Chapter Text
After five full years at Hogwarts, having had classes with Gryffindors, Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs, and his fellow Slytherins, Adam knew everyone in his year at least by face and name. So when an unknown boy dressed in a Ravenclaw blue and bronze tie took a seat in his Monday morning Transfiguration class, Adam was befuddled. And not by a Befuddlement Drought, but the old-fashioned, muggle way.
Once rollcall began, Adam expected the professor to call out the boy for being in the wrong class. Certainly this was a misplaced fifth or seventh year and Adam could be excused for not having a single idea who he was.
Instead, the professor said, “I’m glad to have you this year, Mr. Gansey.”
This kid -- Gansey, apparently -- replied, “I’m glad to be here, Professor” complete with a winning grin. Adam had a small urge to knock his teeth out.
So class progressed as if this new addition was completely normal. The professor was explaining the expectations for a NEWT level course and benefits of studying such a deep, practical side of magic, when the door in the back banged open. In marched Ronan Lynch, no greeting, no excuses, just plopping down on the open stool next to this Gansey person.
“Finally joining us, Mr. Lynch?” the professor said, tone sharp, but that as much admonishment as given. No docked house points, no threatened detention, no punitive essay assignment. Adam understood the complete context of why Lynch was getting a pass for behavior that otherwise would have gotten someone a tongue lashing, at the very least, but he couldn’t stop the bitter resentment that boiled in the back of his throat.
Adam reached up and touched the tender flesh under his eye. How many times had Adam been suffering and still did what was expected of him?
#
When Adam Parrish returned to his sixth year at Hogwarts, Adam had a bruise under one eye and Ronan Lynch was famous. These two facts had nothing to do with each other, except as witness to how shitty each of their respective summers had went.
Adam’s summer hadn’t been worse than the summer’s that preceded it. Except for the fact every summer was worse, for every school year at Hogwarts his blood was more and more infected with magic and the promise of the future. Every summer, back at the trailer park, he went into a more and more intense withdraw.
Ronan Lynch came back to Hogwarts famous because over summer break his father had been murdered.
Adam knew this because he had read it in the Daily Prophet. He had arranged a system with Blue. He paid for the subscription and had it delivered to her house over break and she mailed it to him the muggle way. He had learned after his third year, when he actually had someone to write over break, that seeing owls coming to and fro the trailer often triggered his father’s temper. This way was better, even if Adam read all his news a week delayed.
Niall Lynch’s death had been front page, headline news -- half voyeuristic shock, half obituary. Apparently Niall had been an interesting character, inventor and adventurer, the delight of dinner parties if any you could get him to follow through on an invitation. Adam hadn’t known any of this until an editorial published in the wake of this tragedy showed up in the leisure section.
Adam read the Daily Prophet front to back. Every section was of interest to him, because every page held details that would help him better understand and integrate into the wizarding world. He scribbled down notes and questions to himself to be checked once he was back at Hogwarts and had access to the library.
The story of Niall Lynch’s murder was followed by pieces on the investigation and the funeral on various pages in various issues. As Adam read each paper as part of his own extracurricular study, he hadn’t missed a single update. Nor had missed the photograph from the funeral itself, of the mourning family at the graveside.
Adam stared an inappropriately long time, convincing himself it was just because he was trying to make sure wizarding grieving rituals were the same as muggle ones. Really it was because he could barely recognize the young man he had spent plenty of class time with if never any words. His once curly hair was gone, shaved short. Other than that there was no easy change in him that could pointed out for this dissonance. Maybe it was the betrayal of the camera or maybe it was the set of his shoulders?
Adam wondered if he himself had changed. Other than height, other than new scars, if someone could compare the looks of him before magic had entered his life and now, would there be some ephemeral nature of him that was different?
#
“Already at the homework, Parrish?” Tad said. He then went out of his ways to knock shoulders with Adam as he took a seat at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall.
Adam had his advanced Transfiguration textbook set up between two goblets. The length of the reading which had been assigned to be done before next lesson was astronomical, and Adam was sure his other NEWT level classes would follow suit in rigorousness. It being the first day of classes was no excuse for lagging and getting caught behind.
Adam didn’t respond. One didn’t always need to respond to Tad. He just liked to hear himself talk.
It was very easy to get Tad going on the talking, and as he was a pureblood who knew and took for granted more about the wizarding world than he could realize, sometimes letting him talk lead to Adam’s advantage.
So when Adam did end up responding, it wasn’t about his study habits.
“Where’d this Gansey person come from?” he said.
Tad scoffed. He scooped a large portion of food onto his plate. He would leave about half of it uneaten, a kind of wastefulness that put Adam on edge every mealtime.
“You don’t know who Dick Gansey is?”
Again, Adam didn’t need to respond.
Tad elbowed Joshua, where he sat on Tad’s other side. “Hey, Parrish doesn’t know who Dick Gansey is.”
“Merlin, Parrish, pathetic.”
Adam repressed a sigh. This whole thing was really his own fault.
“Why don’t you ask your girlfriend,” someone added, with a teasing lilt.
Adam turned the page of his textbook and let his classmates distract themselves with laughter and jibs. Blue wasn’t his girlfriend. The only time they had been close had been back in third year when they had shared a single kiss and a minor flirtation. After that they had fell and followed solidly in the path of friendship and it worked for them. Adam had never had a friend like her before; he never had nothing like her before, someone to rely on.
Asking Blue, however, wasn’t a bad idea. He owed her a letter anyway.
#
This Gansey person made an appearance again in the double Potions session after lunch. Where he shook the professor’s hand and introduced himself. Adam squinted, watching the entire thing go down.
He introduced himself. A returning student of their year would have no need for introductions.
#
Dear Adam,
It’s so frustrating every school year when you get back and you’re so close but I don’t get to see you until the first Hogsmeade weekend. Ugh. Not fair. We should get Persephone to do something about this.
Anyway, everyone is fine here. Except Orla. She’s annoying as hell. Now that’s graduated, not only is she around all the time, she acts all superior because she’s a full blown witch. I’m ready to take her wand and stick it up her… well, you can imagine.
To answer your questions… Yes, I heard about that Lynch guy’s death. No, I don’t who this Gansey person is. His name does sound vaguely familiar, though. I’ll ask Mom. She’s with customers all day, or I would ask now. You could ask Persephone. You have better access to her up the castle during the week than I do. I’ll let you know if I find anything out.
Don’t study too hard.
-Blue
PS - That last part is a joke because I know you will.
#
“Scrying is the method in which we divine messages and visions, the crystal ball is a just a tool, the medium through which we receive them,” Persephone said from the front of the class. It was hard to call what she was doing -- speaking in her soft, peculiar voice -- a lecture. “One can scry through many mediums, but the crystal ball, traceable back to the Celtic druids, has a special place in the clairvoyant arts, and any divination education without it would be incomplete.”
Adam raised a hand and was given a nod to speak: “I heard somewhere that scrying is dangerous.”
There were only three people in the NEWT-level Divination class, most having dropped it after the OWL exams, with the the allure having worn off after years of trying to divine and failing. Also, Persephone didn’t go light on assigning essays. Adam, frankly, surprised that their class was this big: him, a Hufflepuff girl who seemed to be purely into it for the aesthetic, and a Ravenclaw girl who always seemed like she didn’t believe a single prediction that came out the class.
Because all four Houses were condensed into combined classes at the NEWT level, this mysterious Gansey person kept popping up in the same places Adam was. Thankfully, this didn’t include Divination. Gansey’s personality (or what Adam had observed of it) and Persephone’s didn’t seem possible to exist in the same place. The same way Adam had a hard time imagining his mother existing in the world of magic. Gansey, polite and primed, didn’t belong in the world of Persephone’s tower classroom.
“It can be,” Persephone answered. “When you’re scrying, you are opening up your mind. You risk your mind getting too far away from you, or for something to get in that you don’t want.”
The Ravenclaw girl coughed in a skeptical way.
Persephone raised her wand and gave it a flick. The lights lowered so that the room was only illuminated by the afternoon sun streaming through the window creating all manner of streaks of light and long shadows. “Now, we’ll start with some breathing exercises so we can practice our concentration.”
Adam breathed.
The Slytherin head had tried to convince Adam to drop Divination. Adam had come into the school year with a plan to pursue every NEWT-level course his OWLs would qualify him for… which was all of them. Adam had received E’s and O’s in all his OWL exams last year, a letter that was worth the anger it ired up in his father by the delivery owl pecking at the window at 7 in the morning. Adam’s full course load ambition had been quelled down by the advice of his Head of House, who warned that it was ill-advised, unprecedented, and probably impossible. Eyes set on something sustainable, salaried, with plenty of growing room at the Ministry of Magic, he’d dropped Ancient Runes, Care of Magical Creatures, and Astrology, and kept Divination on instead.
After class, Adam took extra long packing his backpack, especially considering they hadn’t even gotten out their textbooks that class, as he waited for the girls to be long gone.
“Ask what your thinking,” Persephone said, about second before Adam was going to clear his throat to start.
Adam played with the clasp on his bag. It was a cheap metal, once plated to look chrome, but now that worn away to reveal the dull gray underneath. “We have a new student,” Adam said.
“We have new students every year,” Persephone replied. She hadn’t raised the lights again, so her face was catch in shadow, except for the light that glinted off her glasses’ lenses. It made it look like she had shining eyes like an animals out in the nighttime, but in reality it was a mask hiding all telling expression.
“We have a new sixth year student,” Adam said. “That doesn’t happen every year.”
“No it doesn’t,” Persephone said. “Some people get special treatment.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ask your cards,” Persephone said in a tone that was the closest she ever sounded to commanding. “Or ask Gansey.”
Adam left the Divination classroom feeling befuddled like back in third year when he first met Persephone. She only spoke straight forward in bits and pieces, the rest of the time residing on hints and riddles. She wanted you to figure out things for yourself, thought there was more power in it.
But for Adam, Gansey was an oddity, a curiosity, not a destiny. And if Adam couldn’t get a quick answer from one of his usual sources, it wasn’t worth his time and energy to do more. He had his classes, and thus the entire swell of his future, to spend his attention on.
So life and school went on those first few weeks. Gansey’s schedule overlapped Adam’s a great deal, but not completely. Adam had even a less overlapping schedule with Ronan, but his appearances in classes were sporadic and the professors’ patience with him grew thinner each passing day.
What Adam did learn about Gansey without trying was that Gansey was popular, that he had a polished smile, and that people of all houses called out his name in the corridors to get his acknowledgement. He was significant enough to be known and acquire sycophants at an alarming rate. “With a family like his…” Adam overheard a swooning girl say in the Great Hall, and it all came clear without any secret needing to be spelled out. What made Gansey special was money and prestige.
It was the way of the wizarding world, very much like the muggle world outside of it. There were a few brilliants who worked their way up, but most of the important people were born lucky. Gansey, like a toxic mirror, just reinforced what Adam already knew, what Adam was already reminded of every day. That Adam had been born as unlucky and as common as dirt, but Adam Parrish wasn’t going to let luck stop him.
#
On Friday afternoons Adam had a favorite table in the library where it was mouse quiet. No one but him did studying on a normal Friday afternoon. Sunday afternoons, yes, in the rush to get everything done for classes on Monday. Friday afternoons before exams, yes, but those weren’t normal Fridays. Every other day of the week, maybe, it trickled depending on assignments and due dates.
Friday afternoons in the library were Adam’s perfect privacy as the rest of the school would be restless with newly born weekend freed: in the common room, out on the lawn, in the Great Hall, and in the corridors in between.
So Adam Parrish found his table, spread out his books and parchment with no care that anyone else might need the space. As he settled in for a solid few hours of work, voices drifted through the stacks from a few bookshelves down. Familiar voices.
“I can’t find it here… Is this even the history section?” This was Gansey, Adam believed, for he raised his hand and answered enough questions in class for it to become familiar already.
“I don’t fucking know.” That could only be Ronan Lynch. Adam had seen them sitting together in classes and even together in the corridors. Neither seemed like a friend the other would want.
“You don’t know? How long have you gone to this school?”
“What part of ‘I don’t fucking know’ do you not understand?”
Adam glanced toward Madam Pince, sitting at desk near the doors into the library, an ever vigilant guard of her precious tomes. She was one of those librarians who cared more about the wellbeing of her books than about people using them. She didn’t care for students in her library and she was intimidating to ask for help. Adam thought he might of come one of her favorites, or at least one of her least hated, over his constant years of coming here and never breaking the rules about loudness, food, or mess once. She didn’t glare at him quite so viciously as other students upon entering.
With a sigh, Adam stood and followed the voices to their source. The faster they found their book, the faster they would leave, the faster Adam’s private time could continue as planned.
He poked his head around the bookcase.
Ronan was sitting on the windowsill, head leaned back against the glass as he stared indeterminately up at the ceiling. The heal of one foot was propped up on a low shelf, putting dirty treads of worn shoes very close to the spines of some very precious books, a vision that would’ve given Madam Pince a minor heartache or the necessary inspiration to perform an Unforgivable curse.
Gansey, in stark opposition of his companion, was studiously going down the shelves, squinting at titled spines, trying to read was what worn away or in archaic forms of English.
Adam cleared his throat. Both boys turned to look at him: Ronan with a lazy dip of the head, but Gansey with something a little more startled. It was the first time Adam had witnessed this posh young man anywhere near the area of uncomposed.
“The history section is actually over in that corner,” Adam said, with a demonstrated point. “That is if you're looking for history-history. If you looking for the history of a spell or something, that’s in the magical theory section. Over there.” Another point.
Gansey straightened up. “It’s history-history,” he said.
And that’s how Adam ended up helping Gansey find his the book he was seeking, Ronan following behind like a shadow.
Grinning down at the book now found in his hands, Gansey said, “So, Adam, you’re a library expert?”
Adam shifted the weight between his feet. “I spend a lot of time in here.”
Gansey glanced up. “What do you know about Welsh kings?”
#
Saturday morning, when Gansey approached Adam at Slytherin’s table in the Great Hall and said -- “Ronan and I are stealing some muffins and are going to eat breakfast out on the lawn. Want to join us?” -- Adam almost said no. After all, helping someone find a book and then listening to their monologue on their weird obsession were hardly the dependable makings of a friendship. If Adam could be one to judge what were the makings of a friendship. And those things -- the finding and the listening -- had been performed as a means to an ends, to get the intruders out of his study space.
However, seeing Tad and some of his other classmates gawking, with confusion, with horror, with longing, seeing that Gansey was talking to Adam out of all them, making this offer to the least worthy of them… Adam couldn’t resist. He could spare breakfast time. He could spare more than breakfast time. After getting Gansey and Ronan to vacate the library, Adam had worked well into the evening and plowed successfully through most of his homework.
Ronan was skulking in the Great Hall doorway, awaiting them, as Adam followed Gansey out. They ended up seated amongst the roots of an ancient tree on the edge of the lake.
“Ronan was telling me about the Giant Squid,” Gansey said conversationally, after a stretch of them all devouring muffins from the sizable collection they had accrued by stuffing their pockets and stacking them in their arms and walking out like they were completely allowed.
Back to the trunk of the tree, Ronan scoffed. “If you mean I told you it fucking existed.”
“There’s supposed to be merpeople down there too,” Adam said.
“Really?” Gansey said, with genuine interest. “That’s not in Hogwarts, A History.”
“That book has a bunch of glaring oversights,” Adam replied.
Ronan groaned, loudly, dramatically. “Why are you two such nerds? I’m about throw myself to the giant squid.”
“The squid will throw you right back out,” Adam countered.
Gansey snorted. “Yeah. No polluting the lake, Lynch.”
So the morning went, fading into the noon and past it, just a couple boys throwing jibs at each other, Gansey asking probing questions about other mysteries of Hogwarts left out of the books, and lapses of comfortable silence. And for some stretch of minutes, even, Adam was able to sit there without thinking about all the other things he could be or should be doing. It was like he was his whole self, not past or future, just purely present, for a little while.
That evening, Adam wrote to Blue: I think I accidently made some friends.
#
Blue had started a new job this year, waiting tables at the Three Broomsticks. It was highlight in her letters, sometimes complaints, sometimes outlandish stories about patrons, always tempered by the sentiment: Good tips though.
She, like Adam, was a collector of odd jobs, seekers of entrepreneurial satisfaction. Although money was a motivating factor for both of them, Adam couldn’t help but figure Blue had another motive. With her jobs she was collecting experiences, personalities, identities, connections, so that maybe if she surrounded herself with enough of them she wouldn’t feel so out of place.
Adam hadn’t told her this, his estimation of her. He was fairly certain she wouldn’t appreciate it.
Blue had a shift at the Three Broomsticks the afternoon of the Hogsmeade visitation day, but the morning was just the two of them, on the porch of her eggshell blue house, catching up.
“So when am I going to meet this mysterious Gansey person?” she said. “I never did get around to asking my mom about him.”
Gansey was spending the morning touring the town as this was his first visit. They planned to meet up at the Three Broomsticks later, during Blue’s shift. Adam relayed this plan to her. And added, “Don’t bother asking your mom about Gansey. If her response is anything like Persephone’s, it will be vague and knowing and pointed.”
“Damn,” Blue said. “They’ve had time to conspire by now… How’s your divination stuff going, by the way?”
Adam made a little noise in the back of his throat and rubbed a hand over his hair. “This whole scrying thing… I’m not getting it. We’ve been at it for weeks in class, and still… I mean, not every seer can do every type of divination, right?” He was asking or Blue’s expert opinion, having lived with an entire species of seers for her whole life.
Blue just sort of shrugged. Perhaps it was the wrong question to ask.
“So Gansey,” Adam said, because he didn’t like the long silence. “Just fair warning, he’s kind of obsessed with this Glendower person.”
Blue snorted. “Glendower? That’s like Quibbler stuff.”
“Quibbler?”
“The Quibbler? Oh, it’s this like trash magazine full of conspiracy theories and stuff. You should totally read it. It’s a riot.”
Adam walked with Blue to the Three Broomsticks when it as time for her shift. When they reached the pub and pushed through the door, the place was teaming with Hogwarts robes, uniformly black and crested on the right lapel. Blue sighed, aggressively. Hogwarts students en masse were her biggest annoyance.
He took a seat and nursed a single butterbeer -- he couldn’t justify splurging on more than one a Hogsmeade visit -- as he waited for Gansey and Ronan to join him. It felt strange and worrisome, anticipating introducing his friendship with Blue, something years old now, to this newly founded thing with Gansey. Whatever connection he had with Ronan, Adam wasn’t ready to exactly call it friendship. At this point, they only ever shared the same approximate space because Gansey was there like summoning spell, pulling disparate parts together.
In preparation of this Hogsmeade visit, when Adam had mentioned the meeting of these two different friendships, Gansey had graciously agreed. Ronan, who hadn’t seemed like he had been paying attention, piped up to say, “Are you talking about that mouthy squib girl?” because apparently Blue had a reputation that preceded her. Adam, after all, hadn’t been the only one to witness her dumping a drink over someone’s heads. As Hogwarts rumors went, it had spread fast and in inaccuracy. His and Blue’s favorite variation is the one where she flipped a table.
When Gansey and Ronan did arrive, joined Adam at his table, met Blue when she came over to take their order and say hello… it didn’t go well.
Ronan was abrasive as always, but Adam had warned Blue about him, because Ronan was the type of person that needed to come with a warning label. Gansey, however, had a different way of putting his foot in his mouth all in the attempts of his usual brand of charming. It worked fine on adults and other young people like him, who had been brought up rich and posh. But a comment about the service that was supposed to come off as a light-hearted joke but really overlooked the realities of someone having to work for their money, and Blue a person with a very short bullshit tolerance most days and would probably had even less this day… It didn’t go well.
Walking up the dirt path back to Hogwarts, Gansey said, “I’m sorry I offended your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Adam said, a routine phrase by now.
“She’s not?” But it wasn’t Gansey who asked this with immediacy. It was Ronan.
“What?” Adam challenged. Ronan was a person who just asked to be challenged; he didn’t seem to operate with any other realm of human interaction. “You interested?” There was something about Blue’s and Ronan’s caustic natures that was matching if not complimentary.
Ronan looked away from Adam, then back at Adam, then away again. “No.”