Emofest09 Lorcan/Hugo/Lysander 7
Hugo knew, even if he wanted to, that he couldn’t spend the rest of his life in the Room of Requirement fooling around with the twins. Eventually someone would find them or start to worry and even if sex with the pair of them was amazing, life changing even, it wasn’t something he wanted to get caught doing by anybody else, he was sure. He was also sure that Scorpius be damned he wasn’t going to betray the Quidditch team by throwing any more matches. Once had been enough to make him wish he’d never picked up a broom but after how insistent the twins had been about what a good person he was he knew he couldn’t betray them by doing something so horrible.
Oddly, he felt good about his decision. He may be running the risk of the whole school thinking he was a poof but at least he’d still have his integrity. The twins wouldn’t let him feel too miserable either, at least not if Lysander’s tongue had anything to say about it.
With that new resolve, he watched from the benches with everyone else a week later as Gryffindor smeared Ravenclaw in their next Quidditch match. He caught a brief glance of Scorpius murderous glare after the game but thankfully he was too well surrounded by the rest of his team mates for the blond to have an opportunity to drag him off to the dungeons again.
“It would have been brilliant if you had been there, mate!” Liam hooted, slinging one sweaty arm around Hugo’s shoulders. Liam was always much more cordial after a winning Quidditch match. “You better get that bloody grade up because we’ll definitely want you for the next match even if its just Hufflepuff. It’s just not the same without you.”
“Maybe,” Higgs suggested, “you could get someone else to write one for you. Pay ‘em a sickle or two that ought to be enough!”
“Yeah,” Hugo couldn’t help but crack a smile, being there with all of his friends, drunk on their own success, was definitely worth the risks he was running. If he had gone through with it and drugged them to have a horrible game he wouldn’t be able to stand here joking around with them as if nothing was wrong.
Finnigan’s laughter was interrupted with a quick “Bollocks,” followed by him ducking behind Higgs as he gestured down the pitch from. “Guard your arse, boys, look who it is.”
Hugo followed Finnigan’s attention and saw, with a bit of a concerned grimace, that Lorcan and Lysander were heading straight for them, him to be more exact, with excited happy smiles on their faces. Please don’t act gay, he muttered to himself as they got nearer and nearer. After everything the two had done for him and what they’d been through in the Room of Requirement several times that week he probably shouldn’t have even been thinking it but it couldn’t be help. They weren’t the most tactful of people and he was standing in front of his entire Quidditch team.
“You did it, Hugo, you did it!” Lysander exclaimed and abandoning all hope for a conversation where nothing was weird or strange, Hugo stood helpless as the younger twin and best blow job that this school had probably ever seen hopped on him and wrapped him up in his arms, kissing his cheek.
“Well you didn’t do it but you would have done it if you were on the field.” Lorcan agreed and rubbed his back in an affectionate way that made Hugo want to dig the world’s deepest hole and hide in it. True to his own dread, the entire team, even Lynch, was staring in shock.
“You should let us take you out to celebrate!” Lysander announced and took one hand.
Lorcan took the other and pulled on it suggestively. “We can have ice cream in the secret laboratory!”
“Weasley!” Finnian, who had been hiding before looked horrified and a little ashen as he stepped out around Higgs. Hugo turned to face him right in time to see Emily the captain’s girlfriend, and Abbey who attached herself to Finnigan’s arm, join their group. “What are you doing?” Clearly Hugo being hugged and kissed and dragged off to celebrate in a secret room by a pair of blokes was a little strange and from the look on Liam and Palmer’s faces, also rather disgusting. Abbey, although she wasn’t smiling, seemed to want to, her eyes filled with vindication.
Hugo looked between the twins and his team mates, wordless for a moment before he jerked his hands away from them with a laugh, rubbing Lysander’s kiss from his cheek. “You guys have got to get me out here. Just because I’m single again, every bird and queen can’t seem to wait to get their hands on me.” He refused to look back at the hurt he knew he would see on Lysander’s face, maybe even Lorcan’s and followed the rest of the team which still looked a little unsure, away from the pitch and towards the locker room. Lorcan and Lysander had to have realized they couldn’t just waltz up and grab him like that in public and if they hadn’t, Hugo was sure they’d definitely realized it by now.
By the time dinner came, the Gryffindor team’s celebrations were just getting into full swing. Everyone seemed to have forgotten all about the weird interlude between Hugo and the Scamander twins. Even Abbey had stopped glaring at him! Things got so raucous that Rose had to leave dinner before she’d finished her book or, she claimed, she’d never get to the end of it. Hugo spent the whole evening trying to have a good time but kept waiting for Scorpius’ big reveal. More than once he’d glanced over to the Slytherin table where the blond sat with Albus, who had for once not joined them at the Gryffindor table, but Scorpius didn’t look like he wanted to say anything. Was it possible that this whole time the Slytherin had been all talk and now, in the moment of truth, no action? By the time things were winding down with the meal it had certainly seemed that way.
In fact, the only thing missing in Hugo’s opinion, was Lorcan and Lysander who had not showed up at all the whole night. He assuaged his worry with the very viable possibility that the twins had just gotten wrapped up in another one of their experiments and lost track of time and not that they’d failed to show because they were mad at him or somehow hurt by how he’d snubbed them on the field.
When they got back to Gryffindor Tower, Hugo excused himself from the revelry under the guise of needing to finish up some homework he hadn’t gotten done. Finnigan and Higgs insisted that he’d better be going up there to finish his Muggle Studies essay.
Extra credit was the farthest thing from Hugo’s mind as he climbed the stairs and closed to door to the sixth year boys’ dorm and blocked out the noise of the carrying on below him. The twins’ absence was an itch he couldn’t quite satisfy and he knew he needed to find out if they were alright.
Laying on his stomach across his bed he reached beneath the mattress feeling around for what he knew he kept safely hidden under there. Coming back with a green charms book he hadn’t viewed with disdain or apprehension in a very long time, he flipped through the pages until he found a folded paper crane, pressed for safe keeping with Lorcan and Lysander’s name written on the outside.
He unfolded it carefully and wrote quickly at the top of the blank page. L&L- Sorry about earlier today. I hope you guys weren’t too upset. I’m just not ready to come out yet, please understand. -Hugo. Folding the page up back into a crane took some trial and error but it was the one origami animal Lysander had made sure he could properly fold and charm so that they would always be able to get in contact with one another if they had to. When he finished, Hugo spelled the paper and waited with baited breath until it flapped its wings and took off towards the nearest window.
Hugo fell off his bed to catch it before it smashed itself beyond use and carried it over to the window, opening up the glass. “Hurry back,” he told the crane and watched it until it was a white speck in the distance.
Knowing it would take some time for the crane to find its intended recipients, especially if the twins were in the Room of Requirement, Hugo settled in for a long wait. Minutes spread out into an hour and then hours. He’d half fallen asleep when the door to the dorm opened and he sat up with a jerk, wiping a bit of drool from his mouth. “Sandy?”
“Whose Sandy?” Abbey asked, leaning against the door frame to the room. Her words were the tiniest bit slurred to match her jilted posture.
“Who?” Hugo lied, and swung his legs over the side of the mattress with the intent to stand. “Abbey, are you drunk? Are you guys drinking down there?”
“Liam had a bottle of Fire Whiskey!” She answered probably much more loudly than she had intended and sauntered dizzily into the darkened room towards him. “Then we played strip Exploding Snap.” More or less colliding into him, Abbey slid her fingers up Hugo’s chest with a slow smile. “You can tell I won because I’m wearing all my clothes, “ she purred and then paused and looked up at him coyly. “Well almost all of them. I did lose something, do you want to know what it was?”
Hugo was pretty sure he could guess and leaned away from the brewery that was spilling out of her mouth. “Not really, Abbey.”
She laughed out loud and took his hand, pulling it drunkenly towards her crotch, a gesture that was easy for Hugo to avoid. “It’s my panties!” she informed him in a whisper that was nearly a shout and burst into laughter. Only a moment later her voice lowered to a hushed whisper and she pushed him down onto the bed. “Boys are so stupid, Hugo. Except you, no, not you.” She leaned over to whisper seductively, at least Hugo was sure she thought she was being seductive. He may have even fallen for it if he was drunk. Well, drunk and straight. “You’re such a smart little, dummy dum dumpling.”
“I’m sorry, I’m a what?” Hugo caught her wrists, trying to keep her on her feet as she clumsily attempted to mount him. Thankfully she was more skilled at falling out of his lap then getting into it.
“A dummy dum dumpling!” She repeated with another giggle. “Come here and kiss me. Just gimmie a kiss, Hugo and I’ll let you shag me any way you want.” Leaning forward she tried to capture his mouth with hers, another tactic he easily avoided. It only seemed to make her want to try harder. “You can even shag me in the arse if you want, that’s what you like, innit? Innit what I did wrong?”
“Merlin, Abbey.” Hugo feigned shock and disgust although the more he thought about it, neither was much of an act. “You’re drunk, get out of here and leave me alone. Go ask your new boyfriend if he wants to sodomize you!”
“No, Hugo, I want you! I’ve always wanted you.” When she began to unbutton her shirt he looked away and was thankful that he did because at that moment, banging into the window haphazardly was a paper crane, most definitely with his name on it.
With a sudden sense of urgency, Hugo stood and grabbed Abbey around the waist. Thinking she was getting what she wanted, the girl shrieked in delight and begged, “that’s it, Hugo, that’s exactly what I want! Shag me! Shag me rotten!” He ignored the way she lifted up her bra and pressed her breasts in his face in favor of getting her out of there. He dumped her as soon as he could in the hallway and cast a locking charm on the door to insure that in her drunken state she wouldn’t be able to get back in again and practically dove for the window. He shoved the glass open before the messenger the twins had sent him head banged itself into oblivion. The wrinkled crane floated lamely into the room and landed on the floor at Hugo’s feet.
Not hesitating even for a second and ignoring the way Abbey yelled his name and banged on the door calling him every dirty name he’d ever heard and some he was pretty sure she made up on the spot, he unfolded the note, turning the light on to get a better look at the script. By now he recognized it as Lorcan’s handwriting and luckily it was good news! Hugo - It’s alright, we understand. We won’t be so careless in the future. We’re sorry if we caused you any problems. -L&L.
Hugo hadn’t realized how worried he was until he felt relieved at the return word that everything was alright. He’d still apologize to them in person the next time he saw them but he was at least confident now that he hadn’t done any lasting damage. Both of them would definitely have to be more careful, that much was true.
After Abbey’s claim that Finnigan had brought a bottle of Fire Whiskey to the party, Hugo was a little surprised when on Monday morning everyone had not only made it to their beds but were awake and getting ready for class as if nothing had happened. He had been one of the first ones to bed but he was also one of the last waking up and when he shuffled into the bathroom he caught only a glance of Higgs before he darted off towards the showers at a near run. “I don’t get it,” Hugo mused, thinking nothing of it as he leaned over the sink to wash his face. “How can those guys party all night long, get pissed, and still wake up before me. It’s unnatural.
Wyatt Caldwell, who was standing at the sink next to his, looked Hugo up and down, shaking his head before squeezing some mint smelling paste on his toothbrush. “It ain’t the most unnatural thin around here if you ask me,” he answered.
“What do you mean?” Curious, Hugo dried his face on a towel and then like Wyatt, started brushing his teeth. “Did something else happen? I mean Abbey came to my room and tried to molest me but that was pretty much the weirdest thing I saw. She did call me a Dummy dum dumpling.”
Wyatt didn’t say anything as he scrubbed his teeth clean, which was understandable. After he spat and rinsed, he looked over at Hugo as if he were searching for something on him. “You’re right, that’s weird. They took some potion to cure the hang over. It’s got them all up and running around not just as if nothing’s happened but like they’re on something. It did the trick alright but not the way they’d planned I’d bet.”
Higgs reappeared, guiding Finnigan who was blinded by the soap dripping down from his hair and into his eyes and holding a towel around his waist as if it were the only thing holding him onto the face of the Earth. “Don’t drop the soap, Caldwell!” Higgs shouted on his way out the door.
“I take it back,” Hugo said slowly, not entirely sure that what Palmer had said meant what he thought it did. “That’s definitely the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
It seemed, however, that the strangeness that had affected the bathroom in Gryffindor Tower had extended all the way to the Great Hall at breakfast. He caught sight of the twins and when they made eye contact he smiled and waved before turning his attention to his own table where things were very much out of order. First of all, he noticed he absence of Albus who, after a quick search around the Hall, Hugo realized was still sitting with Scorpius. He knew the two of them were friends but in the six years Hugo had been at Hogwarts, Albus had sat with them for every single meal. It was a puzzling detail that was easily brushed off when he realized his normal seat between his Quidditch friends and his family was currently occupied by Abbey who hadn’t seemed to have gotten a single drop of the potion the rest of the revelers had and found it impossible to lift her head from her plate. The team hadn’t saved him a different spot either they way they usually did when their ranks were ruffled by the coming and going of significant others.
He realized when he glanced at Rose in a silent question of what going on that neither Albus or where he was going to sit was the least of his problems. His sister answered his question with a scathing glare, the likes of which he had never seen before. His sister could be stern on many different levels, but it was the hurt that laced the edges of her hardened stare that he had never seen before, as if he had done something against her personally that was particularly mean or unnecessarily cruel.
The only spot left for him was between Lily and Molly. Neither Molly or Lucy who sat next to her older sister, looked particularly pleased to see him either. Unlike his sister however, they weren’t angry they just looked a little nervous. “What’s going on?” Hugo asked, more towards his team mates than anything else.
It was Lily who answered, grinning at him and patting the seat between her and Molly. “I saved you one!” She chimed happily watching him the whole time with the largest smile he’d ever seen on her face as he sat down between the two of them. It was strange sitting with the girls, he felt like he was at the children’s table during a holiday dinner where all of his family had gotten together.
“The girls are back together again.” He heard Palmer snark to Liam on their side of the table.
Finnigan laughed so hard he choked on his scrambled eggs. He took a drink of his pumpkin juice quickly so he could swallow properly again and added with a grin, “that’s good because painting the nails on your dominant hand really sucks when you have to do it yourself.”
Both of them laughed, a bit too loudly in Abbey’s opinion and she let them know it by elbowing Seamus in the side. Hugo wasn’t all too thrilled either and he grunted, “What’s that supposed to mean, Finnigan?”
Liam ignored him completely and instead jumped away from Abbey in his seat, rubbing his side where she’d hit him. “Come on, Abbey, it was funny, admit it!”
“You’re too loud,” she groused and looked up at him with shadowed, red-rimmed eyes. “I can’t believe you had that anti-hangover potion and didn’t share it with me.”
“Aww,” with an overly sweet tone, Finnigan pulled her head down towards him to kiss the top of it. “Well you were having your girl time with Weasley so I didn’t want to bother you.”
If it wasn’t for the way Rose was glaring at him, Hugo might have wondered if somehow he’d managed to turn invisible in the shower the way the end of the table he wasn’t related to kept ignoring him. “Nothing happened if that’s what you’re mad about,” he insisted and even though Palmer, Liam, and a few of the other seemed to have heard him that time since they all burst into laughter, still none of them answered him.
“It’s okay, Hugo,” Lily tried to comfort him by patting him on the back lightly although her consolation seemed far too excited to actually have the tranquil effect she was looking for. “Don’t worry about what any of them say, they’re just confused by their own sexuality so they have to take it out on you!”
Hugo’s upset look crumbled away at the edges to be replaced with something akin to the desperation he’d felt while being cornered by the twins in the library. Slowly he turned towards his cousin almost afraid to ask, “what are you talking about, Lils?”
For all of the energy practically oozing out of every pore on he body, Lily still managed a faint embarrassed blush. “Uhm, well, you know I don’t usually subscribe to rumors, especially about my own family but this one kinda seems to explain a lot and, well, don’t get mad and if it’s not true you can just say it but it’s all over the school by now.”
Hugo opened his mouth and then closed it again feeling all eyes at the table turn towards him even if more than half of them didn’t seem to want to talk to him. “I’m not,” he heard himself whimper, “I’m not gay.” The word was more difficult than ever to say and he knew from his tone and the way his voice trembled that no one at the table would believe it.
Rose stood up so suddenly it nearly gave Hugo a heart attack. Towering over him she looked like she wanted to say something, or to strangle him, and for a moment he thought she might do both but instead she just abandoned the table and the Great Hall as if someone had just made the allegations Hugo was facing about her.
“I’m not,” He insisted when a silent survey of the table told him no one had believed him, not even Lily.
“I think he’s going to start crying.” Higgs looked amused as he watched Hugo as if he were an attraction in a circus.
“This is so disgusting, I think I’m going to be sick.” Abbey groaned and on shaky feet headed for the door.
“Oy! Don’t leave, he might sit next to me!” Liam shouted and followed her out.
Hugo was speechless and horrified as the whole table seemed to break up then, people leaving one by one and all of them with something to say either in the form of an underhanded comment or simply with their eyes. For his part, Hugo didn’t have anything to say to any of them and instead watched his empty breakfast plate with his mouth slightly agape as they left. Even Molly ushered her little sister out of the Great Hall before either of them had finished their breakfasts.
Beside him, Lily watched him cautiously, pushing around what was left of her morning meal around with a fork. “So,” she began after a long suffering silence, “do you have a boyfriend?”
Hugo spent the rest of the morning trying to convince Lily that he wasn’t gay as if by somehow convincing her the rest of the school would follow suit. He didn’t know who had started such a rumor, although he had a pretty good idea, he couldn’t believe how fast it had spread if his whole house seemed to have heard it by breakfast. From the way people caught sight of him and then grabbed their friends closer to whisper to them, he guessed it wasn’t just Gryffindor who had heard the secret either.
Knowing the rumors that were circulating around the school about him did nothing to help Hugo prepare himself for the week started with one of the most horrible mornings ever. At first it was just the looks, whispers, and giggles that followed him around but as the days progressed and the rumor spread everything seemed to get worse. Most of the hazing was harmless, at least he was sure the perpetrators thought that way. There were jokes about his proclivities and how he spent his free time prancing around in women’s clothes, and more mentions of the word ‘fabulous’ than he had ever heard before in his life time. In the hallway he’d gotten called a sissy, a nancy, a fairy, a fag, and even a few more creative names he couldn’t recall without cringing.
Every now and again, though, someone would come up with a brilliant prank like transfiguring his quill into a giant, hot pink plume that littered his notes with silver glitter whenever he wrote or changing the colors of his robes from black to purple and the Gryffindor insignia on his chest into a rainbow triangle.
Sadly, not every confrontation or commentary was as benign. He’d had his books knocked out of his hand on more than one occasion, been spit on, and once he’d nearly been pushed down the stairs. Even if the person, a burly looking Slytherin, had insisted it was an accident it had certainly felt deliberate since it had been proceeded by Hugo being called a faggot.
Abbey seemed to take a particular delight in Hugo’s misery and never missed an opportunity to remind him and anyone else who would listen how she had known he was gay all along. Probably the worst of it came from her as he laid out every embarrassing detail of the time they’d spent going out. She told people about how when she’d tried to get close to him he’d freaked out, sweating and trembling and shoved her out of his lap before running for the door. She made sure everyone knew what a sissy she thought he was. In Potions Barton Pittiman even asked him if it was true that she had walked in on him prancing around the sixth year boy dorm in her knickers.
Swiftly, every aspect of his life became about the war between the school to prove he was gay and Hugo who kept insisting that he wasn’t. It was all anyone wanted to talk to him about and the reason why people he was acquaintances with before now no longer wanted to talk to him at all. It was why all of his ex-girlfriends needed to corner him again, either in tears or to hit him, and why he was often given a wide breadth in the hallways.
Hugo couldn’t even catch a break from the mess his life had become in the sanctity of his own dorm room. The silent treatment he’d gotten from Liam and Palmer on Monday at the breakfast table persisted and the pair seemed to have convinced everyone else he bunked with to do the same. Every morning when he went to shower it was heralded by Liam and Palmer rising the alarm to cover up, that the fag was coming, and for people to guard their dicks.
Any reprieve he may have found in the company of the twins Hugo knew he had to shy away from. Hanging out or being seen with either of them would only cement every single rumor that was floating around the school about him. He had to be cruel to avoid them, ignoring them in the halls when he couldn’t hide from them and refusing to accept any of the messages they sent, even the private ones in the shape of origami animals that would show up at his feet every now and then. Without them he had no one. He couldn’t dump his problems on Lily, she was only fifteen and seemed far too enamored with the idea that he liked kissing other guys to actually take him seriously and Rose still refused to speak to him.
Everything culminated and broke on Thursday. Hugo was returning to Gryffindor Tower red faced with his robes balled up in his arms after walking around the whole day with the word ‘PONCE’ written across his shoulders in gold glitter. The fact that it had been a Professor that had pointed it out to him that seemed to make it worse and all he wanted was a little peace and quiet. He was sure he could get it in his own House since by the end of the week everyone there seemed to think he had caught some contagious, terminal plague.
He took the long walk through the common room and up the stairs silently, ignoring Palmer and Seamus who had been talking quietly together but stopped when he came in to follow him with their eyes. Hugo made it about halfway to his dorm when he kicked a very familiar green charms book left in the middle of the stairwell. Thinking it odd and too tired to wonder how or why it was there, he picked it up. A few more steps up were some more books, a picture of his family, souvenirs from the Chudley Cannons game his father had taken him to the summer before his sixth year started.
Bracing one hand on the stone wall, Hugo leaned around the corner of the spiral stairway and saw exactly what he was coming to expect. It wasn’t just a few of his personal items tossed down the stairs, it was all of them, all of his clothes and personal affects, his trunk, his Quidditch gear, even the sheets, pillows, blankets and mattress from his bed. All of it had been tossed out of his room and down the stairs. He’d been evicted. He’d been evicted out of his own room.
Hugo had been tired before but this most recent affront lit the slow burn of rage he had somehow managed to contain through all of the harassment and abuse he’d tolerated over the course of the week. It wasn’t much of a mystery who was behind it, especially when he emerged and saw the pair of them laughing.
“Merlin, look, he’s throwing a hissy fit!” Higgs managed inbetween snorts of laughter. “You better take this, Finnigan, you have much more experience with insane girls than I do.”
“Maybe he’s just having his period,” Liam answered and somehow, through his hysteria, managed to stand just in time to catch the green charms book Hugo threw with his head. “Bloody hell!” Liam shouted and clutched his forehead. Anything he had found funny five seconds ago seemed to be quickly forgotten.
“Oh, what?” Hugo snarled back, at him, “just because you think I’m queer you’ve forgotten that I can kick your arse?”
“If you’re trying to pick a fight, Princess, forget it,” Liam took his fingers away from his head and checked his fingers for blood, finding none he rubbed the spot roughly again, the corners of his mouth turning down in disgust as he took in the sight of the fuming Hugo before him. “I don’t hit girls.”
Hugo grabbed him by the front of his robes and when Liam tried to pry his hands free, he shoved him backwards so that he very nearly tripped over a low table. “What did you do to all my stuff?” He demanded and advanced on him so that Liam had to crawl backwards over the furniture Hugo had shoved him into.
“Don’t worry, we took a vote,” he was assured, although Liam didn’t look at all like he was trying to calm him the way his tone suggested. “We got everyone together and decided we were tired of trying to sleep in the same room with you. We gave it our best shot, Weasley, but when our personal and academic life is being affected because we can’t get a decent night’s sleep out of fear that you’re going to rape us in the middle of the night it’s time we do something about it!”
“That’s...that’s sick,” Hugo snarled through clenched teeth. His hands at his sides had started to shake in their fists for want of punching Liam’s head in.
“Tell me about it.” Liam shook his head. “I couldn’t agree more. You’re pretty disgusting. But don’t worry, we did take your vote into account. Needless to say you were the only one who voted that you be allowed to stay.
“And where am I supposed to sleep?” Hugo demanded, not sure how much longer he was going to be able to control himself.
Liam seemed to be at the same breaking point because he shoved Hugo backwards to put more distance between them as he stood again. “I don’t fucking care where you sleep, Weasley! Sleep in the bin with the rest of the rubbish for all I care! You’re a disgusting, perverted, faggot and the thought that I’ve shared the same room with you for six years oggling my arse and wanking off to fantasies of you doing who knows what to us makes me want to puke! I don’t even want to know what was going through that rotten, perverted mind of yours during Quidditch and in the locker rooms! If I wasn’t afraid of catching something I’d knock all of your teeth out!”
“Holy crap!” Palmer interrupted with a fresh burst of laughter that was so inappropriate it couldn’t possibly be on account of anything being shouted at that particular moment. Hugo realized with dread that at some point between him throwing the charms book at Liam’s head and now that Palmer had picked the book up and the scrap piece of parchment paper that had fluttered out from between the pages. “Finnigan, look at this! Look at this! This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life!”
Liam snatched the paper away and any chance at Hugo denying that it belonged to him was lost when he dove unsuccessfully to intercept it. It didn’t take long to read and when Liam had finished, he was smiling too, waving the paper tauntingly in front of Hugo. “Are you serious, Weasley? Really?”
Palmer caught Hugo’s arm and pulled him back when he lunged for Liam and not the paper as Finnigan turned around to address the group of Gryffindors that had by now gathered to watch the spectacle. “I’m Gay,” Liam read in a mock weepy tone that was so close to how Hugo had felt when writing that very line it sucked the strength of his rage right out of him. “everything and everyone hurts,” Liam went on and pretended to sob as he waved the paper above his head. “I don’t even know who I am anymore!”
Liam and Palmer weren’t the only ones who found Liam’s show entertaining as laughter rippled through the assemblage. Hugo, however, wasn’t the only one who didn’t find it funny either. It wasn’t hard to pick Rose’s frowning face out of the jovial crowd. “You’re the saddest most pathetic sorry excuse for a human being that I’ve ever seen.” Liam shook his head and looked at Hugo with an amused smile. He crumpled up and tossed the note at him and Hugo snatched it up off the floor before anyone else could get their hands on it.
After that there wasn’t much else he could do with everyone looking at him and laughing so when Hugo saw Rose break away from the rest of the crowd and slip out of the room he took it as an excuse to leave and went after her. “Rose!”
His sister must have been tired of not talking to him because it was ridiculously easy for Hugo to catch up to her after her hasty exit from the Gryffindor common room. He caught her arm and forced her to face him, panting both from chasing after her and from what he’d just been involved in in front of everyone. He didn’t even want to think what Palmer and Liam were saying about him now that he had gone. “Rose, wait! Please! It’s been four days. I keep waiting for you to lay into me but you never do. What’s wrong with you?”
Even though she’d let him catch her, Rose still didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to Hugo at all. Reluctantly, though, the hardness in her face softened and though she pulled her arm out of his grasp, she didn’t try to leave him there again. “What’s going on with you, Hugo? Didn’t you think you could tell me? We’ve always told each other everything. What were you afraid of?”
“Rose, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” He insisted, a pathetic lie. Hugo knew he couldn’t admit anything to Rose, though. There would be no denying it to anymore if he confessed, not just to Rose but to anyone.
The ground Hugo had gained by begging for her to tell him what he did was instantly lost when he said that, he could tell by the crushed expression that depressed her features. He hadn’t seen a look like that on his sister’s face since he’d told her once when they were much smaller, that he wished he didn’t have such a pushy, nosy, know-it all sister and would have rather been an only child. “I don’t know what happened to you Hugo that you don’t think you can trust even me, your own sister, but I’m not going to sit here and let you lie to my face and pretend that everything’s alright. Just be honest with me. Are you gay? If you tell me you’re not, I’ll believe you. I’ve never really bought into rumors.”
Hugo laughed nervously and even if he felt Rose pulling away and the rift he’d caused between them growing wider and wider and even though he wanted to stop it and tell her everything, he couldn’t. He heard his voice as if it belonged to someone else, willed it to tell the truth, and then let it lie. “You really think I’m gay, Rose? Maybe you’re stupider than I am.”
“I’m not stupid,” Rose was ridiculously calm, a lot calmer than Hugo would have been if their roles had been reversed. “And you’re not stupid either, Hugo. When you want to actually have a conversation let me know. Until then I can’t stand seeing you like this. I know who you are, Hugo, but I don‘t know who you‘re turning into.“ Rose took a few steps back before turning to leave him there. He wanted to follow her, to repair at least one thing out of the hundreds he’d screwed up but without knowing how he could do so without telling her everything, he simply let her leave.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, NEXT, Part 9, Part 10 final