Year/Job
Dad
"I'm pretty major and I'll sing it out loud." |
Travis
Fox Bishop
Flourish and Blotts Employee IS OFFLINE
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Post by Fox Bishop on May 31, 2023 20:44:18 GMT -8
Fox sighed, studying the abyss of his tumbler. Beneath the clear glass was the dark, polished wood of the bar. Beneath that, the floor, and beneath that a foundation, and beneath that still, the earth stretched for thousands of miles. Fox imagined Emilia there on the other side of the world. He felt as empty as his glass. Emptier, even. The heat in the room was actively converting the ice in his glass into water. Soon it would be half-empty.
“Another drink, Mr. Bishop?” Lloyd offered with a distant, sort of stern smile. “Spare no expense,” Fox said. As Lloyd uncapped a bottle of Weller Special Reserve, Foxed turned around to study his classmates filtering into the boathouse. They came with smiles, they came with laughs, they came without a concern in the world. Fox had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“You got a girl, Lloyd?” Fox asked the Hogwarts bartender, swirling the bourbon in his glass before taking a hit. “I do not, Mr. Bishop,” Lloyd said. “I got a girl too,” Fox replied absently. “I haven’t seen her in,” he paused, counting the weeks in his head. “Ten hours.” “Sometimes,” Lloyd started slowly, polishing a freshly cleaned glass in his hands. “Hours can feel like centuries.” “That’s very true, Lloyd,” Fox nodded.
“For me, of course, it feels like only a season ago that I last saw my Wesley. But it must have been…July fourth, nineteen twenty-one, yes. My god. Has it really been that long?”
Fox had lost interest in the conversation. He drifted into his drink now, sinking down below its golden surface. Down, down as far down as he could go. He searched for Emilia there, found only the melancholy memory of her. A year ago, in the Room of Requirement, he’d sat at this same bar and drank with Emilia. With each sip of his blue lagoon, Fox grew more vulnerable to Emilia’s veela charm. In the past he had been resistant to the veela rays that made boys go all stupid, but drunk, Fox simply couldn’t resist.
“You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. “I know.”
As Fox swiveled in his chair, the boathouse faded out around him. He was back in the Room of Requirement on that September evening in 2011. He was watching himself. Emilia dragged him by the hand, pushing through classmates to find a place to settle down. They found a private corner of the room, a couch recently vacated by a group of students who had drank too much for their first time. He felt everything as he watched the events play back. The cool kiss of the Stoli bottle on his lips, its sudden warmth when Emilia passed it back to him.
“I want to kiss you. Is that alright?”
Fox felt the phantom tug of Emilia’s fingers as they glided through his hair for the first time.
“No.”
Fox couldn’t do this. He couldn’t keep playing the same memories over in his head. He had gone back to Hogwarts for Emilia. He’d made a promise to her that he wouldn’t let their mistakes hurt his future. But if he kept doing this, if he kept living every moment in the past, he was sure to fail. Wiping tears from his eyes, Fox hopped off the stool and sprinted out of the boathouse.
He continued running up the Hogwarts lawn. The world was spinning around him, his stomach seemed to turn in the opposite direction. The sound of cobblestone beneath his feet pounded in his ears. Fox had studied every corner of this castle, knew most of its secrets from books he’d read in the library alone. He didn’t care to take the passageway outside of the greenhouses that led into the corridor just outside of the Hufflepuff common room. He simply pushed through the large double doors, caring little about what trouble he encounter on the other side. He pushed on, up the treacherous staircase. By the time Fox reached the clocktower, he was as pale as Lloyd.
He found a trio of first years there, huddled around a dimly glowing lamp. On the floor between them sat a large square of parchment that Fox recognized as the original Hogwarts Charter, usually found safely behind glass in the Great Hall.
“I don’t get it,” the messy haired boy in the middle mumbled. “The Stone of Whispers said that the secret of Godric’s Gold was hidden in the charter.” “Are you sure it didn’t say ‘chowder’, Henry?” The red headed boy to his left said. “I guess it could have, Reggie.” Henry replied, brushing the hair from his eyes with a physical look of uncertainty. “Merlin’s sake,” the girl on Henry’s right exclaimed. “It’s a code! We obviously have to do something with the parchment to reveal the map.” “Brilliant, Ariadne!” Reggie reached across Henry’s line of sight for a high five, but Ariadne didn’t return the gesture. “Maybe we should pour pumpkin juice on it and see what happens,” Henry offered.
Before Ariadne could rebuff Henry’s supremely dumb idea, they spotted Fox’s shadow dancing in the glow of the lamp. Reggie looked up in terror and gasped, “Cheese it, gang! It’s Professor Tannen!”
The trio bolted from the clocktower, scurrying passed a dazed Fox with the charter in hand. He made a mental note to tell Julian about the plot to steal the thousand-year-old document as he took a seat on the floor in front of the lamp. He dimmed the light so that he could stare out in the stars. He found the moon in the sky there too, not quite half empty but working its way there. He wondered if Emilia was looking out at the moon tonight as well.
He remembered something Emilia had said once about the moon bringing good luck to certain signs on certain nights. It was all gibberish to the always logically driven boy, but in his state Fox was willing to try anything. Tonight he applied his own spin on the magic moon. He closed his eyes and made a wish. He sighed as he opened them again, finding nothing else around him but the blanket of stars in the sky.
“I can’t do this,” Fox said to the sky. “I can’t do any of it. I don’t want to do any of it. Not without you.”
Lloyd was right about time. It felt like only this morning that Fox had last seen Emilia, it had only been this morning. But time seemed to freeze there in the clocktower. It had been a century since he’d made his wish, and all he wanted now was for time to speed up. To close his eyes, and open them up in the future. Beyond school, and all the things that school meant. Classes, and Quidditch, and studying, and exams, and bullies, and parties, and fights and, and cults, and clubs, and main characters, and secret treasure maps hidden on school charters. He wanted to open his eyes and see Emilia.
But all he could do was go to sleep.
Fox heaved one last, wanting sigh. He stood, picked up the lamp and turned toward the door of the clocktower, and what he saw standing there he could barely believe.
“Emilia,” he smiled.
Emilia Montes
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Year/Job
Healer
Potion & Plant Poisoning
Heaven’s here, it’s right where you’re standing. |
Steph
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Post by Emilia Montes on May 31, 2023 22:46:07 GMT -8
The room was hot, almost suffocating. The lights flashed all around them, people moved along to the music on the dance floor and Emilia felt her heartbeat pounding in her chest, but even in all the chaos they had managed to find a place for themselves. She could feel Fox’s heart beat with hers as she leaned in closer, her lips mere millimeters from his. His breath felt hot against her skin. And even though they didn’t kiss on that couch, she constantly thought about this moment.
It had been a whole year since the back to school party in the Room of Requirement. Emilia knew she should have been back at Hogwarts just like she should have let Fox have a kiss on the couch that night. Instead, she was home alone, three weeks shy of her due date. She also knew that she had to be strong now more than ever. After all, she was the one who shot down any plan Fox had brought to her. She was the one who convinced him to go back to school. If she was feeling any regret, about any of this, it was all her fault. So she needed to deal with her bad decisions.
Despite her earlier resolve, Emilia wasn’t sure how to be without Fox around. She missed his laugh. She missed his stories. She missed feeling his cheek press against her belly as they both waited for their baby to give them a sign that it was indeed still in there. She missed everything. Without Fox, the silence was deafening. She sat in the nursery, her tears had all been shed by this point, and she closed her eyes. The summer breeze blew through the open window, smelling of flowers and salt from the sea. Emilia wished she could have held on longer when Fox cupped her face with his hands as they said their goodbyes that morning, but she wasn’t going to get in the way of his future. Their future.
There was another jab against her hand as she placed it on her swollen belly. It felt like their baby was trying to give her the push she needed now. She suddenly opened her eyes. Emilia wasn’t sure how she was going to do it or what she was going to do to be exact, but there was no way she could spend another day without Fox. The last few hours had already felt like an eternity. So, Emilia calmly stood up and began to gather her belongings. If she left now, she could be at Hogwarts by the end of the night.
It was a spur of the moment decision that she didn’t have time to really think about. And when she managed to speak to the Headmistress, Emilia had to make some tough choices regarding the next few months without even consulting Fox. She would have said anything and done anything in order to be allowed to stay at school. When Emilia emerged from the Headmistress’ office that night, she couldn’t believe she’d gone through with it, let alone convinced Professor McGonagall. Sitting in front of the Headmistress and pleading her case had been one of the scariest things Emilia had ever done in her entire life.
None of that really mattered the second she stepped out into the empty corridor. Immediately all she could think about was finding her husband. Emilia had been here long enough to know most of the older students would be partying into the early hours of the morning, but that wasn’t Fox’s scene. She thought about heading to the library but something in the back of her head told her she was going the wrong way. Emilia followed the same path Fox had taken her through on their first night together, she felt like she was following a ghost. Everything was so quiet and everything grew darker the closer she got to her destination. She stopped when she heard whispers up ahead, pulling out her wand.
She stood still, the tip of her wand lighting the walls around her. Was she really about to get detention for being out on her first night back? She decided to go forward and rounded the corner but stopped in her tracks, almost colliding with a young boy. He abruptly stopped, his friends bumping right into his back. The three kids stared wide eyed at her before they all looked at each other and ran away screaming. Emilia wasn’t sure what they were up to but it couldn’t have been good.
She extinguished the light from her wand before stepping toward the entrance of the clock tower. She peered in, noticing a dim light flickering somewhere in there.
Once again, Emilia felt her heart pounding in her chest, she could recognize the back of that golden hair anywhere. She let Fox have his moment which lasted longer than she thought it would. All she wanted was to run up to him, to throw her arms around him and hold him close. But when Fox stood up, Emilia stayed still again.
“Emilia.”
When she heard his voice, Emilia felt herself move forward, an invisible force pulling her to Fox. Her body was buzzing with energy, with every emotion she had felt in the last few months - happiness, love, sorrow, everything. It had led her right here, where it had all started a year ago. Emilia couldn’t believe she had done it. She stepped up to where Fox was standing, her hand reaching up to tenderly touch his cheek but she didn’t stop moving. Emilia pushed him back toward the wall behind him until he was right up against it and she leaned in for a long kiss. She closed her eyes and for a moment she was transported back to the first night they had spent here. The only difference being that he was the one against the wall this time. And, well, the baby still growing in her belly. Emilia forced herself to break the kiss.
“I found something to love about Hogwarts after all,” she said with a small smile.
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Year/Job
Dad
"I'm pretty major and I'll sing it out loud." |
Travis
Fox Bishop
Flourish and Blotts Employee IS OFFLINE
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Post by Fox Bishop on Jun 1, 2023 15:48:34 GMT -8
“Let me show you something.”
For Fox, the clocktower had always been one of Hogwarts’ best kept secrets. Everything happened in the owlery, some things in the library, even the kitchens got their share of threads. But nobody seemed to know about this tower, where you could look out behind the glass of Hogwarts’ massive clock and see the world. Fox had discovered it by chance, introduced to him in his first year by a friendly Hufflepuff second year and a fellow Muggleborn just looking for a place to belong at magic school. “This is where I go to cry.” Lenny boasted.
Fox found it to be so much more than that though. It was his escape from all of the noise—in the halls and in his head. He’d always been brimming with confidence, but sometimes the pressure that he put on himself to succeed could be overwhelming. Would he ever admit to anyone that he needed a quiet place to recharge? Maybe Emilia, sure, but to anyone else he kept a secret like this closely guarded.
That night, Fox didn’t care about any of his secrets. Emilia’s beauty struck him in a way no other girl’s had before. There could be ten Fidelma Finkelbottoms in the Room of Requirement and Fox wouldn’t have glanced at a single one of them. He could only see Emilia on that couch, and he’d wanted to kiss her so badly. But she’d pulled him away from the couch before they got their chance, driven by alcohol, pixie dust, and some level of self-sabotage that made it impossible for her to initially act on a romantic impulse.
“Let’s dance!”
Emilia had dragged Fox to the middle of the dance floor where most of the action was taking place. He remembered the nerves he felt twisting there on center stage with her. He knew that if he had a night to study a book of dance moves in the library that he could really show off, but most of Fox’s skill points were too heavily allocated to dueling. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t dance, because Emilia was attracting all the attention of the boys at the party and that didn’t sit well with some of the girls. When the fight broke out, Fox pulled an increasingly upset Emilia from the crowd and led her out of the Room of Requirement. He hadn’t expected her to accept his offer to leave, but if she followed, he knew that the clock tower was just the place she needed that night.
When was the last time Fox had spent a night apart from Emilia? They’d been inseparable all summer long. Most nights at Hogwarts they’d snuck into the Room of Requirement where they stayed until the early hours of the morning. It must have been around this time last year, shortly after the party when they spent the first few weeks of class stealing glances and dodging each other in the hall. It had all moved so quickly after that. It was tough to go from such an extreme to another. Fox didn’t know when he’d see his wife again. Would she make him wait until Christmas break?
He found his answer when he saw her standing there in the doorway. It was just like one of his crazy schemes after all.
Was this real? Was this some strange magic?
Her hand was warm on his cheek. Her lips as soft as he’d imagined. When she pressed him to the wall and said, “I found something to love about Hogwarts after all.”
It was real.
It wasn’t all making out the first night here in the clocktower. Emilia had confessed to Fox things that she normally wouldn’t have sober. She talked about losing her father, about her life after. She admitted that she hated Hogwarts, and she thought every day of Frigiliana. Acting on some strange, romantic instinct, Fox had enchanted the clocktower glass to reflect the sights of her hometown in France. She kissed him after that, and he pressed her against the wall as he took his own kisses for himself.
It was all so much like that night, Fox felt like he’d traveled back in time. Of course, there was a bit more space between them now. He looked down at her belly and he said, “I can’t ever be apart from you again. We’re too connected now, it’s too much to let go. I’ve missed you too much.”
Anyone spying on the two that evening may have taken them for a pair of overdramatic teenagers, and maybe they were. But this was the mess they had created for themselves, and standing there in the clocktower with his young wife, pressing his hand to her belly to feel his child for the first time since that morning, Fox thought it was such a beautiful mess.
“How?” he asked. “Did you send McGonagall my letter?”
Emilia Montes
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