written for: the level-up competition; tutorial, stage one, task three: a max 3k oneshot about your otp (rosescorpius)—wc: 2645.

prompts: hot-headed / argument; student / hogwarts setting; romantic

notes: i kind of have a ridiculous amount of ships i classify as otps? not like, hundreds or anything, but for most gens, there's something like two or three ships that i straight up cannot decide between for which i love most, so. this is definitely one of them, though! also—i've had family things and exchange applications and basically just a lot of stuff going on the last few weeks, so this is actually being published like two weeks after it was due (as well as written when i was in a pretty drawn out and strained place) so just a heads up going in that it is quite possibly a mess, because i was.

thanks: to the squad. right now, slytherintoagrave who is running this competition and also left me the greatest possible review to do not go gentle—thank you so much. i really wanted to get this in on time bc i didn't want to disappoint you, but unfortunately, life got in the way. i'll try get back on board with all the next tasks, though! also my friend nick, because yeah, it's been a hard few weeks, and he absolutely made my day yesterday and it just made everything seem that little bit less terrible, and my friend thomas for essentially the same thing, but today.

warnings: small bit of language in here

disclaimer: disclaimed.

"You're not that subtle, you know."

Scorpius raises an eyebrow, but steps out from the stairwell and into the room.

"I wasn't aware I had to be," he answers smoothly, slowly approaching the windowsill where Rose is perched. Her entire form is stretched out, with her back against one vertical edge and her legs splayed across the sill, one foot dangling over the external edge. Scorpius thinks to himself about how high up they are, and swallows a shudder.

Rose shoots him a glance, amused. "Not trying to sneak up on me?" she queries, cigarette balanced between two fingers.

Scorpius gives her a wry half-smile. "I wouldn't deign to assume I could," he returns, earning a laugh that reminds him of summer—not the sticky heat that he loathes about the season, but the way his entire body is warmed, even to the point of discomfort. He's not sure what it says about him that Rose Weasley's laughter makes him uncomfortably warm but addicted to the feeling, so he tries not to think about it too much.

Rose pulls her legs in, bending at the knees so there's a spot beside her. She does nothing else to imply that she wants him to sit with her, but Scorpius has known Rose Weasley for seven years, and he recognises an olive branch when he sees it. He hoists himself up beside her, crossing his legs for balance as he sits.

She snorts. "Even clambering onto a window sill a couple of hundred feet in the air, you're graceful," she mutters, before taking a drag of her cigarette.

Scorpius just waits patiently. Rose comes here when she needs to think, and if she's keeping him around, then she has something she wants to say.

Finally, she exhales. "My uncle died," she says conversationally.

Of all the things Scorpius had even considered this being about, that had never crossed his mind. His first impulse—born out of general social decorum, as ingrained in him by his mother—is to express sympathy; his second is to ask which one. His mother would be aghast with that, but years of knowing Rose has taught him that she deals in wry remarks and sharp quips, especially in any situation where she might otherwise be expected to cry.

"Shit," he says instead—not in a sympathetic breath, as he'd rather expected, but bluntly and loudly, like her cousin Lucy would, in a way that seems intrusive in the stillness of the cool night. "Which one?" he asks, hoping that by it not being his first response, it straddles the line of sympathy and brusqueness instead of laying firmly in the latter camp.

Rose doesn't quite smile, but something in her shoulders softens and she leans her head back against the wall. The cigarette slips from her fingers and falls into the night, but Scorpius doesn't think Rose even notices.

"That's the million dollar question," she murmurs. Scorpius doesn't follow, but prying into Rose Weasley's head isn't a good idea at the best of times, and he highly doubts this classifies as that.

"He left me a bit over two thousand Galleons," she says after a few moments.

Scorpius raises an eyebrow and gives a low whistle. Neither his family nor Rose's is poor, and he has definitely lived the grander life—materially, at any rate—of the two of them, but that is not an insignificant amount of money, especially not for a seventeen year old girl.

"Right?" she says, with a sardonic laugh. "How fucking extra—no, wait, hang on," she says, rummaging around in her pocket and retrieving a slip of paper. "Twenty-two hundred Galleons, fifteen Sickles and eighteen Knuts precisely."

"That's a lot of money," Scorpius says quietly.

"Yeah," Rose replies. "Yeah, it is." A beat passes. "I didn't really know him," she says, her tone made to hold confessions and secrets—the kind of tone that makes Scorpius' blood hum with something electric whenever Rose uses it with him, because it means something like trust, something like truth.

"Which one?" he repeats, his tone softer this time.

"Charlie," Rose says after a moment. "I mean, I liked what I knew of him, and I'd at least met him before, but I didn't really know him at all. He was always with his dragons, see? He's the one who works in Romania. My Uncle Harry told me that through all the years before he married Aunt Gin, he only met Charlie a handful of times—at the Quidditch World Cup and the rest of that summer, later that same year for the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and then three years later for Uncle Bill's wedding and the Battle of Hogwarts."

Scorpius raises an eyebrow. "How many times had you met him?"

Rose pauses for a second, and Scorpius can't tell if she's thinking it through, or lost in the past tense of his question.

"He came to Grandpa's seventieth, and Freddie's wedding," she recounts slowly, "and Victoire's birthday a couple of years ago—though that was more about the memorial than her birthday, I think."

"Must have sucked for Victoire," Scorpius mutters.

Rose tilts her head. "It always does," she says thoughtfully, "but it's probably less of an issue in this case—she's been working with him for the past few years, with the dragons. She probably knows him best of all of us. I'm sure he's made it up to her somewhere along the way." She cracks a wry smile. "Teddy says he always had a soft spot for Uncle Bill's kids, and it goes both ways—Charlie and Aunt Gin were the only adults Dom told about the elopement."

"To this day?" Scorpius asks, frowning. If anyone could keep something hidden from the entire world in Rose's family, his bet would be Rose, Dominique, Lucy or Albus, but given that Dominique and Oliver Wood running away together was common knowledge amongst the cousins, he couldn't see how they could manage to keep it from all of their parents.

"Nah," Rose says, grinning a little. "Lou loves his sister but he's a total mama's boy—not that he gave her any details or anything, but he couldn't stand to see her so worried so he told her Dom was fine, and of course Aunt Fleur pounced. To be fair, he didn't actually let up—he just said she was happy, and then Aunt Fleur asked if she ran away with a boy, and Louis can't lie to the women in his family for shit. From that, Aunt Angelina totally twigged that it was Oliver—guess Hogwarts Quidditch teams never stop knowing each other best, or maybe they're just tighter than they seem. At any rate, Dom hasn't come home since."

"She and Lou all right?" Scorpius asks. Louis is one of his closest friends, so it feels odd to not be sure about something like that, but Louis has always been fiercely protective of his sisters' privacy and Scorpius doubts even Dominique declaring she hated her brother could change that.

"Dom knows her mother," Rose says with a small grin. "She doesn't blame Louis at all. She was mostly glad that Aunt Ginny and Uncle Charlie didn't rat her out—I don't actually know if Uncle Bill or Aunt Fleur even know that they knew, come to think of it." Her smile fades. "Not that they could do anything to Charlie now."

"Are you all right?" Scorpius asks suddenly.

Rose—unflappable, sarcastic, witty, funny Rose, who loves her family and hates the press, who could be anything she wanted if she put her mind to it but sits on windowsills hundreds of feet in the air and doesn't sleep—looks at him with surprise. "I'm always all right," she says, her response too immediate to be anything but automatic.

Scorpius gives her a flat look.

"Well, I'm not not all right," she says mutinously. "I just—" she cuts herself off with a sigh. "I just don't know how to feel about this. It's a lot of money from someone who, yeah, he's my uncle, but I also don't really know him, so I just—I don't see why I got it. Hugo doesn't have any," she says quietly. "And I don't know about any of the others—it's kind of the first time I haven't been able to talk to Lou or Al about something, because I don't know if they got anything."

Scorpius carefully sidles slightly closer to her and twists his body so that his legs are dangling outside the tower, allowing him to wrap an arm around her shoulders.

"You know, when Dad told me..." she says softly. "I just sat there. I had no idea how to react. He just handed me the letter with the slip and mentioned that Hu had nothing, and that it was even more than he got, as Charlie's brother. I don't know if I said anything that entire conversation—and then, a few minutes later, as I was leaving, I had my very first coherent thought in reaction to this." Rose laughs bitterly, and looks at Scorpius. "I thought to myself, since when does Dad read my mail?"

There's something in her eyes that looks like guilt, and Scorpius wants to hug her, to just hold her together, to tell her that people react to the smaller things when in shock because their minds are just searching for something they can cope with, but he can't. The words are stuck in his throat.

"Of all the selfish things—" Rose begins, and that's when Scorpius finds his voice.

"No," he says firmly. "It's not selfish. You are not a bad person for not knowing how to react to all of this, Rose. I promise you, no matter what Louis and Albus have received from your uncle, even if it's nothing, they would be echoing me here."

"I have not grieved once," Rose argues, but there's a catch in her voice and Scorpius knows it for a lie. Lies make him testy usually—at least when they come from someone he trusts—but there is something deeper going on here; he wants to give her leeway because of the situation, but the lie seems to exist solely for the purpose of trying to make her seem worse than she is, and Scorpius can't abide that.

"That," he says crisply, looking her straight in the eyes, "is blatantly untrue."

"I haven't grieved for myself," she clarifies, looking mutinous and guilty and furious all at once. "Not even for Charlie, really, which I should have, because he fucking died and he's my family, but I haven't and—"

"Rose," Scorpius interrupts, catching one of her wrists as she starts gesturing wildly in her agitation. "What have you grieved for?"

Rose, stubborn as always, looks away from him. He waits patiently, releasing her wrist and stroking small circles onto the back of her hand instead. Rose sighs once more.

"My dad," she says grudgingly. "And his siblings—I just—" and here, she falters for a moment, before picking up again, voice so resolute that if he hadn't heard it himself, he would have never believed her capable of faltering, "—can't imagine what it would be like to live without Hu. Or Al, or Louis, or James or Luce or any of them." Her voice cracks, and that moment—that moment of pain and compassion and mourning for someone else's loss—as far as Scorpius is concerned, pinpoints exactly why Rose Weasley is so much better than she is determined to think of herself. The world holds her to an impossible standard and punishes her for not being her parents, but Scorpius Malfoy knows Rose Weasley, and he knows that she is worth far more as she truly is than as any repetition of heroes remembered as golden.

He uses the arm wrapped around her to pull her closer, letting her head rest on his shoulder. They sit there for a long while in the stillness of the night, the only sounds the steady thrum of his heartbeat and the slight hitches in her breath every so often.

Eventually—seconds minutes hours days years decades centuries infinities—he feels her shift and he loosens his grip so she has no resistance when she moves.

"What are you going to do?" Scorpius asks. With the money, about Albus and Louis, about her inability to cry, about her uncle, even about Dominique not coming home—he doesn't know which he means, but probably all of them.

Rose shrugs. "I think," she says, "I want to go to Romania and talk to Victoire. I haven't seen her in a while, and maybe she knows more about this inheritance situation—at the very least, she can tell me a bit more about him. I owe him at least that much."

Scorpius nods. "Al and Lou?" he queries.

"I want them with me," she says. "Like they've always been." She exhales. "Not that I have any idea how to do it, but..."

Scorpius shrugs. "They'll follow you. They always do. They don't know how to not have your back," he says with a small smile.

Rose smiles back at him—it's small, and it's tentative, but it's a smile from Rose Weasley that's just for him, and it makes him feel electric, like always.

"Yeah," she says softly. "Louis... he misses Dominique, so I don't know, maybe we'll make a trip out of it. A crusade for the lost Weasleys," she suggests wryly, but Scorpius can't help but notices a touch more sincerity in her tone than usual.

"Sounds like a plan," Scorpius says with a smile. "Maybe you can even use some of the money to fund it."

Rose's smile is dazzling, and for a moment, Scorpius thinks his heart may actually stop. "That, young Master Malfoy, is an exceptional idea," she says, before pressing a kiss to his cheek.

"I've been known to have them," he remarks wryly, grinning at her.

She laughs, before sliding out from under his arms and hopping down from the windowsill. He twists around so he can see her, taking in the sight of a revitalised Rose Weasley. He's half convinced that she might actually skip off when she suddenly turns and fixes him with her gaze.

"Do you want to come?" she asks—direct, blunt, but with a hint of fondness, and so Rose Weasley that it makes his heart want to burst.

"Do you want me to?" he asks, his tone even and eyebrow slightly arched, even as his heart races. Every inch of him yearns to go—Louis, Albus and Rose have carved themselves niches in his heart over the past seven years, and are now those whom he holds dearest to his chest—but it is, as Rose said, a crusade for lost Weasleys, and Scorpius understands that there are some things about which blood will always be thicker than a seven year bond.

Rose scrutinises him. "If I didn't?" she asks.

He spreads his hands in front of him and paints a genial almost-smile on his face. "I'd still be here," he says.

Rose looks at him, considering. "There's nowhere I could go that I wouldn't want you to come with me," she says finally, locking eyes with him. A smirk flits across her face. "Also, your stoic face is shit. Didn't fool me at all."

The laugh is startled out of Scorpius' chest before he can help it. "Think I should work on that?" he asks her inquisitively.

She holds out her hand. "Well, I think we've got a bit of a journey ahead. I might be able to teach you," she says teasingly, winking at him.

Scorpius looks at her—Rose Weasley, standing in front of him, with a grin on her face, her hand out to him and telling him she would take him anywhere with her—and commits the image to memory. Then he gets down from the windowsill and grins back at her.

"I'd like that," he says, taking her hand.

a/n. if you've read this far, i would very much appreciate a review! otherwise, please don't favourite without reviewing! :)