when you slightly tilt your head to the side and blink slowly. He exhales, then snaps himself out of his daze. “Thank you so much,” he says. “Are you new? I swear, I’m not usually this late.” Great. Megumi’s pretty teacher might think I’m just the worst parent on this damn planet. 

You nod. “Yes, I’m new. Today was my first day with this angel,” You use a finger to gently boop Megumi’s nose, and he smiles, shyly burying his face into Toji’s shoulder, “and the other kids. I figured you might’ve been held up at work or something. It’s okay. Things happen. Besides, he’s such a well-behaved kid. I didn’t mind spending this much time with him.” 

Toji places Megumi on the ground, then gently taps his shoulder. “Let’s grab your stuff, okay?” As he helps Megumi pack his backpack, Toji bites back a smile when he sees you watching him out of the corner of his eye. He notes the way you fiddle with your hands and avert your gaze after catching yourself. 

You walk over to your desk and open a drawer, pulling out three suckers from a sealed jar. Once Megumi had all of his things packed, you kneel before him, handing him the suckers one by one. “Here you go. One for you, one for your sister, and one for your dad. I can tell he works really, really hard.” 

Toji doesn’t hide his smile this time; it was impossible, especially when Megumi accepts them excitedly. “Candy! Thank you!” He hugs you gently, and you return it, rubbing your hand up and down his back. “You’re so welcome. Thanks for being so sweet today. You made my first day so fun.” 

A muffled gasp coming from outside has the three of you looking towards the window. Toji sees Tsumiki’s face squished against the glass with her usual, excited smile, and Shiu Kong standing beside her, looking relieved when he sees Megumi safe and sound. He purposely avoids Toji’s glare. 

The sound of Megumi’s small yawn gets his attention, and Toji’s gaze softens when the boy rubs his tired eyes. “Aw, ‘m sorry. It’s past your bedtime. Let’s get you home.” He leans down to pick him up again, and once you have your belongings, the two of you leave the building together. 

When you three make it outside, you face Toji and Megumi. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Megumi,” you say quietly to him, who is slowly beginning to drift off. Then you look up at Toji, who is softly smiling at you. “And I’ll see you tomorrow, too, right?” You ask.

“Yeah, you will.” 

You wave goodbye, and Toji makes sure you get into your car safely. “Hey, Megs,” Toji gently shakes Megumi as he watches you drive out of the parking lot. “Do you know her name?” 

“Ms. [Y/L/N]” 

He chuckles. “No, kid, her first name.” 

“I dunno,” Megumi mumbles before closing his eyes and resting his cheek on Toji’s shoulder. “Sleepy, papa.” 

“Ah, there they are!” Shiu exclaims, and Toji would’ve thrown a punch if his son wasn’t in his arms, and if his seven year-old daughter wasn’t happily skipping towards him. “Hi, papa!” 

“Hi, sweets, how was school today?” 

“Good,” Tsumiki says, then grins mischievously as she points to the spot where your car was just a minute ago. “You like her!” She teases. “You wanna hug her and kiss her and give her chocolates!” 

“Alright, you.” Toji rolls his eyes and laughs softly as he uses his free arm to lift up a giggly Tsumiki, then presses a kiss to her forehead. “Both of you should be in bed. Let’s get home.” 

“Aw, okay.” Tsumiki then leans forward to gently kiss her sleeping baby brother’s cheek. “Night, Gumi.” 

Toji secures both Tsumiki and Megumi in his car, and then faces Shiu, who is smiling nervously. “Well, look at that. Megumi’s doing great and you even developed a crush. How cute. All’s well that ends well.” 

“Very cute, but guess what?” 

“What?” 

Toji finally throws a swift punch at Shiu’s jaw, greatly holding back his strength so it wouldn’t break. Shiu stumbles, then groans, cupping his face with his hands. “Okay, fine, I deserved that.” 

“Damn right,” Toji says as he opens the door to the driver’s seat. “See you later.” 

—

Toji almost never stresses about his appearance in the mornings. After all, it was just dropping off the kids. But this morning, he frets over which shirt would look better with the jeans he picked out, if he should wear a different type of cologne, or if he should slick his hair back. 

All because he’s seeing you again. 

He decides to skip the new cologne and go for his usual, simple one, dresses in a dark shirt to match the jeans, and also ditches the idea of slicking his hair. Once the kids are ready for the day, he leaves early and goes to a coffee shop to pick up a medium cup of coffee. First, he drops Tsumiki off at school, then he takes Megumi to preschool. 

Toji spots you almost immediately. You were out in the front amongst the other preschool teachers, parents and their kids, wearing a gorgeous yellow top and simple blue jeans. When you see Toji and Megumi approaching, you pause your conversation with your coworker and walk over to them. Toji decides that he likes that, and that he loves the way you kneel in front of Megumi to meet his eye level, telling him good morning and asking if he was excited for the day. 

You raise to your feet, Toji hands you the cup of coffee he purchased earlier. “For you,” he says, “As a thank you for everything yesterday.” 

“Aw.” Your eyes light up as you accept the cup. “Mr. Fushiguro, this—” 

“Toji,” he corrects softly, and he ignores the way his heart stutters when your smile grows. 

“Well, Toji, this is lovely. Thank you so much.” 

“I never caught your name last night.” 

You tell him your name, and Toji tests it once. From the way you shyly avert your gaze, he can tell you that like the way it sounds in his voice. Megumi clears his throat, and Toji looks down to see him staring up at him, his brow raised in suspicion. “You never stay this long. Don’t you have to go to work?” 

Damn, kid. Thought we were on the same team. 

You laugh as Toji rolls his eyes and sticks his tongue out at Megumi—a gesture that the four year-old returns immediately. “Well, he’s right, gotta get going,” Toji says, looking back up at you. “I’ll see you later?” 

“Yes.” You nod, then point to the warm cup in your hands. “Thanks again for the coffee. Have a great day at work.” 

“You too.” Toji then gently ruffles Megumi’s hair. “Be good.” 

He doesn’t realize how big he’s smiling until he’s back in the car, and he sighs as he remembers Shiu’s words from the night before. A crush. That word seems so silly. He’s not a teen in high school. Toji looks up just in time to watch you take Megumi’s hand and lead him inside the building with the other children, and he chuckles to himself as he starts the car up.

Maybe “silly” was okay when you’re this pretty.

[pedroscurls]

in every lifetime

summary: you lost logan in this universe. logan lost you in his. what happens when you both see each other again, but realize that you're both from different worlds? pairing: logan howlett x fem!reader warnings: post deadpool & wolverine ("worst" logan!variant), angst (mentions of death, loss from both reader and logan), no use of y/n. word count: 2.1k a/n: this is my first logan fic, so if anything is ooc, i'm sorry in advanced! just like everyone else, i've been obsessed with hugh jackman / logan after watching deadpool & wolverine (if it isn't obvious lol)... i had the song 'unchained melody' in mind when writing this story because whenever i hear it, i think of logan for some reason lol (tried to embed it but it didn't work, but i'd highly recommend listening to the song while reading this!) anyway, hope you enjoy! next part.

“I’ll be back.”

“But what if–”

“I always come back, bub.” Logan’s looking down at you, hand cupping your cheek. In moments like this, you can see the age in his features. The crows feet at the corners of his eyes. The gray in his hair and beard. 

“Logan…” Tears sting your eyes. You know he has to leave, has to go help Charles, but there’s a feeling deep in your gut that knows that if he goes, he isn't coming back. 

“Wait for me, then.” He says, dipping down to gently peck your lips. “Okay? Wait for me.” 

“Logan,” you repeat. “What do I do if I– if I lose you?” 

There’s a feeling in the pit of Logan’s stomach, a sense of dread and fear that he’s only ever felt when you were concerned. This feels a lot like a goodbye… That maybe if he does go, he won’t come back. And the thought alone scares him. He never used to have to think about the possibility of dying, his regenerative powers always healing him in record time, but he knows that he doesn’t heal as quickly as before. He feels more pain now than he ever had. And he knows he’s sick, knows that the adamantium that once gave him strength is now slowly making him weaker.

But now, the thought of dying… It fucking scared him. It scared him to think that he’d leave you here, all alone, grieving him. He had never thought he’d be deserving of someone like you, to be loved and taken care of so gently, so sweetly, so patiently. Even with all of the baggage he carried, you never pushed. He knew, right off the bat, that you deserved someone so much better than him, but you stayed. 

Through it all, you stayed. 

And Logan would forever be grateful. After everything he’s been through, the things he’s seen, the things he had to do, the people he’s lost, you gave him a life that was finally worth living. 

“Then, you move on, darlin’.” Logan finally answers. 

“And if I can’t?” 

“You’ll have to.” 

“I don’t… I don’t want you to go, but I know that you have to. Charles needs you and–”

“I love you with every fiber of my being, baby,” Logan interjects. “And I will love you in every lifetime.” 

And that was almost a year ago. The moment he stopped calling, you knew that was it. That he either got into some real trouble or… Or that he was no longer here. It wasn’t until a young girl named Laura showed up on your doorstep, holding his dog tags that your assumptions were correct. 

You had fallen to your knees, a sob escaping your lips, as you felt your world come crashing down. Logan’s death had left a gaping hole in your heart, in your life, and everywhere you looked and everywhere you went, all you could see was him. 

You learned from Laura that during his last moments, he had told her to come and find you, that you would take care of her and give her a good life. Whenever you were around her, you tried to be strong, tried to put on a brave front, but behind closed doors, you were a complete mess. There were days where you didn’t want to get out of bed, didn’t want to eat; you just wanted the pain to stop. Every night, whenever you closed your eyes, you forced yourself to sleep because that was the only place where you could be with him. 

In your dreams, he was alive. 

In your dreams, he had made it back home.

In your dreams, he was here with you, helping raise Laura. 

And every time you woke up, you were welcomed with the sudden reality that he wasn’t alive. He wasn’t coming back home. He wasn’t ever going to be here with you to help raise Laura. 

Logan was dead and now, you had to try and learn how to move on. 

For yourself.

For Laura.

For Logan. 

—

He didn’t know what he was doing here, why he agreed to stay with Wade because it was driving him crazy. This wasn’t even his timeline; he wasn’t even meant to be here. Despite saving Wade’s timeline, Logan still found it hard to fit in. He tried to keep Wade and every single one of his friends at an arm's distance because he knows what happens to people he cares about. 

But the more time he spent around them, the more he felt at ease. Logan would be lying if he said he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but when Laura mentioned your name at one of Wade’s family dinners, his heart skipped a beat. When he realized he would be able to stay in this timeline, you were all he could think about. 

Logan wondered if you existed in this world and what he would do if you did. So, when Laura casually said your name, his head turned around so quickly that he felt dizzy. There were so many things he regretted in his own timeline, but you were his biggest regret. 

Just like he failed the other X-men, Logan had failed you too. You had been there with the other X-men, trying to warn them of a planned attack and ended up getting caught in the crossfire. You had called out for him, just like Scott, like Charles, like Storm. 

He managed to get to you before you had taken your last breath, holding you in his arms. Logan begged and begged for you to fight, that he’d do things right from now on as long as you just held on, but you were losing so much blood and Logan couldn’t stop it. 

Even then, when you had every right to be angry with him, you gazed up at him with an understanding look on your face. You had always been so patient and kind, so sweet and considerate. You had made him so happy and it scared him, which ultimately ended in pushing you away because he didn’t think he was deserving of it. Of you. 

“I love you, Logan,” you had said, wincing at the pain. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m–” Logan felt a sob catch in his throat, tears stinging his eyes as he looked down at you. “Please, baby, please please please, don’t–”

“I–” you coughed, eyes fluttering as you felt the pain overcome your entire body. “I will love you in every lifetime, Logan.” And then, you took your last breath, eyes falling shut and body falling limp in his arms. 

Since then, Logan drank himself day after day, from dawn to dusk. The alcohol never truly helped, his regenerative powers sobering him so fast, but with every swig of liquor, it burned. And he spent years bringing pain unto others, including himself. 

That was, until he met Wade who had given him a chance, a reason to fight for something… To not turn his back on someone who relied on him. A chance for redemption, to finally make things right. 

“So, will you meet her?” Laura asks, holding Dogpool in her arms as she gazes up at Logan. “She– She used to be with this universe’s Logan and…”

“No chance, kid.” Logan interrupts, shaking his head. “I’m not him.” 

“Did you have someone like her in yours?” she asks. “She’s always put me first, always made sure I was taken care of even when she didn’t have to, when she was grieving. And I think–” Laura sighs. “I think if she knows that some version of you is alive, it would make her real happy.”

“I’m not him,” Logan growls, feeling his irritation spike. “‘Sides, she’s better off without me.” He stands from the table and walks out into Wade’s balcony to get some fresh air, shutting the door behind him as he leans against the railing.

“But she’s coming tonight,” Laura finally says, long after Logan’s walked away.

Throughout the rest of the dinner, Logan remains outside. He can hear the muffled laughter coming from inside and it only angered him because it was just another confirmation that he didn’t belong here. He’s already on his fourth bottle of beer when he hears a familiar voice, smells a recognizable scent. He turns slightly and catches you stepping into Wade’s apartment, an arm slinging over Laura’s shoulders so casually, so maternally. 

He feels his heart rate pick up. Your smile still lights up a room and he can’t help but his lips turning upwards at the sight. With his enhanced hearing, Logan can hear your voice and he shuts his eyes for a moment, tuning all of his attention on you until you’re the only one he hears. 

Then, he hears your laugh and he lets out a sigh. He never thought he’d be able to hear that again, but his eyes shoot open when he hears you say his name. There’s a shocked tone in your voice, laced with sadness and hope. It all but crushes him because he knows that you’re probably expecting someone else, expecting this world’s Logan and he doesn’t want to disappoint you. Not again. He doesn’t think he’d be able to handle it if he were to hurt you again. 

But when he looks at you, his breath catches in his throat when your eyes meet his. Logan notices the surprise look on your face, but before he could try and escape, you’re already walking towards him. When you open the door and step out with him, your scent fills his senses and it makes him dizzy, like he can’t fully concentrate. 

“You…” he hears you say, voice unsteady. “You’re not… I’m–” you sigh and shake your head. 

“I know who you are,” Logan finally says, his own voice shaky. 

Your hands reach out for him, but stopping halfway when you realize this isn’t your Logan. This is not the same man who died all those years ago. This is some version of him – much younger, less wrinkles and gray hairs in his hair and beard, but he still has that same look on his face. The scowl. 

“From Laura?” you ask hesitantly. 

“From my universe,” Logan answers. 

“There– There’s a version of me in your universe?” 

“There was.”

“And what happened to me?” 

Logan’s jaw tightens. “The same thing that happened to your Logan in this universe.”

“Oh.” Your face drops, eyes softening. “I’m sorry,” you whisper. 

Logan wants to run far from here, far from you because he feels himself yearning for more. He almost forgot how it felt like to be near you, to be inches away that he can just reach out and pull you into his arms. Your eyes captivate him, the kindness it expresses makes him feel like he matters. You had always made him feel that way that even through all of his anger, through all of the walls he put up, you showed him that he was deserving of something good. Even if he didn’t believe it himself. 

And you… You were the best thing to ever happen to him.

“Don’t know why you’re apologizin’,” Logan mutters. 

There’s an uncomfortable silence that engulfs the both of you. He can see the tears threatening to spill over, can see the way your lower lip is beginning to tremble and he has this sudden urge to console you, to wipe away the tears that have now fallen down your cheeks. 

“I’m sorry,” you repeat, bringing your hands up to wipe away the tears that seem to be trickling down your face nonstop. “I just– Losing my Logan just crushed me and I don’t think I’ve ever recovered.” 

My Logan. 

Logan can practically feel his heart beating in his chest. This isn’t a conversation that he thought he would be having and certainly not with someone he loved and died because of him. 

“That’s okay,” Logan responds quietly, his tone softening. “I don’t think it’s easy to recover from losing someone you love.”

“Did you– Did you love me in your universe?” 

Logan nods slowly, tightening his jaw as he gazes down at you. “With every fiber of my being.” 

Your eyes widen and stare up at him. This might be a different Logan, but hearing those words again just brings you back to the moment you last saw your Logan before he left to go take care of Charles. 

“Did you love me in yours?” Logan asks hesitantly.

You nod instantly, tears trickling down your cheek as you stare up at him. “I’d love you in every lifetime.” 

Logan feels his own set of tears pool at the corners of his eyes and he moves a hand to rest on the railing, fingers lightly brushing against yours as he stares into your eyes. 

“I’m not him,” he whispers. 

“I know,” you say quietly. “And I’m not her.” 

[sunnami]

❝i am half-agony, half-hope. . . i have loved none but you.❞

summary: how the marauders loved you in their time. featuring harry potter the time-traveller and sixth-wheel.

pairing/s: poly!marauders + lily x reader.

tags: reader is referred to as she/her and a mother throughout the whole fic[!], reader is a violent gremlin who craves blood but the marauders love you for that, implied child abuse[!], mentions of blood and violence[!], disgustingly sappy poetic fluff, no angst, happy ending, not proofread we die like finnick odair, edited: very minor detail.

note: there is little plot, it’s just the marauders and their adoration for you. thank you all so much for your kind responses to my first marauders fic :(( ilysm! i hope you enjoy this one as well! because there are parts when i was writing that i ended up kicking my feet in the air and smiling to myself.

“MY NAME IS HARRY POTTER. I come from twenty-years in the future, you’re my mum — one of my ‘em, actually. It’s complicated. And you’re married to James Potter, Remus Lupin, and Sirius Black.” 

You blink. 

“Get the fuck out of my room!” 

Harry James Potter has dodged many things in his life. Killing curses, jinxes, girls, Draco Malfoy, and Dudley’s sloppy punches, but he’s never had to dodge his sixteen-year-old mother’s fuzzy slipper before. (Godric, that sounds weird, even in his head.) He doesn’t know precisely how he arrived here. In the Slytherin common room, to be exact, in your dorm. Harry remembers duelling with Death Eaters, Hermione calling his name, and a flash of light hitting him square in the chest, then he remembers waking up in the cold tiles of the snake dungeon. He nearly throws himself off the window when he meets your eyes, bleary from interrupted sleep — it’s not often he gets to meet [read: one of] his dead parents, after all, three had been brutally murdered by Voldemort, and one killed by his own loony cousin. He misses Sirius, though. A lot. And right about now, he could do with some of Hermione’s nagging and brilliant plan-making. 

At present — or past, Harry guesses — he watches you scramble out from your duvet, hand clumsily reaching for your wand as you snarl at him. He wonders if his mother knows that he’s encountered other creatures far more threatening than her. Oh shit, he realizes with all the forces of an angry Hermione Granger, isn’t this the last thing he’s supposed to do? But, well, Harry has given, and given, so much of himself all for the greater good — just this once, he’d like to see his parents alive and well. Even if they were currently trying to blast him into the walls. 

“If you’d just let me explain, mum—!” Harry pleads, nearly dropping his glasses after dodging one of your stinging hexes. Godric, you’re crazy. “Please!” 

“Stop calling me that!” You screech, eyes set ablaze.  Harry finds that you’re quite dynamic with your attacks. A hairbrush, followed by a stinging jinx, then a thick History of Magic textbook — which rudely hits him in the face, but he doesn’t dare complain because you’re his mother, and he’s respectful like that — and after you’ve exhausted your breath, running him into a corner, and your nostrils flare with the stubbornness of a lion, you point the tip of your wand at him. “If this is another one of the Prewett’s shitty pranks, I want you to leave! You are in the girls’ dormitory beyond midnight, and so help me, if you aren’t walking out that door in the next five seconds, I will kill you and string you up by your bottoms for everyone in school to see! Maybe all your stupid rumours of me being a Death-Eater might come true after all!” 

“You’re a Death-Eater?” Harry asks dumbly. 

You growl furiously, and Harry figures that was not the right thing to say. “I wonder what McGonagall would say if I delivered your head to her on a silver platter.” 

“Professor,” Harry corrects with a toothy grin. “Professor McGonagall.” 

You slam his head against the wall.

Definitely the wrong thing to say. 

Harry groans, little Dobby heads floating around his vision. Why was this so much harder than actually facing Voldemort? Quick, he needed to think of something, otherwise he’d end up eviscerated to ashes on your cold, stone floors. Harry is pretty sure you’d use his remains as decoration to send off a message to your enemies. 

“You hate your father,” Harry slurs through the pain, remembering Remus’s stories of how you were the gentlest magical being he’s ever had the privilege to love — now that Harry thinks about it, Remus was being extremely biased, nothing about you is gentle at all. “He’s forcing you to marry someone old enough to be your grandfather. You love to read Muggle literature but had to stop when your father burnt your whole collection of books. Your favorite novel is Persuasion by Jane Austen. It’s the one book you carry with you everywhere, you could never get tired of it.”  

Your grip on his shoulders falters, but the fury in your eyes crackles. “This isn’t funny.” 

“It’s not meant to be funny, mum,” Harry croaks, voice cracking pathetically — strange how this is the most he’s ever uttered the word, mum; it’s a peculiar string of letters, foreign on his tongue. “You have tremors in your left leg from when your father cast the Cruciatus curse on you. One of your dearest friends is a Hogwarts house-elf named Pipley. You cheated on your Transfiguration essay once, and—” 

“That’s enough!” You bark, eyes narrowed in dangerous slits. “I don’t know where you heard those from, you creepy, little stalker, but if you want to keep breathing, then I suggest you shut up.” 

Harry scoffs — you don’t understand. Everything he’s learned about you is from Sirius and Remus. They talk about you with whispered devotion, your name like a prayer on their lips, their eyes glazed with wistfulness as though they could see you reaching out for them — but you were dead in Harry’s time. Yet, you might as well have been alive with their tales of you. 

(“She’s a different kind of beautiful,” Sirius had said, a year after breaking out from Azkaban, sitting by the fire in Grimmauld Place, taking a swig of decade-old firewhiskey, “The kind of beautiful you don’t want to take your eyes off from because you’re afraid she’ll disappear from your eyes. But you won’t forget her, oh no, you’ll memorize the freckles and moles on her skin, the scars from her years, the light in her eyes, and the way she holds her head up high. You should have seen her, James, she. . . she was — is glorious.”) 

“I told you,” says Harry firmly — although he loves his mother very much, she’s beginning to wear him out, “My name is Harry James Potter, I come from twenty-years in the future. You are one of my parents.” A lightbulb flashes in his head. He squirms in your hold, reaching for his robe pocket until he finds the thing he’s looking for. Harry dangles the ring in front of you, grinning in success when your eyes flash in recognition. “It’s—” 

“A family heirloom,” You say breathlessly. The alexandrite winks under the light, a familiar gold band with the Latin inscription of your House words. “Where did you steal this from?” 

Harry rolls his eyes. “You left it for me in my Gringotts vault. It’s my heirloom now. You have to believe me, there’s no way you can deny this.” 

You take a step backwards, nibbling on your lower lip, as you stagger to your bed — Harry nearly stumbling to catch you in case you fell; adjusting to the living proof of time travel was quite difficult, he, of all people, should know. He exhales, dragging a hand down his face. “Magic, amirite?” 

You throw a pillow at him, which he catches gracefully thanks to his Seeker reflexes, as you plop down in the comforts of your quilts. “Sleep. The other girls won’t be back until the end of the holiday. We can deal with whatever this is in the morning. It’s way too early for me to process the idea of a future Potter spawn following me around.” 

Harry smiles. “Yes, mum.” 

ONE THING THAT his fathers failed to tell him about you, and that Harry had to learn himself, was that you took ages to get ready. You sat on the chair in front of your vanity mirror, the birch wood legs whittled with snakes, and it was as though you had a Sticking Charm on the cushion. Harry didn’t know there could be so many creams, oils, and serums, and powders one put on their face. He blanches when you turn to offer him a cream for his under eyes. (“Suit yourself.” You shrug, turning to brush your cheek with dusts of pink. “Just saying, those dark circles aren’t doing you any favors.”)

“What am I like in the future?” You ask, a kind lilt to your voice, much like a warm hug, much like home. 

Harry stiffens, shoving his hands in pockets of the robes that were twice his size — you had given him the garments of Lucius Malfoy to change in, which you apparently had stolen from his room. It’s come full circle, really, the Sorting Hat had once told him he would be great in Slytherin, and now here he was, looking fabulous in green — because he was about to hurl at the feel of the velvet on his skin, knowing slimy Lucius Malfoy had worn it. (“No son—” You pause with a tight purse in your lips, as if you still can’t accept the fact. Harry doesn’t blame you. “—no son of mine will be parading around in red of all colors, future or not.” And Harry finds that he really doesn’t care, so long as you call him your son.)  

“Loved,” replies Harry gruffly, avoiding your eyes in the reflection of your mirror — they were piercing. One look and Harry wanted to spill all of his deepest, darkest secrets. He remembers the photographs in his album, the one he’s stared at so many times as a child. It’s a moving photograph of the five of you, fresh out of Hogwarts, each wearing a smile that stretched from ear-to-ear. Before Sirius and Remus, it was the only semblance of proof that Harry had — that you had once been alive. Remus is holding you by the waist in the picture, twirling you around as autumn leaves fell. You were — are — loved, and Harry thinks there’s no better description than that. 

(“I bloody hated her cat,” says Remus with a roguish quirk to his lips, regalling Harry with more talks of his parents. “Sirius, too. We just never got along with the little creature. But your mother loved it, and we would have done anything to make her happy. She deserved it, you see. She deserved more than what I had to offer her, but still she chose me anyway. And I am a selfish man, Harry, I crave glimpses of her and the whispers of her voice. She has made me a mad man whose only reprieve is her touch.”) 

You hum knowingly. “Stupid question, I guess. Since you aren’t allowed to reveal anything more about the future.” You sigh, gracefully threading your arms in the sleeves of your shirt, a green tie in the center of your collar. “Except, of course, when you gave me a heart attack in the middle of the night by telling me the last thing I want to become — no offense, I just don’t see how a relationship with those rowdy bunch would work. They get on my nerves far too much for me to ever feel anything other than disgust.” 

Harry doesn’t need a mirror to see that his expression has contorted in confusion; brows knitted and upper lip crinkled. By their memories of you, you all were madly in love in Hogwarts. Damn. This just made his trip to the past a lot harder. No maze seems to be ever just a maze. 

Luckily, you don’t notice him brewing a grand master plan to bring his parents together. Instead, you say, “But you don’t seem to be phased by any of this. If I had been thrown twenty years into the past, I would have puked my guts out twice at some point.” 

“Thanks for the image,” says Harry with a scowl. Truthfully, it had either been a present with a noseless Dark Lord to face, trauma to unpack but really never have the chance to, or a past where all of his parents were alive, and a chance to talk with them for however long he has. He knows where he’ll be staying, thank you very much. 

“Anytime,” You reply with an impish smile. 

Your heels pad across the floor as you walk over to him, mouth clicking as you pat the top of his head, full of wild, untameable Potter hair. “You need a trim soon,” You mutter, frowning, as you brush the thick strands away from his eyes, then you gasp — and Harry knows exactly what’s coming next. “Oh, you’ve got Evans’s eyes. That’s freaky.” 

“I know.” Harry grins. 

“Here’s the plan,” You say as you lead him out of your room, making sure no one saw him walking out of your door and getting the wrong impression — because that would be so wrong on many levels, but also, explaining to someone else that the person beside you was a time-traveller was just complicated in general. The Slytherin dungeon is unfamiliarly familiar, eerily quiet, as the two of you made your way out. “Just say you’re Potter’s distant relative, twice or thrice removed, and you’ve always been here. If you lie to their faces enough, they’ll believe it eventually.” 

“Will that work?” Harry doesn’t really mind — he needs a connection to James, his father, if he’s going to work out a connection between you and the others, because at the moment, it doesn’t seem like you’re too fond of them. There’s a tick on your jaw every time you mumble the word, Potter. Nevertheless, Harry decides he’s going to spend the duration of the holiday break trying to set you up with them — on the list of most insane things he’s ever done, living out the Parent Trap was high up the tally. 

You shrug. “They’ve fallen for less.” 

(“She’s got this adorable habit when she lies,” Sirius tells Harry, whipping up a stack of pancakes for their breakfast — Remus browsing through the morning paper. It’s the closest he’s ever been to a normal family. “It’s not obvious to her, of course, but I know her more than I know my own name. So we play along with it.” For a moment, he stops drizzling the maple syrup on the well-cooked batter, gazing at Remus fondly. “D’you remember that, Moony? She led us straight to one of her pranks, and we ended up covered in slug slime. She was so obvious — with her adorable fucking giggles. I need help with Charms, she said, and we knew right away it was a set-up. But it didn’t matter. I’d happily let her lead me to my ruin.”)  

The Great Hall is the same as Harry remembers. Now that most have returned home for the holidays, those who stay back mingle with students from other Houses, sharing meals under the bewitched ceiling, their low murmurs and hushed Christmas greetings bouncing off the walls. Harry scours the four tables to find a hint of blazing red hair, or the scent of impending trouble. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to search very far. As fate would have it, James Potter finds you — and where he is, Sirius Black is sure to follow. 

You’re barely seated when James comes bounding over to your table — more precisely, he struts, and Harry is horrified to ever be proven wrong by Snape, of all people. He ignores the roll of your eyes as he drags a leg over the bench, sitting to face you as Sirius occupies the space to your left before Harry can even sit down. He can’t even fathom how weird it is to see his parents as rambunctious teenagers. Lovesick, rambunctious teenagers. 

“Morning, dove.” James preens under your glare, stealing a grape from your bowl with a boyish smirk. His hair looks as though he’s ran his hand through it many times. “You look ravishing today.” 

“As always,” Sirius pipes in. “But that eyeshadow really isn’t complementing your skin tone, my darling.” 

You smile at him, right before your lips twist into a cutthroat sneer. “Piss off, Black.”

James stifles a laugh as he shovels a mass of potatoes on your plate, then pumpkin pasties, and slides a steaming cup of Dragon Well tea in front of you. 

“What the hell are you doing, Potter?” You reach over to smack his arm when he sprinkles apple slices and bacon on your breakfast. 

“What does it look like?” James smiles lopsidedly. “You need to eat more, honey.”

(In the future, Sirius will tell Harry, “It started off as a joke, a way to get on her nerves — but then, it just became this thing about taking care of her, making sure she got enough sleep before her tests, wondering if she had breakfast or dinner, staying with her in the library, walking her to the Slytherin common room, and sending her stupid notes just to make her laugh. You don’t get it, Harry. I’d give my every breath to ensure her life. We all would.” Harry doesn’t see Sirius any more during that evening, but he hears a bottle crashing against a wall, cracking into a million pieces, and the masked sound of Sirius sobbing, and Harry decides to leave him alone for the night.) 

Then, you tear your eyes away from James — he huffs, pushing your plate to you, mildly annoyed that you’ve deprived him of your eyes; they were his favorite part of you, you see, so expressive and full of life; James thinks you put the stars to shame — and thankfully, you remember that Harry still exists. You lightly smack Sirius’s leg until he gives Harry some room to sit. “Potter, meet other Potter. It’s the holidays, shouldn’t it be the perfect time to let go of House prejudices and spend time with family?” 

James looks at Harry up and down. “You must be from dad’s side of the family with all that hair.” 

Harry lets out a breath of relief. That was easy — way too easy. When he takes the vacant space in between you and Sirius, you dump all the available food on his plate, just as James had done for you. 

“Eat,” You say with a tone of finality. “You look like the wind could snap you in half.” 

“Yes, m—” Harry stops himself before he could finish his sentence, avoiding Sirius’s curious gaze. 

“Wow.” Sirius pokes Harry in the shoulder and in the cheek. “You really look like a mini-James, you’ve even got his terrible eyesight.” 

“Oi!” 

Your fork clatters against the silverware as you turn to Sirius with a shrill. “Not that I do enjoy your company — because, trust me, I do not want you here at all and would very much prefer if you got out of my sight — but why are you here? The Gryffindor table is over there. Unless your housemates finally got sick of you, Potter, which I can definitely see happening.” 

James chuckles, tossing another grape in his mouth without taking his eyes off you. “It’s as you said, isn’t it? It’s the time for putting aside House prejudices. And I think it’s a lovely day to enjoy a meal with my favorite snake.” 

“Drop dead,” You retort, digging into your chicken with a little more force than necessary. 

“Oh, dove.” James shakes his head, a teasing grin pulling at his lips. “It’s cute that you think death will keep me from you.” 

(Harry’s been told before, probably by Sirius, that this line had been wedged into his wedding vows for you. “A dramatic one, James was,” Sirius chuckles to himself one morning, Harry and Hermione listening intently, “He always said he’d rather die than ever hurt her. There was this time in seventh year, they had a fight — it was ugly — and she had ignored him for a week. James cried in Remus’s arms begging him to cut his heart out, saying that he didn’t deserve to keep on breathing, not after making you cry.”) 

“That is so creepy,” You say in disgust, scrunching your nose. Sirius chortles at your side. “I still wonder why Evans agreed to go out with you.” 

“It’s all part of the charm, dove.” James winks. “It’s all part of the charm.” 

Harry wants to barf, actually.

After breakfast, James then decides to introduce Harry to Lily, Remus, and Peter. (He’s gonna need the patience of a saint to not Avada Kedavra that rat on the spot.) Harry had spent the whole morning watching Sirius peel oranges and give them to you with a smitten look in his eyes — naturally, you gave whatever Sirius offered you to Harry, and each time Padfoot would visibly wilt. If he were in his Animagus form, Harry thinks he would be whining by now, tongue out and all. James and Sirius follow after you like lost puppies when you extricate yourself from the table.

“Where are you going?” James calls, hot on your heels as you leave the Great Hall.

“Away from you, Potter!” 

And James actually sighs when you turn the corner and disappear from their peripheral vision. Seconds later, he turns to Harry with a blinding smile, “She’s definitely charmed.”

Harry chortles.

“Well, come on then!” James guffaws as he wraps an arm around Harry’s neck — this is so, so strange. They begin walking in the opposite direction of where you went. “I still can’t believe we’ve got another Potter here and in Slytherin. I think I would have remembered Minnie calling your name during the Sorting Ceremony. What year are you in?” 

He’s supposed to start his sixth-year in a few weeks. “Fifth.” Technically. 

“We should ask Lily,” says Sirius, hands in his pockets and ebony ringlets tickling his nape. “She’s got the best memory out of all of us.”

It’s odd, Harry thinks, meeting the person who’s got his eyes — or the other way around, as people have told him. It’s like someone carved out the emeralds of Lily Evans’s eyes and bestowed it upon Harry for safekeeping. She sits beside Remus Lupin, head resting on his shoulder, hands clasped together, as they enjoy the shade. Nex to them, oblivious to their intimate conversation, is Peter Pettigrew — with his rosy, cherub cheeks and innocent blue eyes; not at all the image of a pathological, cowardly liar. Their heads snap in attention as James boisterously cries for their name. 

“Marauders — and Lily-pad — meet ickle Potter.” James lightheartedly whacks Harry on the back, to which Harry feels his lungs spill out from his mouth, he’s sure there’s an imprint of his father’s hand on his back now. 

“There’s two Potters in Hogwarts?” Sea-green eyes look at him in scrutiny as Lily knits her brows. “How even is the castle still standing?” 

James cackles like it’s the best joke he’s ever heard in his entire life, slapping his knee for dramatic effect. Oh, well, at least they’re buying Harry’s half-baked lie. At this point, it’s not even baked, it’s just wet, soggy, and poorly done. “Good one, Lily-pad!”

Sirius ruffles Remus’s shaggy blonde hair, canines bared in a wide grin. “This one here’s Moony, uptight prefect in the morning and absolute beast in the evening.” 

Harry blanches. Surely he was talking about his furry problem, right? Right? 

Remus doesn’t even flinch, just peels off Sirius’s hand from him and extends his hand out to Harry. “Please do not mind him. Remus Lupin, nice to meet you. Although, I can’t believe this is the first time we’ve met. We would have definitely remembered if we had another Potter in our midst.” 

“It’s true, we Potters are just hard to forget,” says James, smiling cheekily. 

Harry pokes the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Mum didn’t take the Potter name. I’m part Dursley. Muggle.” 

Lily hums, toying at the ends of her bright hair. “Dursley, huh? What a familiar name.” 

“It’s a common one,” Harry assures her — not at all the names of the people who would take him in after they died. And make his life miserable. 

“I suppose you’re right,” says Lily, unconvinced. 

“And this is Peter.” James introduces the boy eagerly, pride in his voice — as though this isn’t the person who literally allies himself with Voldemort. As if Peter won’t betray his friends all because of fear. 

“N–Nice to meet you,” Peter stammers with a nervous fidget, “Any family of James is a friend of ours.” 

Harry’s eye twitches. 

IT IS ALMOST COMICAL — the way their eyes land on your figure, bursting through the courtyard from the corridors, winter cloak swishing with every step, tendrils of hair swaying in the crisp wind, and head held up high, thick books under your arms. You pause in front of the Marauders, face blank, then you turn to Peter, greeting him with a: “Hello, only Gryffindor I can tolerate.” 

Peter’s cheeks burn a saccharine hue of pink. Oh, no, no, no — absolutely not — Harry will not stand for a little crush Peter Pettigrew has on his mother. He needs James to act now. “Hi,” Peter replies shyly. 

Lily quirks her lips. “Hello, princess, see your score for the Astronomy test yet?”

You scowl. “Zip it, Evans.” 

The sound of Lily’s laughter fills the atmosphere — it’s the sort of melody that makes flowers bloom in deserts. “Had a bit of difficulty with the star charts?” 

Sirius pinches your cheek — Harry thinks you’re going to murder him on the spot. “Difficulty? I think this one just slept through the whole thing.” 

James snickers. “Must have been one hell of a nap, princess. You were drooling on my jumper.” 

“I most certainly do not drool!” You gasp, appalled, eyes wide as you step away from Sirius.

Sirius rolls his eyes. “What? Is drooling too barbaric for the pretty, little pure-blooded princess now? Newsflash, pet, you’re just as human as we are.” 

“Oh, you horrible, loathsome, infuriating—” You whip around to beat his chest with the course book in your grasp — it’s the kind of book Hermione would consider for light reading. 

“Irresistibly attractive—?” Sirius supplies for you, grin widening with as he captures your wrist with his hands. 

“In your dreams!” You shrill. 

You exhale slowly, eyes closing, chest rising when you take a sharp inhale. You open your eyes and stare straight at Harry — for a moment he fears that you’ll bite his head off. “Harry, dear, will you accompany me to the library? I think I’ve found something important regarding your situation.” 

Harry nods. “Is it time already?” 

“Yes,” You say firmly. “And time is of the essence. Come on.” 

“Wait!” Lily calls out to you as you turn to head back to the castle, Harry in tow — he tries to avoid the way James is glaring at your linked arms. “Hogsmeade next week?” 

Your jaw falls to the ground — this must have been unrehearsed, if the others’ reactions were anything to go by; Remus had dropped his book in shock, Sirius looked like he couldn’t decide between applauding Lily’s bravery or shaking her, and James was somehow frozen in time. “Excuse me?” 

“You’re excused, princess,” says Lily, dimples poking out of her cheek as she takes another step towards you. “You, me, Hogsmeade. A date. I’m sure you’ve gone on one of those before.” 

Harry elbows your stomach as you stare at Lily in shock. It takes a few moments to break you out of your stupor. “A–And what makes you think I’ll just go with you?” 

Lily shrugs. “I’m fit. Aren’t I, Remus?” 

“The fittest,” says Remus without missing a beat. 

You laugh incredulously. “Do you just expect me to go along with this? You’re mad, Evans.” 

Harry glares at you. You need to go along with this. 

“Are you scared, princess?” Lily’s face is inches away from yours, noses almost touching — Harry doesn’t know if he should keep watching this painful way of flirting — as she grins at you, happiness barely contained within her eyes. 

To your credit, you don’t back down. (Harry has to say this for the masses: he saw your gaze flitter down to Lily’s lips for a split second.) “Stop calling me that, Evans.” 

“One date, then.” 

You growl in exasperation, eyes flickering to the boys behind her back — pretending not to hear their conversation. “I suppose I’ll have to deal with them as well?” 

Lily beams and Harry swears sunflowers could grow in her direction. “We’re a package deal.” 

“Unfortunately,” You utter — but Harry notices it, the lack of venom in your voice. You straighten your posture, nose lifted haughtily, “I choose where we’re going.” 

“Done.” The sun peeks out from the cloud just as Lily smiles at you. 

“And I want to—” 

“Done,” Remus interjects raspily, peering up at you from underneath his lashes. “Anything you want, it’s yours.” 

You fight a growing smile, but continue, “If we’re going out in public, you’re going to have to wear—” 

“Done,” says James giddily, he looks as though he could kiss you in front of everyone without a care in the world.  

“You can’t just agree to anything I say!” You flap your arms in frustration. 

“Yes, dear,” Sirius teases. 

“Do you know how much you piss me off, Black?” You squawk. “Because you are this close to—”

“You are so fucking beautiful,” Sirius confesses, every pretense shed raw from his skin, sincerity pouring from his words. 

“I—” You falter, heat rushing to your cheeks. “You’ve gone mad.” 

“It’s your fault, dove,” says James, eyes twinkling like crescent moons as he smiles. “You best take accountability for this.” 

“You’re incorrigible — all of you,” You say as you avoid their gazes.

(But they were yours. Past, present, and future. They loved you so much that their soul was no longer their own — it was yours; yours to keep, yours to break, and yours to love. It would be unjust to ask them why they loved you. Do we ask why the sun rises each day without rest? Do we ask a daisy to stop blooming, or a tree to stop growing after it has endured storms and floods? After all, we do not ask why humans follow the light in a tunnel shrouded in darkness.) 

“Come on, Harry, let’s go.” You reach for his hand, he notices immediately that the tips of your ears are pink, and your palms are warm with sweat. He barely sees Peter wave goodbye before you tug him in the direction of the castle entrance. 

“Wait up!” Remus catches up to you two in quick strides, offering to carry your books for you — not that you agree, stubborn Slytherin that you are. “I’ll walk you to the library.” 

“There’s no need for that, Lupin, thank you.” You dodge his eyes, lips tightly pressed together, nails slightly digging into Harry’s arm. 

“Remus,” He says with a twinkle. “Call me Remus.” 

“Alright.” You pause. “Remus.” 

(In that moment, Remus wonders if you remember decking Lucius Malfoy in the face to defend him in your fourth year. He didn’t think he deserved to even breathe in the same air as you — the pure-blooded princess, dressed in clothing worth more than his life, adorned in jewelry he could only dream to afford, raised to believe she was better than everyone else. Then, you beat up Evan Rosier the next month in the courtyard, eyes ablaze, extravagant silk marred with grass stains and mud, and knuckles split open. You spit blood on the ground, looking at Lily then back at Rosier. “Red,” You say, kicking him one last time in the stomach, unafraid of McGonagall’s wrath growing louder and louder. “Just like everyone else. Like those Muggleborns you fear. We’ve all got dirty blood, Rosier. Suck it up.” 

“I’ll tell your father about this!” Rosier bellows through bloody teeth. 

“Tell him!” You grab his neck and slam your forehead against his. “Tell him that I decide my own future now!”

Remus doesn’t even have to think about it. 

He falls in love.) 

FUNNILY ENOUGH, IT’S LILY who gives you her heart first, before anyone else does. It’s the last month of her first year at Hogwarts — it still hasn’t quite sunk in yet that she was a witch. Her, not Petunia, but her — Lily Evans, the witch. Apparently, some people can’t believe it either. A girl from Ravenclaw calls her this foul word, she’s heard it a few times now but it always hurts the same. James and Sirius get into a fight for her honor, now faced with detention later this evening. But she can’t help but wonder, what if they were right? What if she really didn’t belong in this world? It was too good to be true, anyway. Perhaps she’ll just run a flower boutique with Petunia.

“Oi.” 

The sound of your voice startles her, and she nearly topples over in the Great Lake. Lily catches sight of your Slytherin colors and resigns herself to another round of name-calling. “What do you want?” 

“They’re wrong, you know,” You tell her, ignoring Lily’s question. You look down on her with your nose raised arrogantly — she wishes she could be like you. Born to be magic. “You’ve got a terrifying brain locked up in your head there, Evans. And they know it, too. They’re scared.” 

Lily scoffs. “I’m just a Mudblood to them. There’s nothing to be intimidated by.” 

You sneer. “Don’t say that word. You’re more than that. More than them. They’ve got long ways to go to prove they have a place in this world. But you — you’ve defied the odds and you were destined to become magic. You don’t have to prove anything. You have the right to be in the wizarding world and no one can take that away from you.” 

Then, you pivot on your heels, not bothering to hear her reply. “You’re my rival now, Evans. Do keep up. We’ve got an Astronomy test tomorrow. I look forward to seeing how you do then.” 

Lily just gapes. She’s certain there’s butterflies in her stomach. Her heart thumps wildly against her ribcage. Lily raises her hands to feel her blushing cheeks. There’s a light unfamiliar sensation in her stomach — like the urge to kick her legs and scream into a pillow, or more precisely, chase after you and hold your hand.

She stiffens.

Oh.

part two

[simpjaes]

666 ― S.JY

When does an interest in the supernatural become unnatural? You’d say right around the time a spirit told you to write his name with your own��.body fluids

minors dni! | reblog to summon a hot demon

WORDCOUNT― 4.8k

PAIRING― demon!Jake x reader (ft. boyfriend Sunghoon)

CONTENT― Jake the jealous demon and is also a massive cocky asshole, reader the instigator. made up sex magic, Jake is A VERY horny demon. sunghoon also wants demon jake. peep the smut tags lol

WARNINGS ― infidelity but like ur cheating with a sex demon so, some instances could be mistaken for manipulation

NOTE― this is a halloween fic that i forgot about that i wrote for haechan on my other blog ncteez. if you’re one of the few who actually read this before, just know that I am the same person!!!!!!!!!!! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!

smut tags under cut:: 

smut tags― cock mimicking (demon fucks you with your boyfriend’s cock), forked tongue play, finger fucking, ghostly foreplay, HUGE MASSIVE COCK PENETRATION, mind reading, horns react to touch the same way a cock does ・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

You've always been into halloween, Sunghoon just thought it was a cute little quirk of yours. Until he started dating you and realized that...it's not just halloween that you're into. It's just a general list of things that would be considered disturbing on any other month that isn't october.

Deities, spirits, ghouls, demons, bones, death, blood.

He's supportive, of course. October is one of the months you're allowed to openly enjoy these things, because everyone pretends to like them too at this time of year. Temporary stores open up to sell the congealed fake blood, ouija boards are moved to the outside aisles of retail stores, and of course, everything is on sale.

This is great for Sunghoon because, as your boyfriend, he knows you celebrate the month of halloween more than you celebrate your own birthday, and the gifts can be plentiful.

Lately, you've been more interested in spirit work too, so when he's on his way home from work to see you, stopping by one of those chaotic halloween stores to grab a fancy, way too expensive if not on sale ouija board? It was a given.

Anything to see that cute smile on your face.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

Well. The ouija board miiiiiight have been a mistake on his part.

Knowing next to nothing on spirit work, he wasn't expecting a board game sold in children's stores to actually pick anything up for you. Yet, night after night when he comes home, you approach him with a tight hug, an excited smile, and stories of which spirit gave you their name this time.

You, on the other hand, claim to know more about spirit work than you actually do. You did not expect to get any type of response either, especially in this pristine apartment that you assume no one has died in yet.

You learned fast though. Research, research, research.

"Today I learned that spirits aren't actually trapped in one space like all the ghost movies try to say. They might be connected but they can freely come and go." You smile against Sunghoon as he settles himself on the couch, freshly showered after work.

"You really like playing with that thing, huh?" He smiles back, still believing in the shallowness of it all, when it comes to corporate companies selling boards for people to "connect with loved ones".

Nodding to him, you stand up and look at him expectantly.

"Do you wanna try?"

He's reluctant at first. As much as he supports you and your interests, they aren't his.

He's great at humoring you though. Amazing, even.

"Yeah, why not?" He smiles, standing to his tired feet and following you into the bedroom.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

"Two fingers on both hands," You quietly guide him on how to use it. "If you're not comfortable asking questions, I can do it."

Sunghoon nods casually, still not quite believing in the gimmick but loving the way you're so passionate.

"I don't mind asking, can I try?"

You frown, knowing exactly what will happen when he does.

"Yeah, of course!" You turn your frown into something unreadable, hoping that the same spirit you've been talking to is off at some middle school party switching the lights to get a kick out of it.

Then, there's silence. The candle's flame that you had previously lit bounces in the still air, indicating that tonight is already primed for the various spirits you've willingly accepted into your space.

"Uh," Sunghoon suddenly feels awkward, speaking out to nothing in the room when you're right in front of him, watching him. "Hello?"

You snicker at his awkwardness, knowing that you felt it too.

"Is there anything–anyone– here tonight? We'd like to talk."

Here's the thing. From the moment you started fucking with this oujia board, you never watched your words. You assumed that using proper grammar when speaking wouldn't matter much, considering they're dead and all. You keep it respectful, of course, but...

Anything being in your apartment is a huge difference compared to anyone.

The anythings tend to make a run for it, and the anyones are forced to stay away from the dangerous energy you're unintentionally inviting.

Speaking of the anythings, there's a regular. If your frown from moments ago is anything to go by. A vulgar spirit which you know as nothing more than "Jae".

Jae, the spirit, claims to be in his twenties, slides the planchette with just your fingers on it to numbers and letters with ease, and also is very fond of sarcasm, apparently.

The last time you spoke with this specific spirit, it ended it you asking him if he left any loved ones behind when he died. The board said yes, Jae said yes.

He claimed to be male, he claimed to have died ten years ago, and claims to have been in love.

And when you tried to relate, speaking of your boyfriend, saying your boyfriend's name, the spirit stopped responding. In fact, the board flew straight across your room as you spoke of Sunghoon.

Arguably, you were thrown off and only a little bit afraid. You definitely weren't the one who swiped the board off your bed, letting it hit your wall.

Which is why, while inviting Sunghoon to try the board, you hope that said spirit is off doing other things.

Which he's not.

Sunghoon's eyes nearly roll when he feels the planchette pull, dragging to the word of "yes" after you spoke out after his awkward greeting.

"You're pulling it, right?"

You ignore him, already locked in and staring at the board.

"Can you give me your name?" You whisper, now glancing up to Sunghoon and waiting for the planchette to move again.

It does, straight to the "J", and as it continues, you lift your hands out of discomfort, unintentionally proving to your boyfriend that you're not moving it.

"A" Sunghoon whispers as he stares in disbelief, feeling his hands move against the ghostly board. "E."

And when the planchette stops, he looks at you.

"Why'd you let go?" He says, glancing between both you and the board. "This is insane!" A smile.

You can see the same excitement you had the first time it moved for you, but the fact that the same spirit is back, after rudely throwing your board across the room at the mere mention of Sunghoon is a bit worrisome.

"Jae?" Sunghoon calls out, now feeling the adrenaline in his blood push past the anxiety of talking to nothing. "How did you die?"

"Sunghoon! You can't just ask him that!"

"Him?" Sunghoon side eyes you. "What makes you think it's a guy?"

You avoid eye contact.

"Well," You tick your tongue. "He's kind of told me like, two weeks ago. Plus, that’s a dude’s name."

Sunghoon laughs, making jokes. This is harmless. This is fun.

"Oh?" Sunghoon tilts his head, lifting his fingers to encourage you to place yours back against the planchette too. "Jae, have you been flirting with my girlfriend?"

It was a joke of a question, and quite disrespectful in your mind for him to ask such a thing, but the way the planchette moves to "yes" has you sweating, and kind of, smiling.

A spirit, jealous of Sunghoon? Not something you had on your bingo card for the year.

"So you think I'm pretty?" You smile, avoiding your boyfriend's eye and watching the planchette move over to "no".

Your smile falls, and the planchette moves again.

"H."

"O."

"T."

You actually cannot explain the warmth inside of you. Flirting with a ghost, while your boyfriend participates? Hilarious scenario, surely Sunghoon isn't taking this seriously.

"You're moving it now, there's no way some dead guy is coming after my girl." Sunghoon chuckles, shaking his head.

The planchette responds, moving to "no."

"Alright, stop fucking around." Sunghoon narrows his eyes at you. "A spirit wouldn't take the energy to contact us just to call you hot."

The planchette responds again, moving to the letter "B."

"Take your hands off again, there's no way." He seems more concerned this time.

"I."

"T."

"C."

"H."

Sunghoon's mouth falls open.

"Who are you calling a bitch? Me, or my very hot girlfriend that you can't have?"

"Y."

"O."

And as the planchette makes it way over to the "u" Sunghoon lifts his hands and glares at every empty space around the room.

"He just called me a bitch." Sunghoon rolls his eyes. "There is a spirit in this room, who thinks i'm a bitch."

You laugh uncomfortably, and he laughs more casually.

"Well, that was fun, I guess." Sunghoon continues, standing to his feet as you cross your fingers that the board wont go flying into his head. "I'm gonna go take a shower then."

He kisses you gently on the forehead and leaves you alone in the room where, obviously, you're still not alone.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

Days pass and Halloween draws closer as you are both drawn to and forcing yourself away from the ouija board.

Something calls you to it. Whispers of your name when Sunghoon isn't home, feather light touches that raise your skin, nightmares, but your gut tells you to stay away.

Can you though? Can you really resist such a strange happening?

Of course not.

Spirit work is fun, but you can't help but wonder if this entity is a spirit at all. Out of all the research, people rarely get more than one to two answers during a session of Ouija. This Jae thing seems to hold a lot of energy, an entire personality, and the ability to haunt you in a way that makes you feel weirdly.......safe?

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

"Jae, are you here?" You call out in the early morning, the oujia board tucked safely under your bed as you lay there.

Your curtains move as if the window is open.

"The dream I had last night, was that you?" You continue to speak into the void, allowing it to speak back.

Except it doesn't speak back, it touches. You feel your ankle being tugged, as you scoot down the bed.

Most people would scream. Most people would call a priest. Most people wouldn't want to be alone with it. Then again, you're not most people.

You laugh, scooting yourself back up on the bed.

"I wish I could see what you really look like. In my dreams, you're just a shadow."

Another tug, and then the oujia board goes sliding out from under your bed, indicating that he wants to communicate better with you.

You take the bait, lying the board out with your sleepy eyes and drowsily smiling at the empty space in front of you.

Before you can even place your hands on the planchette, it's moving.

"S"

"U"

"M"

"M"

"O"

"N"

You should probably be running for the hills after that, but you don't. You sit, still drowsy.

"How would I manage to do that?"

"S"

"L"

"E"

"E"

"P"

And for some reason, you do. Instantly, you go back to sleep. Despite waking up without an alarm, the drowsy feeling stayed throughout your morning conversation with the spirit in your apartment. Dozing off came easy, with the oujia board still in front of you.

And there, you dream despite knowing that the sun is hitting your face as you sleep. You can feel the warmth of it in the dream as a creature, no, a man, approaches you in an empty expanse of fog.

In your dream, you cannot speak despite trying to. No voice comes out, but the man speaks smoothly, fuzzy and distorted face slowly untwisting itself into that of an actual man.

That's him. You can feel it through your heavy sleep, your hairs raising both in the astral realm and in your waking body.

"You want to summon me?" The man asks, smiling at you in a heavenly way. "You have to say my full name."

You can't speak back, but he continues.

"You have to be alone, though others can still join if the door is open. On both ends."

You stand, listening to his echoed voice through the fog.

"If you want me in the physical form, you have to do something physical for me." He continues, stepping closer and closer until his body is nearly going through you. "Say my name each time you're pleasured, and write my name against your skin with the mess of it."

You quirk a brow, and the form in front of you smiles.

"What? You thought I'd let you summon me for anything else? I've been here for thousands of years."

You thought he died ten years ago.

"Angel pussy only gets so tight, you know."

Vulgar. Yet, your physical body is tingling. Angel pussy? Is he an angel? From a religion you don't even believe in?

He notes the confusion on your dreaming face.

"You see me now, my face, if you want to feel me too, you'll do as I say." His dreamed up voice is something you know you've never heard before. His face, someone you've never seen.

You know it's not possible to dream of a physical person you've never seen, and he's so clear to you at this moment. Practically feeling his voice blow in your face.

His hair, messy, almost wet looking. His eyes are piercing, his lips, pretty.

You nod, and he smiles.

"And don't invite your boyfriend."

Then, you snap awake. Feeling as if you've just had the wettest of dreams.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

Naturally, you listened to the figure in the dream, using every pleasurable mess your body makes to write his name on your skin. A name which came to you without him stating it at all in the dream.

Days go by, his name remains on your skin.

Halloween comes and, well, so does Sim Jaeyun. 

Finally.

October 30th, 11:59am is the last moment of your life where you'll be curious. October 31st, 12:00am is the first moment of your life where a ghostly touch became a real one.

You were awake, of course you were. And alone.

Sunghoon tends to spend the 30th with you, and the 31st with his parents, helping to tend to the haunted house his family likes to throw each year.

"You're alone?" You hear, whispered against your ear as you slouch against the couch.

The echoed voice is all to familiar, sending a shock through your body in an instant and you turn, only to see nothing.

"Jae?" You question into the air, glancing around the room.

A deep chuckle is heard in your other ear, and a cold feeling is felt against your cheek.

"Entirely alone?" The voice sounds out.

"I've done what you told me to do, and I still can't see you.”

"I know." The voice sounds further away now, and you follow it all too easily.

Straight into your room, you follow the whispers. You see the board get thrown again, and you tilt your head.

"You're upset?" You question to the emptiness, and you get no response at all until you feel it.

Ice cold pressure running from your ankles to the nape of your neck. Traveling up and down your body until you can barely stand the feeling of goosebumps refusing to go down.

Thunder. Lightening, and then the sound of raining rattling against your window.

You sigh at the new feeling, your legs moving on their own to your bed as you lay against it in a feeling of cold comfort.

"One more time." You feel the whisper before you truly hear it, a weight on your bed, a weight hovering over you. "Write my name."

The ice cold feeling strikes between your legs, instantly giving you the very material to do as he says. And you do, dipping your fingers between your legs in awe at the feeling of how fast you manage to get wet over this.

And there, you feel the weight against your hand, almost as if he's writing his name himself against your thigh.

And you wait.

and wait.

and wait, until....

"Close your eyes."

You do, not daring to open them until he says. You feel that ice cold energy leave, replaced with a searing hot feeling, something that makes you sweat, something that makes you shake.

You hear shuffling, you hear your bedroom door opening and closing, you hear mumbled whispers in a different language, and then you hear his voice in real space. Bouncing off your walls rather than being implied right up against your ear.

"Open your eyes."

You open them to your empty room sitting just as you left it, the air feeling neutral, the oujia board looking much less magical as it lays on the floor. Then you hear your door open. Instantly your eyes glance to the space there.

"It's you." You whisper out, looking him up and down, feeling overwhelmed, and quite frankly, astonished.

"Of course it's me, you summoned me." The figure smiles, looking nothing more than a man despite something being...off. Which is obvious, but still stirs your stomach uncomfortably.

"You're no spirit, are you?" You blurt, unsure of how rude it may seem to him.

"Oh no, clearly not." The figure looms over, taking visible strides towards you before holding his hand out to truly feel you for the first time. "I got you good though, didn't I?"

"What are you, then?" You question, ignoring that you've been writing his name on your skin day after day with the slick your orgasms produce.

"Does it matter? I'm only here physically for the night." He glares deeply at your questions. So willing to bring him here, but so unwilling to complete the other half of the deal that he, maybe, didn't expand on in previous communications.

You stare at him, still trying to process that the so-called spirit you were so excited to speak to before, is here, now, in flesh. With a voice, and a body that doesn't entirely appear to be breathing at all. He looks so human, so, so, human, yet so....not.

He doesn't falter at your reaction much longer though. It's been hundreds of years since he's managed to get a woman to call out for him in such a vulgar way. It was funny to him, really, looming in every corner watching you do as he instructed. Reading your mind when you're intimate with Sunghoon.

"Last night– you were thinking of me instead.." Jaeyun smiles warmly, uncaring of how strongly he comes off because opinions and thoughts are something he is well versed in.

He can read everything you're thinking, and you want it. He's gentle when he moves to you, claiming his spot hovering over you, staring down at your eyes. He never knew what it was like to look at someone, to cherish and love, even. He only knows how to look into and through a person.

"I did." You admit, unable to look away from him, unable to feel fear, or pretend that you want to squirm away from his weight loosely pinning you against the bed. "Were you always here? Watching?"

He nods with a smile.

"Quite pretty when you're writing my name," He comments, leaning down to lick against your bottom lip. "If only you knew what it all meant, in the grand scheme of things."

"Hm?" You try to question, feeling like you're in a trance by the way his tongue flicks out so quickly, satiating your entire body with just that single act.

"Six times." He breathes. "You did so well."

You sigh at the feeling of nothing, as he pulls his face back from yours. There's still a ghostly pressure against all of the right places, and he's very aware of it.

"I own you." He comments with a chuckle, moving his hand down your body to feel the wet he created with no effort at all. "You'll never be rid of me."

You find....great pleasure in that. He knows you do. Even if he couldn't read every thought behind your eyes, the way your body moves toward his hand is enough to go by.

Humans, so desperate. So obsessed with praise, so...selfish. Just like him. Time and time again, he will grow bored of the sex other realms offer. It doesn't matter how many forms of fog he can get his claws on. Becoming human, being with a human, it sears hotter for him.

Makes him hotter. Makes him feel like the god who damned him.

"I'm a demon, babe." He laughs, now effectively thrusting two fingers into you and enjoying the way you seethe out at the heat he can't help but emit.

Deep down, you knew. You accepted it. You brought him here, you kept him here. You simply don't care. Otherworldly beings are meant to give curiosity. Who cares if you gave in? You didn't know where your everlasting soul would end up anyway, at least now you know that it'll end up with this....humanly thing who works his fingers like magic.

Because it is magic. Hellish magic.

"Is this what you always look like?" You ask, "Is this what you always sound like?"

The demon chuckles against your throat, fingers making little effort in the way it quite literally feels like you're already having the best sex of your human life.

"Does it matter? You gave yourself to me, I can be whatever you want me to be." He whispers out, licking against your naked skin.

That's right. Somehow, you're undressed. You felt no fabric, and you could honestly care less if he snapped them into the void.

You moan at the feeling, comprehending only slightly how his tongue went from flat and humanly to...forked. Two tips of his tongue, wrapped around your nipple, moving smoothly, wetly, hotly against you in a way that feels as blasphemous as it looks.

And when you reach up, on your very earthly instinct to grip his hair, you're met with a pair of curled horns.

You moan again, and he chuckles, knowing that this is for your pleasure, not his own quite yet.

"You can touch them." He insists, sliding his fingers out of you and writing his name again against your thigh, essentially sealing the contract you already agreed to. "You'll have no choice but to hold on to them later."

You, for some reason, take that promise as if it is seared into your fate. Forever damned to take hold of a demon's horns, forever blessed to be fucked by him.

"I like that thought," the demon chuckles with a second voice, seemingly penetrating your thoughts more than the place between your legs right now. "Blessed." He smiles, tongue long as it remains against your nipple and yet, he still is able to lift up to make eye contact with you. "Cute."

You're so entranced by the happenings in this moment, that Sunghoon seems...lesser. He feels like the past to you, as you feel and experience a hellish hand, and a hellish tongue. Soon, possibly, to experience whatever kind of cock demons have.

"Lesser? Fitting." he comments straight into your thoughts with that second voice, soothing your ambitions of being anyone other than his. "and my cock..."

You listen so intently to that second voice, your body is burning up with pleasure. The way he continues to write his name on your skin somehow feels better than when his fingers were inside of you. All of it feels better than anything you've ever felt in your life.

"It can be more, can be less, can be bigger, smaller, doubled, tripled, and even..." His secondary voice pauses with a chuckle, "if you're into experimenting, i am and will be whatever body you're interested in being fucked by."

That...seems exciting.

And it is. Trading a human life for whatever the fuck this is seems like such a great idea. Entranced or not, you still have a mind of your own and it's one that wanted this. He knows it, you know it, and no one else needs to know it.

"That's right, work your little brain." He pulls back, leaving your nipples more than swollen while he uses his real voice. Raspy, vulgar, enticing. "You made this choice." He taunts, flattening his palm against your thigh and pressing your legs open, hooking one above his other leg and instantly sliding into you.

The moment he hears your thoughts, searing in the pain you summoned upon yourself, he smiles. He coos out, pitying the way you so willingly want this deal to be real. And oh, it's so real.

That pain you're feeling with the cock he perfected just for you. He knows what you want.

"Familiar?" He smiles wickedly against your neck, darting his tongue out to lick a searing heat against you.

You can barely think through the feeling of his cock practically morphing inside of you. The pain from before, with the large hardened length turning into that of something...not only familiar but, too familiar.

He's fucking you with Sunghoon's cock, and can't help but notice how much you fight against wanting anything other than that.

"Too familiar?" He repeats your thoughts, stretching you open more than you think you ever have been, as his cock becomes thicker, heavier, hotter. "So, mine will do then?"

You try to nod, but you're a bit busy trying to comprehend the fact that a demon cock is quite literally tearing you apart right now, on Halloween fucking night. How grossly cliche.

"We like gross though, don't we?" He smiles, pulling his length out only a bit, and feeling the way your pussy grips it as if you'd find a way to threaten him for not keeping you filled to the brim. "You like feeling like you're being split in half, don't you?"

You do nod this time, arms reaching up to his horns and squeezing tightly. He grunts at it, loving the feeling of someone touching on him while lying helpless beneath him. Such willpower you have, such willpower you don't want.

He feels what you feel, that pain? You love it. The warmth in his horns? Nearly pulsing against your palms at the pleasure of this act? You love that too.

"It's like you were made for the hells, babe." He comments snidely, pulling out, then pushing into you roughly. "Made just for me." He continues, claiming you, fucking you, all while knowing that you're already his. 

All while knowing that there's another person entering this apartment, and you're too far gone to pretend that this isn't temptation. It's willingful lust, and it's a deed you signed for.

"Weren't you?" His secondary voice demands that you respond with your voice rather than your thoughts, as he continuously stimulates your entire body through his own made up form.

"Weren't you?" He echoes again, real and secondary voice now filling your senses alongside the squeezing in your gut, your g-spot stimulated by a demon cock seemingly built for doing just this. A body built for pleasure, a demon created for it.

"Weren't you?" He echoes through a seethed whisper, tongue darting out and between your lips, forcing an answer from you.

You wail out in pleasure, sheer lack of humanity showing through the sound. He loves the way you sob a "yes!" through amazement. Humans aren't meant to comprehend what he's doing to you, or what he will do to you.

Humans aren't meant to accept seeing either, yet, here comes Sunghoon. Sprinting to the room where he's just heard his beloved girlfriend scream.

Only to find you gripping onto a pair of pulsing horns. Legs spread wider for this creature than they ever were for him. A forked tongue looking as if it's sucking the life straight from your throat.

But those screams aren't from pain, Sunghoon sees it plainly.

The sound of a cock too big for you, pleasuring you. The grip you have on this creature, and the grip that creature has on you.

Sunghoon can't find it in him to even ask what the fuck is going on. He just stands there frozen, knowing you don't notice him there. Who would?!

The creature, makes eye contact.

"I tried to fuck her with your cock," It echoes out to him in a, almost apologetic voice and it sends shivers down his spine. "She needed more."

Sunghoon is still standing in the doorway of your bedroom. Frozen solid, his heart is racing as he watches that he's not only being cheated on but like, goddamn, with a fucking....thing?! Not even a person?

Your ears are ringing, sure you've orgasms a dozen times by now, both feeling all of it and not feeling any of it at all because the demon just keeps going. Listening to your every thought, cooing at each orgasm and willing more, more, more. Until he can trace his name six hundred and sixty six times into your skin. "You could be mine too, Sunghoon." The demon calls out, forcing his voice into the man's head, reading every thought, half-assed prayer, and unbelievable idea of trying to intervene. "I know you want to."