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sinking-in-a-gentle-pool-of-wine · 15 days

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Green // Sebastian Sallow x MC fic (pt. 1???)

Word Count: 2600+

Warnings: All characters aged 18+

A/N: I’ve been wanting to try 3rd person POV again so I’m experimenting with a longer form thing idk how many parts there’ll be! I also wanted to explore more of MC’s backstory so that’s why that’s there LMAO okay bye

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Green had always been her favorite color.

It represented life, the endless cycle of leaves changing and grass growing and plants speaking with one another. The fabric of her father’s forest green sweater, which hung off her like a dress when she’d put it on in the falls during breaks from school. The translucent spray of juice when her mother would make fresh limeade in the summer. The faded paint on the walls of her room, littered with pencil sketches she promised her mother she could always erase when and if the time came to sell the house.

It was the color of the carriage that she had watched her parents get into the last night she saw them. She had received her letter from Hogwarts the week prior, and her parents had been elated. They’d always told her that she had countless gifts—“And Lord knows who you got ‘em from!” her dad would say—so, her invitation had almost come as no surprise to them.

The existence of a school for witchcraft and wizardry, of course, had come as quite the shock—to MC as well. Her world had felt flipped on its head. The thought of leaving her current school excited her, no doubt; she had never felt adept at making—or retaining—a great number of friends. So, she thought, perhaps it was due to the fact that she was not meant to fit or make her way in this world, after all. The students in class with her had always scorned her unending curiosity; she believed each class offered something valuable and necessary to learn. It had often appeared feigned to those around her, though—a desire to move up in the academic hierarchy, to garner the teachers’ attention—despite her best efforts to illustrate her sincerity. The illustration of sincerity itself actually felt a bit oxymoronic to her, now that she thought about it.

Ah, well.

She’d had hopes to bring her parents with her for what she imagined to be a quintessential move-in day, but instead, she was left with a house she couldn’t stand to be in alone and a professor with the name of Fig knocking on her door.

When the dragon attacked their carriage, MC had felt like a sick irony was bubbling like bile inside her stomach. The police that showed up in her school’s front office that morning hadn’t told her what they’d found in the debris of the crash. Their pale faces had told her all she needed to know. So, when the blue carriage she’d found herself in with Professor Fig and George Osric had been torn in two, taking George with it, she’d been all but remiss that it hadn’t taken her in his place.

Instead, she’d gotten ripped into a submerged plot that too many wished to keep hidden. Ancient magic couldn’t bring back the two people who’d loved her most in the world. The two people she’d known would take her back if she’d found out she couldn’t perform at this school after all—if she couldn’t be the person she wanted to be. And so she would relinquish that side of herself. She arrived in the Great Hall—Professor Fig having just sent her on ahead—at the end of the Sorting Ceremony.

If she had expected the entire room’s collection of heads to swivel in her direction, she was fortunately mistaken; only a few students sitting on the edges of their tables had taken any notice of her arrival. The room was impossibly long: four tables stretching what looked to be half a kilometer down a stone floor. What stood out to her first were the colors: green, blue, yellow, and red. The students that filled the benches wore robes that matched the runners decorating the tables. As she walked down the aisle between blue and yellow, she craned her neck to the ceiling—and almost stopped where she stood. The ceiling mimicked the sky she had just left the cover of—clouds, backlit by the full moon, drifted lazily, blocking out the twinkling specks of starlight as they passed.

She had to consciously keep her jaw closed; maybe walking through a room full of the entire school’s population with her jaw on the floor, essentially wearing a hat that said, ‘Look at Me: I’m That Old New Kid,’ wasn’t the best move on the first day.

Finally, she reached the end of the walkway and was met with the stony, lined face of a man whom she could only assume was the headmaster.

“And might you be that late-addition, new student?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, gulping slightly.

“Wonderful, you’re just in time,” he said, sounding much like it was not wonderful. “Go have a seat in that stool once that student is assigned his house—”

“GRYFFINDOR!” the hat on top of that student’s head—wait, the hat?—shouted.

The boy grinned widely and leapt up from the stool, all but throwing the hat to the woman standing next to him before running off the stage. He went straight for the table in red; the students at the head of the table were cheering and clapped him on the back, pouring an orange tinged beverage into his cup. MC heard a light cough to her left and turned to see a lady with similarly colored hair looking at her expectantly, a friendly smile on her face.

“You’re up,” she said. “Better get a move on.”

MC took her spot on the stool. Facing the great hall at this end of the room was a great deal more daunting. Dozens of faces looked up at her—some friendly and smiling, others’ brows furrowed in confusion, even more in blank stares, but the majority of the room paid her and the ceremony no attention. She was grateful for their disinterest.

As she scanned the faces, she couldn’t help but gravitate to the sea of green—Slytherin, if she remembered Professor Fig’s descriptions correctly. This table in particular paid her no mind—the students too busy chattering, some even arguing. One boy in particular caught her eye, though. He had light brown hair and was speaking animatedly, but as far as she could tell, he was only talking to himself.

Then she noticed the engaged expression of the bright blond-haired boy to his right, nodding along. As she felt her head cock in wonder, the first boy’s head turned slightly in her direction and paused on her eyes—she’d been caught. He stared back, a slight smirk forming.

She quickly averted her gaze down to her lap just as the sorting hat made its decision:

“Ravenclaw!” it cried.

A wash of relief flowed over MC as the table of blue went up in a roar. She stood up and shot a glance back at the Slytherin table; the boy had already turned his attention elsewhere. The mob of blue engulfed her as she found her place with the students her own age, and the rest of the night was spent trying the new foods on the table—as well as the not-too-sweet goblets of pumpkin juice—before making her way to the dormitory, escorted by that amber-haired professor—Weasley, her name was.

The adrenaline had long left her veins, and she desired nothing more than to collapse into her four-poster bed and drift in dreams until morning. But the rest of the students in her year had other plans. After she had showered and thrown on her father’s sweater, she came back into the dorm room to find them chatting away, updating each other on their summers. They invited her to join them, and MC wished she could join, really, but the thought of explaining the way she arrived at this castle in the middle of nowhere Scotland with no one to reach out to did not sound appealing.

She shook her head with an air of forgetfulness, muttering some excuse about needing to brush her teeth, and stuck her feet into the sneakers by her bed before jogging down the stairs. She’d be able to get back in by answering the door’s riddle just fine, she knew, so she pushed the portrait open and stepped into the stony hallway. Now was as good a time as any to acquaint herself with the castle, she supposed.

Professor Fig had taught her the Lumos spell, but she still felt vulnerable and lost in the corridors. The stone sucked the warmth out of the air while maintaining the moisture, and she couldn’t help but feel slightly damp as she shone the white light on each wall, marking their distinctive features so as not to get lost. The walls were tall; her wand’s light didn’t reach the ceiling, so the space above her appeared dark and unending. As she reached the foot of a long staircase, she heard voices.

“No student should be out of bed, Simon. I don’t care that you’re my little brother,” a deep-pitched voice rang tersely down the hallway.

“Nox,” she said, lowering her wand and pressing against the wall. No one had told her she had a curfew.

“But I wanted to explore the castle!” a younger, brighter voice replied.

“You can explore the castle during the daytime, on your way to your classes. What would Mum and Dad say if they knew you were shirking your responsibilities already—on your first day, hmm?”

A wand light had been making its way down the hallway, and MC fumbled to find a statue behind which to hide herself. She almost banged her head on a suit of armor as she slid across the hallway to it, concealing herself behind its steel.

The two boys rounded the corner, and she could see them clearly in the light of the older boy’s wand. They wore red robes—Gryffindors. They both had a shock of red hair, though the younger boy’s was certainly more orange than his brother’s. They were just about to be far enough away that she could make a run for it, when she heard the suit of armor beside her begin to move—and… snicker?

“Aren’t you in the right place at the right time,” it whispered to her.

She had to keep from screeching in surprise, but it didn’t matter—the ensuing cacophony would have hidden her scream.

“REDUCTO!” the suit of armor yelled, casting at the ceiling.

MC heard a loud POP! and looked up to see what had happened, as did the two Gryffindor brothers. An unfortunate choice on their part, as the shower of liquid fell directly onto them—onto their faces. They shouted as it pelted them, drenching their robes. MC was suddenly hit by a wave of stench; the liquid must have been Stinksap to carry that potent and repulsive of a smell.

The older boy began swiveling his head in search of the perpetrator, and his eyes landed on MC.

“You! You’re the new student, right? What did you have to do with this?”

“Um… I… I didn’t…” she started.

The suit of armor beside her then began to laugh, clapping a hand on her shoulder. The boy’s eyes darted to the armor as rage colored his features.

“Sallow,” he said slowly. “I know that shit-eating laugh from anywhere.”

“I find that idiom to be phrased, ‘Shit-eating grin,’ typically, Garreth,” the armor said.

“Yes, well, I can’t very well see your ugly face right now, can I?” the boy, Garreth, replied.

“You injure me,” the suit of armor released her shoulder to remove his helmet, revealing the brown hair and freckled face of the Slytherin boy from earlier. “My mother always told me I was handsome.”

MC had to stop from gasping at her recognition. And up close he really was quite handsome. His brown eyes glinted with energy—deceptively concealed behind his relaxed position leaning against the wall.

“And you,” Garreth continued, darting his eyes to MC. “What are you doing with him?”

“I didn’t know he was in there,” she said. “I just thought it was a regular suit of armor.”

“Ha!” the Slytherin boy cut in. “Look at that—I’m a regular knight. She thinks I look like one of those statues we have, Weasley.”

“Simon,” Garreth turned to his brother. “Run back to the common room and hit the showers. I’ll deal with you later.”

The small red-haired boy nodded, his eyes wide, before turning tail and running down the hallway. How did he already know his way around this castle better than her? He just started today, too!

“You get turned Prefect, and suddenly you can’t take a little prank, is that it?”

“Shut it, Sebastian. I’ll have you both thrown in detention for weeks for this!”

“But I didn’t do anything,” MC argued. “He’s the one who cast that spell and spilled the Stinksap on you. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Exactly—out of bed.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sebastian said before placing the helmet on MC’s head.

“Wait, what—?” she started to ask, when Sebastian grabbed her hand and started running.

He shot a spell off behind them, and MC could hear Garreth swearing as his shoes slipped on the surface of the stone. The helmet didn’t fully obstruct her vision, but it clanged around loosely on her head as they whipped around one last corner. There, Sebastian stopped and began removing the pieces of armor from himself.

“You know how to get back to the Ravenclaw common room from here?”

“What?” she said, ripping off the helmet. “Of course not! It’s my first day! I was charting out the castle before you interrupted me with your stupid prank.”

He placed a hand over his heart in mock insult.

“It wasn’t stupid! Just stinky.”

“Yes, well, it almost got us both in trouble. I don’t intend to soil my opportunity to learn within my first week. I already have enough problems to deal with without getting dragged into yours. Besides, what did Garreth ever do to you?”

Sebastian had gotten the armor fully off during her speech and was now looking at her with one eyebrow raised, his lips quirked into that same smirk from earlier. His arms crossed over his chest, and the t-shirt he wore revealed the freckles there. She felt her mouth dry up a little bit and worked to keep her face neutral yet full of disdain.

“He’s pretty irritating, you have to admit,” he said.

As MC was thinking of what to say next, she looked down to see that he was wearing dinosaur pajama shorts. She couldn’t help but let a snort out.

“I like your shorts,” she said.

“Oh, man, I forgot I was wearing these,” Sebastian laughed, his smug posture instantly dropping. “I didn’t anticipate anyone but Weasley seeing me out like this. And even Weasley, I’d’ve preferred not see through my foolproof disguise.”

“Considering you stuck around to see your handiwork and taunted the victim, I’m not sure what else you expected,” she said. “Maybe next time try looking like the statue you were pretending to be.”

“Touché. Though I wouldn’t have had to step in if you hadn’t been about to so sweetly take the fall for me.”

MC rolled her eyes.

“Maybe next time we’ll get you in a suit of armor as well,” he continues.

“Hard pass,” she said, though the idea did send a small thrill through her. An excuse for adventures around the castle…

“We’ll see about that,” he said, starting to walk down the hallway.

“Wait!” she whispered after him. “I… need your help finding my way back to the Ravenclaw common room.”

He smiled slyly.

“You’re asking me to come back to your room with you?”

“Oh, you wish,” she shot back. “I’ll blow your arm off if you get anywhere near me.”

He put his hands up in surrender.

“Relax! I may be the cunning Slytherin, but you’re the clever Ravenclaw. I’d never try to pull a fast one on you. Besides, I’m a taken man.”

“Oh?” MC asked as Sebastian began to lead the way down the corridor in what she was confident—kind of—was the right direction.