Rose/Scorpius- Dear Angel- Chapter 3: Quid Pro Quo
Title: Dear Angel- Chapter 3: Quid Pro Quo
Author: butterflys_fics/blacksouledbutterfly
Rating: R
Pairing: Rose/Scorpius
Word Count: 2,888
Summary: A simple game. Two determined players. One unbelievable outcome. Two lives forever altered.
Warnings: Mentions of sex and foul language throughout
Notes: The chapter index can be found here.
Lovely chapter image by lotrfan185 @ The Dark Arts
He found that the situations that can bring people together could often be the strangest and the least likely. You can spend almost all of your time around specific people without ever speaking to them; you can see a person every day of your life and not say a word to them and then something happens and all of a sudden you're drawn together, you end up speaking to them and talking to them and from that day on the course of your world shifts just a little bit. That’s what had happened with Rose; that’s what had set this whole strange series of events into motion. At first he never even spoke to her, at first he would scarcely even look at her from across the room. He had been casually kind to her every once in a while but he never really spoke to her. And then she had approached him in the hall that day and dared him to figure her out and it was like flicking that first domino, the one that makes the whole lot of them fall down. She had been the domino that day in the hall and the rest of his life afterwards had been the line of them.
Three days after she had asked him if he was a virgin or not he hadn’t spoken to her again, at least not yet. He had spent most of that time wondering why it was that she would actually want to know that about him, why she would care at all about whether or not he happened to be a virgin. And he realized that answering her was probably a bad idea, that it really wasn’t any of her business that he wasn’t a virgin anymore. It wasn’t anyone's business but his. And, of course, whomever he had gone and shagged. But it certainly wasn’t her business and yet he had answered her. And she hadn’t returned the favor and answered him.
And so it made him wonder the entire time why she had opted not to answer him, what she was trying to hide and whether or not she was, in fact, a virgin or not a virgin and why she had felt the need to hide the answer either way. If she was a virgin then he figured that maybe she was embarrassed by that fact. And if she wasn't them maybe she was embarrassed by that as well, maybe it had been a very bad experience for her or something of the like but whatever the reason he kept wondering over and over again whether she was or wasn’t; he kept wondering why she hadn’t answered him after he had asked her and he knew that it was probably intentional, that she had avoiding answering him just to annoy him.
At this point he realized that nothing Rose could do would probably be surprising to him, that she was definitely what you would consider a complex person. There are people in the world that you can understand with very little effort and people that you couldn’t understand no matter how hard you tried and he was starting to believe that Rose fell into the second category, that he could try for the rest of his life to understand her and it would never, ever happen. It was frustrating and fascinating and infuriating and a million and three things all rolled up in one. He wasn’t sure why he even wanted to understand her anymore except that he didn’t understand her, that was this big puzzle that he seemed to be missing half of the pieces of.
He hadn’t told anyone about Rose's little challenge or her little game of 'lets confuse the hell out of Scorpius', hadn’t thought that it would be important to tell them. And to be honest, he didn’t think his friends would understand why he was willing to play her little game. It wasn’t as though he had to understand her for any reason. Sure, in some small way he had been fascinated by her since they were first years but he's positive that’s simply because she was such a mystery to him. Had she been even remotely easy to figure out then he was sure she would be pretty much static in the background to him. But when someone is basically impossible to figure out that makes him just want to try even harder to understand them, makes him want to pick apart the strings and get to the basics of who they are.
He had let his mind forget about that all during the first Quidditch game of the season, focusing on the game. It hadn’t been that difficult of a game- games against Hufflepuff rarely are- but it had made him focus on something other than the game, made him focus on the yellow of their uniforms and the feel of the broom between his legs; made him focus on the air rushing around him as he moved through the air, made him focus on a million other things that didn’t involve Rose Weasley and her naïve/seductive smiles and her game and her personal questions that she refused to answer about herself.
Slytherin had beat Hufflepuff, predictably, and the teams had gone to their respective locker rooms and changed back into their clothes, his team talking about the game and congratulating themselves on their victory while the Hufflepuffs all talked about Merlin knows what. And then slowly the players started to file out of the room until it was basically empty, all them just wanting to get back to the school so they could bathe because despite what people seemed to think playing Quidditch could build up a pretty good sweat.
"You all played quite well," he heard as soon as he stepped out of the locker room prompting him to turn slightly to find Rose Weasley, the very same mysterious bird that had been frustrating him to almost no end walking along the root of a rather big tree, her feet moving delicately over it like a ballet dancer, her bare soles collecting dirt against her pale skin. He was pretty sure that given the time of year the ground was probably rather cool and thus chilled her skin but she didn’t seem to notice it, just kept walking along the root to the end and then stepped gracefully off of it, pressing her toes into the dirt first and then lowering it down until her heel pressed down as well and then her gaze turned up towards his face, her blue eyes dancing with some sort of mischief that he couldn’t quite place but he knew that look already because she had the same look on her face when she had told him she wanted to know something about him and then she had asked him whether or not he was a virgin. "Rather surprising, actually."
"Why is that so surprising?" he replied incredulously, a bit insulted by the way she had put it, implying that the team wasn’t capable of playing a good game on a normal basis when they're actually quite good. True, he may be a bit biased seeing that he's on the team but he's sure that they're not bad enough for her to seem surprised that they were good in that particular game.
"You've been rather distracted lately," she noted, tilting her head in that naïve/sexy way she seemed to do quite often around him, looking very much like a cross between a little girl and a vixen in her flowing skirt and her simple shirt, her head cocked to the side and folding her hands behind her back like a little kid trying to convince their parent to buy them something they don’t really want to. "I wonder why that could be."
Scorpius watched her for a couple of seconds as if trying to decide whether or not she was serious and then scoffed, a louder sound than he had intended and one that didn’t get his desired reaction because she merely smiled, a smile that was almost a smirk as she looked at him, her eyes sparkling again.
"I think you can imagine why," he retorted evenly, his voice void of any emotion, keeping his tone as empty as she seemed to like to keep hers when around him.
"Me?" she questioned, sounding quite innocent and looking just as innocent, her eyes widening slightly, unfolding her hands so she could put her one hand on her chest, as if motioning to herself in disbelief. "Now, why would you possible think that I would have even the slightest inkling as to why you happen to be as distracted as you've been lately? It isn’t as though I were psychic, Malfoy."
"No, you're not," he agreed easily. "But you're manipulative, aren’t you? You enjoy this little game that you have going on right now. And you're thoroughly convinced you're going to win. I don’t think you consider me a worthy adversary."
"Game?" She arched one of her dark eyebrows at her, the shade of brown standing out as starkly against her skin as her messy hair did, hair that sat around her thin face in unruly waves, hair that didn’t seem to be able to be untangled even if her life depended on it. "I don’t have any clue what you're talking about."
"Come off of it," he requested tersely, heaving a bit of an annoyed sigh and reaching up to run his fingers through his pale blonde hair in frustration. "You know exactly what game I'm talking about. The game you started. That little challenge you issued."
"And what challenge might that be?"
"To figure you out."
"Figure me out?" The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, almost smiling. "Am I really that complex?"
"You know exactly what you are."
"True," she conceded, glancing down at her bare feet once more and taking those delicate, dance like steps, one foot directly in front of the other as though she were walking on a very narrow beam and was trying to keep her balance. "I know what I am quite well. I don’t, however, know what you think I am. That most definitely remains a mystery to me."
"You're trying to play with my head," he accused, narrowing his eyes at her, watching her as though she were a snake ready to strike.
She paused then in her steps and threw her head back, laughing as though he had just said the funniest thing she could have ever imagined him saying, her eyes closed, hair blowing in the wind. She reached up, put her hand over her mouth to try to muffle the sound, her shoulders shaking with the amusement she was feeling. "Lovely," she finally managed to say once the laughter had subsided a little. "And why, pray tell, would I want to do that?"
"Haven't quite figured out your motive yet," he admitted, shrugging his shoulders a bit.
"Then perhaps its safer to assume that you're paranoid than to assume that I'm up to something," she suggested, looking over at him with one of her dark eyebrows arched again. "Paranoia can be a dangerous thing. You might want to look out for that."
"I'm not paranoid," he insisted and then, without thinking about it and scarcely even realizing that he was going to do it he reached out and clasped his hand around her wrist, tugging on her arm, sending her tiny body forward so it nearly slammed into his chest and probably would have had if she hadn’t stuck her hand out to brace herself, her fingers colliding with his chest.
"I'm not paranoid," he insisted again, his voice sharper this time even as she tilted her head up very slowly to look at him, her face betraying absolutely nothing. "I don’t know why but you've decided to play a little game with my head, to confuse me, to try to keep yourself this big mystery to me. You think you can win, that you're better at being a mystery than I am at figuring things out. You can deny it all you want but we both know that’s the truth."
Then she did the strangest thing. She got this look on her face like she was truly concerned, her eyebrows knitting together, her head cocking slightly to the side in a completely innocent way, not a single bit of the sexuality she normally exuded in that act visible this time. "Are you ill?" she asked him quite seriously, reaching up with the hand that wasn’t immobilized by his grip and pressing the back of her hand against his forehead as though checking for a fever. "Perhaps you should go to the hospital wing and have them give you a check, yeah?"
Narrowing his eyes at her he growled, a deep and dark sound that rumbled in the pit of his chest, and he reached up, grabbing that wrist in his hand as well, lowering it down from his face. "You know bloody well that I'm not ill," he hissed down at her and then he was moving, moving her backwards as he moved forwards, his eyes locked on hers, managing to find the amusement hidden within the blue orbs that she'd been trying so hard to hide.
Her back made contact with the tree which made them both stop abruptly, could have made him crush her against the tree if he hadn’t been careful not to hurt her. As annoyed as he may be with her Scorpius Malfoy has never, ever been violent with a girl and he didn’t intend to start now of all times. "You know that I'm not ill and I'm not paranoid so quite playing innocent. You aren’t nearly as good at it as you think you are."
The corners of her mouth turned upwards again, turning up into a slight smile and she shifted a bit, settling more comfortably against the tree, pressing her lower body more firmly against his as she did so, teasing him because he knew she knew exactly what she was doing and meant absolutely nothing by it. "Oh, you let me get to you far too easily," she cooed at him like he was a child. "If you think you could ever possibly win any sort of a game with me when I can get you this upset this easily then I'm afraid you're dreaming, Malfoy."
"You're devious."
"Compliments will get you nowhere," she informed him evenly, cocking her head to the side again, this time going back to that naïve/sexy way, resting her head against the tree, her hair getting caught up in the bark as she sighs a bit in almost a resigned sort of way. "Is this the part where you berate me for being a prat?" she questioned. "Or are you thinking of something far more nefarious?"
"Good to know you think so lowly of me," he replied dryly, releasing her wrists but not stepping back from her, keeping her there so she can't do her dance like movements and step away from him this time like she had done last time; so she can't just make all of the rules in this little game. "I think you owe me an answer to a question, Weasley."
"Oh? And what question might that be?"
"The very same question that I asked you last time we spoke."
"Oh, Malfoy," she cooed again, reaching up and running the tips of her fingers down his cheek in an almost caressing fashion. "I never said I was going to answer questions, did I? If I never promised you answers how can you say I owe you them?"
"I answered you. Quid pro quo, Weasley. What's fair is fair."
"Who ever said anything about fair?"
"Games should be fair. What good is a game when you have the advantage?"
"Do I really have the advantage?"
"You know you do."
"My. How unfair of me." She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as though she were scolding herself and then watched him for a couple of seconds before narrowing her eyes at him, almost smirking. "Why do you want to know if I'm a virgin or not, Malfoy? I told you why I was asking but why do you want to know?" she questions and then she does smirk as she leans up a bit so her mouth is almost brushing against his. "You don’t fancy me, do you Malfoy?"
Of course he didn’t fancy her. She was fascinating to him, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing. But still, standing there with her that close, with her lower half pressed against his, her breath warm on his face, the floral scent of her shampoo wafting into his nostrils the denial dies in his throat and it makes him forget for a couple of seconds.
"Malfoy! What the bloody hell do you think you're doing to my cousin?"
Rose smiled then, her eyes sparkling as she gazed up into his. "Hello, Albus," she called out softly and turned her head to look at her cousin. "Problem?"
Score: Rose 2, Scorpius 0, he thought bitterly as he turned his head to look at her very, very annoyed looking cousin.
Author: butterflys_fics/blacksouledbutterfly
Rating: R
Pairing: Rose/Scorpius
Word Count: 2,888
Summary: A simple game. Two determined players. One unbelievable outcome. Two lives forever altered.
Warnings: Mentions of sex and foul language throughout
Notes: The chapter index can be found here.
Lovely chapter image by lotrfan185 @ The Dark Arts
He found that the situations that can bring people together could often be the strangest and the least likely. You can spend almost all of your time around specific people without ever speaking to them; you can see a person every day of your life and not say a word to them and then something happens and all of a sudden you're drawn together, you end up speaking to them and talking to them and from that day on the course of your world shifts just a little bit. That’s what had happened with Rose; that’s what had set this whole strange series of events into motion. At first he never even spoke to her, at first he would scarcely even look at her from across the room. He had been casually kind to her every once in a while but he never really spoke to her. And then she had approached him in the hall that day and dared him to figure her out and it was like flicking that first domino, the one that makes the whole lot of them fall down. She had been the domino that day in the hall and the rest of his life afterwards had been the line of them.
Three days after she had asked him if he was a virgin or not he hadn’t spoken to her again, at least not yet. He had spent most of that time wondering why it was that she would actually want to know that about him, why she would care at all about whether or not he happened to be a virgin. And he realized that answering her was probably a bad idea, that it really wasn’t any of her business that he wasn’t a virgin anymore. It wasn’t anyone's business but his. And, of course, whomever he had gone and shagged. But it certainly wasn’t her business and yet he had answered her. And she hadn’t returned the favor and answered him.
And so it made him wonder the entire time why she had opted not to answer him, what she was trying to hide and whether or not she was, in fact, a virgin or not a virgin and why she had felt the need to hide the answer either way. If she was a virgin then he figured that maybe she was embarrassed by that fact. And if she wasn't them maybe she was embarrassed by that as well, maybe it had been a very bad experience for her or something of the like but whatever the reason he kept wondering over and over again whether she was or wasn’t; he kept wondering why she hadn’t answered him after he had asked her and he knew that it was probably intentional, that she had avoiding answering him just to annoy him.
At this point he realized that nothing Rose could do would probably be surprising to him, that she was definitely what you would consider a complex person. There are people in the world that you can understand with very little effort and people that you couldn’t understand no matter how hard you tried and he was starting to believe that Rose fell into the second category, that he could try for the rest of his life to understand her and it would never, ever happen. It was frustrating and fascinating and infuriating and a million and three things all rolled up in one. He wasn’t sure why he even wanted to understand her anymore except that he didn’t understand her, that was this big puzzle that he seemed to be missing half of the pieces of.
He hadn’t told anyone about Rose's little challenge or her little game of 'lets confuse the hell out of Scorpius', hadn’t thought that it would be important to tell them. And to be honest, he didn’t think his friends would understand why he was willing to play her little game. It wasn’t as though he had to understand her for any reason. Sure, in some small way he had been fascinated by her since they were first years but he's positive that’s simply because she was such a mystery to him. Had she been even remotely easy to figure out then he was sure she would be pretty much static in the background to him. But when someone is basically impossible to figure out that makes him just want to try even harder to understand them, makes him want to pick apart the strings and get to the basics of who they are.
He had let his mind forget about that all during the first Quidditch game of the season, focusing on the game. It hadn’t been that difficult of a game- games against Hufflepuff rarely are- but it had made him focus on something other than the game, made him focus on the yellow of their uniforms and the feel of the broom between his legs; made him focus on the air rushing around him as he moved through the air, made him focus on a million other things that didn’t involve Rose Weasley and her naïve/seductive smiles and her game and her personal questions that she refused to answer about herself.
Slytherin had beat Hufflepuff, predictably, and the teams had gone to their respective locker rooms and changed back into their clothes, his team talking about the game and congratulating themselves on their victory while the Hufflepuffs all talked about Merlin knows what. And then slowly the players started to file out of the room until it was basically empty, all them just wanting to get back to the school so they could bathe because despite what people seemed to think playing Quidditch could build up a pretty good sweat.
"You all played quite well," he heard as soon as he stepped out of the locker room prompting him to turn slightly to find Rose Weasley, the very same mysterious bird that had been frustrating him to almost no end walking along the root of a rather big tree, her feet moving delicately over it like a ballet dancer, her bare soles collecting dirt against her pale skin. He was pretty sure that given the time of year the ground was probably rather cool and thus chilled her skin but she didn’t seem to notice it, just kept walking along the root to the end and then stepped gracefully off of it, pressing her toes into the dirt first and then lowering it down until her heel pressed down as well and then her gaze turned up towards his face, her blue eyes dancing with some sort of mischief that he couldn’t quite place but he knew that look already because she had the same look on her face when she had told him she wanted to know something about him and then she had asked him whether or not he was a virgin. "Rather surprising, actually."
"Why is that so surprising?" he replied incredulously, a bit insulted by the way she had put it, implying that the team wasn’t capable of playing a good game on a normal basis when they're actually quite good. True, he may be a bit biased seeing that he's on the team but he's sure that they're not bad enough for her to seem surprised that they were good in that particular game.
"You've been rather distracted lately," she noted, tilting her head in that naïve/sexy way she seemed to do quite often around him, looking very much like a cross between a little girl and a vixen in her flowing skirt and her simple shirt, her head cocked to the side and folding her hands behind her back like a little kid trying to convince their parent to buy them something they don’t really want to. "I wonder why that could be."
Scorpius watched her for a couple of seconds as if trying to decide whether or not she was serious and then scoffed, a louder sound than he had intended and one that didn’t get his desired reaction because she merely smiled, a smile that was almost a smirk as she looked at him, her eyes sparkling again.
"I think you can imagine why," he retorted evenly, his voice void of any emotion, keeping his tone as empty as she seemed to like to keep hers when around him.
"Me?" she questioned, sounding quite innocent and looking just as innocent, her eyes widening slightly, unfolding her hands so she could put her one hand on her chest, as if motioning to herself in disbelief. "Now, why would you possible think that I would have even the slightest inkling as to why you happen to be as distracted as you've been lately? It isn’t as though I were psychic, Malfoy."
"No, you're not," he agreed easily. "But you're manipulative, aren’t you? You enjoy this little game that you have going on right now. And you're thoroughly convinced you're going to win. I don’t think you consider me a worthy adversary."
"Game?" She arched one of her dark eyebrows at her, the shade of brown standing out as starkly against her skin as her messy hair did, hair that sat around her thin face in unruly waves, hair that didn’t seem to be able to be untangled even if her life depended on it. "I don’t have any clue what you're talking about."
"Come off of it," he requested tersely, heaving a bit of an annoyed sigh and reaching up to run his fingers through his pale blonde hair in frustration. "You know exactly what game I'm talking about. The game you started. That little challenge you issued."
"And what challenge might that be?"
"To figure you out."
"Figure me out?" The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, almost smiling. "Am I really that complex?"
"You know exactly what you are."
"True," she conceded, glancing down at her bare feet once more and taking those delicate, dance like steps, one foot directly in front of the other as though she were walking on a very narrow beam and was trying to keep her balance. "I know what I am quite well. I don’t, however, know what you think I am. That most definitely remains a mystery to me."
"You're trying to play with my head," he accused, narrowing his eyes at her, watching her as though she were a snake ready to strike.
She paused then in her steps and threw her head back, laughing as though he had just said the funniest thing she could have ever imagined him saying, her eyes closed, hair blowing in the wind. She reached up, put her hand over her mouth to try to muffle the sound, her shoulders shaking with the amusement she was feeling. "Lovely," she finally managed to say once the laughter had subsided a little. "And why, pray tell, would I want to do that?"
"Haven't quite figured out your motive yet," he admitted, shrugging his shoulders a bit.
"Then perhaps its safer to assume that you're paranoid than to assume that I'm up to something," she suggested, looking over at him with one of her dark eyebrows arched again. "Paranoia can be a dangerous thing. You might want to look out for that."
"I'm not paranoid," he insisted and then, without thinking about it and scarcely even realizing that he was going to do it he reached out and clasped his hand around her wrist, tugging on her arm, sending her tiny body forward so it nearly slammed into his chest and probably would have had if she hadn’t stuck her hand out to brace herself, her fingers colliding with his chest.
"I'm not paranoid," he insisted again, his voice sharper this time even as she tilted her head up very slowly to look at him, her face betraying absolutely nothing. "I don’t know why but you've decided to play a little game with my head, to confuse me, to try to keep yourself this big mystery to me. You think you can win, that you're better at being a mystery than I am at figuring things out. You can deny it all you want but we both know that’s the truth."
Then she did the strangest thing. She got this look on her face like she was truly concerned, her eyebrows knitting together, her head cocking slightly to the side in a completely innocent way, not a single bit of the sexuality she normally exuded in that act visible this time. "Are you ill?" she asked him quite seriously, reaching up with the hand that wasn’t immobilized by his grip and pressing the back of her hand against his forehead as though checking for a fever. "Perhaps you should go to the hospital wing and have them give you a check, yeah?"
Narrowing his eyes at her he growled, a deep and dark sound that rumbled in the pit of his chest, and he reached up, grabbing that wrist in his hand as well, lowering it down from his face. "You know bloody well that I'm not ill," he hissed down at her and then he was moving, moving her backwards as he moved forwards, his eyes locked on hers, managing to find the amusement hidden within the blue orbs that she'd been trying so hard to hide.
Her back made contact with the tree which made them both stop abruptly, could have made him crush her against the tree if he hadn’t been careful not to hurt her. As annoyed as he may be with her Scorpius Malfoy has never, ever been violent with a girl and he didn’t intend to start now of all times. "You know that I'm not ill and I'm not paranoid so quite playing innocent. You aren’t nearly as good at it as you think you are."
The corners of her mouth turned upwards again, turning up into a slight smile and she shifted a bit, settling more comfortably against the tree, pressing her lower body more firmly against his as she did so, teasing him because he knew she knew exactly what she was doing and meant absolutely nothing by it. "Oh, you let me get to you far too easily," she cooed at him like he was a child. "If you think you could ever possibly win any sort of a game with me when I can get you this upset this easily then I'm afraid you're dreaming, Malfoy."
"You're devious."
"Compliments will get you nowhere," she informed him evenly, cocking her head to the side again, this time going back to that naïve/sexy way, resting her head against the tree, her hair getting caught up in the bark as she sighs a bit in almost a resigned sort of way. "Is this the part where you berate me for being a prat?" she questioned. "Or are you thinking of something far more nefarious?"
"Good to know you think so lowly of me," he replied dryly, releasing her wrists but not stepping back from her, keeping her there so she can't do her dance like movements and step away from him this time like she had done last time; so she can't just make all of the rules in this little game. "I think you owe me an answer to a question, Weasley."
"Oh? And what question might that be?"
"The very same question that I asked you last time we spoke."
"Oh, Malfoy," she cooed again, reaching up and running the tips of her fingers down his cheek in an almost caressing fashion. "I never said I was going to answer questions, did I? If I never promised you answers how can you say I owe you them?"
"I answered you. Quid pro quo, Weasley. What's fair is fair."
"Who ever said anything about fair?"
"Games should be fair. What good is a game when you have the advantage?"
"Do I really have the advantage?"
"You know you do."
"My. How unfair of me." She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as though she were scolding herself and then watched him for a couple of seconds before narrowing her eyes at him, almost smirking. "Why do you want to know if I'm a virgin or not, Malfoy? I told you why I was asking but why do you want to know?" she questions and then she does smirk as she leans up a bit so her mouth is almost brushing against his. "You don’t fancy me, do you Malfoy?"
Of course he didn’t fancy her. She was fascinating to him, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing. But still, standing there with her that close, with her lower half pressed against his, her breath warm on his face, the floral scent of her shampoo wafting into his nostrils the denial dies in his throat and it makes him forget for a couple of seconds.
"Malfoy! What the bloody hell do you think you're doing to my cousin?"
Rose smiled then, her eyes sparkling as she gazed up into his. "Hello, Albus," she called out softly and turned her head to look at her cousin. "Problem?"
Score: Rose 2, Scorpius 0, he thought bitterly as he turned his head to look at her very, very annoyed looking cousin.