Chapter 1.

Victor Krum has a Delicious Bum Society

The 1994 Quidditch World Cup was undoubtedly one of the biggest events to happen in Wizarding Britain for decades. Everyone wanted to go, even those who didn't really like Quidditch. The hype and prestige surrounding the occasion were enough to make even the most unenthusiastic folk desperate to get tickets. For weeks the Department of Magical Games and Sports had been overrun by witches and wizards alike, pushing and shoving their way through the office. The scuffles got so bad that, eventually, the head of the department had to release a media statement, in which he declared:

"My department is a well-respected and valued division of the Ministry. It is not a place for Quidditch supporters to turn one another into canaries."

If anything, this riled up the public even more. By the time the Quidditch World Cup began, the Magical Games Department had three workers in hospital with 'unexplainable injuries,' a leprechaun infestation, and a Bulgarian flag that had been permanently stuck to the wall along with the words 'KISS MY FAT HAIRY ARSE IRELAND.' The department was, quite understandably, glad to see the back of what would later be known as 'The Summer Everyone Nearly Quit.'

Despite these unfortunate affairs, the Quidditch World Cup lived up to all its hysteria. The deserted moor the Ministry had chosen as the venue was filled to the brim with tents, all various shapes, sizes, and colours. Someone had even brought a palatial marquee, which people were both impressed and scandalised by. Thousands and thousands of people milled around the grassland, making pleasantries and eagerly nattering about what to expect in the upcoming days. Bets were being made left, right, and centre, from who was going to win to which player was going to be the most badly injured.

Above all, however, the atmosphere was electric. Everyone was excited to be there, even small children who had no real idea of what was going on around them. The wizarding world was, for the moment at least, relaxed and carefree, with nothing to worry about except overzealous Muggles wandering onto the moorland.

In the middle of the chaos, Lara Culpepper was in the cellar of her tent, looking for the crates of butterbeer her brother had sent her for. Unluckily for her, the crates of beverages weren't the only things in there. There were also dozens of bottles filled with alcohol, cardboard boxes with various contents, a stack of deck chairs, and a six-foot statue of a dragon.

"Why," Lara whispered into the stuffy room, staring at the menacing-looking dragon in front of her. "Why would he have this?"

Her elder brother, Walter, was a rather strange person all around. He ate only extremely spicy foods, his t-shirts all had slogans on them, he wore glasses with a rainbow-coloured frame, and he once dove into Hogwarts Lake just to try talking to the giant squid. He now worked in the Beast Division of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures at the Ministry, specialising in dragons. His parents hadn't been happy, having expected him to work in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, but Walter had a love for animals that couldn't be crushed.

Proven by his giant model of what Lara was pretty sure was a Peruvian Vipertooth, the most venomous dragon to exist.

(Lara also loved animals—she was waiting to break it to her parents.)

Sighing mostly out of befuddlement, Lara turned away from the figure and went to continue searching the cellar. She pointed her lit wand into the right-hand corner and was about to move on when she spotted a crate with the word 'butterbeer' scrawled across the front. She hurried forward and grabbed two, hoping that if she took an extra crate upstairs she wouldn't have to return. It was a struggle to carry them such a distance, but eventually she stumbled out of the tent, practically throwing the crates onto the grass at her feet.

"I'm not going back down there," she declared loudly. "It's creepy and cold."

"We'll take turns," said Stanley Thruston as he walked over and began to hand out the butterbeers. "And by take turns, I mean I'll make Omar go down when he's drunk."

"Yeah, well, watch out for the dragon."

Omar Shafiq almost spat out his first mouthful of butterbeer at Lara's warning. "Dragon?" he repeated nervously. "What dragon?"

"My brother has a six-foot statue of a Vipertooth down there," Lara sighed, accepting the bottle Stan handed to her. "I almost had a bloody heart attack."

"Why is it here?" asked Erin Goodwin. She was sitting on the grass with her head angled towards the sky, where the sun hung low among the thin clouds. "What purpose does it have at the Quidditch Cup?"

"Why does Walter do anything?"

Amanda Chambers laughed from her place beside Erin, her face half-obscured by a pair of large sunglasses. "That's a brilliant question, Lara," she grinned without looking up. "Speaking of, where's he gone? I haven't heard him for a while now."

"Went over there somewhere." Stan waved his hand around behind him. "Honestly, I just let him do his own thing."

"Probably for the best," commented Omar, taking another gulp of his beer.

Lara shook her head and looked in the direction Stan had pointed. Sure enough, her brother was standing in the distance talking to someone. With the sun determinedly bright today, his conversational partner was not easily recognisable, their body hidden by the vivid rays. Lara sighed and marched over, intent on both yelling at him for the dragon and dragging him back over to the tent. Their parents had made Walter come with her as a 'chaperone,' but it felt more like she was babysitting him.

It also didn't help that he'd recently broken up with his girlfriend, who had been planning to tag along with the group. Stacey was more grounded and less flighty than Walter, often pointing out that he was supposed to be an adult. This, however, had proven to be their downfall; Walter broke up with her the previous week, his reasoning being that he felt like she 'smothered' him. For all intents and purposes, it was probably true. Still, Lara wished he'd waited just one more week before he did it. That way she wouldn't be the one running after him all the time.

"Walter, don't go wandering off," Lara called out to her brother, who turned towards her with an easy grin. "Remember what happened last night?"

Last night, Walter had gotten chatting with a woman who turned out to be a Bulgarian supporter with less than admirable intentions. After searching for him for hours with her friends, Lara had found her brother tied to a lamppost with 'I'm an Irish LOSER' written across his forehead. The only reason Lara didn't completely lose her mind over this was because there were four other boys tied up in the same vicinity. Apparently the woman was part-veela, and getting men to follow her to a 'party'—that turned out to be just her in the middle of a field, where she hexed the boys mercilessly—was less than difficult.

They'd found another six this morning.

"Last night?" Walter's companion questioned. "What happened?"

The sun now on the side of her face instead of in front of her, Lara could clearly see who Walter was talking to. It was Charlie Weasley, her brother's best friend from school. They'd been in the same year, same house, on the Quidditch team together—Charlie as a Seeker, Walter as a Chaser—and had gone into similar professions, though Charlie had moved to Romania and Walter had stayed in England. (Lara would faint at the very suggestion that he move away from her.)

"He got tied to a lamppost—"

"Shhhhh," Walter hissed to his sister, pinching the top of her arm as she grinned at him. "Nothing happened."

"A lamppost?" Another person spoke from Charlie's side, sounding thoroughly amused.

"Wait, were you one of those guys? The ones the veela tricked?"

Lara glanced over towards the eerily similar voices. She didn't know why she was so shocked to find Fred and George Weasley staring back at her given that they were Charlie's brothers, but she was.

"Hey, listen, okay," Walter huffed as the twins sniggered. "She was very charming and very persuasive. I didn't even realise what was happening until I started to get hoisted into the air."

"You're an idiot," muttered Lara flatly.

"Nah, he's just a man," one of the twins grinned, patting Walter on the back. "It's alright, mate. Could happen to the best of us."

"Don't encourage him," Lara scoffed to the redheaded boy. "You weren't the one looking for him at half two this morning."

"Have you ever seen a veela?" the other twin, the one not comforting Walter, asked. "Even Merlin himself would struggle to deny one."

"Then Merlin himself is stupid."

"Aw, don't be jealous, Culpepper," the first twin grinned.

"Yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of Quidditch players for you to ogle."

"So not my point," she muttered bitterly. "Although Krum is pretty hot…"

The second twin gasped and glared. "Traitor!"

"I still don't support Bulgaria, you numpty," snapped Lara. "I just appreciate that Krum has a rather delicious bum."

The first twin laughed heartily. "Numpty. Such an underused insult."

"You can join Ron's fan club, then, if you like," Charlie smirked, and the twins giggled. "He's setting one up, I think. Ron Weasley and the Victor Krum has a Delicious Bum Society."

"It rhymes, too," nodded the second twin.

"I think it's meant to be."

Lara peered at the three redheaded brothers with a small smile, her eyes focusing more on the twins. Charlie Weasley she knew pretty well; he'd spent endless days with Walter during their Hogwarts years, including holidays, which they usually spent at the Culpeppers' because the Weasleys' place was so busy. She rather liked him—and she also knew Amanda had a major crush on him—but it was the twins that intrigued her.

Although in the same house as her, the twins were in the year below Lara, heading into their sixth year in September while Lara began the dreaded N.E.W.T.s year. They were extraordinary pranksters and, from what Lara had heard, pretty smart, too. Rumours swirling around Hogwarts said that they were making their own range of joke products, their intention being to open up their own store one day. This, along with their positions on the Gryffindor Quidditch team and ability to make anyone (except Snape) laugh, made them rather popular.

And, to Lara's surprise, they'd gotten quite good-looking. They were taller than she remembered them being, with shaggy red hair and angular freckled faces. Like Charlie, they were stocky and sturdy, with thick shoulders and arms that screamed 'HEY, WE'RE BEATERS.'

She'd hardly ever spoken to them—she'd never really had a reason to, except to yell at them when they pranked her—but she'd always wondered what they were really like. All she heard was gossip, the occasional 'Fred and George are in detention again' from their friends, and sometimes she caught them executing a prank. They were like one big, funny, ginger puzzle that Lara kind of wanted to figure out.

But then again, they were really loud. And she had a feeling they'd eventually get on her nerves.

"Don't get tied to a lamppost again," she warned her brother, thumping his arm. "I swear to Merlin, Walt."

"I'll be over in a minute," he replied unconcernedly. "Go have fun with your friends."

She rolled her eyes at him but did as he said, nodding goodbye to the three Weasley brothers before she headed back over to the tent. Her friends hadn't moved since she'd left them; Erin and Amanda were on the grass sunbathing while Omar and Stan sat on two deck chairs talking about the Quidditch match.

"Where is he?" Stan asked as Lara flopped to the ground, lying on her back to stare at the sky.

"Talking to Charlie Weasley," Lara replied. "He promised not to get kidnapped by a veela again, but who knows?"

"Charlie Weasley?" Amanda instantly rolled onto her stomach, putting her sunglasses onto her head to look at Lara. "He's here?"

"I think the whole family is. Fred and George were there, too."

"Interesting," smirked Amanda.

"Don't say it like that," Omar grumbled into his butterbeer bottle. "You sound perverted."

"Fred and George are more her age, though," Erin said. "And they, you know, live in Britain. That's a big plus."

"A Ravenclaw that fancies the Weasley twins. Now that's one for the history books," Lara teased her friend.

Amanda shrugged, a bright smile on her face. "They do say opposites attract."

"But which one would you choose?" Erin asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

"I dunno. Is there a difference?"

"They're not a connected mass, Mandy," snorted Lara. "They're individuals."

"Can you tell them apart?"

Lara clicked her tongue; she was more likely to have a date with a Hippogriff than to know which twin was which. There was a joke around school that even their own mother couldn't tell them apart.

"She clicks her tongue when she doesn't know what to say," Erin said simply. "Which means no, she can't tell them apart. I'm pretty sure George is the more sensitive one, though. Fred's apparently got a shorter temper."

"And you know this how?" asked Stan.

"Girls' bathroom," Erin fired back as if he was being totally stupid.

"Probably George, then," Amanda murmured, rolling onto her back again. "Fred and I would kill each other. You know how I get."

Everyone else nodded; they'd all been on the receiving end of Amanda's temper before and none of them particularly wanted to relive it.

"Anyway, straying away from topic of the Weasley twins' animal magnetism," Omar said sarcastically, throwing Stan a long-suffering look. "Someone needs to go get more butterbeer, and I'm not drunk enough yet."

"Be careful of the dragon," Lara murmured distractedly to whoever the unlucky bugger was, and took another drink of her beer.

Sooooooooo…I have a new story! Over three years after I finished my last one...I swear it doesn't feel that long…

This is Phoenix Lament, the story of Lara Culpepper. It follows the books, so if you've only seen the films there might be a few things that are different to how you remember them. Also follows canon storyline. Let me know what you think!

Also***********disclaimer. I don't, and never will (sadly), own Harry Potter in any way, shape or form.

Edit: So, after years struggling with punctuation and capital letters, I finally have a beta! Le soleil brille pas pour toi kindly offered to help me out and she's fabulous. I can finally post chapters and not completely stress out about all the mistakes haha! Anyway, go check out her stories!