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Chapter Text

[What do you mean, “a choice”?]

“The hat [...] asked me would I like to be in Slytherin. And I [...] to be put in Gryffindor, and so I was.”

[The hat listened to you?]

“Why shouldn’t it?”

[Could other people do that?]

“I… don’t see why not.”

[Would you recommend this?]

[At this point, he rubs the back of his neck. He smiles sheepishly.] “I guess I’d recommend choosing your own destiny. Can you imagine what you’d choose to get placed in Slytherin?”

- excerpt from the newsfilm “A Conversation With The Boy Who Lived”. Some parts have been blurred with overuse.

***

Three years ago:

There are four tables, although he can’t see them now the brim of the hat has been dropped over his eyes. Three of the tables are crammed full, elbows and knees and hair and hats, and the fourth is small, a group clumped in the middle, forlorn. Off to the left. They haven’t had any chance to clap tonight, and already they’re well into the second half of the alphabet.

Hello.

Yoongi opens his eyes, but he still sees brown leather. The hat smells of old things and libraries, and it sounds like a creaky door, and it surrounds him so completely that the Great Hall seems like a dreamland away. Hello, he thinks, pleasantly surprised at how his own voice echoes through the hat.

Yoongi Min, yes?

Yeah. Hey. They say you put people in the houses they wanna be in, right? Yoongi fights for the words to transmit without any extra meaning escaping his brain, and he’s pretty sure he does an okay job.

I do. The hat sounds resigned. Maybe it knows what’s coming. Something that’s been requested all-too frequently, the past decade.

Not Slytherin?

Not Slytherin, the hat says dryly. But in Slytherin, you would reach a potential you aren’t yet aware of. In Slytherin, you would change your life. In Slytherin, Yoongi Min would become great. Do you trust my judgement more than you trust the rumors?

Yoongi bites his lip so hard he’s sure he tastes blood. I…

And yet you believe the rumors they say about Slytherin.

Yoongi loses his grip on his inner monologue, and a flood of memories spill into the hat, which hums and chuckles - ominously, to Yoongi’s mind.

Yoongi, doing his school project on the most obscure woodland bug he could think of, just to be obstinate. Yoongi, reading a book far too advanced for his age, pretending to know what the longer words meant. Yoongi, three and silent on his feet, listening at the door as his parents worry about whether his cousin will get bullied much for being sorted into Slytherin.

C’mon, he says to the hat, grabbing his mind back again. Don’t - I can’t be in Slytherin.

On the contrary, I believe you would be a gift to the house, and that it would be a gift to you.

No, wait -

But he hears it, through the dull blockade of the hat. He hears “Slytherin!” As loud as a funeral bell, and when Professor Longbottom whips the hat off his head, he sees the hall staring at him. He wonders what they’re seeing. He wonders what the hat was thinking.

The table to the far left breaks out in applause, but it’s muted over the rushing roar of absolute terror in his ears as he stumbles off the stool and towards them, tripping over his robes. The teacher’s table claps politely too, and the other three tables just - they just stare.

There are over a hundred applicants for Hogwarts in his year, and three of them - including him - are in Slytherin. He claps for the other two, similarly-shellshocked Damien Roadfell and Samantha Woods, who sit either side of him and stare at their knees and don’t say anything - and his palms sting from the clapping, as if the noise the small table makes will in any way make up for the feeling of dread flooding through all three of them.

The food is good, though.

***

part one: third year (first year)

Seokjin does his best, but he’s still in Gryffindor, and Seokjin can’t be around all the time - Gryffindor is about as far away from Slytherin as you could get, and Seokjin’s been made a junior prefect this year, which means even less time to save Yoongi’s ass.

Not that Yoongi’s ass needs saved. Or any of the rest of him. The tentative friendships extended to both Seokjin and Namjoon have Gryffindor more or less covered, apart from the rowdier crowd that knock people about regardless of house colour, and last year Hoseok Jung managed to both befriend Yoongi and keep control of his year in Hufflepuff.

Coming back to Hogwarts is catharsis, of a kind. Over the summer Yoongi goes back to his Muggle friends, his pre-Hogwarts bunch, and it’s scabby knees and going with a fistful of fifty pence pieces to the sweet shop to get a pound of gummy cola bottles and humbugs, and riding in James’ Dad’s car without anybody knowing, and skateboarding in the nature reserve and getting chased by swans and smoking around the back of Tescos. They all think Yoongi got a scholarship to some posh school in Scotland, and he’s not about to tell them otherwise.

Back home, he’s Yoongi just like he’s always been, but at Hogwarts he doesn’t have to constantly itch with the effort of keeping his magic under wraps. Here he might get a few sideways looks, a few odd bruises and bumps, a few pencils chucked at the back of his head, but here he can be magic.

“Saw Chester in the Great Hall,” says Jimin Park - second year, now, a year younger than Yoongi. He’s tossing a ball in the air and catching it, his whole body flung against one of the sofas in the Slytherin Common Room.

“Chester who? Chester the place? Chester the big friendly dog?”

Jimin tosses the ball at Yoongi, who only just ducks it. “Don’t be a fucker. Chester Whitehall. Y’know what he said?”

“‘Hi, my name’s Chester Whitehall, I suck cock?’” Yoongi puts on his best Yorkshire accent, but he’s pretty sure he mangles it. “Jimin, don’t fuck about, I gotta go to the library.”

“He said he was gonna get you,” Jimin says. “Throw me that ball back.”

“I’m keeping it for self-defence.”

“Like fuck. Gimme.”

“Give him the fucking ball,” Samantha Woods says, sitting cross-legged by the fireplace, her eyes half closed, her head resting against the marble detailing, soot on her cheeks - she’s tall, and broad, with sandy blonde hair plaited scraggly down her back. “It’s the first bloody week and I’ve had it up to here with you already, Park.”

“I’m a goddamn delight.”

“Yeah, a real pride to the Slytherin name,” Yoongi says dryly, but he tosses the ball back to Jimin. “I’m gonna go to the library anyway. Chester can’t kill me but I’m pretty sure Longbottom would try if I don’t do his fuckin’ essay on Bowtruckles.”

“Bowtruckles,” Gerry Thompson says dreamily, face down in a Charms textbook; he’s one of four Slytherin seventh-years, one of the biggest years in the house. He’s built like a snappy birch tree, as though he could break in the wind, all floppy hands and baggy eyes. “God, I miss Bowtruckles. Yoongi, you wanna do my theoretical Charms, I’ll do your Bowtruckles?”

“Fuck no.”

Yoongi lets himself out of the Common Room to the sound of Jimin laughing and Gerry slowly expiring into his homework.

Hogwarts isn’t bad.

Sure, there’s people like Chester Whitehall and Minjae Yoon and Sadie MacDermot, and others like them, and they kind of make it a bit difficult on the day-to-day side of things, but there’s magic. And books. And Jimin pissing everyone off and Gerry complaining about his schoolwork and the owls and Quidditch - god, Quidditch, the desire drives him round the bend - and the trips to Hogsmeade, and the (less frequent) trips outside the grounds to apparate to the nearest town to buy packs of smokes and Muggle newspapers.

(Yoongi hitches a lift as a side-along with some of the seniors. He hasn’t got his licence yet.)

But generally -

He sees the foot seconds before he trips on it, and manages to duck out of the way. “Heya, Chester. Nice summer?”

Chester Whitehall is two years older than Yoongi, and a Gryffindor. He’s from Yorkshire, and he plays on the junior Quidditch team and his local rugby league.

It shows.

“Fuckin’ fantastic, actually,” Chester says, falling into step with Yoongi as he takes the first staircase he sees that’s going up. “Y’know what I did?”

“Your balls dropped?”

Chester nudges him with his hip, and Yoongi’s side hits the stone banister with a lot more force than he wants, this early in the term. “Yeah, fuck you. Like you even have any. Know what I did?”

“Your mum,” Yoongi says, and sprints for the library, ignoring Chester roaring behind him; his Herbology notes clutched in his hands, he hardly notices the Ravenclaw boy sitting in the nook of the wall, eyes wide over an upside-down copy of Hogwarts: A History as he watches Yoongi flip the bird and vanish into the library.

***

“Have either of you met Chester Whitehall?”

This said by Jimin, lounging on the hearth, holding a comic up to his eyes - directed at Isobel Way and Alwyn Brydon, the two new Slytherins, sorted just last week. They’re both big-eyed and skinny, and seem to tuck themselves into corners of the Common Room away from everyone else - not that Yoongi can blame them, when Gerry is their responsible adult, and Jimin and Damien are constantly running around the House yelling about the most inappropriate shit they can, like it’s some sort of game to freak the kids out.

Isobel Way (an old family, from down the south of Ireland) shrugs her skinny little shoulders. Her cloak is far too big for her, and a thick silver pin shines at her shoulder. “Which one’s he?”

“Big, built like a brick shithouse, total arsehole, once broke Yoongi’s wrist-”

“No he didn’t-”

“And Yoongi denies it because he has this whole fragile masculinity thing going on-”

“No I don’t-”

“Shut up,” Samantha says, slapping Jimin on the shoulder. “Quit fuckin’ scaring them.”

“We’re not scared,” Alwyn says defensively. He’s from Wales, with the thickest accent Yoongi’s ever heard, and whenever he knocks into something or forgets his mind, he curses in Welsh and it’s the funniest thing ever, seeing this bug-eyed little first year yelling in a language that’s basically lyrical spitting.

“You sound scared,” Jimin says.

“Jimin, shut up.”

“Jimin, shut up,” Jimin mocks, turning the page. “The kids need to learn who to run away from.”

“Everyone,” Alwyn says. “Gerry already told us. You gotta run away from everyone.”

“I mean, Professor Malfoy is pretty okay,” Jimin says thoughtfully. He sets his comic down, and Yoongi swipes it under the couch before anyone else can see the contents (Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, in a slightly more 18+ situation than you’d usually find in a Batman comic.) “You probably don’t have to run away from him. Also Longbottom. And Dickens, obviously, but he’s head of house.”

“Don’t run away from anyone,” Damien says, walking in and ruffling Alwyn’s hair. “Punch them in the fucking face.”

“I can’t do that. I’d break my hand,” Isobel says with a straight face.

Damien cackles. “I like this one,” he says. “I’m keeping her.”

Which naturally leads Damien, Yoongi, Jimin, and Samantha to crack out a pack of cards produced from one of Damien’s pockets, and to play a rough game of poker with the two first years as stakes, while Alwyn and Isobel look over their shoulders and help everyone to cheat indiscriminately.

(Damien wins Alwyn, Yoongi wins Isobel.)

(Isobel ruins the effect by asking Gerry to adopt her instead.)

***

“Bowtruckles,” Yoongi announces with grandeur, “Can suck my dick.”

The Hufflepuff table is next to the Slytherins; Hoseok looks over and winks, along with Jimin’s second-year friend (Taesung? Taehyung?) but a group of girls giggle, and one of the Hufflepuff prefects rolls his eyes, piecrust stuck to his chin.

“Just because the bowtruckles can suck your dick doesn’t mean they will,” says Gerry.

“Bowtruckles have caused me so much emotional damage in the last hour that they should suck my dick just to make up for it.”

“Apology blowjob,” Jimin says. “I like it.”

Alwyn tries to hide his grin into his dinner, and only partially succeeds.

From the Gryffindor table, a tiny owl flutters up and deposits a note in front of Yoongi - it’s Friedrich, Namjoon’s scruffy hoot owl, who pecks Yoongi once on the wrist and then flutters back to sit on Namjoon’s shoulder. Stop talking about interspecies fellatio ur scaring firsties says a note in Namjoon’s chickenscratch handwriting.

In response, Yoongi waits until he’s caught Namjoon’s eye, and shoves his tongue into his cheek with a grin.

Lunch on a Saturday is always insane, especially the first Saturday back after the opening week of term. The first years - including Alwyn and Isobel, probably even more than most - from every house look exhausted, traumatised, or insane, depending on their approach to the situation, and anyone from fourth year up looks close to death already - Gerry’s brought his theoretical Charms to the table, which explains why half of his dinner is on his face, not in his mouth.

Friedrich delivers a second note. It lands in Yoongi’s vegetable soup.

Meet @ lake??? jin also and hobi :) squad banter lad times lol

Yoongi shoves his thumbs up, and when he sees Chester catch his eye he turns it into the two-fingered salute.

“So abrasive,” Damien Roadfell says slyly, filling in the crossword in the Prophet. “Honestly, Yoongi. Hey, Edie-Maude, what’s an eight-letter word… old newspapers, frequently dated?”

“Chester’s a dick,” Yoongi says.

“That’s not the answer,” Damien taps his pen against his lip, and Isobel snorts.

“Of course Chester’s a dick, and the sky is blue,” Samantha says.

“The sun is yellow.”

“Gryffindors are shit.”

“Jimin’s mum is- oi-”

“Jesus Christ, you bunch of savages,” Damien murmurs, as Samantha and Jimin poke at each other with their butter knives. He tosses the crossword down by his elbow, giving up on anyone helping him with the clue; “Yoongi - hey, did you actually do the Bowtruckle essay, or did you just bitch about it?”

“I did it. You want it?”

“I owe you one.”

Damien grins as the essay produces itself from inside Yoongi’s robes, and tucks it carefully into the pages of his newspaper. “Thanks, Yoongi. You’re a gem.”

There’s a kid staring at the deal from the Ravenclaw table, but Yoongi doesn’t notice it.

And after lunch, he meets Seokjin, Namjoon, and Hoseok, and they walk down to the lake together.

Seokjin was in second year when Yoongi was in first, and he was introduced to Yoongi by punching Chester Whitehall very hard in the nose and then escorting Yoongi down to the hospital wing to get him fixed for a sprained wrist (freak accident, pushed against a knobbly gargoyle, you know how these things go.) (Not a broken arm, no matter how much Damien tries to tell the firsties it is.”

Namjoon, Hoseok, and Yoongi are all in their third year now. Yoongi met Namjoon during first-year potions shared with the Gryffindors; he met Hoseok during second-year hazing by Minjae Yoon, who had jinxed Yoongi and Damien together and then pushed them down the stairs.

(Nothing broken, except some pride.)

“Friedrich has a sore wing,” Namjoon says, the owl in question fluttering off his shoulder to go bombs-away on Sadie MacDermot before he comes back to nest in Namjoon’s hair.

“Poor Friedrich.”

“Poor Friedrich.”

Hoseok wrinkles his nose. “Sadie’s gonna kill us, y’know.”

“She didn’t see who it was,” Namjoon says, although he quickens his step - the four of them do. Sadie is tall and thin and she plays Quidditch for Ravenclaw in term time, and goes back to play semi-professional girls’ hockey in Scotland. Sadie is scary.

When they’re all slumped on the grass, t-shirts sticky, shoes kicked off - and it’s a Saturday, no uniform today - Seokjin groans. “You sprogs don’t know what’s coming to you. OWLs. Jesus.”

“It’s not your OWL year yet,” Hoseok says.

“Soon enough.”

Yoongi sighs moodily, flicking the head of a daisy with his thumb. “I’ll be lucky to survive to then. Two this year. Fuck, Chester’s gonna kill them. Squash ‘em like a bug. They’re little babies, y’know? This one girl, this Isobel, I think she worships the ground Damien walks on. They’re gonna leave here in a hearse, I’m telling you.”

“Fuckin’ Harry Potter,” Namjoon says with feeling.

“Fuckin’ Harry Potter.”

Neither Hoseok nor Seokjin say anything, but Seokjin huffs a laugh. Yoongi doesn’t like Harry Potter out of an instinctive hatred of things that don’t like him, and he’s pretty sure that not-Slytherin newsfilm will never leave his head, especially when he looks around the Slytherin dorms, at how big they are, at how many of them there used to be. Namjoon doesn’t like Harry Potter because -

“Fuck the system,” Namjoon says dramatically, and slumps nose-down in the grass. “Fuck it,” he says, more muffled, and then screams.

“An ant just crawled into his mouth,” Seokjin observes.

“Oh dear.”

Hoseok has a box of chocolate; the normal kind, Roses, although there’s less toffees and more of the green ones with the nuts in caramel, and the blue taffy ones that nobody likes. Yoongi takes a few minutes unwrapping them all and tossing them in the lake for the squid, who hoots mournfully when he realises Yoongi’s got no more left.

“Taehyung made a new friend,” Hoseok says, lying on his belly, watching Namjoon wipe his tongue with his hoodie sleeve.

“Jimin will be sad.”

“Jimin made a new friend, too.”

“Same friend?”

Hoseok shrugs. “Li’l speccy Ravenclaw kid. Ears out to here and a big nose. Almost shit himself when I said hi.”

“Firsties do that anyway,” Namjoon says. The ant is crawling unsteadily around his knuckles. “Hey, look, animal conservation.”

“Ring the bloody RSPCA, fuck me,” Yoongi holds his finger out for the ant, grinning when Namjoon whips it away. “It ain’t half as big as Hoseok’s speccy Ravenclaw.”

“He’s not mine,” Hoseok says. “Jesus. He’s like, called John or something. But he’s Korean.”

“If he’s a ‘Claw, Sadie will snap him up,” Yoongi says gloomily.

They fall into a lull, then, watching the squid in the lake, and the trees in the Forbidden Forest shake with something weird and mysterious. Seokjin’s eyes are half-lidded, his hands behind his head, his t-shirt riding high on his hips; Namjoon’s cheeks are red any time his eyes dance anywhere near Seokjin, so he’s playing with his ant instead, getting it to climb up his fingertips. Hoseok is holding a blade of grass between his two thumbs and trying, unsuccessfully, to make a whistling sound with them.

(It isn’t working.)

Yoongi leans against the incline of the hill, and pillows his jumper against his head, and goes peacefully to sleep.

***

Samantha Woods, for all that she pretends to hate the very ground Damien and Yoongi walk on, is pretty solid considering the shit she’s had to put up with since they were sorted.

“You need to just fucking run away from him,” she says, peeling the back off a sticking plaster and dropping the two sides into the fire.

Yoongi huffs and shrugs, just edging his face to the side so she can stick the plaster on his cheek. “He was talking shit about Isobel ‘n Alwyn.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t beating them up.”

Yoongi winces when her thumb presses hard against the cut. “Okay, point one, he didn’t beat me up, he just punched me in the face and I kicked him in the balls so technically I beat him up, and point two, I’m fuckin’ used to it and the kids aren’t. Alwyn looks like he’d dissolve if you looked at him funny.”

Samantha groans and slaps him on the shoulder. “You stubborn fucking bastard.”

“I learned from the best,” he grins at her, and he’s rewarded with a laugh and an offer to play cards, instead of going back out to see Chester lord it over him. Yeah, Samantha’s pretty solid. All okay.

***

The problem was caused, of course, by centuries of faction divide, and by Voldemort. The problem was brought to the boil by Harry Potter, though, and so Yoongi chooses to pin most of his annoyance there - when Jimin comes back into the Common Room with his bag torn and his face covered in ink, and when Gerry asks the firsties if anyone’s been bothering them and they grin all dry and say who hasn’t, and when Yoongi ends up shoved into walls and portraits, finding himself five minutes early for every class so he can avoid the crowd in the corridors.

The problem is perpetrated by neglect. But it’s still a fucking problem, no matter what caused it.

“Fuck off, Chester.”

The problem is this: Yoongi’s bag is floating twenty feet in the air, and Yoongi is red with humiliation, and Chester Whitehall and Peter Jenkins are sitting on the staircase, taking it in turns to pull pages out of Yoongi’s bag and transfigure them into feathers, twigs, and pencils (that’s the Bowtruckle essay. Thank fuck for Damien Roadfell, taking the original.)

“Whatcha gonna do?”

“Tell you to fuck off,” Yoongi says. His wand is in his bag. His wand is in his bag because he always got told that story about the Auror that blew his left buttock off when he shoved his wand in his pocket, so his wand is in his bag.

Chester pulls a few battered Frog cards out of the bag and they hover before he summons them. “These rare?”

Hermione Granger and Aleister Crowley. “No,” Yoongi says through gritted teeth.

With a lazy incendio, Chester sizzles them to a crisp. “I sure do hope not,” he says, schoolboyish, sincere. “I think Crowley was a special edition, but I could be mistaken, ‘cos only fuckin’ creeps collect Frog cards. Creeps and kids.”

“Fuck off,” Yoongi says. Wandless magic. He can do wandless magic. Accio bag. Accio bag. Fucking-accio-bag-you-fucking-cunt-accio-bag.

“He’s gonna cry,” says Peter Jenkins. Also in Gryffindor, also a fifth-year. “He’s a baby.”

“Give me my stuff,” Yoongi says.

“Say you’re a baby and we will.”

“Gimme!”

“‘S what babies say,” Chester says. “Go on, Yoongi, you know you want your stuff. Class in five.”

Accio-bag-please-accio-bag-fuck-you-accio-bag

“Accio,” a tiny voice comes quiet from the side stairwell, and all Yoongi’s stuff flies into the shadows.

Chester grins.

Yoongi runs.

He doesn’t have to run long, much as he thought he would - his bag, and all his stuff, is sitting in the lap of Hoseok’s speccy Ravenclaw kid, the one with the big eyes and the ears like soup plates. He’s crouched in the shadow of the stairwell, hunched over the bag, casting a diligent little reparo over the strap, and the broken clasp.

“Hey,” Yoongi says. Maybe a bit louder than he means to. “That’s my stuff.”

The Ravenclaw kid looks up, sees who it is, and turns bright pink.

“‘S cool you got it off Chester, though. Thanks.” Firsties shit themselves no matter what you do, he thinks of Namjoon saying. “Uh. Don’t? Be scared?”

“I’m not scared,” the kid says.

“You totally are.”

“Not of - you, I’m scared of the other one.”

Yoongi sits on the steps, letting the light shine back over his shoulder. “Chester? You’re scared of him?”

The kid shrugs, tapping his wand against the clasp of Yoongi’s bag - the burnished bronze starts to shine again, years of abuse scrubbed away as though polished. “Isn’t everyone scared of him? Even my prefect is scared of him.”

“Sadie MacDermot?”

The kid nods.

(In first year, Sadie had pointed at Yoongi and screeched “that little creep felt my tits!” and Yoongi had the bruise of a Sadie-shaped handprint on his cheek all the way through October.)

(He hadn’t. He’d been across the hall from her, but he was a Slytherin, so nobody was gonna question Sadie “My Granda Fucked A Veela” MacDermot.)

“Sadie isn’t scared of Chester,” Yoongi says. “Thanks, anyway. Chester’s - a creep. I’m Yoongi.” He offers his hand; after a long few seconds, the kid shakes it.

“I’m Jeongguk Jeon,” he says, his ears going all pink. “Um. Um?”

When Yoongi arrives to Charms - ten minutes late, red with embarrassment - he roots around in his bag for an ink bottle, and comes out with a Frog card. Aleister Crowley, and Crowley himself on it, and a little pink sticky note: collection of jeon :).

“Where were you,” Namjoon hisses at him.

Yoongi screws his face into the universally recognised Chester-glare, and tucks the Frog card into his cloak, feeling all sorts of weird. When Jimin says he’s made a Ravenclaw friend, and that nobody is to make fun of the boy with the massive ears and the twitchy nose, Yoongi shrugs and agrees and puts the Frog card on his bedside locker, a reminder to give it back to the kid if he possibly can.

***

“You should join the team.”

“I’m not joining the team.”

Gerry kicks Yoongi’s knee. “If you joined the team we could win the House Cup.”

“If I joined the team you’d have enough members to enter for the House Cup,” Yoongi corrects, turning the leaves of his Herbology book. “Fuck off, Ger, I said I wasn’t gonna do it.”

“Join the team.”

“Fuck off.”

“Join the team.”

“Gerry, I swear to fuck-”

Gerry sighs mournfully. “I’m going to leave Hogwarts never having participated in the House Cup. I can’t believe I’m doing this. My Da would be ashamed if he could see me now. He’d be rolling in his grave.”

“Your Da isn’t dead,” Yoongi says. “Fuck off.”

“I’ll kill my Da if you don’t join the team.”

“Jesus Christ-”

The Slytherin Common Room has a fire lit in the place, burning yesterday's newspaper and a bundle of merry sticks. It casts odd shadows onto the unused walls, the door to the sixth-year girls dorms (no sixth-year girls, just two twins, Derek and Simon Molesley) and the window, pressed against the lake where the squid curls to see what the deal is.

“If you don’t join the fucking Quidditch team, I’ll kill you, and then my Da,” Gerry says cheerfully. “Go on. It’ll be a bit of craic.”

“It fucking won’t. I can’t fly a broom, Gerry.”

“Ain’t a problem. I’ll teach you.”

“Your friends can fly,” says Edie-Maude Black, looking up from Pride and Prejudice with a cheerful, innocent look dimpling her cheeks. (Second year. Jimin’s year. Five Slytherins in that year; a good crop.) “And so can we. Join the team before Gerry dies of early-onset heart failure.”

“If Gerry dies, it’s his own fault.”

“Join me.”

Jimin throws the bouncy rubber ball at his head. “Join him, god. If you join, I will. Taehyung’s trying out for the Puffs this year, anyway.”

“Is he? Hoseok will-”

“Join Slytherin,” Gerry says maniacally.

“Join Slytherin,” repeats Jimin, his eyes glimmering mischievously. “Oh, go on, you know you want to.”

“I already joined Slytherin. Ain’t no going back now.”

“Join the bloody Quidditch team.”

“When pigs fly, Ger.”

Yoongi wakes up at three in the morning to see a pink plastic pig floating around and around his dorm room; Damien shouts fuck you, Gerry through the walls and Yoongi just buries his head under his pillow, trying to hide the sounds of a happy plastic pig oinking over the four-poster bed.

***

Hoseok is the lead Chaser for the Hufflepuffs, even though he’s only in third year. Their Seeker is a slim Chinese-American girl, Melody Cheung, on transfer from Ilvermony for two years; she blushes prettily when the audience catcall, and then she throws a bludger at them, and everyone stops. (Chester Whitehall starts screaming fucking marry me and barely ducks the Jelly-Legs Jinx Hoseok flings his way.)

“You could join the team,” Seokjin says thoughtfully. He and Yoongi are sitting sharing a bag of butter toffees, watching Hoseok corral all the little baby Chasers into a neat line. “Then you could enter the cup, right? They’d take a late submission.”

“Chester wouldn’t let me live it down,” Yoongi mumbles. His teeth feel gummed together with toffee.

“What, you’re scared of Chester?”

Yoongi raises his eyebrow until Seokjin drops his gaze. “He’d fuckin’ kill me. Imagine. Jesus.”

“‘S not like you’d be…” Seokjin’s jaw drops and a toffee falls to the grass. “Slytherin’s Seeker? Oh my god. Oh my god. Gerry is insane.”

“That’s why I’m not doing it,” Yoongi says confidently. “Gimme a toffee. And close your mouth, you heathen.”

“But-”

“Shut it and laugh at the firsties like everyone else, Kim.”

When Yoongi was seven, he wanted to be Viktor Krum. Mind you, that means nothing; every seven year old wanted to be Viktor Krum when they were seven, but Yoongi really did. Really. He had Krum’s poster on his door, and every week his Dad would go to Diagon Alley and he’d bring Yoongi back the Weekly Broomstick and Yoongi would cut the little collectible stickers out of the back page, and when he had ten he’d send away for the Krum Kollectible Miniature Firebolt - as long as his index finger, and it would fly in circles around his wrist, wherever he wanted it to go.

His Mum taught him to fly, the rudimentaries of it. When he was three, on a Cleansweep Seven as old as the hills, Yoongi balancing on the front.

“I was in Ravenclaw,” she’d tell him, and pat his shoulder proudly. “Chaser. Won the House Cup twice in a row!”

(His dad was a Hufflepuff. They’d both been… lukewarm on his house, but how was he meant to hide it? They’re not too bad anymore, although he makes sure never to tell them about Chester Whitehall and the others of his ilk.)

“You could join the team,” Seokjin says.

“We wouldn’t win the Cup.”

“‘S not about winning.”

“You can say that only cos you fuckers win the Cup most years.”

Seokjin just holds out the bag of toffees.

And that’s the problem. When Yoongi was in first year, Slytherin hadn’t had enough Quidditch players to make the team; Gerry had been a fifth year with three bedraggled little Chasers and a Beater, desperately trying to drum up support in the house. But there’s barely twenty-five in Slytherin house altogether, against the two or three hundred in every other, and on the years Gerry did have enough to make a team they just got laughed out of the place. Last year it was Gerry and Edie-Maude, the only two that showed up.

Yoongi likes Hogwarts well enough, but he’s not such a glutton for punishment that he’ll go asking for things Chester and Sadie and Minjae and the like can use against him. He’s not dumb.

(He’s cunning, apparently. According to that bastard hat.)

“Come flying with us on Sunday morning,” Seokjin offers, interrupting Yoongi’s silent sulk. “And then we can play chess or some shit.”

“Yeah,” Yoongi says. Scuffs his foot on the ground. “Yeah, sure.”

In the air, the Hufflepuff team have finished their warm-ups; Taehyung, Jimin’s newest friend, flying over the stands and grinning. Waving at a little dot of blue and bronze.

With a start, Yoongi realises who it is.

“You know him?” Seokjin follows his gaze, the butter toffees all gone.

“That’s… Jeongguk,” Yoongi says. “I owe him a Frog card.”

“That’s Taehyung’s friend.”

“He can be two things at once.”

Hoseok flies off the pitch red-nosed and pink-cheeked, grinning from ear to ear, his scarf so long it hits the ground several seconds before he does. There are introductions of a sort, Yoongi-this-is-Taehyung-Taehyung-this-is-Yoongi, and promises to hang out in the library, and other things of the sort. Yoongi finds himself agreeing to a game of chess with Taehyung, and to a jaunt to Hogsmeade with Hoseok, and it’s all very nice.

The little Ravenclaw burrowed in his scarf is gone, when Yoongi next looks up at the stands.

***

“It’s the system,” says Namjoon again. He burps. “It’s the system. The - thingummy.”

On the floor is an empty bottle of firewhiskey. In Namjoon’s hand is a bottle of cheap Irish whisky, which is quickly following the example of it’s magical cousin, vanishing into the teacups Yoongi has long since pilfered from the Slytherin Common Room.

“The system,” Yoongi suggests.

“Yeah, that.”

“Fuck it, right?”

“Yeah. Fuck it.”

“Sodomise that fucking system,” Seokjin murmurs. “Stick your dick in it.”

Hoseok has fallen asleep, hugging his hat, his mouth open, drool crusting on his chin.

“Nononono, the system. ‘S an abstract concept. Y’can’t fuck an abstract concept.”

“You,” Seokjin points accusingly, “Jus’ haven’t tried hard enough. You can fuck everything.”

“The Whomping Willow,” Yoongi offers, and the three of them fall into horrified silence for a moment, until Namjoon tips his head back to slug a mouthful of whisky right from the bottle. (Say what you like about Hogwarts - at fourteen, if you aren’t an experienced drinker yet, you’re probably doing it wrong. Hogwarts might be magic, but it’s still British.)

The firewhisky was a gift from Seokjin’s aunt in France, and the Irish stuff was something Yoongi swiped from underneath Gerry’s bed when he fell asleep. They’ve taken it up to the top of the Astronomy Tower, where nobody really goes on a Saturday night, and they’d meant to get a little tipsy - that was before Hoseok finished the firewhisky and started trying to stargaze his future while hopelessly, ridiculously, burningly drunk.

(“I can’t remember if I’m a virgo or not,” he’d said, seconds before he fell asleep. “If I am, I gotta… avoid salads. Or solids. Or something.”)

“The system,” says Namjoon insistently.

“We’re gonna fuck it.”

“No-”

“You told me to fuck it.”

“I meant that, like, conceptually.”

Yoongi blinks. “Nope,” he announces, and snatches the whisky to take his own from the neck of the bottle; it burns his throat, and there are tears springing in his eyes when he passes it to Seokjin. “Too big a word. Fuck the system, you said, so I’m gonna fuck it.”

“I meant. I meant. I meant.”

Seokjin sighs. “God, I hate whisky.”

Namjoon grunts his agreement. “Exactly.”

Drink makes Yoongi sad, and he doesn’t know why. Quidditch, that’s a big part of it, and the empty Common Room, and Chester Whitehall, and a Frog card sitting on his bedside locker.

“I’m going to bed,” he says.

Seokjin and Namjoon raise drunken hands in goodbye; Hoseok snores.

***

Yoongi finds himself in a carriage on his own, going home for Christmas on the Express. Seokjin is getting the Knight Bus tomorrow, and Namjoon’s staying in the castle over the holidays; his parents have gone to visit family back in Korea, but he’s pretty content to stay and hang out with Hoseok, who hardly ever bothers to make the trip to Ireland, where his family stay.

Damien is staying too, and he’d asked Yoongi if he wanted to - lounging up on their dorm room floor, his hands and wrists all tucked under his head. But Yoongi misses his mum, much as he doesn’t want to admit it, and so - train. Carriage. On his own.

“Um. Is anyone else in here?”

Speccy Ravenclaw kid. Jeongguk. “No,” Yoongi says, taking his feet down from the seat; the kid’s already dressed in his civvies, jeans, trainers, a scruffy Sex Pistols hoodie that doesn’t look like it belongs to him. “Hey, Jeongguk, right?”

Jeongguk nods, sitting where Yoongi had been, perched on the seat like some kind of owl, his chin resting on his knees. “And Yoongi?”

“Yeah - listen, I owe you something.”

Jeongguk cocks his head to the side. Jesus. He looks like a puppy. “Do you? We only talked once, though?”

“Yeah, it’s from then,” Yoongi refuses to be embarrassed. Chester Whitehall is a wanker, and Yoongi is just an easy target, nothing more. “Here.”

It’s the Crowley card. Special edition: you had to save up for it in Cultists Collect, ten stamps on parchment to be sent by owl to Flourish & Blotts. Only five hundred of them were ever made.

“This isn’t mine,” Jeongguk says - he’s a surprisingly smooth liar.

Yoongi grins. “You label all your Frog cards, you know that? Pink note on the back. Nice hand, though.”

Jeongguk turns as pink as the sticky note on the Crowley card. “I-”

“It was a nice thing, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t wanna steal your Frog cards, ‘specially that one. Chester’s a dick, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk says softly, putting the Frog card in his pocket. “I just - he’s mean, but you’re not. So I wanted to do something nice?”

“You got my bag back. That was pretty nice.”

“Nicer.”

Yoongi observes him, then. Longish hair, bags under his eyes, but already his face is getting a little more the right size for his nose, the right size for his ears. The hoodie is far too big for him, and covered in holes - an older brother, perhaps, or a dad. A comfort hoodie.

(When Yoongi went to Hogwarts, the Slytherin prefect in seventh year - a girl called Bethany Hood - gave him his first green and silver scarf. “Be proud of it, okay?” She’d told him, the day Chester broke his wrist, and Yoongi wore the scarf every day from September of first year to June, and when he opened his wardrobe to find the moths had eaten through it, he cried far longer than he really wants to admit.)

“You’re friends with Taehyung? The Puff?”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk says. If he’s thrown by the new conversation, he doesn’t show it; he’s fiddling with the Frog card in his pocket, running his thumbs along the edges. “Yeah, he - he’s tutoring me in Transfiguration and stuff. Sometimes Hobi helps. ‘N Jimin.”

“Jimin. He mentioned you.”

“He’s nice,” Jeongguk mumbles into his collar. “He said… you were gonna try out for Quidditch?”

Yoongi keeps smiling. “Did he? The little shit.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.” Jeongguk fumbles with the Crowley card, and it falls to the floor. “He… kinda seemed like he wanted you to? A lot?”

Yoongi shrugs, looking out the window, the Scottish countryside plastered in damp rain this close to Christmas Day; he bends to pick up the Frog card, smoothing out the pink sticky note on the back. “Maybe, I guess.”

Jeongguk bites his lip. “I think it’d be. Pretty cool? If you. If you did.”

***

yoongi,

u wrote me saying u would go so i wrote to professor dickens and he says we’re in for the house cup theres no fuckin backing out now u dickhead if you do ill curse your fucking socks and have house elves drown you in moaning myrtles wee

yours sincerely
gerry thompson, Slytherin Quidditch Team Captain

***

Fuckhead,

Hello, You Massive Cuntwaffle,
Pleased to hear you pulled your head out of your ass. Slytherin Seeker is a go. If Chester Whitehall says anything, I’ll rip his balls off and feed them to Sadie MacDermot.

Yours truly,
The Most Beautiful Slytherin In The Whole House (Park)

***

Yoongi never finds out what Namjoon wants to say; he gets a letter by Floo saying that Friedrich collapsed on the way from Hogwarts to Yoongi’s house in Devon, and that the poor fucker had to be resuscitated by professional owlers, and it cost Namjoon his weight in galleons.

Yoongi sends back a Floo message: a lol and a plate of owl treats, because Friedrich doesn’t deserve the owner he has.

Seokjin just sends him a Patronus that says dickwank dickwank dickwank over and over, so Yoongi takes that as a positive sign and videos it for posterity, and for possible showing at any future weddings and/or respectable social gatherings he can embarrass his friends at.

And for Christmas, his Mum gives him her Cleansweep, and a kiss on the cheek.

(His Dad gives him a bottle of malt whisky and tells him not to tell his Mum.)

***

Term comes back on a Friday, so classes are that lazy sort where none of the teachers have anything planned. Yoongi and Namjoon spend all of Charms trying to discreetly turn Minjae Yoon’s hair hot pink, but Minjae catches them, and flings a pencil sharpener at them. Potions is similarly productive, with Professor Malfoy just giving up altogether and showing them how to brew a proper cauldron full of hot cocoa; Yoongi bottles his portion up in a thermos, and dumps his holiday homework on the desk before he’s free to go fuck around beside the lake.

Seokjin, Hoseok, and Namjoon are already there.

Along with Jimin, Taehyung, and Jeongguk.

“Where the fuck were you?” Seokjin asks. “Have a nice Christmas? Get anything good?”

“Heya,” Yoongi says to Jeongguk, ignoring the others for the moment. “You want cocoa? I got cocoa.”

Jeongguk’s ears turn bright red. “Do - me?”

“Malfoy let us make it,” Yoongi waves his thermos in the air, swatting Namjoon’s grasping hand away. “Fuck off, I wanna be nice to the new kid.”

“I’m not new,” Jeongguk says, but he takes the thermos lid and holds it out for Yoongi to pour the cocoa in. “I’m here a whole term.”

“Two years,” Jimin says smugly.

“Three,” says Hoseok.”

Seokjin raises a hand. “Four, so shut up, and Yoongi, what did you get?”

“Good shit from Dad, a Cleansweep from Mum,” Yoongi says. Jeongguk, three sips into the cocoa, does a cartoonish spit-take, and starts choking; Taehyung cheerfully begins to thud his back, making sympathetic clucking noises.

Hoseok is doing the Bowtruckle essay Yoongi was set at the beginning of term, and after various promises to go flying and to copy homework and to drink and to play chess, they settle down as a seven instead of a four. It’s weirdly easy.

First year seems a long, long way away from this.

Jeongguk pours himself another cup of cocoa, but nobody really talks; Hoseok and Jimin are both doing homework, Taehyung is knotting grass together, Seokjin is lying back with his eyes closed, and Namjoon is reading a history textbook.

Yoongi stares out on the lake, all squid-curling tentacles and the ripple of cold January water.

Is it the Quidditch?

That, too, and other things.

He grew up in the wizarding world. The first book he ever read, his chubby finger stuttering over the pages, was The Little Owl.

The little owl said “I don’t want to go to bed!” And the little owl’s little mum said “if you don’t go to bed, a snake will slither-in!”

“Slytherin!” Yoongi had cheered, and tapped the book. He’d thought it was the cleverest thing in the world. Slytherins were the bad guys, especially after the Second War, after the rise in all those YA fiction novels in Flourish & Blotts where the plucky young Hufflepuff, or the brave young Gryffindor, would defeat the odds and their Slytherin bully to win the House Cup.

Maybe that’s why Chester does what he does. And Sadie, and the rest of them. Pre-emptive, so that when Yoongi inevitably turns, he’s already scared of them, and their work’s been done.

He’s fucked up, maybe.

And the smell of cocoa drifting across the lake, and the giant squid curling tentacles hypnotically, and the sound of Hoseok’s quill scratching against coarse parchment. Maybe he isn’t fucked up. Maybe it’s the January weather, or the sleep he’s lost on the train up, or the way the little owl didn’t want a snake to slither in and scare him.

Jeongguk touches his shoulder gently, and hands him the cup of cocoa. “You can finish it,” he says quietly. “It’s really good.”

Yoongi does, and it is.

(And he’s so warm that the inside of him doesn’t really get cold, not even when Sadie MacDermot and a gaggle of Ravenclaw girls dunk a bucket of cold water over him and Jimin when they’re heading back to the Common Room.)

(And he’s so warm that he forgets to pretend to be mad when Gerry starts talking about Quidditch tactics at one in the morning.)

***

“One advantage of being in this House is that we get a fuckin’ Firebolt Six like it’s nothing,” Edie-Maude Black says, clutching her slender Nimbus 5k in the palm of her glove. There’s seven of them, gathered around the Quidditch pitch at six in the morning on a cold January morning, early enough that Professor Dickens hadn’t run into any bother when he booked it for them.

Jimin sits side-saddle on the Firebolt Six, his toes trailing the grass, his smile as smug as the cat with the cream. “She’s a nice one, isn’t she?”

Gerry Thompson has been voted their captain, just ‘cos he ranks first in age and enthusiasm. And he’s a Chaser, a good one - apparently he plays for the Armagh Lions during summer, and they’ve won the all-Irelands twice in the last five years. Derek Molesley, one of the sixth-year twins, and Edie-Maude, a freckled, spectacled second year, are the other two Chasers; Derek is clutching the Quaffle close to his chest, trying to hide a yawn in his knuckles.

“She’s fucking beautiful,” says Damien, a heavy Keeper helmet unbuckled on his head.

Samantha taps him on the back of the head with a cricket bat they’ve temporarily repurposed so she can be a Beater. “Sound less like you want to fuck the broomstick.”

“I don’t wanna fuck the broomstick.”

“Good-”

“I wanna make sweet sweet love to the broomstick.”

“Creepy,” Edie-Maude says mildly.

Jimin flies a little higher on his Six, preening, his own cricket bat hanging loose and languid from his hands. “Sorry, Roadfell. She’s mine. We’re exclusive.”

“Swap you a Nimbus.”

“No can-do.”

Yoongi can see his breath on the air when he huffs out, curling silvery into the air; dragon’s breath. His toes have gone as numb as his fingertips and his nose, and it’s six in the morning and that’s all he can feel - that and the Cleansweep in his hand, and the blush of familiarity that comes of telling dumb jokes and stamping feet.

“Dickens says we got slated for a match against the Puffs in February,” Gerry says, tapping Jimin’s boot. “Oi, c’mon down. Puffs. Puffs.”

“Puffs,” Jimin starts to chant, wriggling his foot out of Gerry’s grip, flying higher into the air. “Puffs! Puffs! Puffs! Puffs!”

Which leads to them half an hour later, the sun breaking over the horizon, throwing the Quaffle to each other to the rhythmic thud of Gerry yelling Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck and Jimin merrily singing a drinking song every time the ball leaves his possession. It’s cold and Edie-Maude is swearing and Gerry looks like all his Christmases have come at once, and really this Quidditch thing isn’t so bad; fun, even, when it’s just them all larking around.

As the sun tips closer to seven in the morning, they split in two. Not enough of them for a real practice match; they have Keeper and Seeker, Damien and Yoongi, and with them is Edie-Maude, their side’s Chaser. Gerry, Derek, Jimin, and Samantha run at Damien and Edie-Maude, and Gerry releases the Snitch.

“Practice ends when you catch him,” he says, a low Irish burr, and the little golden thing is off.

And Yoongi grins and high-fives Jimin and leans low over the handle of his broom and

f
   l
      i
         e
            s.

***

“A little bird tells me you joined the Slytherin Quidditch team,” Taehyung says, sitting at their table during breakfast without a care in the world, his Hufflepuff tie glaring yellow amongst the forlorn cluster of greens.

Jimin tosses his arm over Taehyung’s shoulders and smiles. “Y’mean, the fucker joined just so a team could exist.”

“My hand was forced,” says Yoongi, through a mouthful of soggy egg.

Over with the Ravenclaws, sitting near Sadie MacDermot, he sees Jeongguk giving him a timid little smile, and he waves.

***

finds out only during that first match, Slytherin against Hufflepuff. It’s March now and the snow and the cold have melted into something approaching summertime; Seokjin’s been making sheep noises and trying to recite Wordsworth’s daffodil poetry, but only Namjoon indulges him, and it’s almost nice enough to go back to sit by the lake, if it wasn’t for the bloody damp.

For weeks now, Yoongi’s been listening to Gerry, Damien, and Edie-Maude making league table calculations - if we win Hufflepuff we’ll be against Ravenclaw, and depending on whether it’s Snitch-win or Chase win... Gryffindor for the finals, with a Seeker like Whitehall… - and listening to Hoseok and Namjoon discussing Quidditch over their homework, and Jeongguk quietly swapping him Frog cards and handing Yoongi all the famous Seekers without ever really explaining himself.

“I liked him,” Jeongguk says, the day before the Hufflepuff match, handing Yoongi a card - Ai Fengmian, the Chinese Seeker from 2003.

“You grew up Muggle, though,” Yoongi takes the card anyway and hands Jeongguk a Botticelli, the artist cheekily winking behind a moving nude sculpture with a tastefully placed bunch of grapes.

“Yeah…” Jeongguk grins. “I watched loads of past World Cups over Christmas, though. Tae send them to me. A present.”

“Cute.”

This is three hours before the match, the seven of them sitting in the Charms classroom (plus change, the Slytherin team) - Yoongi hadn’t wanted to risk meeting Chester and having that confrontation. Not before they beat Hufflepuff.

(Cos they will.)

(Totally.)

“Don’t be nervous,” Seokjin says. He’s knitting. Not - like, actually knitting, he’s just holding his wand in the air and watching a pair of disembodied needles work through the rows.

“I’m not nervous.”

Jeongguk taps his foot. “We’ll cheer for you guys.”

Which is awesome right up until the five seconds before they walk onto the pitch, and Yoongi hears Chester yelling from the Gryffindor stands. Gerry looks uncomfortable in the Slytherin robes; hell, they all do, since the robes were pulled out of Professor Malfoy’s cupboard in the Potions room and the moths were chased out and they don’t fit and they smell of old wardrobes and bad cologne.

“I think I’m gonna cry,” Jimin whispers in his ear.

“Don’t cry.”

“I’m gonna drop the bat.”

(Since their first practice, they’ve got their hand on proper Beater bats, nicked off the Hufflepuff spares courtesy of Hoseok, who’d ruffled Yoongi’s hair and said he was proud. Yoongi had flipped him the bird, but he’d also taken the bats.)

“Okay,” Gerry says. “Pep talk time.”

Which would be more effective if he himself wasn’t a pale shade of green, and visibly sweating.

“We’ll be grand,” says Yoongi, wiping his damp palm on his knee; the pale cream riding trousers are light, at least, with padding all up the inner thighs that makes it kind of difficult to walk. “We’ll be a hundred percent. Even if we fuck up, what’ll happen?”

“Chester’ll beat us up,” Jimin says.

“Now that’s just defeatist.”

“He broke your nose last year,” says Damien, licking his upper lip anxiously. “I still have the blood on my tie.”

“Yeah, well-”

“Stop fucking talking about Chester,” Samantha snaps. “Let’s just play some bloody Quidditch and be done with it, okay?”

Gerry holds his broom in the air. “What she said!”

The seven of them cheer raggedly, and then walk on out onto the pitch opposite the Hufflepuffs; Hoseok and Taehyung wave, Hoseok a sleek Chaser, Taehyung marching behind him, in the Seeker spot right behind the Captain. The stands are awash with gold and black, and badger banners - go hufflepuff go - and even Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, non-participants, are cheering for the Puff side.

The Slytherin stand is glowing green and silver, and the remainder of the house, the ones not on the pitch, are cheering as loud as they can - but twenty voices against eight hundred? That’s nothing. Isobel and Alwyn are at the front of the stands, waving battered little flags around they must have handmade without the rest of them seeing.

“Go Slytherin!” Professor Dickens screeches, shooting silver sparks from the teachers stand.

“I’m going to throw up,” says Yoongi. He very carefully isn’t looking up at where Chester is. “I’m actually going to be sick. Oh my god. What if we win? They’ll kill us. We’ll die. Concrete feet and chucked in the lake, we’ll be a horror story to tell the kids-”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jimin says through gritted teeth.

Gerry and Hoseok meet mid-field and shake hands. “If it was anyone else, I’d be rooting for you,” Hoseok says.

“Understandable.”

“Good luck, right?”

Gerry shrugs. “We’ll do our best, you do yours.”

Taehyung looks at Yoongi and smiles. “Good luck,” he mouths, and then reaches out, fist closing over an imaginary Snitch. “I’ll win.”

Yoongi flips him off as discreetly as possible.

“Holy God, kids, it’s gonna be a historical day!”

“Fuck-off-you said I could introduce us-”

“Yeah well I lied-”

Yoongi squints up at the commentary booth, where Namjoon and Seokjin can be seen faintly, tussling over the megaphone while Professor Malfoy sits beside them, serene, as though nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

“A historic match!” Seokjin yells, all the BBC announcer as he holds the megaphone out of Namjoon’s reach. “Slytherin House have entered the Cup for the first time in just under a decade, and what a line up we have here! Damien Roadfell, Keeper! Samantha Woods and Jimin Park, Beaters! Yoongi Min, Seeker! Derek Molesley and Edie-Maude Black, Chasers! And Gerry Thompson, Chaser and Captain!”

Muffled cheers, and boos from a knot of Ravenclaws, and the entirety of Gryffindor. Yoongi hunches up behind Gerry, feeling way too exposed.

“And Hufflepuff’s line-up…”

“Just get the Snitch as fast as you can,” Gerry says in an undertone. “Hoseok runs a tight fuckin’ ship, and lets face it, we got nothing on them. You got a whole fuckton over on Kim, though. He’s new, right?”

“New to flying, anyway,” Yoongi murmurs back. “Second-year. Jimin’s friend.”

Gerry looks like he’s going to say something else, but then Professor Longbottom lets the Snitch go, and the Quaffle is tossed in the air, and -

Quickly, the players split. The six Chasers are a knot across the pitch, fighting for control of the Quaffle; at the Hufflepuff end, their sixth-year Keeper is flying lazy loops around the rings, and on their side, Damien is buzzing anxiously. The action is pushing towards them; Yoongi flies high above the arena, a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings, watching Gerry and Hoseok toss and duck and pass.

“And they’re off! And it’s Hufflepuff in possession, Jung with the ball, holy fuck look at him go-”

“No swearing,” comes Malfoy’s voice, low through the megaphone.

“Sorry, sir!”

“The Seekers have vanished, it’s Kim and Min -  second-year Taehyung Kim is a new hire to the Hufflepuff side, and Yoongi Min is the last founding member of the renewed Slytherin team. Who will win?”

Yoongi casts his gaze away from the Quaffle. There’s the sound of a ball hitting metal, and then Damien screeching a cheer -

and the whole arena booing, sighing. “Slytherin Keeper Roadfell successfully blocks the first aimed point! And it’s Thompson, Thompson passing to Black, Black passing to - oh, no, Hufflepuff in possession-”

“No bias, Kim.”

“Sorry sir!”

Yoongi keeps thinking he sees the Snitch, but it’s just a bunch of guys in the Gryffindor stands, mirrors or something else; they’re bouncing the sun off the reflective surface, and Yoongi would bet good money that’s Chester’s idea. Trying to make him look like a fool.

Yeah, well, lucky for Chester, Yoongi’s a dumbass all on his own.

He can see Taehyung, too, who’s taken to circling the outskirts of the arena just below the stands, leaning low over the arch of his broom, a blur of yellow and black.

Snitch. Find the Snitch quick, and before Damien has a chance to tire. Hoseok runs a far better team than the haphazard lot Gerry’s cobbled together, even if Jimin and Samantha have a lot of pent-up rage to use striking Bludgers into clumps of players, even if Damien can field ninety-nine percent of the balls thrown his way.

“Oh my god, Jung with the Quaffle again, but holy shit, there’s Woods and she looks pissed-”

“Namjoon Kim, if you don’t control yourself-”

“Sorry, sir!”

Yoongi circles lazily, ignoring the flashes from Chester and his lot. The sheer disapproval radiating from the stands is crushing them, it has to be - their house has been drowned out completely under the rhythmic chanting puffs puffs puffs and any time Gerry, Edie-Maude, or Derek grab the Quaffle, they’re sunk under a tsunami of jeering.

Yoongi sinks lower.

“No sight of the fucking Snitch, though-”

“Seokjin!”

A brief argument over the megaphone, which Malfoy seems to lose, as Namjoon and Seokjin start yelling into it at the same time, a mixture of swears, the names of the players, and incomprehensible screams.

“And there’s Min, the Seeker for Slytherin, and one sexy motherf-”

Yoongi flies down until Seokjin can see his two-fingered salute. “Fuck you,” he says cheerfully, and then salutes the browbeaten Potions master. “Sorry about the kids, sir.”

“Play the game,” Malfoy sighs, rubbing his temples.

“And it’s another attempted goal and it’s - oh, shit, it went through! Roadfell dived for it, missed it by the skin of his teeth! First point of the match goes to the Puffs!”

Cheers so loud Yoongi can’t hear himself think, and he sees Damien slipping half-off the broom; he must have ducked for the ball to the very edge of the stick.

“You’re shit, Slytherin,” comes a magically-amplified voice from the Gryffindors. “Yo, Min, you gonna do something? Can you fly at all?”

“Fuck you, Chester - sir, c’mon, he’s being a twat-”

“Seokjin Kim, you are this close to a detention-”

“Sir, the match!”

Yoongi grits his teeth. Gerry, fair play to the poor bastard, just keeps flinging the Quaffle to Edie-Maude and Derek, flying gooseflank towards the Puff hoops as though they have any real chance of scoring. Hoseok’s the only Chaser that goes to meet them, as the other two Puffs hang near Damien, waiting for the inevitable Quaffle toss towards them.

“Another point for the Puffs!”

“Fuck,” Yoongi almost bites through his tongue; he can see Taehyung on the other side of the pitch, scanning the skies, flinging him sympathetic glances as the entire student body seems to bray for their blood.

There’s a lull, as the Quaffle gets flung aimless around the centre of the pitch - ten minutes where Seokjin and Namjoon fall into an entertaining banter to distract from the standstill the play has become.

And then Yoongi hears it.

A little reedy voice from the centre of the Ravenclaw stands, and a huge burst of green and silver sparks. “Go on, Yoongi! Go on!”

Jeongguk, bless his soul, red in the face, his fist in the air, his cheeks all beaming bright.

Yoongi looks at him - really looks at him, big ears, pink cheeks - and sticks a resolute thumb up.

“Seeker Kim has seen the Snitch!”

It must be fucking fate.

Taehyung has gone shooting up into the sky and Yoongi wrenches himself up as hard as he can, going horizontal to vertical, wishing he’d gone with the goggles now even if they do make him look like a prat. He can see it now too, the little golden thing, buzzing from left to right with frenetic energy, as though looking for something it’s lost.

Jeongguk thinks he can win.

The Snitch falls down, abruptly, and Yoongi follows it before Taehyung, flying faster than he thought his shitty Cleansweep was capable of going, catching up to it, getting so damn close -

“Holy fucking Satan on a bread roll, Yoongi-”

He reaches out his hand -

“Go! Yoongi you can do it-!”

***

The party in the Slytherin Common Room gets very very out of control, very very quick.

The first to crash were Seokjin and Namjoon, still windbitten from the commentary stand, still clutching their megaphone between them. They’d dumped a six-pack of Muggle beers on the coffee table, and Gerry hugged them hard enough that Yoongi would swear he heard bones crack.

Next up, Hoseok and Taehyung had wandered in, around half an hour ago, carrying with them an entire crate of now-useless Hufflepuff celebratory butterbeer. Everyone drank. Everyone’s drinking. Damien, cheering, tries to down a bottle in one go and ends up coughing while Edie-Maude pats him on the back.

Gerry vanishes into his room, and comes out slurring a little more, with a heavier accent and three bottles of Irish whisky.

Everyone cheers. Even Hoseok, who should by all rights be comforting his team -

“Where you going?” Damien calls, and Yoongi freezes with one hand on the door of the Common Room.

“Someone isn’t here yet,” he says, a little defensively. “I’m gonna go get them.”

“And then back for drinks,” Edie-Maude waves a can of Stella at him.

Yoongi flings her a lazy salute and slips out the door; he can already hear Jimin starting to tell Taehyung how great the Hufflepuff team was, how much of a fluke the Slytherin victory must have been.

The portraits that line the corridor seem happy, at any rate; most of the melodramatic Romantic works are down here, old Potions masters and Slytherin masters flitting from art style to art style, Caravaggio to Courbet as they follow him.

“You should be celebrating with your house,” says one of the newer-looking paintings, a rather austere work done with heavy impasto around the edges, and dark shadows, chiaroscuro making his nose seem even more hooklike, his long hair even darker.

Yoongi shrugs - the painting follows him as he leaves the dungeons, as he starts climbing towards Ravenclaw, sticking to back corridors to try and avoid being seen by anyone. “I wanna get Jeongguk. He should be celebrating too.”

The hook-nosed man hums. Tucked into the background of a facsimile of Caravaggio’s Narcissus, he looks more ghoul than human. “A kindness. But surely you don’t want to go up there. Not with that… MacDermot girl, the Veela.”

“Not really.”

The painted man slides into the frame beside him; Boy With Fruit. Whoever decorated this corridor must have had a real thing for homoerotic Italians.

“I can fetch him,” says the guy - he must be an old Master or something, with those robes, that imperial voice. “Wait here.”

Yoongi does.

There’s the comedown, after the match - sure, they won, but Chester isn’t gonna be happy, and he can’t imagine this will change the House standings that much. It feels perilously like drawing unneeded attention their way, especially on the first-years (Isobel Way and Alwyn Brydon) who are already having a rough time of it.

Doesn’t mean they won’t enter again. The way the cards are played, their next match will be against Gryffindor in May; if they win that they go on to the final in June, but Yoongi highly doubts it.

(Chester is the Gryffindor Seeker.)

“Yoongi?”

The painting-master slips back into the row of Caravaggios, looking a little smug. Jeongguk is in his own clothes, now it’s after-hours; the huge hoodie, a green beanie crammed over his hair, looking a little sleepy. “Did you want me?”

“Want to come to the party?” Yoongi shoves his hands into the pockets of his robes, wishing he’d changed out of the Seeker kit. “Uh. Like, Tae and Jimin are there, too. And me.”

“Oh,” says Jeongguk. “Um… yeah!”

When they get back, Gerry and Namjoon are sitting next to the fire, an empty bottle of whisky between them as Gerry coaches him through the words of Irish rebel songs in a surprisingly tuneful baritone.

“Oro se do bheatha bhaile.”

“Oh ho se do bleata wally.”

“No, no… fuckin’... spit in the back of your throat…”

“Have a butterbeer,” Yoongi says firmly, steering Jeongguk away from the alcoholic stuff. “And… ignore Gerry.”

Jeongguk settles down onto the sofa, and pats the leather beside him, and he and Yoongi end up talking Quidditch and Charms and Muggle summer holidays until three in the morning, when Gerry throws up and starts to cry.

***

Yoongi ends up staying at the castle over Easter, purely so he can cram for the end-of-years. He wants to apply for Ancient Runes OWL, and Arithmancy if he possibly can, but they’re hopelessly oversubscribed, which means he actually has to score well if he wants to be allowed back into the classes.

“So,” Seokjin says - he and Namjoon have stayed, but Hoseok’s elected to study at home - “So, this kid. This Jeongguk.”

“I don’t really know him,” Yoongi shrugs. In the humidity of mid-April, the walk to Hogsmeade is more of a torture than anything else; too cold to go bare arms, too hot to wear a jumper. He ends up draping his cloak around his shoulders, and wiping the sweat off his face with the hems.

“Tae says you’re always talking to him.”

“Tae is a filthy rotten liar.”

Namjoon grins, chewing on the edge of a gummy snake from the sweetshop, the paper bag crinkling in his hand. “You li-ike him.”

“Gross. He’s, like, seven.”

“You’re seven.”

“Your mum is seven.”  

A brief pause while they scuffle in the dirt, and Yoongi gets dandelion blown in his face by interested observer Seokjin.

“He’s nice,” Namjoon offers, after the fight is over (Yoongi won. Namjoon has mud on his cheeks.) “His ears are kinda big, but he’s nice, ‘n he thinks Sadie’s full of shit.”

“He’s a baby. He’s my friend.” Yoongi takes one of the gummy snakes. “Why do you fuckers care?”

“Because, my dear Casanova, word is getting around that you’re frigid as hell, and if Chester gets ahold of that…” Seokjin mimes his hand falling, and exploding on impact with the ground. “Boosh. Reputation gone.”

“Who the fuck’s saying that?”

“Sadie,” Namjoon says.

“Sadie says everyone’s frigid.”

“Yeah, but you’re not everyone.”

Yoongi scoffs. “You calling me an easy target?”

“Yoongi…”

“Yeah?”

Seokjin swings a friendly arm around his shoulders. “I mean this in the nicest way possible…”

“Yeah?”

“You are the easiest target in this whole fucking school.”

Yoongi throws a gummy snake at him, and laughs when it wriggles down Seokjin’s shirt and refuses to move.

***

A week before the match with Gryffindor, Chester does get ahold of the rumor, and for a few days Yoongi can’t go into the Great Hall without half of the Gryffindor table screeching at him. His neck burns red with humiliation pretty much constantly, and Jimin stops nagging him so much, and Gerry offers him an invisible charm he got from the Weasley place, and Jeongguk starts sending him little letters in the evening, stuff like sadie says she’s gonna find you after herbology so maybe give that one a miss! and good luck yoongi they’re just dickheads, which is encouraging, and pretty useful.

Still, it’s all a bed of roses until he goes to the bathroom in the middle of Transfiguration.

(Which sounds - weird. It totally isn’t.)

Except for the bit where Chester and Minjae Yoon are waiting there, when he turns around; and there aren’t any paintings for Yoongi to fall on the mercy of, and they’re blocking the door.

“Fuck you,” says Yoongi preemptively. “Move it, I’ll be late to class.”

“We’re gonna play you on Saturday,” says Chester.

“I’m fuckin’ aware, dumbass. I actually looked at the rota sheet ahead of time.” Yoongi tries shouldering past them, but they play Muggle rugby, and they’re two years and a few feet ahead of him; Chester just shoves him back. “I said let me out-”

“You’re a fucking creep, Min,” says Minjae.

“Okay, sure-”

Chester takes a deliberate step forward, tramping on the trailing hem of Yoongi’s robes until the neck of them is biting into his throat. “I just wanna discuss Seeker tactics. Exclusive-like. You Slytherin bastards can’t beat us, y’know that?”

“I dunno,” Yoongi counters, and he knows he shouldn’t, he knows he should run, but he’s angry and he’s gonna miss class, “I dunno, man, Gerry’s a pretty decent captain-”

Chester’s fist hits his shoulder. Mock-punch. Mock-mock-punch. “Interrupting is rude.”

“Yeah, like anyone ever taught you table manners in the barn you were brought up in-”

This time, Yoongi has the foresight to duck, until Chester wraps his fist in the front of his robes and slams him against the stone gargoyle next to the drinking fountain; its pointed snout digs painfully into Yoongi’s back. “You fuckers have no chance,” Chester says.

“Sure we don’t.”

Minjae leans against the door, twirling his wand in between his fingers.

“If you fucking win, you’re dead.”

“Pretty sure that’s illegal ‘round here,” says Yoongi. His hand twitches into his pocket, curls around his wand-

Minjae casts expelliarmus without so much as a blink, and grins happily when he catches it. “You gotta short fuckin’ wand. Short fuckin’ dick-”

“That’s gay, Minjae,” Yoongi says.

“You’re gay.”

“And?”

Chester stomps hard on his foot. “Fucking look at me, you prick. If you catch that goddamn Snitch, I’ll-”

“What, break my nose?”

So Chester does.

***

Yoongi ends up sitting in an alcove somewhere on the seventh floor, holding his nose and trying not to cry every time he feels the bones shifting inside it. He’d go to the Hospital Wing, but the Healer there - a skeletal guy called O’Shannon - doesn’t believe anyone’s injury is as serious as they say. Last year, when Gerry broke his leg, O’Shannon made him walk up and down the hall three times before he finally healed it.

It’s all unfair, and Yoongi doesn’t care how childish he sounds when he says that. Over Easter, with nobody but his friends in the castle, it was easy to enjoy himself - and after the Hufflepuff match, it was easy to think they could win something. But there’s still gonna be fuckheads like Chester about, and people writing articles for the Prophet about how Harry Potter likes to wipe his ass, and nothing is ever, ever gonna change.

And he’s got blood on his new shirt. Not like he can afford another one, and not like he’s ever been any good at laundry spells.

The fucking problem is that everyone thinks Slytherin is evil, and so everyone thinks they’re cracking down on the bullies before they even get a chance to get started. And the fucking problem is -

“Myb bose hurbs,” Yoongi tries to say, and slumps over his knees, his head tipped back. “This fubbing thucks.”

“Min?”

Aw, fuck. Yoongi looks across the hall, and sees that caped painting guy sitting in the foreground of a dappled Renoir, still as batlike as ever. With the hand not pinching his nose, he raises his two fingers, not gratified by the painting’s innocent shrug.

“There you - fuck!”

Yoongi narrows his eyes at Jeongguk, whose eyes have widened bigger than soup plates. “Go back bo class,” he manages.

“What the hell did you do?” Jeongguk drops his satchel off his shoulder and shakes his wand out of his sleeve, tapping it nervously against his palm. “Are you okay? Is it your nose? Did something explode?”

Yoongi shoves his thumb in the air twice, and then down once.

“Shit, I - do you want me to heal it?”

Thumb up.

“Oh, god.” Jeongguk looks faintly nauseous. “Uh. Episkey? You know that?”

“Cast ib,” Yoongi says. “Pleab.”

Jeongguk squeezes his eyes shut, and points his wand in Yoongi’s face; his hand is shaking. “Episkey-”

“Oh, thank fuck,” Yoongi says, as something complicated happens on his face, and his nose crunches back into the place it’s meant to be. He’s still covered in blood and snot, now starting to crust on his cheeks, but at least now all his body parts are functioning like they’re meant to be. “Jesus, Gukkie, you’re a lifesaver.”

“The hell happened?” Jeongguk sits in the alcove next to him without asking; wordlessly, Yoongi shuffles up to accommodate.

“Chester Whitehall and Minjae Yoon. Minjae nicked my fuckin’ wand and Chester broke my nose,” Yoongi wrinkles his face up at the thought, “It’s ‘cos of the match Saturday. They think we could actually beat them.”

“You could.”

“Guk…” Yoongi sighs, leaning back against the stone wall. “Even if we beat the Puffs, that’s only because nobody expected us to be any good, so we had this whole element of surprise thing going on for us. Chester will kill me. Jimin and Samantha can’t Beat half as well as those kids, and even if we won, we’d probably be killed on the way back to the Common Room.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nothing’s fair.”

Jeongguk sighs. “I… guess. But. But I’m still annoyed.”

“Do me a favour and don’t get involved, right?”

Jeongguk shrugs, his hands knotting together. “I can get your wand back.”

Minjae Yoon is in Ravenclaw, of course. “If you think you can get it without him seeing you, then go ahead,” Yoongi says, ignoring the eyebrow-raising going on in the painting opposite him. “Just… watch your back. And don’t get involved. This is a Slytherin thing, ‘n you’re like… you’re an innocent bystander.”

They sit for a long while, and Yoongi looks at the wall opposite him, underneath another painting of Barnabas the Barmy teaching some trolls to do ballet, and wonders if there’s anywhere in this damn castle he can catch a break.

***

Jimin and Samantha are all for going to give Chester a shiner to match Yoongi’s face, but as Yoongi scrubs the crusted blood and snot and tears off his cheeks he tells them not to do a fucking thing. That’s the irony, here - if anyone counters back, they’ll be seen as the instigators.

(There are still horror stories circulated around the Slytherin dorms about the time Harry Potter made Professor Malfoy bleed in a bathroom, and he was able to excuse it away - mostly - because he’d been provoked.)

(Hah.)

At least he gets his wand back. Jeongguk sends a little note via Friedrich, meet me in the dungeons in 5mins, and hands it to him all polished and stuff, as though brand-new out of the box.

Yoongi hugs him. It’s weird, and then Jeongguk hugs him back, and says I think Minjae’s a dick in this fierce little voice that makes Yoongi really upset for reasons he can’t quite pin down.

“We’re going to lose Saturday,” Damien says.

“Yeah.”

Gerry grunts, and buries his head in his NEWT-level Charms.

On Monday, Jimin gets a pitcher of water leviosa-d over his head, and when it falls it soaks both him and Taehyung walking beside him.

On Tuesday, Damien gets trousered by a gang of fifth-year Ravenclaws.

On Wednesday, Samantha’s bag gets stolen, and Yoongi spends five hours trying to summon all her revision notes back from awkward places in the castle.

On Thursday, some enterprising person hits Yoongi with a Fair-Weather Jinx, and he gets heat stroke and has to go to Seokjin and Namjoon for the counter-curse, and then has to go to the dorms and lie down with a cool cloth over his forehead.

On Friday, someone tries to set fire to Gerry’s Charms, and he punches them in the cheek.

On Saturday, Gerry gets detention for the rest of the year for assaulting another student.

On Saturday, they put on the green robes like they’re dressing for a funeral.

“If we win this, I’ll become Minister of Magic out of sheer joy,” Gerry says, standing in the shade of the changing room, buttoning the wrist cuffs of his leather gloves. “Just… do your best, okay?”

Yoongi walks out onto the pitch as though underwater, the shout of the rest of the school body nothing more than the sound of ripples against his ears. He can hear Seokjin and Namjoon fiercely yelling support, and Professor Malfoy not even trying to stop them; he can see the huge sparkling fireworks flinging from the Ravenclaw box courtesy of Jeongguk; he can see the remainder of Slytherin house, chanting and cheering, a huge paper-mache snake propped up on the end of sweeping-brush handles, being waved industriously in the air by the two firsties. Isobel and Alwyn, bless their hearts.

Gerry shakes hands with Chester, and the two teams fan out behind their captains. If Yoongi squints up at the Hufflepuffs, he would see Hoseok and Taehyung leading most of the rest of their team in a chant for the Slytherins, but he doesn’t look. He looks at the grass. Fuck.

And they try their best. For what it’s worth, they really, really do.

(Not to prove a point - but because Gerry, for all his ridiculous carrying-on, really cares about this. Win it for him. Try to.)

They try, anyway.

Damien falls off his broom when he knocks the Quaffle away from centre hoop, and Jimin swoops down to catch him before he hits the sand - Samantha keeps striking at the knot of Gryffindor Chasers, a supremely irritating Beater, and Gerry and Edie-Maude burn the sky green with their drop-pass, but it’s not like it’s any use.

Yoongi sees the Snitch before Chester does - years before Chester does.

It feels like he’s moving through treacle.

“Holy fuck, Min has sighted the Snitch! The score is fifty-ten to Gryffindor, the bastards, and Min has seen the Snitch!”

Yoongi tears upwards, the wind whipping wet from his eyes as he stretches out for it and if only they could win -

High above the pitch, high enough that nobody will be able to see what happens, he feels Chester slam his shoulder into Yoongi’s side, knocking him off course to such an extent that the snatch for the Snitch is lazy and triumphant before it’s even in Chester’s hand.

“You tried your best, I guess,” Chester says, looking down at Yoongi, the little Snitch wings stroking the air. “As though you’d ever fuckin’ win.”

Yoongi tosses him the bird, and feels sore and cold and empty that night in the Common Room, as everyone pretends Gerry isn’t sniffing into his NEWT revision notes.

***

“You’ll stay on the team next year,” Jimin says. He’s lying on Damien’s bed in the third-year boys’ dorms, watching Yoongi and Damien tossing clothes into their trunks. “Both of you will, right? We just need another Chaser to replace Gerry, and Derek already promised he would. You will stay. You gotta. Right?”

“I guess so,” Yoongi says, tucking his box of Frog cards into his trunk and kicking it shut. He’s wearing a hoodie he nicked off Jeongguk, the big Sex Pistols one, and even on him it’s too large, almost to his knees. Jeongguk had left it in the Common Room the night of the party, and Yoongi never got around to returning it - he’ll have to do that soon, even if it is warm and comfortable and safe.

“We’ll show them next year,” Jimin says.

Damien locks his trunk. “We’ll send the trophy to Gerry.”

It’s a slow and sombre procession of Slytherin House out to the train on the last day, as Gerry hugs them all and promises, voice thick in his throat, to write to them all and to invite them to his Quidditch games for the Lions.

It’s weird. Of course, Bethany had given Yoongi his scarf, and she’d been important to him, but Gerry had been the odd Prefect that adopted them all and taught them how to drink without vomiting at the end of the night, and how to play proper sportsman Quidditch, and how to cheat on your homework without any of the teachers noticing.

“We’ll write,” says Yoongi eventually, and all twenty-four remaining Slytherins nod.

(“Too good for the rest of us?” Chester yells, and gets ignored.)

Yoongi finds a carriage empty. Seokjin’s parents always lift him from school, and Namjoon takes the Knight Bus, and Hoseok’s gone home a week early - his nan took sick, or something. Yoongi feels like taking sick.

“Uh… seat free?”

And Jeongguk scuttles in, and he doesn’t say anything about the match Yoongi lost, or the hoodie Yoongi’s wearing. And when Yoongi falls asleep on the kid’s shoulder, halfway between Scotland and London, Jeongguk doesn’t wake him up to complain - he just buys him a pasty from the trolley lady, and waits for him to wake up before he offers it to him.

“Thanks,” Yoongi mumbles.

There’s a problem, and it’s Harry Potter’s fault, but not everyone buys into it.

“No bother,” Jeongguk says happily. He pulls out a deck of cards. “Wanna play snap?”

Chapter Text

***

part two: fourth year (second year)

As it turns out, everyone lives on mainland Britain except Hoseok, who’s from Belfast. The first week of summer, Yoongi takes the Floo to Seokjin, who lives in this big posh upper-class apartment in London - except it turns out Jin’s invited the younger three, too, and Yoongi ends up touring the Natural History Museum with Jeongguk and Namjoon while the other four drink coffee, listening to them both geek out about dinosaurs.

It’s fun.

Yoongi himself lives in Devon, which is such a nowhere sort of a land that he doesn’t feel bad about spending all summer in the Floo to other parts of Britain. He hangs out with his mum and his dad and his brother, obviously, but the day trips - to Jin, and to Namjoon in Aberystwyth and even to Hoseok in Ireland, happen almost once a week.

“How’s posh city?” Nathan asks one day - a friend from primary school Yoongi’s never quite managed to lose. Muggle. They’re kicking a football back and forth in the park, skateboards abandoned under the basket swing.

Yoongi shrugs. “‘S okay. Full of wankers. Some fucker broke my nose.”

“You kiddin’?”

“Nah.”

Nathan grins. “Let’s fuck him up.”

“Doubt you could, mate. Yorkshire.”

Nathan mimes vomiting into a bush, and they kick about until the sun sets too far for them to see the ball.

And there’s holiday homework, now third year’s over and they’re going into the run-up to OWLs. Jeongguk takes the bus up to Yoongi’s house one day, and they both sit outside with ice-cream floaters fizzing lemonade and do history of magic; Jeongguk’s hair is growing out, and his face is beginning to fill, and his ears are beginning to fit him. He talks about the goblin wars a lot, and about Crowley, and Quidditch, and Yoongi talks about them back, and they drink the fizz out of the top of the floaters before they sink.

come 2 my house. or u are square. next year u are going to win.
- Gerry Thompson, Slytherin Quidditch Team Captain

Which is a weird kind of a note to get over egg and soldiers.

“You should go,” says his mum. “I like Gerry.”

So Yoongi takes the broom across the Irish Sea, because Floo isn’t so reliable over long distances, and finds that Gerry actually lives on a beef farm a few miles away from Armagh, and that Gerry’s da is just as friendly as Gerry is, and that Gerry passed his NEWTs with flying colours and is going on to do an apprentice in theoretical Charms, someplace in the Dublin Ministry of Magic.

“Yoongi!”

“Jimin!”

Hot day in July, and even Britain gets the sun sometimes. Edie-Maude Black, with her hair cut cropped up near her chin and her freckled cheeks red with the hint of sunburn, is sitting on the roof of one of the sheds, her broomstick beside her. Jimin is playing with a housecat, jerking a string around - Gerry is standing in jeans and shirtsleeves and heavy wellies, beaming, directing Yoongi to land someplace halfway clean, with half of Slytherin house running around his yard in summer dresses, shorts, and robes in one or two cases.

“What’s up, fucker,” Damien Roadfell greets Yoongi with a slap on the shoulder and a grin, wearing a bizarre mix of a wizarding cloak cast over one shoulder and a shirt with Blur on it, the letters peeling half-off. “Good summer?”

“I guess,” Yoongi slides off the broom, leaning into the hug. “Been hanging out with the others, mostly.”

“Cool.” Damien’s done the opposite of Edie-Maude; where her hair’s been cut, smaller and cuter, he’s let his grow long, scruffy straw colour curling at the nape, all ankles and elbows and sideways smiles hung on his mouth. He’s grown, like, half a foot in a month.

“You done the Charms stuff?”

“Nah.”

They walk into Gerry’s house side-by-side, Yoongi burrowing into Jeongguk’s hoodie - still unreturned. And the two new first years are here, too… or second years, now, Isobel Way and Alwyn Brydon, sitting eating gingerbread at the kitchen table.

“Guess which knobhead showed up,” Damien announces. “Wait - shit, Ger, your mum about?”

“Nah,” Gerry says. “If she was, you’d get fucked. She goes to Mass twice a week.”

Damien flings his arm around Yoongi’s waist, even as Edie-Maude stumbles into the kitchen to start singing about fucking priests twice a week, or something like that. A drinking song. Alwyn and Isobel look mildly scarred.

“I called you all for a specific - Sam, get in,” Gerry says, as Samantha Woods stumbles through the kitchen door, yelling out a greeting. “I called you all here for a specific reason - Jimin, I swear to fuck-”

“You’re starting a cult,” Damien suggests.

“A commune,” Yoongi says.

“A cult that lives in a commune.”

“Nudists,” Jimin says, still with the cat curled out on his shoulders. “A cult that lives in a commune with some nudists.”

“There are children present,” Edie-Maude says. “Only pure thoughts here.”

“A nudist commune sounds cool,” Alwyn volunteers, and ducks away from the slap Isobel aims at the back of his head. “Oi!”

“I’m your official coach, so shut the fuck up about communes,” Gerry claps his hands. “If me ‘n Derek quit the team, I’m bringing the kids in as Chasers, right, so no communes or cults or Jimin walking around with his cock out or I’ll kill you all.”

Isobel cracks a gingerbread arm off. “I’ve heard way too much about Jimin’s dick in my life already.”

“Wait ‘til you get to my age,” Yoongi tells her, with as much solemnity as he can muster.

It is fun, though. Damien is good to goof around with, and they’re far enough away from town that they can play a proper game - Isobel and Alwyn play good doubles as Chasers, led by Edie-Maude, and Damien manages to Keep most of the shots when they line up to do penalty shootouts. Gerry is in his element directing them all with a merry frantic energy, and Jimin and Samantha proudly demonstrate their sync Beating.

(In between times, Yoongi’s pretty sure Jimin’s filming the whole thing for his Snapchat story, which is… okay. Sure.)

(This is proven when Yoongi looks at his phone to get a picture of Jeongguk grinning, with the caption having fun?? written in sparkly pink text.)

It’s a good summer. One of the best. Yoongi has fun, and eats lots, and texts Jeongguk about how much he hates the dramas on the BBC these days, and texts Damien about his summer work, and the Quidditch team hopefuls make an owl mail-train for the benefit of the people that don’t have phones, and Gerry tells him how the new apprenticeship is going.

And going back to Hogwarts is what it always is.

Cathartic.

***

Three days before term starts, Yoongi meets Jeongguk, Taehyung, and Namjoon in a little record shop three streets away from the Leaky Cauldron.

“This is so last minute,” Namjoon says, his hand dancing awkwardly around the list he has - he and Yoongi are taking almost all the same classes for fourth year (basics, plus Ancient Runes and Divination - Namjoon picked Muggle Studies, and Yoongi’s doing Arithmancy.)

Jeongguk’s grinning; he’s grown too, shot up like a beansprout, and the hoodie he’s wearing crawls up his forearms where before it might have drowned him. “Shopping! Let’s go, c’mon, c’mon…”

“You came here in first year though,” Yoongi says, as they file through the Cauldron, tipping hats to various drinkers in shadowy corners. “Didn’t you?”

Jeongguk shrugs, half-armed, a little sheepish as Namjoon shakes his wand out of his sleeve to tap into the wall. “Muggle parents, right? Mum couldn’t get the day off work to come down here, so I got them ordered by owl and just had to show up at the station on the day.”

“Oh, wow,” Yoongi says, and settles back to watch Jeongguk’s face as the bricks peel away from the bins leaning against the wall.

“What’s those?”

“Toad eyes-”

“What’s that?”

“Keep your voice down, that’s a hag-”

“Who are they?”

“Aurors I think, look at their robes-”

“What - oh my god, a Quidditch shop-”

Yoongi is pretty sure his sleeve has stretched way past his wrist from the sheer force of Jeongguk’s excitement tugging him around. “Yeah - Guk, wait for Namjoon-”

“Oh, no,” Namjoon says, following them. “Oh, no, why should anyone wait for me? Nah, nah, I’ll just stand here. Chopped liver. That’s me.”

“Shut it, you,” Yoongi says, but he snags Namjoon’s elbow to pull him where Jeongguk is heading. “‘S mad in here. We’re gonna lose the kid.”

“You won’t lose the kid,” Jeongguk shoots back. Then he yelps. “A thing just bit my foot!”

“Underfoot toad goblins,” Namjoon says sagely, nodding. “One bite from them… well, you probably won’t die…”

Yoongi ruins the joke by snorting out a laugh, and Jeongguk fires them both a glare before he slips into the shop, still kind of holding Yoongi by the sleeve, his hand around Yoongi’s wrist. Quality Quidditch Supplies, with the latest Firebolt in the window, and a display that has all the Quidditch balls set to circle the shop like a solar system, with the Snitch at the centre.

“Hello,” beams the wizard behind the desk. “New term, boys?”

“Ah - uh, yeah, but… we might just browse for now,” Yoongi says, rubbing the back of his neck. He has a Galleon in his pocket, Namjoon is perpetually broke, and Jeongguk has a Muggle tenner he said he needed for the train fare back home.

“Ah, grand, grand.”

“That’s so cool,” Jeongguk says sotto voce, pointing at a bright silver Snitch.

“Ah, that,” the guy behind the counter says, “That is ornamental, I’m afraid. Still, a pretty piece.”

“Huh.”

They poke around the Quidditch shop for a little, and then take a detour into the Weasley place, where Jeongguk admires a box of Gobstones.

“Flourish and Blotts,” Namjoon says sternly. “We need books, my little ducklings, not fuckin’... hangmen that really hang themselves every time you fuck up, ‘kay?”

Yoongi pokes him in the side. “You go on,” he mumbles, “I’m gonna grab something, right? Be two seconds.”

He meets them ten minutes later in Flourish and Blotts, hiding the little package wrapped in old Prophets in the inside pocket of his coat. Namjoon is shepherding Jeongguk from section to section, from history to the Hogwarts syllabus stuff to the small collection of Muggle fiction books - Narnia, mostly.

“Why don’t you guys have any, like, wizarding fiction?” Jeongguk drags his hand across the battered spine of the Lord of the Rings. Namjoon, behind him, is carrying two armfuls of Ancient Runes textbooks and looking disgruntled.

“Wizards don’t go much in for fiction,” Yoongi says. Sure, there’s a few Liza White books, that series where the girl falls in love with centaurs and they all go for orgies in the woods, but overall… the great literary tradition of most societies has passed them by.

“I used to love reading these,” Jeongguk mumbles, crouching down on the bottom shelf. “I used to wanna be a hobbit. Wanted to do magic ‘n stuff.”

“I wanna be able to use my arms in the future,” Namjoon interrupts. “Let’s go and pay, jesus.”

As they’re leaving, Yoongi slips the Gobstones into Jeongguk’s bag, and spends the whole Knight Bus ride back to Devon feeling all happy and warm and ready to go back to school. Gerry has their team all coached - he’s going to be doing almost all his classes with Namjoon - Damien keeps sending him letters about how they’re going to decorate their dorm this year - and Jeongguk is going to be there, all happy and bright and grinning ear-to-ear. Chester Whitehall and the humiliation of the end of third year is a distant memory, as Yoongi fixes his green and silver tie to his neck, as he slips through the barrier on the first of September, armed with his trunk and his wand tucked up his sleeve.

***

On the Hogwarts Express, Yoongi sees Jeongguk in a compartment with a bunch of other Ravenclaws, and tries not to feel strange about it. It’s not like he was entitled to Jeongguk, and it’s not like he doesn’t have other friends - Damien and Edie-Maude have a compartment right there for him - but it’s weird.

“You look like shit,” says Damien, as Yoongi struggles into the carriage, through a sticky door.

“Thanks, Damien. Real lovely.”

“You look fine,” Isobel says helpfully - she’s here, but Alwyn isn’t, not yet. And her tie is tied, and her robes are on, and she has green and silver ribbons tying the ends of her two plaits fixed. “Who’s Quidditch captain this year?”

“Who’s oldest,” Edie-Maude says, through a mouthful of cheese and tomato sandwich. “Roadfell? Min? Woods?”

“Sam could probably do it,” Damien shrugs. “We can talk in Common Room.”

Alwyn arrives, and squeezes in next to Isobel; he’s had his hair cut, so his ginger ringlets are more like a ginger mushroom cloud, and his glasses are a bit stronger. He looks like a Celtic stick insect, and the overall effect isn’t helped by the fat toad he’s clutching in his hand. Still, there’s greetings, insults exchanged, and they all settle back in again.

“Jimin’s gonna take the ride with Taehyung,” Edie-Maude reports. “Got the owl yesterday. ‘Don’t save me any room’. Prick.”

Various nods and murmurs, agreements that Jimin is, indeed, a prick. The train starts to shudder away from the station; Isobel waves happily out the window, and a similarly small, mousey sort of woman waves back, looking a bit teary. The rest of them just sit back, even Alwyn - as far as Yoongi knows, most of them made their own way down.

“More important,” says Yoongi, when it seems like Alwyn is about to make fun of Isobel, or something equally insensitive, “How many kids d’ya reckon we’ll get this year?”

Edie-Maude pulls a Galleon out of her pocket. “Three.”

Damien slaps his own coin on the central table. “Two.”

Yoongi adds his own. “Okay, I’m saying four. Fuck you.” And then, to Isobel and Alwyn, “You playing? Whoever guesses right takes all the money.”

Isobel shrugs and adds a Galleon. “One, I guess,” because it’s basically impossible for Slytherin to get more than four to a year. “Alwyn?”

“Count me out,” he says. “No way I’ll win with five.”

“Ah, go on.”

“Nah.”

“Chicken!”

“You’re a knob, Izzy.”

“Chicken!”

Out the window, the urban London is melting into the southern countryside, as the Express makes the long journey up north. Hogwarts, glimmering on the edge of the Scottish highlands - and Hogwarts is catharsis, no matter how much bigger and stronger Chester is, no matter how much smaller and sadder Slytherin is, no matter what happens, no matter who stays.

Yoongi ties his tie an hour before they’re due to arrive, and he pretends he doesn’t see Isobel taking the ribbons out of her hair, and tying them safe in little looped bows before letting her plaits hang loose and plain.

And without Gerry’s year, they’re a house of twenty-three.

***

The Sorting this year is dismal. None of them take any joy in dumping their money into Isobel’s lap, and Isobel looks no happier to receive it. The one Slytherin they get this year is a quiet Northerner called Max Hastings, who tries not to cry into his custard. Yoongi makes eye contact with Namjoon over the kid’s head, and shakes his own grimly.

It’s a quiet night. Yoongi goes to bed early - fourth year is still fourth year, OWLs and stuff - and he hears Isobel telling the new kid, in a heavy, serious voice, all the people to avoid.

Dismal.

***

“Divination last thing on a Friday afternoon?” Hoseok hands Yoongi back his timetable, a scone half-eaten in his hand. “You must be fucking mental, mate. That’s disgusting.”

“It’ll be relaxing,” Namjoon says, but he looks doubtful. “You could still switch into Muggle Studies if you really wanted.”

“I want to do Divination,” Yoongi kicks them both under the breakfast table, one by one. Inter-house mingling isn’t technically allowed in the Dining Hall, but it’s a Saturday morning, and nobody cares. (Yoongi hasn’t seen Chester at all in the day they’ve been back, and he doesn’t want to break his winning streak, not now.)

“I think you’re crazy,” Jeongguk announces cheerfully, sitting beside him with a slice of toast and a bowl of honey porridge. “I wanna do Muggle Studies.”

“You’re Muggleborn.”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk points his spoon at Yoongi, smiling, “That way I get an easy pass. Didn’t think of that, did you?”

Yoongi grins. “We got a real boy rebel on our hands here, lads. A genuine ol’ Just William.”

Seokjin joins them, looking exhausted. “I’ve been made Gryffindor prefect,” he says, with a voice like tolling funeral bells. “I hate children. I hate them. You ever tried to give a tour to thirty sugar high twelvies? Never again. Never.”

Yoongi thinks about Max Hastings sniffing into his sleeve, and about the solemn little tour, trooping around Slytherin house, showing him the dorms and the lake window and the fire and all the cosy little reading chairs. “Yeah, must be tough,” he says, and he tries not to make it sound sarcastic.

He thinks he succeeds.

Jeongguk reaches for a slice of toast during the lull in conversation. “Play Gobstones with me tomorrow?” He asks, kicking Yoongi under the table. “Some totally random kind soul who I don’t know at all slipped me a really nice set, and I want to break it in.”

“That was nice of them.”

Jeongguk pushes a Frog card over the table. “Thank you,” he says, quieter. “And. Um? I hope… if you ever need any help with the new first-year…”

Yoongi flips it over, and sees Aleister Crowley winking at him, a little pink sticky-note flapping loose from the back. Hello, again, the Frog card mouths at him. “The first-year,” he repeats, a little muddled, putting the card into his front pocket. “Yeah, if I - if I ever need any help, I’ll ask you.”

Jeongguk’s smile is broad and bright and earnest. “Thank you, Yoongi.”

“Any time.”

***

It’s a pretty productive first few days back, in that Slytherin House settles very quickly back into the old routine of horrendous late hours, poker played around the fire, and copious amounts of whisky consumed at a terrifying rate. Max Hastings falls into rhythm with Isobel and Alwyn, and the three of them make a little trio curled up next to the fire; Max has a cat called Molly, which he seems to carry everywhere. It’s ridiculously pet over by Izzy and Alwyn, and Sam and Edie-Maude.

“Seen Chester yet?” Damien asks, on their first Monday morning back. He’s tying his tie, the one Yoongi bled on back in first year.

“Avoided him. Proud of me?”

“So proud of you.” Damien smooths his shirt flat, and then starts brushing dust off Yoongi’s shoulders. “What’s your first class?”

Yoongi hands him the timetable over his shoulder; he’s busy buttoning his shirt, right up to the hollow of his throat. “Potions, right? Malfoy. Namjoon’s there, so you can sit with Sam. I’ll be okay.”

“Awesome,” Damien hands the page back to him, folded back the way it was.

Potions. Core class. Yoongi already knows he’s keeping it on for NEWT - Professor Malfoy is an asshole, but he’s admirable in a way, and Yoongi looks up to him, how untouchable he makes himself, how unthinkable he makes it that he would ever be insulted. Or hit. Or - yelled at, or tripped, or cursed with embarrassing jinxes.

“I’m not hungry,” Yoongi says, when Damien waves his hands towards the door. “Hey, if you see Namjoon, tell him to save me a seat.”

“Sure.”

Damien leaves clattering through the door, leaving Yoongi on his own; he flops down against his unmade bed, staring listlessly at the ceiling. He doesn’t want to go back to classes - over summer, he’d had pretty much the best time ever, and he doesn’t want to go back to ducking Chester and Sadie and getting Fair Weather jinxes cast on him and practicing Quidditch only to lose.

“Moping doesn’t suit you,” says an irritatingly familiar voice. Yoongi turns his head to a rather lovely impressionist painting hanging between his and Damien’s beds, to find the old Master from last year glaring balefully out of sunspotted brushstrokes.

“Go away,” Yoongi says flatly. He sits up, brushes his knees. “I wasn’t moping.”

“Good God, boy, at least when I was alive Slytherin had some self-respect.”

“Self re-”

“None of this lying on beds feeling sorry for ourselves.”

“I’m sorry, who-”

“Although there was a fair bit of that,” the Master says, his light tone turning dark and droning. “As I recall. I pity you that grows up in such a time.”

“Pity is just as bad as the other lot,” Yoongi mumbles, knotting his shoes in a neat loop. “Why can’t people just say, oh yeah, four Houses, that lot, that lot, that lot, that lot, instead of going all - Slytherin, like we’re some sort of rare fuckin’ disease. No offence, sir.”

“None taken,” the painting says dryly. “You are not the coarsest student I have met. Nor are you the most eloquent. But my point stands - you should not spend all this time moping. Especially about something you feel you can’t change.”

“I can’t change it,” Yoongi says, shouldering his satchel, waiting by the door as the painting flits into a smaller portrait near the mirror - a dark Old Master. Titian, perhaps.

“Can’t you?”

“If I could, wouldn’t I have done it by now?”

The painting shrugs; a modern gesture that looks horrendously out of place on his classically painted body. “That depends on the sort of person you are. Go to class, or you’ll be late. Potions is a fine art, indeed, and it would be a pity to miss it. Malfoy especially has lived up to expectations.”

Yoongi can’t be bothered questioning the portrait any more on what he means; he just nods, and waves, and leaves. And ducks behind a wall or two when he sees people likely to react badly to him.

***

Jeongguk takes Yoongi’s set of Gobstones out of his bag with a kind of scary reverence, setting them on the table between them in the library. The September sun shines happily through the windows, and the librarian is all the way over on the other side of the room, and the place is full of the soft murmur of students getting back into the rhythm of Hogwarts.

“It’s pretty,” Jeongguk says, fingers dancing over the silver clasp. “You shouldnta got them for me.”

“I can buy things for my friends,” Yoongi says. Mumbles. “Wasn’t anything.”

“Was.”

“Wasn’t.”

Jeongguk kicks him under the table. “Thanks, anyway,” he says softly. When he unclips the Gobstones case, the hexagonal wooden box splits lengthways, revealing a Gobstones table-board carved into the wood, little stylised moons and suns detailing the point goals. Twelve Gobstones per side, green and blue, shake in their little pens.

“Do you know how to play?” Yoongi asks, scooping his six into his palm - the blue ones. Jeongguk is left with the green.

Jeongguk shrugs. “Played marbles in primary school, if that counts.”

“Kinda? Think marbles, with pool, and little balls of spitting acid. It’s sort of like that.”

“Sounds… kinda extra,” Jeongguk says, and grins. “I’ll play green.”

The six stones are heavy in Yoongi’s hand, and he shakes them back and forth before he places them on his side of the Gobstone table. “Arrange them like this, yeah? Six, one in each corner of the hexagon…” Jeongguk copies his motions. The stones sparkle in the sun; Jeongguk seems almost to shine, too, a big beam on his face as he clumsily shoves them into place.

“You flick them, like this,” Yoongi demonstrates, taking his first move. “You see the circles in each side of our hexagon? The goal is to get all six of your stones into my circle, and mine into yours, and the winner is whoever can do it first.”

“Okay,” Jeongguk says, brows furrowed. His tongue is trapped between his teeth in concentration.

Gobstones is one of those games that’s easy to pick up once you know the basic rules, and Jeongguk is a fast learner. They talk as they play - about Gerry, who sends whimsical owls to the Common Room, and about Namjoon, who’s trying to work up the nerve to ask Seokjin out, and about Jimin, who’s just existing, being Jimin.

“I might try out for the Ravenclaw team this year,” Jeongguk says. He takes aim and fires, but bounces off the inside of his own hexagon and ends up knocking a few carefully placed stones out of place; they all promptly gob green acid at him, which he narrowly ducks.

“You should,” Yoongi says. “If you want to.”

“You still have a team, right?”

“I dunno? Gerry was kinda the life and the soul.” Yoongi shoots his third blue Gobstone into the goal. “I just think there isn’t much point, with Izzy and Alwyn so small and everything. Chester’d only get at them.”

“He gets at you already.”

“Different.”

“Mm.” Jeongguk aims, fires, knocks one of Yoongi’s stones out of position. “You’d be Captain, wouldn’t you?”

“Not necessarily,” Yoongi shrugs, “Could be Damien or Samantha. Could even be Jimin or Edie-Maude - Captain doesn’t mean oldest, not any more.”

Jeongguk doesn’t talk any more about Quidditch, and Yoongi is grateful; the conversation idles along, as conversations do, and time spins slowly in the library, in the sun.

“Fuck Samantha, kill Jimin, marry Damien,” Yoongi says, in response to Jeongguk’s Slytherin house? “Okay, you go… Ravenclaw-”

“Why’d you marry Damien?” Jeongguk interrupts. Yoongi won the first game, and they’re playing a second, but their moves are slow and far-between, now they’ve found word games to play. “Why not Sam?”

“Sam’s okay, but she’d drive me nuts in the long run,” Yoongi plays along Jeongguk’s serious tone, although he’s not quite sure why. “Me ‘n Damien have lived together for, like, four years now. He’s cool.”

Jeongguk shrugs. He flicks his Gobstone with a little too much force, and it bounces all around the board before hitting his own stones. “Shit. Uh… what was the question?”

“Ravenclaw. Fuck marry kill.”

“Fuck… Sadie, marry Fred, kill Sophie.”

“Sadie?”

Jeongguk grins. “She may be a piece of shit, but she’s still Veela.”

“She’s a piece of shit,” Yoongi says. “And she packs a bloody strong punch, too.”

“Fine then… plant life around Hogwarts.”

“That’s bloody specific,” Yoongi says, and sends his Gobstone flying in a random direction. “Uh… hey, I ever tell you about the time last year Jin got so drunk he started thinking about fucking the Whomping Willow?”

“No,” Jeongguk sounds delighted. “Did he really?”

“Yeah, it was great. And Namjoon started talking about marrying the abstract concept of… something.”

“When Ravenclaws drink, they just talk about dumb shit,” Jeongguk says mournfully. “One time I woke up to go to class and Sadie and her friends were all lying about talking about which Gryffindor they’d rather fuck. How gross is that?”

“Very,” Yoongi says. Unbidden, he thinks of Sadie and Seokjin, and mimes gagging over the game board. “That’s gross.”

“Too true it’s gross,” says a voice from round the stacks, and Sadie emerges, her hair perfectly done over her shoulders, her eyelashes long and alluring, Ravenclaw tie in bronze and blue as fresh and pristine as her new red Prefect badge. Two girls flank her, one by each shoulder, both Ravenclaws. “Jeongguk, if you’re being bothered, you shouldn’t be scared to tell an adult.”

Jeongguk rolls his shoulders back. “I’m not being-”

Sadie raps the table with her knuckles and Gobstones go rolling everywhere. “It’s okay,” she says. “Yoongi’s a prick.”

“Leave off him, Sadie,” Yoongi says.

“You leave off him,” Sadie says, something bright and wicked in her eyes. “You’re a creep, Yoongi. Always were.”

Jeongguk says nothing - his eyes are wide, and his foot kicks Yoongi’s ankle under the table, to the beat of an imagined apology.

Yoongi nods, and takes his bag, and leaves.

***

im rly sorry its just sadie is super scary i told her she shouldnt have done that after u left pls believe me

Yoongi folds the note up in his sleeve. “Thanks, Friedrich,” he says, and watches the owl leave out the window - Damien is sitting up in bed, scratching out Quidditch plans, and hardly looks even as Yoongi casts his eye over the note again.

“Practice on Saturday. Five in the morning,” says Damien. “I’ll wake you.”

“You fucker,” Yoongi says tonelessly, and swings his legs out of bed. “I’m goin’ for a walk. Push practice to six if you wanna hold it at all.”

“I got shit for later too,” Damien raps his knuckles against his case. “You know they make cherry vodka? Tastes like dog arse.”

“Probably got it from dog arse,” Yoongi says, stepping into his fluffy slippers. “Don’t wait up.”

In the Common Room, nobody is awake - Isobel and Alwyn and Max, the two second years and their little adopted first-year, are asleep on the sofa, an abandoned game of normal Muggle chess sitting on the carpet in front of the hearth, along with a bottle of ink and a page where Max had been keeping score in his neat, rounded hand.

“Where are you going, so late at night?” Asks the painting-master, scooting into the picture by the door, the one of a bowl of fruit arranged tastefully next to a pitcher of water. “Students out of bed, fifty house points.”

“No offence, but we don’t have fifty points to lose,” Yoongi points out. “And I wanted to find you, actually. I - uh, you know that Claw kid you got last year?”

“Messages. Not like I have anything better to do,” the painting says sarcastically.

“You kinda don’t. You’re dead.”

The painting sneers; his lip curls. “I’ll fetch him for you this once, but only because the library paintings told me what happened. Where should he go? Don’t learn to rely on this, Yoongi. I’m not a messenger boy.”

“Seventh floor… opposite that picture of Barnabas-”

“-The Barmy teaching trolls to do ballet?” The painting hums. “Any particular… reason?”

“Usually empty,” Yoongi says. What other reason would there be?

The corridors of Hogwarts are pretty much abandoned, and Yoongi is very good at sneaking to where he wants to be, even if he suspects Jeongguk isn’t. And despite the melancholy that plagues him this year, there’s still some hope of a normality - Damien and the promise of a piss up on Saturday night, Seokjin, Namjoon, and Hoseok hanging around in the wings, Quidditch at the weekend, Hogsmeade trips incoming, a few letters from Gerry promised to arrive at the end of the month.

He just wishes -

“I wish there was some place to be normal,” he says, voice cracking when he speaks a little above a whisper. He’s pacing back and forth along a stretch of empty wall, the seventh floor. Barnabas and his dancing trolls are watching, and pointing, and laughing.

“Just some place to be normal,” he says. Like it justifies anything.

Something seems to rumble inside the wall.

“Normal,” he says - and Jeongguk comes clattering up the stairs in blue pyjamas patterned with Peter Rabbits, his eyes wide and sleepy, and the master in the portrait comes bursting into the Barnabas, just as the door pops out of the wall behind him.

“What the fuck, Yoongi,” Jeongguk says.

“What the fuck, me? What the fuck wall, I think you mean.”

Jeongguk swipes at his cheek. “I’m sorry about earlier,” he says, approaching the door; his pyjamas are a little too big on him, even though the hem is fraying, and Yoongi can see elastic and little Peter Rabbits printed all down the cotton front. “I just - Yoongi, what the fuck.”

“I didn’t know this was here,” Yoongi suddenly becomes embarrassingly aware of his fluffy slippers, with pink pompoms on the toes. “I just - I just fuckin’-”

“Go into the room,” the painting interrupts. “That is what one usually does, with rooms.”

“Fuck you,” Yoongi says mildly.

Jeongguk bites his thumb, and twists the doorknob.

***

“Whassa?”

“‘S…” Yoongi turns the chocolate bar around. “Aw, fuck, fruit and nut. I fucking hate fruit and nut.”

“Nut,” Namjoon says, and giggles. “Hey, nut. Geddit?”

Hoseok dives his hand into the box of treats sent to him by his brother; they’re sitting by the lake, passing a cigarette between the four of them, while the six-pack of Stella vanishes, empty cans stacked into a little pyramid on the damp grass. “Lemme find the Turkish Delight,” Hoseok says, “And Joon, shut the fuck up.”

“Eat a dick,” Namjoon says amicably. “Or nuts. Eat nuts. Fruit and nut.”

“I like it creamy,” says Seokjin, and he looks at Namjoon, and Namjoon starts coughing into his cider.

Yoongi lies back, his hands behind his head, staring up at the overcast sky. He’s had enough to drink that he feels kind of dizzy, and kind of dazy, and he sort of just wants to curl up and go to sleep somewhere warm and calm.

A bar of Cadburys’ Turkish Delight hits him in the chest, and Hoseok pats his forehead with a tipsy sort of comfort. “Has anyone ever told you you’re like a cat?” He says, and tips his head back, moisture trickling down the can he drains. “Like a big, sad cat full of teenage angst and chocolate. That’s you. That’s who you are.”

“Meow meow, motherfucker,” Yoongi drones. “Fuck you.”

Namjoon unwraps the chocolate bar for him and snaps off a square. “Here comes the airplane, zoom zoom…”

Seokjin is the one smoking the cigarette when it trails down to a stub; he puts it out on the grass, and flicks the butt down to the shore of the lake to join its fallen brethren. “Anyone got any more?”

Hoseok shakes his head - he’s the one with the endless supply of drink and smokes, because his sister is always posting him parcels through owl mail, the castoffs from their parents’ off-licence. “That was the last one. She said she’d send a letter through next week, though, you impatient bastard.”

Yoongi closes his eyes, a mile and a day away.

“It’s called the Room of Requirement,” the painting says, his arms folded, his long face drawn and melancholy. “It gives you what you most need - sanctuary, a place to train, a… a place to hide a book. I thought it had burned down long ago.”

“Obviously not,” Yoongi snaps, the shock making him tetchy. “Guk, don’t go in, just in case it’s dangerous.”

Jeongguk’s hand is still resting on the knob. “I saw beanbags in there, and a TV,” he says mildly. “I don’t think it’s dangerous unless you open the beanbag and choke on the little balls.” Then he snorts. “Choking on little balls. Heh.”

The painting huffs. “Go in, then. What did you ask for?”

“Nothing,” Yoongi says. Being normal seems way too sad to admit, in the face of it. “Just a place to - to relax. Jeongguk, do you wanna-?”

“Let’s have a Gobstones rematch,” Jeongguk says, and slips through the doorway, holding it open for Yoongi. “Are you coming or what?”

And it had been the nicest sleep Yoongi had had in a while, curled up on a soft beanbag, Gobstones between them, a soft blanket over his shoulders, the smell of something nice and clean and cottony drifting through the air. Jeongguk had been playing with the TV settings when Yoongi went to sleep, but when he woke up the kid was snoring too, and the room was a little dimmer, as though to accommodate the nighttime.

“Someone’s quiet,” Hoseok nudges his knee. “Anyone bothering you, or are you just being a twat?”

“Huh? Oh. Nah,” Yoongi takes the chocolate out of Namjoon’s hands. “Just thinking.”

The Room of Requirement (apparently) wasn’t anything special. A smallish room, with a low roof and a shaded lightbulb, so refreshingly down-to-earth in the grand medieval mess of Hogwarts. The walls are wooden panelling, as Yoongi remembers them, with those dumb three flying ducks hanging on the wallpaper verge, just like they do in his house. Beanbags strewn everywhere, cluttered in a corner, a fireplace, brick panelling creeping through the grey flagstones. A bunch of books, old books, well-loved books, books Yoongi remembers reading and enjoying, lie in piles and in bookshelves. There’s a kitchen table, and a few cupboards and shelves, and a pitcher of water that didn’t run empty no matter how much they poured for themselves.

Yoongi finds himself wanting to go back. They didn’t do much - just played and then, later, slept - but it was nice to be normal, without thinking Chester or Sadie or anyone would interrupt.

“I heard Sadie was in the library yesterday,” Namjoon says.

“Yoongi.”

“She didn’t do jackshit,” Yoongi says, rolling onto his stomach. “Hoseok, gimme more chocolate, and Joon, shut your face.”

“According to Maisie Phair, she bugged Jeongguk all evening in the Ravenclaw Common Room.”

“Yeah, well, I coulda told you being friends with me wasn’t gonna end well for the kid,” Yoongi says, and tries to eat an entire bar of caramel fudge in one bite.

***

Dear Snake Fuckers (and also Izzy and Alwyn and New Boy Max)
Your most wonderful and beloved true captain has enclosed his badge below and hereby installs Damien Roadfell as Captain because he is the Oldest and also the one least likely to have a nervous breakdown before the match. Practice hard fuckers, I’m watching. And those of you going to Hogsmeade next weekend, go to the Hogs Head and give the password “gerry is amazing” and you’ll be led to a mysterious gentleman waiting for you.
Much love, kisses, and other shite,
Gerry Thompson, the One True Captain

Yoongi allows a broad smile to spread across his face as he reads the letter. Addressed to Slytherin Fuckers, it had been dumped on their table at breakfast by Gerry’s angry little screech owl (Micky) and the twenty-odd Slytherins had gathered around him as Yoongi read it aloud.

“He’s coming back!” Samantha leans over the table to high-five Edie-Maude. “Fuck yeah!”

Izzy and Alwyn immediately set about explaining to a befuddled Max Hastings exactly who Gerry is and why the entirety of Slytherin House is suddenly planning to go to the village next weekend, and why the mood along the table has perked up massively.

(Hell, there’s even audible conversation. Yoongi knows they’re getting funny looks - he doesn’t care.)

“Fucking wanker, sending his badge in the letter,” Damien says, grinning as he pins it to his chest. “Holy shit, we really have to win the first match, now.”

“Against who?”

“Gerry’s back!”

“Who’re we playing?”

“Yeah, but Gerry-”

“We’re playing Ravenclaw,” Yoongi interrupts, setting the letter in the table, wary of the smears of jam and butter. “Sadie to Seek. So, like, nobody fuck around or nothing, ‘cos we want Gerry to think we’re awesome.”

(Sadie - Ravenclaw - means Jeongguk won’t be cheering for him. Them. Them.)

(But at least Chester won’t break his fucking nose-)

“That’s easy enough,” Damien says - the Captain badge seems to make him bigger, broader, far happier, although his voice is low so that they can’t be overheard by the Hufflepuffs beside him. “Yoongi, you’re the one who has to take Sadie, so that’s the hardest job right now. Izzy, Alwyn, Edie-Maude-”

“Their Chasers are good, but we’re better,” Alwyn says, leaning forward on his elbows and sticking his robes in the butter dish. “Fuck.”

“You have to field the goals,” Samantha points out.

Damien nods. “But their strategy is reliant on Sadie. She’s a flashy kind of Seeker, whereas Yoongi is-”

“Dull,” Yoongi supplies. “I’m real fucking boring. So the Claw team just distracts the main players while Sadie Seeks, but you fuckers have to make a real impact and force the main Claws to stop helping Sadie or fending for themselves.”

In the Hog’s Head, at the Court of Gerry, it seems he's got some supporters to his plan.

“...And therefore there’s only one true outcome to the game,” says Gerry - it’s Saturday, in the pub in Hogsmeade, with fifteen adoring Slytherins gathered around him as he pretty much echoes what Damien, Yoongi, and Samantha had been theorising at breakfast the other day.

Yoongi nods. “We win, but Sadie gets the Snitch, or-”

“Or we win with the Snitch and humiliate Sadie,” Damien finishes, and leans across the beer-slick table to slap Yoongi’s hand in a high five.

Gerry looks well, at least. He’s a month into his research programme for the Irish Taoiseach of Magic, and his accent is far stronger and he’s starting to grow a little scruff of a beard. He still looks fundamentally Gerry, though, and he still pays for all their drinks even when it becomes clear he’ll empty his wallet over head of the meeting.

“I’ll watch the match, of course,” he says, “So you better do me proud. How’s the new kid?”

“Max is great,” Alwyn says enthusiastically, and launches into a long tirade about just what, exactly, makes Max so great, aided by Isobel’s frequent cut-ins and gushing praises. There’s only one other person in the pub, a man hooded and cloaked, and Yoongi wonders if they’re annoying him - but he doesn’t much care. Gerry is back.

“How’s your nose?”

“Huh?” Yoongi looks away from the man and down to Gerry. “Oh - oh. Yeah, it’s good.”

“Anything?”

“Sadie’s bugging my. Ah, my friend? The Ravenclaw kid?”

“Jeongguk, yeah, I know him.” Gerry tries to look sly. “Do you know him?”

“Shut the fuck up, Gerry,” Yoongi says, kicking him under the table.

And Samantha shoves her fist in the air. “More drinks!”

***

The Ravenclaw match dawns in a surreal sort of suddenness, and then it's Saturday and Yoongi is clambering into his robes and fighting with his riding boots and clamping his wand between his teeth so he can knot up his hood.

Gerry is in the crowd somewhere; more importantly, so is Jeongguk, waving a little Ravenclaw pennant because while he might like Yoongi, Ravenclaw is still his house, and Yoongi doesn’t begrudge him the support. He just - feels the lack of it.

Damien buckles his Keeper helmet tight under his chin with the determination of someone going to war. “Alright, fuckers. Lets win or die. Drinks on me if we win.”

“Yeah!”

Izzy and Alwyn, cheering, waving their broomsticks in the air, the only new additions after Derek Molesey left to concentrate on his NEWTs. The Slytherin Quidditch team, bedraggled but still there after everything.

“And here they are, advancing onto the pitch, the Slytherin Quidditch team!”

These nerds, too. Namjoon and Seokjin sit squabbling in the commentator box, with Professor Malfoy in between them looking so stressed he’s passed through the other side into some twilight zone of zen as his students murder each other over him, fighting for control of the megaphone.

“And approaching from the other side, the Ravenclaws!”

An ocean of screams and cheers. When Yoongi squints up at the Ravenclaw stands, he imagines he sees Jeongguk - although he couldn’t, not in that massive sea of blue and bronze. He looks across to the Slytherin stands, sees little Max Hastings shrieking, waving his banner, bedecked in green and silver, his face almost totally hidden in his scarf.

“Good luck,” Damien says, patting Yoongi on the shoulder.

“Good luck.”

When the starting whistle blows, Yoongi immediately flies up to circle the arena, just like the first match they ever played. He can’t see Sadie. He finds he doesn’t care; let her do what she wants. He can catch the Snitch. He has to catch the Snitch.

Sadie’s tactic has always been to involve herself in the action, to distract the crowd themselves from the eventual goal. Yoongi forces himself to look away from her and up instead - they’re still outmatched, the Slytherins, and last night Damien had admitted their best chance of winning would be capturing the Snitch as early as possible, before the Ravenclaw Chasers get time to fall into a groove.

“And right off the bat it’s Isobel Way of Slytherin in possession, a new addition to the team,” Namjoon calls over the stadium. “And look at her go!”

Yoongi watches Izzy fly, zipping across the stadium, Alwyn flanking her close and under. A Ravenclaw goes to block and a bludger flies across her path; she passes to Alwyn and ducks the bludger, and Alwyn neatly throws the ball through the central hoop.

“Slytherin scores! Holy fuck!”

Professor Malfoy’s exhausted groan echoes through the whole stadium.

Yoongi cheers to himself, too high for anyone else to hear. Down low, Izzy and Alwyn high five; up in the stands little Max Hastings is cheering himself hoarse, beside Gerry, who’s badly disguised himself wearing one of Damien’s spare cloaks and waving a stuffed snake in the air.

It turns out to be exactly the boost the team needed. Unwilling to be outdone by the two youngest, Edie-Maude scores twice in a row, and Samantha and Jimin are an unstoppable force, blocking the Ravenclaws at least three times when it seems as though the tight flank of Chasers might score. After half an hour, the score is fifty-twenty in favour of the Slytherins, but Yoongi has yet to see even a glimmer of the Snitch.

“I must say, Slytherin are totally winning all of us over up here in the VIP box-”

“Seokjin Kim-”

“Sir, that wasn’t even a biased statement, I can see you cheering from here-”

Yoongi sees Sadie below, swooping through the players like some elegant blue dragonfly, her twin blonde plaits streaming over her shoulders. She has blue and bronze ribbons tying the ends of them, and they all but shine in the fresh morning sun - she looks the part. Always does. And maybe she feels his gaze on her, because she looks up and smirks at him, and Yoongi looks away, unsettled.

He has to help them win. He’ll never hear the end of it from Sadie or Chester or any of them if they lose because of Yoongi.

“Slytherin scores again! Holy shit, these kid Chasers are killing it!”

Down the pitch, Damien dives into a celebratory loop around his goals, a blur of green and silver on his maplewood broomstick.

But Yoongi can’t see that tell-tale flash of gold, not anywhere.

And

Then

He

Sees

A glimmer of gold, hovering down near the Hufflepuff stands, and his body reacts even before his mind does, wrenching the handle of his broomstick down into a dive as elegant and as fast as if he were an emerald swallow streaming silver down to the earth. Seokjin screams something over the megaphone, but Yoongi doesn’t have the energy spare to hear him. The Snitch is there, it really is.

Sadie flies up to meet him, and the Snitch darts away.

“The Seekers are locked neck-and-neck-”

Yoongi digs his teeth into his bottom lip -

Sadie slides up behind him and it’s like last year all over again, Chester and the Gryffindor match, and the Snitch is in front of a row of shocked-silent Ravenclaws, their banners hanging limply from their loose fists.

The world in motion stops.

Yoongi reaches for the Snitch, dancing right in front of Jeongguk Jeon’s astonished nose, barely visible under the blue scarf he’s wrapped loyally around his neck.

“You better come to the party later,” he manages to say, before he clasps his fingers tight around the little golden thing and yelps as Sadie barrells right into him.

“And in a stunning finale, Seeker Sadie McDermot sends Seeker Yoongi Min to the Hospital Wing!”

With the hand that he can feel, Yoongi lies his head back on the grass and raises a two-fingered salute in the vague direction of the commentary box, and Namjoon cackles across the stadium.

In the end, O’Shannon diagnoses him with a pair of broken fingers that aren’t severe enough to warrant magical fixing, and so Yoongi has them splinted together before he’s sent on his way. Gerry is waiting in the Common Room, with Namjoon and Jin and Hoseok, but no Jeongguk.

“Can I sign your cast?”

“It’s a fucking bandage, you dumbass.”

Namjoon makes like a sigh.

They have a party, and Yoongi drinks himself almost sick, and when he looks up at the portraits on the walls he sees the old Master in his cloak and his long, curtained hair, staring at him. “I am not a messenger,” the portrait says.

It takes a while for the words to soak through the dizziness in Yoongi’s head. “I know that,” he says, blinking. “Hey, didn you know we won? I beat Sadie!”

“Very well done,” the painting says dryly. “In my day even Professor Malfoy found it hard to win against that team. But I’ve been given a message, much as I told him that wasn’t what I’m for. Your friend wants to see you on the seventh floor next to that horrendous painting of the troll ballet.”

“The Room of Requirement?”

“I assume so.”

Yoongi turns to excuse himself, and finds almost all of Slytherin -plus change - passed out in various states of disarray. Alwyn and Izzy are sleeping next to the hearth, and Damien is stretched out in his nightshirt, his lips half-open. Even Gerry is asleep, among empty bottles of the finest Irish whisky an apprenticeship wage can buy; and Edie-Maude and Samantha are drinking vodka in wine glasses and cheering every time one or the other of them has to stop to cough.

So, nobody to miss him.

Yoongi mumbles thanks to the painting, and stumbles out of the Common Room, casting a quick Sober-Spell that works most of the way. Up the stairs he goes, far too late for law-abiding students to be out of their beds.

And back and forth against the wall, three times.

“I want to be where Jeongguk is, I want to be where Jeongguk is, I want to be where Jeongguk is,” he chants, and scurries through the door as soon as it appears - back into the homely room they found the last time.

And into Jeongguk, lying flat on his face in the middle of the carpet.

Yoongi prods him curiously with his toe. “You didn’t come to our party. Gerry came ‘n all. And, like, free drink.”

“I’m too young to drink,” Jeongguk says, muffled through a mouthful of carpet.

“Never stopped anyone before. What’s up?” The little alcohol left in Yoongi’s system frees him up a little, and he doesn’t feel weird plonking himself down beside Jeongguk and slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Wasn’t weird earlier, was it?”

Jeongguk says nothing.

“Not me?”

Jeongguk says nothing.

“Uh… aw, fuck,” Yoongi says. “Did Sadie get you?”

Jeongguk says something into the carpet that could be either i hate her why does she have to be so mean or i hate her go eat beans. Yoongi puts his money safe on the first option, especially when he sees Jeongguk’s face as he rolls over; his cheeks are all blotchy and his eyes are all sad, like a forlorn puppy. “She told me you were just being friends with me to annoy her.”

Yoongi feels like something’s squeezing his insides, horrible and uncomfortable. “I’m not.”

“I know that. Why doesn’t anybody fucking else?”

“‘Cos I’m an evil snake bastard,” Yoongi says dully, drawing his knees up to his chest and tucking his broken fingers between them. “Just - tell Sadie to fuck off, I guess. Or tell me to fuck off. You see her more anyway, ‘f she’s the prefect.”

Jeongguk doesn’t really say anything to that. They both clamber into beanbags, and Jeongguk hooks a book off the shelf - The Horse And His Boy - and Yoongi finds himself falling asleep to that, to the cadence of Jeongguk’s voice crackling his way through Shasta, who bullied and abused finds Aravis and travels to a new land where nobody cares where he came from and nobody hurts him and nobody thinks he isn’t good.

(Yoongi thinks there might be a hand in his hair. He doesn’t know. He’s warm, and comfortable, and his hand doesn’t hurt and they won the Ravenclaw match and Jeongguk is here, and not with Sadie, and that’s more than Yoongi really has the right to ask for.)

***

Divination is, as Hoseok pointed out at the start of the year, last thing on a Friday afternoon. In the winter it had been cold, and in the spring it had been stuffy, but now it’s closer to Easter and Professor Bloom lets them open the windows.

It’s proving, so far, to be a real easy class to succeed in. Yoongi and Namjoon sit at the back, drink tea, and draw pictures of the omens they see in their tea leaves, like cloud pictures but with rewards at the end. Bloom is an okay teacher - apparently better than the last Divination woman - she’s Welsh, and she has long black hair, and little spectacles that balance on her nose, and a cat that Yoongi thought was a scarf until February.

“Today, we’ll move on to something a little more,” she says. “More - more. Who can tell me the purpose of tea leaves?”

“To make a cuppa,” Yoongi whispers to Namjoon.

“That is correct,” Bloom says, pointing at him and winking underneath a flop of dark hair. “However, there’s another purpose. Anyone a little more educationally-minded than Min care to tell me?”

“For predictions,” says Amanda Reilly confidently. She’s vegan, and she’s got a SPEW badge pinned to her front, and she pretty much worships the ground Bloom walks on.

Bloom smiles, and even though the day is a hot one in mid-April and there’s nothing remotely mysterious about it, for a second Yoongi feels a chill down his back. “Of course they aren’t. Tea leaves are a placebo. I could just as easy look at the contents of your dinner leftovers and predict them like your tea leaves. They’re a way of seeing who relies on the pictures they see in the textbook, and who can see the truth that the leaves are a crutch for.”

Which sounds dumb. Yoongi’s just been writing random shit all year - sometimes he and Namjoon use the textbook, but most often they don’t. They have competitions to see who can say the dumbest shit.

“All of you now,” Bloom says, “Make yourselves a cup of tea but for heaven's sake don’t bother using the textbook.”

Hesitantly, Amanda raises her hand. “Miss? Is this a test?”

Bloom smiles at her, and then her eyes drift up to Yoongi. “Most things are.”

***

Spring melts into summer in much the same way. Yoongi goes to Quidditch practice, and when he has a free moment he finds himself wandering up seven floors, and flipping the bird to Barnabas the Barmy and his dancing trolls, and pacing back and forth three steps and slipping through the door into the Room of Requirement.

More often than not, Jeongguk is there, and if he isn’t, he usually shows up. They play Gobstones and Jeongguk teaches Yoongi a few Muggle games, and they read books.

(Read books: if it’s late at night, Jeongguk takes whichever Narnia book they’re on at the moment down from the shelf and he reads it aloud until Yoongi falls asleep. He’s so much better rested these days, even if he’s only spending half of them in his actual bed.)

(Right now, they’ve just begun Prince Caspian. So far, Jeongguk’s favourite is The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, but Yoongi thinks he’ll always have a place for The Horse and his Boy.)

“What’s Monopoly?”

Jeongguk’s mouth drops open and water dribbles all down his front. “No way. Are you serious? Are you for fucking real?”

Yoongi prods the box with his foot. “What part of ‘raised by wizards and only occasionally allowed out to play with my Muggle friends’ keeps passing you by? ‘Course I’m for real. What’s Monopoly?”

“You buy shit and it ends marriages,” Jeongguk says seriously, unfolding the board game and smoothing it out on the floor next to all the beanbags and the healthy-ish snacks the Room keeps supplying for them out of nothing, much. “See this?”

“It’s London,” Yoongi says. “With a massive hot iron and a - is that a boot?”

“I’m always the boot. You can be the iron.”

“Oh, yeah, great. Thanks.”

Jeongguk gives him a cheeky grin, and hands him the little metallic iron. “Don’t you feel one with the iron, huh? Isn’t it great? That’s you as a person, so shut up and listen to me tell you how to play.”

“Yessir,” Yoongi says, and clicks his little iron down next to Jeongguk’s boot.

“...And then two hundred quid every time you pass go, right, and if you get enough money you get to put down a little green house, and if you get four green houses you get a red hotel-”

“This is real estate,” Yoongi says, blinking, leaning back on one of the softest beanbags. The Room shrinks itself when they play games; it’s small, and cosy, and he always feels as though he’s in a world of his own when he’s here - him and Jeongguk, just sitting playing games as though they haven’t got anything better to do. Maybe they don’t.

“I’ll be the banker.”

“See? It’s real estate!”

Jeongguk shakes out a roll of eleven, and the game rumbles to a start.

“Why do you want Mayfair so bad? Isn’t that where London bankers hang out?” Yoongi gasps dramatically. “You’re assimilating. Oh god. Oh, god, there’s no saving you now.”

“Don’t be a cock,” Jeongguk hits him with one of the little plastic hotels. “You want the purple ones ‘cos they’re the most expensive, so if you land on them you have to cough up fifty quid, and if there’s hotels on them you’re fucked.”

“I want these little brown things,” Yoongi taps the properties next to the GO square. “How much are they worth?”

“Not as much as the blue.”

“Figures.”

Jeongguk looks up askance, holding a chance card. “What’s that meant to mean?”

“Nothin’.”

“Okay. I won a beauty contest, so gimme a tenner.”

Monopoly carries them two and a half hours in, almost to one in the morning, and by that time Yoongi’s curled up around one of the beanbags with his head on Jeongguk’s thigh, counting out his pennies and saying “hey, I just got to go to go again,” in a sleepy voice full of grit and tiredness. Jeongguk’s started petting his hair every so often, and it feels nice.

“You get two hundred pounds.”

“Awesome.”

Electronics still aren’t allowed in Hogwarts, so they can’t get any CDs or anything, but every so often a gramophone appears on the scarred wooden table, and a pile of records in faded paper sleeves. Halfway through their Monopoly game, Jeongguk had reached over and set on a record of Les Miserables, for some fucking reason - and now Yoongi is so tired that it’s all melding together, and every time Jeongguk opens his mouth it’s like he’s singing some dirge about being a Parisian prostitute, and the surrealism whirls its way into a pool of sounds and little paper pounds swapping hands in an endless cycle.

“You’re tired,” Jeongguk says. “I just bankrupted you.”

“Call the motherfucking bailiffs,” Yoongi says sleepily into the crook of Jeongguk’s knee. “‘Course I’m tired. I’m always tired. I’m like the fuckin’... Hulk, but instead of, like, punching fuckers I just pass out in Tesco.”

“You go to Tesco?”

“Everyone goes to Tesco.”

“Mmm.” Jeongguk tugs on Yoongi’s hair. “The Queen?”

“She goes to Tesco.”

“David Beckham?”

“He goes to Sainsburys.”

Jeongguk laughs softly. “We should go to bed.”

“Change the record,” Yoongi stretches, feeling his knees and ankles pop with the pressure. “Fuck. What time is it? I’m sad.”

“One in the morning. C’mon.”

“Mmh. Okay.”

The Monopoly board gets tossed as Yoongi stands, swaying back and forward to the softest music, Jeongguk’s hands on his elbows. The Room of Requirement obligingly reveals the door, beside one of the bookshelves, and the gramophone spins down almost silent. They never have to tidy up in here, although most nights they do anyway - Yoongi feels like maybe if they’re polite to the Room, it’ll be nicer to them.

He’s tired, though. The Monopoly board can wait until they come back, surely.

“Jeongguk?”

“Mm,” Jeongguk says, quieter now they’re outside the Room and into the corridor. From the dancing trolls painting, the old Potions Master watches. “Yeah, what’s up?”

Yoongi sighs. “Does Sadie bother you much?”

“I don’t give a fuck about Sadie.”

“I don’t care if you don’t give a fuck,” Yoongi says, ducking into the little arch where Jeongguk had healed his broken nose last year. “I care if Sadie bothers you.”

Jeongguk shrugs. “She bothers everyone.”

“She bothers me, and Jimin, and Edie-Maude and people. And we can deal with it because we have our house,” Yoongi raps his knuckles on Jeongguk’s shoulder. “If she bugs you because of me-”

“Life isn’t a Mills and Boon,” Jeongguk says flatly. “Lemme deal with it if I have to. It’s not your fault Sadie’s a cunt.”

“It is if she’s bugging you because you’re friends with me.”

For some reason, that’s the wrong thing to say. Jeongguk’s face goes all shuttered and dim, and he lets go of Yoongi’s elbow and stands up, shuffling into his fluffy slippers. “I’m going to bed,” he says. “You should too. See you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Yoongi says softly.

(And then, to the portrait: “What did I do?”)

***

Right before the Easter holidays, on the last Friday afternoon of term, Professor Bloom stands in front of the class with her hands clasped in front of her. “Today we’re going to do something a little bit different,” she says. “You’re going to make a cup of tea-”

Widespread groans. Namjoon thuds his forehead theatrically against his textbook.

“-And I’m going to collect every single one of them in, and give you a name. You’ll go up to that person and tell them their fortune.”

“So you’re gonna give us their cup?” Amanda Reilly asks.

Bloom smiles angelically. “Why would I do that? There’s as much to be read in the air as there is in tea leaves.”

Yoongi shuffles up to the teapot with the rest of the class, mumbling along with everyone else about how it totally isn’t fair, introducing a new topic on the last day of term. Hell, right before Bloom walked into class they’d all been talking about how much sleep they were gonna get over the break - and Sarah Jennings is going on a cruise to Malta, which they’d all oo and aahed about. Yoongi hasn’t the energy for effort, especially in such a bullshit subject as this.

“Cup, Min,” Bloom holds out her hand. “Come on, hurry up.”

“It’s still boiling hot,” he grouses, but downs it as fast as he can and presents the cup to her handle-first. “Hey, Joon, gimme yours too.”

It takes most of the class for them just to drink the tea, but Bloom doesn’t seem to mind - she chats serenely with the milling fourth-years, although her gaze brushes over Yoongi more than once. Amanda she talks to for almost ten whole minutes, before moving on, and Amanda sits looking all smug, as though she’s been automatically upgraded. Future Divination Professor in the making, if Yoongi was a betting man.

“Thank you,” Bloom says, as the last cup gets handed to her. “I know you’re all eager to catch the train as early as you can, so I’ll make this part quick.”

All the teacups in her pastel hellscape look the same, and if he’s honest Yoongi isn’t paying the most attention to the cup he eventually gets handed. It’s the same as every other cup of tea he’s ever drunk in this class, once a week on a Friday afternoon for two hours of incense and trying not to laugh out loud at Namjoon’s humorous drawings - just the same. Like, tea leaves in a vaguely-readable shape, cup rim a little chipped. Dregs of tea left to swill around.

Namjoon’s shaking his, looking nonplussed. “I feel dumb,” he whispers.

Yoongi nods.

(He also feels - weird. He was awake late, last night, and Jeongguk didn’t come over to talk to him at breakfast this morning; he did wave, though, which is something.)

“Find the person with the fortune in your cup,” Bloom calls from the front of the room, her plastic necklace clacking against her own china teacup.

Yoongi looks into the leaves in despair. C’mon, gimme something. C’mon. Anything.

He snatches a shoulder at random in the crowd, and Amanda Reilly emerges, looking shellshocked. “Yoongi? You worked it out already?”

“You have a brother,” he says as confidently as he can.

“I - yeah,” she says, voice suspicious, her own cup hanging loose from her hands. “Is that really my cup? You gotta try, Yoongi-”

“Your brother’s what, seven?”

Amanda sighs crossly. “You asked Namjoon, didn’t you?”

“‘Course I fuckin’ didn’t. Listen, I dunno if this is right, but your brother - you should tell him to get his leg checked at a proper Muggle hospital, okay?” And Yoongi doesn’t know where that came from. It seems way too dire for him to have imagined on the spot, and pretty damn offensive considering he’s just improvising, but-”

“You don’t know a thing,” Amanda says. “God. What are you doing in this class?”

“His name’s Peter,” Yoongi says, suddenly and inexplicably overcome with an urge for Amanda to take him seriously. “And you should… I dunno, at least suggest it to him.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I will. Just so I can show you how shit you are at Divination.”

“What the hell was that?” Namjoon asks at his side, when Amanda swans away. “You don’t usually act like such a cock, mate.”

“I dunno,” Yoongi says. “Just a something, I guess. Got rid of my cup, anyway; I’m sitting down.”

“Kay.”

Yoongi sinks into the nearest armchair so he can properly consider how to make it up to Jeongguk - he’s thinking cake, maybe, and another round of Gobstones where he lets Jeongguk beat him at least twice. Or a hug. Maybe a hug would be better. Or both. He can’t really remember what he said yesterday, but he’s almost a billion percent sure it was something bad, since Jeongguk is the nicest person ever to walk this Earth.

Or something.

Or something.

“Min.”

Yoongi looks up into Bloom’s bug-eyed stare. “I already got my cup, Professor,” he says.

“I saw you.” Bloom sits lightly down in the chair opposite him. “Amanda’s brother, right?”

A hot flush creeps up Yoongi’s neck, because there’s no way someone like Bloom wouldn’t know he’s been spouting bullshit. “Uh - yeah?”

“I have your cup.”

“Oh. Cool.”

Bloom shows it to him, and then sets it down on the table and casts her gaze upward, at the leaking stone roof, at the spinning spiderwebs on top of it. It’s grey compared to the pink explosion of the classroom itself; a reminder that no matter how much it looks like a terrifying grandmother’s dungeon, it’s still a part of Hogwarts. “Your cup was very interesting.”

Yoongi tries to arrange an engaged look on his face.

“Are you interested in risk at all, Min?”

Right. Great. More Divination. “‘Fraid not, Professor,” he says, and tries not to be too sarcastic about it.

“You’re the Slytherin Seeker.”

“Only ‘cos nobody else would do it.”

“Of course.” Bloom taps her finger on the table. “Well, Divination is always such a prickly subject, and very hard to be precise. I won’t beat about the bush - your fortune says that the great risk you take will pay off, and the man looking at you is not the one you’re looking at, although I’ll be frank and say I didn’t dive any further into that one. Student romance isn’t my cup of tea.”

Yoongi laughs dutifully at the dead joke.

“Risk, men…” Bloom shrugs. “And a reminder, although it was difficult to see. I’d like to say it was telling you to keep your head up, considering your - House, but it could also have been to persevere. In the end, you’ll get it.”

“Thanks,” Yoongi says as sincerely as he can manage.

Bloom pats him on the shoulder. “You may not believe in it yourself, but you have a real talent for Divination,” she says. “It would be a pity to see that go to waste. Will I see you next year, or have you decided?”

“You probably will,” he says. “I - yeah. I enjoy it.”

“Good. Not many people do.”

As the class is filing out, books and bags shouldered, licking their lips to get rid of the taste of thick, black tea, Bloom calls him back to the desk. Yoongi waves at Namjoon to run on, because Namjoon wants to get good seats on the train just as much as everyone else does - as Yoongi does. (Fucking Bloom, seriously.)

“I’ll give you these,” she says, “In preparation for the new term.”

A paper package. “Thanks,” he says, and then shifts on his feet, “Uh - what is it?”

“An aid, that’s all. All of Divination is an aid,” her plastic necklace clicks and clacks and she looks very small sitting in her chair. “Go on. If you run, you can still find a seat beside that Ravenclaw boy. He’s holding one for you.”

And when Yoongi races down the stairs and out down the lane to the Express, he finds that Jeongguk is.

***

Dear Yoongi,
Namjoon gave me your owl address I hope you don’t mind. I told my brother about what you said in class and we went to St Mungo’s - Peter has a limp see, he’s had it since he was a kid - and they just gave him a better walking stick.
We got him one already btw
And there’s a Muggle Hospital near Mungo’s so we went there, and he’s got this appointment for physical therapy which sounds like Muggle crap but actually works and he’s saying his leg doesn’t hurt so much
So thanks I guess?
Thanks from Peter, too
Amanda Reilly

Which is weird. And unexpected.

Dear Yoongi,
Good job seeking
See u at my house this summer
Yours, Gerry, the Forever One True Captain

Which is not weird and very much expected and goes into the scrapbook page Yoongi’s titled dumbass gerry moments. (This being right beside the dumbass hoseok moments, another page that’s filling up nicely.

Yoongi,
Mum says she’ll make u pudding if u come to my house next week. Also I think namjoon tried 2 send me a letter bc i found friedrich outside my window but he fainted again
signed faithfully The Best Monopoly Guy Ever, Jeongguk

Which Yoongi smiles at, and tucks into a page at the back of the scrapbook just kind of titled Jeongguk.

***

Bloom’s package turns out to be tarot cards, and Yoongi spends most of Easter just learning what they’re all called. The cards are kind of used and bent and folded, and much taped and repaired, and they smell of old bookshops.

Yoongi just uses his break doing that, with a brief day trip to Ireland to hang out at Gerry’s house, and a jaunt down to meet Jeongguk in London.

A good Easter, overall.

***

“Where are you going?”

Damien is sitting up in bed, the neck of his shirt fallen to one side so it’s tight around his throat and falling off his shoulder. He hasn’t cut his hair at all this year - now, well into May, it’s started to lengthen and curl dramatically, making him look even more the slender mystery. (Except Yoongi knows he snores, so - no mystery.)

“Nowhere,” Yoongi says, his hand on the door, ready to head up to the Room. “Why?”

“I’m beginning to think my Quidditch Captaincy is putting you off. You hardly sleep in here anymore,” and Damien’s voice is light, but there’s an undercurrent of real worry there.

“I’m just -” Yoongi shrugs. The Room of Requirement is his, his and Jeongguk’s. “Just going out to talk to Jeongguk.”

Damien watches him leave.

And the next Quidditch practice is on Sunday morning, at five, when the dawn’s barely broken across the sky. “Gryffindors have pitch from eight,” Damien yells across the changing rooms, “So look busy! Last match of the year against the Puffs, remember. Edie-Maude, you take Izzy and Alwyn for a bit, I wanna do stuff with Sam and Jimin…”

Yoongi tightens the laces of his boots, ties his riding cloak firmer around his neck, and plays good Quidditch for two and a half hours, cheered on by Max Hastings, still in his pyjamas with Alwyn’s cloak around his shoulders for warmth in the dewy air.

“Hey,” Damien says, gliding beside him as they break for a moment. “I - can you hang back in the changing rooms?”

“Yeah, sure.”

They’re getting really, properly good. Yoongi knows Damien gets special Quidditch letters from Gerry, as well as the letters sent to the whole House, and Slytherin have been training far harder this year than they did the last. Yoongi’s not one to get his hopes up, but he thinks - really, genuinely thinks - they could do this one.

Maybe.

All they have to do is play Hufflepuff, and hope that Gryffindor loses the last match of the season, and they’d be in with a shot.

Maybe.

(Please.)

Izzy and Alwyn and Jimin are playing tag around the stadium, screaming every time one of them grabs another, and Samantha is trying to juggle Bludgers without getting one into her eye. Max runs down from the stands to join them, and there’s nothing better than the sheer dumb fun they manage to have just fucking around - even if it is at the arsecrack of dawn when they’re all almost too tired to shower.

When Yoongi emerges, towelling his hair with his school trousers on and his shirt unbuttoned, Damien is waiting in the main changing room, his tie hanging loose around his neck, fixing his belt. “Hey.”

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Why do you hang out with that Claw kid at three in the morning?”

Yoongi shrugs, a little irritated if he’s honest - this is like last Easter, with Namjoon and Seokjin. “Why not? He gets bothered by Sadie, so we hang out when she can’t annoy us.”

“Sadie and Chester and the like are fucking by the course to be friends with us,” Damien says, long fingers knotting his tie as messily as they can. “What, he embarrassed about you?”

“It was my idea, actually,” Yoongi says sharper than he means to. Sometimes Chester raises his hand in the corridors, and Yoongi flinches, and then Chester will high-five one of his friends and the whole gang of them will burst out laughing and Yoongi will scurry off with tears prickling his eyes and he doesn’t want that for Jeongguk. Chester, Sadie… they’re bad news.

“Your idea.”

“Yeah,” Yoongi starts buttoning his shirt and Damien stands, a few inches taller than Yoongi, even more pronounced when he’s standing this close. “Damien, he’s a kid. I don’t wanna fuck with that.”

“Yeah, but that - you could come back to the room, is all I’m saying,” Damien tugs on the end of Yoongi’s shirt, curling his fingertips into the cotton. “You buttoned it up all wonky, you plonker.”

“Fuck you.”

Damien pokes the odd button, watching Yoongi fold it out of the fabric and back into the right place. “You leaving tonight?”

And something about his face makes Yoongi say no.

(He and Jeongguk meet in the library to do their homework together - studying for the end of years - and Chester throws spitballs at them and Jeongguk just smiles and Yoongi knows he’s putting on a brave face and that’s sore.)

Damien keeps looking at him. They’re studying in the library, Yoongi and Damien and Samantha and Jimin, and Damien keeps looking at the crease of Yoongi’s wrist, and Yoongi feels all prickly with the gaze. Their exams are next week, and he’s pretty much set for all of them - even Divination, and he has a funny feeling Bloom will pass him anyway because of her funny feeling or whatever - so he’s writing a letter to Gerry.

And Damien is looking at him.

Gerry
Team is doing ok. Damien enjoys being captain too much

“I can read upside down,” Damien says. “Fuck you.”

“Damien enjoys being captain way too much,” Yoongi makes a theatre out of adding the word, the nib of his quill scratching against parchment. “What am I meant to say?”

“Tell him Izzy’s growing her hair out,” Samantha says.

Jimin kicks him under the table. “Tell him we miss him.”

Yoongi dutifully writes both of these statements down, although he underlines we miss you and adds a little sad face where the full stop should be. Gerry keeps sending them letters about how unfair their emotional blackmail is, so it’s only fair Yoongi and the rest of the house double down on their efforts to make Gerry cry at work.

And Damien is looking at him.

A paper ball lands on their desk; Jimin unrolls it, while Yoongi’s looking over his shoulder to see where it came from.

faggots. And a drawing of someone with a dick next to his face, and the word Min with an arrow pointing to said dickfaced someone.

“Thanks, Chester,” Yoongi yells over his shoulder, and then ducks under the table before the librarian can find him and tell him to shut up.

“I hate him,” Damien whispers.

“Yeah, that’s great and all, but he could still fuck you up,” Yoongi hisses, pinching his leg. “Shut up. Maybe he thinks I left.”

He can see Chester’s legs, his shoes moving towards their table and stopping. “Roadfell? Did Min scarper?”

“So what if he did,” Damien says coolly, and under the table Yoongi grabs onto the fabric of his trousers. “What’s your fucking problem, Chester?”

“What’s yours?”

Yoongi pinches Damien as hard as he can.

“Just stay the fuck away from Yoongi,” Jimin pipes up. “He never did nothing to you.”

Yoongi can’t see Chester, but he imagines his face screwing up all malicious and hard. “You’re all fucking snakes anyway. ‘S only a matter of time.”

“Fucking prick,” Samantha mutters, but Yoongi stays under the table, holding onto the hand Damien reaches down, and wishes he was in the Room of Requirement with Jeongguk.

***

And that’s where he is, when the news breaks.

Jeongguk finishes his exams two days after Yoongi and the two of them celebrate with Firewhisky in the Room, sitting on big, soft armchairs and listening to old Divine Comedy records and singing along to Generation Sex as loudly as they can. Yoongi is happy and Jeongguk is happy and there’s a Quidditch match on Saturday and Slytherin are going to win and everything is just - fucking - awesome.

And then the portrait of the old Potions master runs into the Room, into the painting hung by the table - a Lucien Freud, or a reproduction of one, stark greens and blacks running into a spreadeagled nude. The Professor looks hilariously out of place next to the mattress, but he doesn’t seem to care. “Min! Get back out there, now!”

Jeongguk drops Yoongi’s hand. “What the fu-”

“It’s - that Way girl,” the painting says, only now seeming to realise what painting he’s wandered into, and drawing his robes around himself. “Quickly, you must go.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Follow me,” the painting says grimly. Yoongi finds he doesn’t need a Sober-Up Spell to stand, and Jeongguk doesn’t seem to, either; they slip out of the Room and down the stairs, and even though it’s three in the morning and Jeongguk must be wrecked, he never mentions going back to bed.

And down in the dungeons, in the corridor, little Isobel Way is clutching her wrist and sobbing.

“Fuck!”

The Old Master slips into another painting and Yoongi dives for the kid, Jeongguk right next to him. “Fuck, Izzy, Izzy, shit - what happened?”

Jeongguk’s eyes are as big as soup-plates, looking from the wrist to Yoongi to Izzy and back to the hand. “I - I know episkey-”

Izzy curls around the hand and just cries harder, and Yoongi ends up lifting her bodily, telling Jeongguk the password through gritted teeth so they can clamber through the door. It’s three in the fucking morning, so nobody’s awake, but Jeongguk knocks on every door he can see while Yoongi’s laying Isobel down on the longest sofa - Samantha comes running out in her dressing gown, Damien in his loose shirt, Max in his fluffy teddy bear pyjamas, Edie-Maude still in her uniform, and Alwyn in his nightgown.

“Alwyn-”

“Izzy-”

Yoongi catches the kid around the waist before he can knock into Izzy and do even more damage. “I don’t know what’s hurt-”

“Izzy, what the fu-”

At that moment, Jimin falls, rather than walks, through the Common Room door. His cheekbone is bruised and his eyes are full of fury. “Fucking Chester Whitehall was down here,” he says, and he’s so angry that his voice is bubbling tears, “Fucking - fucking Chester, I tried to chase him and he said he’d call the out of beds hours and then Sadie the bitch fucking slapped me and - is Izzy okay, is she okay? Is she okay?”

“See for yourself,” Damien says grimly.

“What the hell happened?” Yoongi is still holding Alwyn, although he’s melted now from actively struggling to just kind of limp, staring at Izzy crying as though he’s never seen anything like it. “Jimin, did you see?”

“Whitehall flung some sorta curse,” Jimin says, kneeling by Izzy, unbuttoning his cloak to wrap it over her shoulders. “She lifts her hands, yeah, and it hits her in the wrist, and I lost it and chased him and Sadie got in my way and I came to my fuckin’ senses and some painting said you found her. Shit. Shitshitshit.”

Yoongi puts his hand on Jeongguk’s shoulder. “Hey-”

“Izzy-”

Across from the fireplace, the portrait of the Master is looking out from the big Caravaggio hung there. Yoongi paces across to him as quietly as he can, over the backdrop of Edie-Maude cursing the sky blue and Alwyn threatening to kill most everyone he can think of; Jeongguk, meanwhile, is crouching next to Izzy with his wand held in his shaking hand.

“Can you fetch Professor Malfoy,” Yoongi says quietly. Dickens is their head of House, but Malfoy will know what to do. “Please?”

For once, the portrait doesn’t make a fuss about not being a messenger boy. He nods, looking down his crooked nose at the scene in the Common Room, and draws his robes around him before he vanishes out of the frame, leaving Yoongi abandoned by the fireplace.

When Professor Malfoy storms in, he’s in a nightshirt and fluffy slippers, his cheekbones high and red and his eyes wild. “What happened? Way - Way? Is she - Roadfell, Min, tell me what happened.”

As best they can, they do.

“Whitehall,” Malfoy repeats. “Whitehall and… MacDermot? Sadie? The Ravenclaw?”

At the sound of his House name, Jeongguk ducks behind Yoongi’s shoulder. Max Hastings has joined Alwyn in squishing next to Izzy on the sofa, and Izzy’s stopped crying so loudly, although she’s still clutching at her wrist, tears dripping down her cheeks. “All of them,” Jimin says dully. All of Slytherin, plus a teacher and an extra, are gathered in the Common Room - it still feels empty.

“They will be punished,” Malfoy says. “Way - Isobel, can you stand up? We can go to O’Shannon.”

White-faced, Izzy shakes her head.

“O-O’Shannon won’t be able to do anything,” Jeongguk says,  voice cracking.

“What the hell are you doing here, Jeon?”

“Sorry, sir,” Jeongguk shoots an apologetic look at Yoongi as he clutches his elbow, “I - me and Yoongi were just hanging out, and we heard - and I came down, I thought I could do something-”

“He fixed my nose last year when Chester broke it,” Yoongi says.

Malfoy gives him a look. “I wasn’t aware Whitehall broke your nose.”

“It got fixed, so I didn’t bother mentioning it.”

The teacher sighs, his shoulders sinking, and he looks both very very young and very very old. “Fair. Right, Jeon, why will O’Shannon not be able to do anything?”

“It’s a jinx,” Jeongguk holds up his own hand, flopping it forward. “It - doesn’t actually do anything to the, like, the hand? It just hurts like fu- like bug- like, like a thing that hurts a lot, and your hand feels numb.”

Malfoy frowns, but to his credit he doesn’t doubt Jeongguk’s word. “I stiill want O’Shannon to know. Isobel, come with me-”

“I’m coming too,” Alwyn and Max say in the same breath -

“I wouldn’t dream of anything different,” Malfoy assures them, and lifts Izzy with a muttered spell of some sort. “Come on. Professor, can you wake O’Shannon?” This directed to the painting, the one that’s always helping Yoongi, who bows his head obligingly and disappears for the second time that night.

“Jesus fuck,” Jimin says, when they’re all left. “God.”

Damien, white-faced, sinks into a chair. Nobody suggests Jeongguk move. Nobody suggests going to bed.

***

“Detention? For a week? He fucked Izzy up bad!”

“I know,” Professor Malfoy says calmly. Damien, Yoongi, and Samantha are standing by his desk, Damien almost vibrating with fury. “I suggested detention and suspension next year, but I was… disagreed with. Vehemently.”

“It’s not fair, sir,” Damien says.

“No, it isn’t.” For once Malfoy does look annoyed, properly annoyed, and not at them. On behalf of them? “It isn’t fair, but there’s nothing I can do. O’Shannon said Isobel wasn’t harmed-”

“She was crying, sir-”

“I know that,” Malfoy closes his eyes, rubbing at his temples. “What’s done is done. Whitehall hasn’t earned himself any favours, though, with his teachers.”

Yoongi says nothing. The whole school seems to know about Izzy - they’re getting a lot of sympathetic looks these days - but nobody’s actually doing anything. Slytherin will have to pull out of the Quidditch Cup, because without Izzy they’re down one Chaser, and no matter how much they begged, nobody would break the first-year rule to let Max play.

(“Harry Potter did it-”

“But you are not Harry Potter, Hastings.”

Max had stormed back to the Common Room, kicked a cushion, and screamed suck a dick! until he felt better.)

It’s an abrupt and painful way to end the year.

***

“I’ll see you over summer,” Jeongguk says, clasping Yoongi in the biggest, warmest hug he’s had in a while. “Right? I will, right?”

“Of course you will, you ninny,” Yoongi hugs him back. “You’re my best friend. Who the fuck else would I see?”

He’s kind of pleased about the blush that suffuses Jeongguk’s cheeks, even as they have to peel apart, watching the train chuff into the station. “That’s dumb. You’re dumb.”

“You’re dumb.”

Jeongguk nudges him. “Write?”

“I’ll write so much they’ll have to buy me an owl of my own,” Yoongi says, clutching his heart melodramatically. Jeongguk has time to giggle before his Ravenclaw friends emerge to pull him away, and Yoongi’s left standing with his trunk and a chest full of the warm fluffies.

“Yoongi?”

“Yo,” Yoongi lifts a hand to Damien, climbing into the carriage Damien points to. “You good?”

“Gerry sent me a letter.” Damien hands him a sheet of paper that’s just got FUCK CHESTER written on it in massive red Sharpie.

“Good for Gerry.”

“He sent Izzy one, too, but I think he actually put effort into that.”

“Good for Gerry.” Yoongi looks out the window, and he can see Namjoon and Seokjin and Hoseok picking a carriage for themselves - he’ll have to take a wander down there sometime during the journey.

A half hour into the rattling motion of the train, Damien slips his littlest finger around Yoongi’s thumb.

And Yoongi is tired, and he lets him. It feels okay.

Chapter Text

part three: fifth year (third year)

Damien kisses Yoongi in the middle of August, when they’re hanging out in the centre of London, thick with tourists. Yoongi’s leaning against one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, and Damien is beside him, and when Yoongi turns around to say something, Damien kisses him.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Damien says.

Yoongi blinks. “Nah - nah. It was okay.”

“So I can do it again?”

“If you want.”

Damien does, and Yoongi doesn’t mind it even more, and on the third time he even starts to like it, and they take the Muggle train home and hold hands the whole way.

On the whole, summer is good.

***

“OWLs can crawl up my ass and die,” Namjoon says matter-of-factly, sitting by the lake on their very second day back.

Yoongi, nose-down in the grass, tries to scream his emphatic agreement, and ends up with a mouthful of daisies and probably some curious worms. He’s so worn down that he manages not to even care - at least in his mouth the worms will be warm. At least worms don’t have to think about careers. At least worms die young.

He says all this to Hoseok, who’s viciously chewing a lump of gum half the size of his head. “I wouldn’t like to be a worm,” Hoseok says.

“You wouldn’t?”

“I’d be a wasp queen,” Hoseok says.

“Valid,” Seokjin says. He’s leaning against their tree. “I think I want to die, but I’d be a wasp. I’ve decided the giant squid can do my NEWTs for me while I take a career break.”

“You don’t have a career,” Yoongi points out.

Seokjin fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “That’s the problem.”

The Sorting is okay this year. Slytherin gets two twins, an Irish pair called Aoife and Amelia, who are both tall and gangly and have serious eyebrows and play the flute and fiddle, respectively. Max declares that he’s adopted them, which is kind of hilarious because he’s still this little five-foot-nothing kid, and the twins look older than Izzy and Alwyn - Yoongi’s beginning to think that the Sorting Hat is playing a massive practical joke on them all, where you’re sorted into Slytherin purely based on whether or not you’ll drive your seniors mad.

And there are only three other things - Yoongi refuses to call them issues - that he has to think about, coming back.

The first one is OWLs, obviously. He’s sitting them at the end of this year. His first Divination class back with Bloom is tomorrow, and he’s kind of dreading it now that she’s singled him out for some fucking divine purpose - but apart from even that, if he doesn’t pass OWLs, he can’t come back. He’s fucked.

He’s gonna start asking Seokjin to tutor him, and hunt about for someone to help him with Potions.

The second and third are mixed together in a way he can’t work out yet - Damien, who might be his probably-boyfriend, and Jeongguk, who might be his probably-best friend. He hasn’t mentioned Damien to Jeongguk. Or - no - he has, but he’s mentioned Damien in roommate terms, in normal terms, avoiding talking about the kisses and the hand-holding and that one time Damien gave Yoongi a hickey in the bathroom on the National Express.

He isn’t sure why this is a problem. He’ll work it out later.

(He’s not even going to think about Quidditch yet.)

“You look stressed,” Hoseok kicks his ankle. “Oi. Oi.”

“I’m stressed,” Yoongi says, staring up at the skies. A cloud looks a little like a sinking boat. Is that an omen, or is it just the product of too much time spent with Professor Bloom?

Could be both.

“We’re all fucked, lads,” Namjoon says gloomily, and the other three mumble hear-hear.

***

“I missed you,” Jeongguk says, hugging Yoongi tighter than Yoongi remembers his grip being. “You look so old!”

“You look ancient,” Yoongi says. “Jesus, beansprout, leave some height for the rest of us.”

Over summer Jeongguk really has shot up. Now he’s easily as tall as Yoongi, taller even, and his head fits his ears and his smile fits his cheeks and his teeth are still a little crooked and his eyes are all warm and bubbly and he’s the same old Jeongguk he’s always been, just more. The Room of Requirement is refreshingly normal too, with the same old furnishings, the armchairs and beanbags and cushions and homely brickwork. It even has Jeongguk’s abandoned Gobstones set laid out invitingly on the floor.

“I missed you,” Jeongguk says again. “‘M sorry we didn’t hang out much.”

“Me too,” Yoongi says, guilt eating at his throat. Over summer they met three times, in the middle of July, but then Jeongguk had gone skiing with his family and Damien had happened to Yoongi and what with one thing and another, although they’d exchanged letters, they hadn’t actually met again. Not ‘til September. “Jeongguk, I gotta tell you something.”

Jeongguk slumps over one of the armchairs, his eyes all soft and alert. “Yeah?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Yoongi sees the portrait of the old Potions Master scoot into a frame.

“I’m - me and Damien are sort of… like. Like going out?”

“Goin steady,” Jeongguk says in a bright Cockney accent, after a pause that lasts a second too long. “I’m happy for you. Let’s play Gobstones.”

“O-kay?”

Yoongi feels like he missed something there; like he accidentally skipped five seconds forward on a song, and ghosted over the thing the whole melody hinges on. It’s not like he can ask Jeongguk, though, and he’s certainly not going to ask Damien, who thinks Jeongguk’s some kid Yoongi tutors sometimes (or something) - he just pushes all the somes and things to the back of his head, and shrugs. “Gobstones, I can do that.”

“I been training all summer. You’ll never beat me.”

“Hah!”

Jeongguk doesn’t mention Damien again. He talks in a solid, brittle sort of way about his summer skiing holiday, and wins three of the four games they play, and laughs when Yoongi gets Gobstone acid spat at him.

Which, gross.

“I missed Hogwarts a lot,” Jeongguk admits, flopping over the flagstones. It’s late at night, and sleep is beginning to loosen his tongue - Yoongi’s, too. “Do you ever feel like that? Like - like, I love my mum and stuff, and nothing beats her cooking, and home is home, but…”

“It’s nice to belong somewhere,” Yoongi says lowly. Belonging. It’s a tough one to parse through.

Jeongguk rolls over, his hand flopping down over Yoongi’s elbow. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Miss Hogwarts.”

“Of course I do,” Yoongi pushes the Gobstones board away, and shuffles along the floor so he’s lying alongside Jeongguk. “I miss it more than I probably should when I’m at home. Like - mum and dad are home, but Hogwarts…”

“Is Hogwarts,” Jeongguk finishes. His gaze drifts away from Yoongi and towards a spot just behind his head; the middle distance, lost in thought. “Do you… does Damien make you belong?”

“Mm. He does.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

I want you to belong, too, Yoongi thinks about saying, but he doesn’t. They lie in silence and he pretends he can hear rain beating down on windows, although the Room of Requirement doesn’t have any - he wonders then, if it would give them one.

“Yoongi?”

“Yeah?”

“Slytherin makes you belong, too, right?”

Yoongi squeezes his eyes shut tight. Izzy last year - of course this year she’s back, and just as happy as ever, and her and Alwyn and Max are looped into their little trio by the fireplace as though nothing happened, and this year Chester is in seventh year and maybe nothing will happen. All the same. “Of course it does. ‘S my House, Jeonggukkie.”

“I guess I just worry sometimes,” says Jeongguk. His hand closes around Yoongi’s elbow. “‘S not very big.”

“Gerry made us watch a Muggle film about it, ‘n… it was something like - some alien gets adopted and they’re kinda messed up but it’s okay ‘cause they have each other.” Yoongi wants to hold Jeongguk’s hand, but he’s too comfortable to move.

“Lilo and Stitch?”

“Yeah. That one.”

Jeongguk laughs through his nose, all snuffly. “You’d make a good Stitch. Small and kinda vicious but all gooey on the inside.”

“Too sappy. Get your feelings away from this joint.”

“You started talking about belonging,” Jeongguk says, and laughs, and Yoongi laughs with him.

They’d fall asleep there, except the Potions Master in the painting coughs very loudly and asks, in a pointed sort of way, if they intend to be late for their very first class of the year. He’s so authoritative that both of them say sorry sir, and the portrait smiles and shakes his head and mutters something about Professor Malfoy.

***

"Your OWL year is an instrumental year, as I'm sure you don't need to be told," Professor Bloom says sedately, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes travelling over the room. They rest on Yoongi for a beat too long and he thinks of the tarot cards he spent all summer learning how to use, and he's the one that looks away from her.

"I think I got anxiety just from hearing that fuckin' word," Namjoon mumbles over his cup of tea. "Yoongi. Yoongi. I want to die."

Yoongi kicks him under the table. "Shut up."

"An OWL in Divination is difficult to achieve," Bloom says. "I, for one,  do not agree with the standard system, but this is a subject different to the rest. Those with certain affinities will find this year a breeze."

Yoongi keeps staring at his cup. He doesn't want Bloom to think he has special affinities. He doesn't have special affinities. If one more teacher tells them they have to think seriously about their options, he thinks he's gonna throw up and then where will they be?

"The year is modular," says Bloom. In her wishy-washy-windy voice, even that word sounds mysterious; modular, breathed through the Divination classroom, disturbing the thick-hanging scents of perfume and musk. "Although you can choose which device to use in your final module, I will be assisting you with the first two. Tea leaves-"

The class groans. Namjoon makes a little sobbing noise into his hands.

"And crystal balls," she continues, as though there were no interruption. "I will coach you in smaller groups depending on your choice of third module, and you will demonstrate all three in the practical OWL itself."

Amanda Reilly shoves up her hand. "Professor? What's the written OWL, then?"

"More predictions, but in a different fashion," Bloom smiles and unfolds her slender hands. "Now. Make yourself a cup of tea."

"I think this is hell," Namjoon says hollowly.

"You can drop out."

"And only get eight OWLS? Mum would fucking slaughter me. My brother got eleven and he had a motivational poster of Hermione Granger over his door," Namjoon pours a gloomy cup of loose leaf tea and stirs it with a tinkly silver spoon.

"Oh yeah? What did the poster do?"

"Yelled things at him whenever it saw him." Namjoon grabs the sugar bowl, and shakes a ridiculous amount into his cup. "Y'know. He'd be coming up for breakfast, next thing, Granger 'ud shout have you done all your homework and my brother would, like, scream and do his homework. She used to give him fucking advice on how to wake up feeling chipper. Bottom line is, Granger ruined my brother's OWL year. Y'know what Mum sent me in the post?"

"The same poster," Yoongi guesses. Last year they all became experts in brewing a proper cup of Earl Grey, and he doesn't have to look at what he's doing.

"Worse. A poster of Granger and Potter," Namjoon shoves the spoon in his mouth to lick the sugar off. "They gang up on me and shout at me. I think I'm going insane."

"Word of advice, mate: burn it."

"Oh, I'm gonna."

"You're smart anyway," Yoongi takes the spoon out of Namjoon's mouth so he can stir his own cup with it. "You get Os and shit. Remember that time in third year when you got Exceeds Expectations and cried on Jin's shoulder for an hour?"

"Never happened."

"I have several witnesses, you cock. You did it in the Great Hall."

Their burst of giggling is cut off by Bloom herself, doing steady loops around the class. The girls bunched around Amanda Reilly are taking it seriously - ever since Amanda claimed to have healed her brother through Divination last year, she's gained godlike status - but for the most part the rest of the class is kind of acting like Namjoon and Yoongi. Like Divination is just a relaxing cup of tea.

(Which, like, it basically is.)

"And what do you see in your leaves, Kim?" Bloom peers over Namjoon's shoulder theatrically. "Oh - you haven't finished yet. Can't be helped."

"Haven't finished yet either, Professor," Yoongi says when Bloom looks all bug eyed at him. "Sorry."

"I shouldn't think the state of tea would do anything for your predictions, Min," Bloom says. Namjoon looks between the pair of them, blinking in confusion; Bloom pulls up a spare chair from Amanda's table, and sits with her fingers crossed under her chin, looking at Yoongi. "Humour me and tell me what you think is in your cup."

Yoongi shrugs. "Uh. Confusion. For sure. This is a confused cup of tea. Practically bewildered."

Namjoon snickers into the sleeve of his robe.

"Confusion," Bloom repeats, leaning forward. "Where do you see the confusion?"

"Uh. In the cup."

"In the cup."

"Yeah."

She looks at him for a second and then stands, all in a tinkle of plastic jewellery and silk dressy scarfy things, and perfume and musk. "I look forward to seeing what your choice of module will be, towards the end of the year," she says archly. "Min, Kim. Keep at it."

"Dude, you need to get better at bullshitting," Namjoon says, taking a long slurp of his tea. "Bloom's kind of scary. I keep thinking she's gonna beat me to death with magical vegan brownies."

"I know what you mean," Yoongi stares at the cup.

It sounds kind of stupid, but he does feel confusion coming from it. Big confusion all bubbly and strange, and personal too. When he drinks he feels kinda dizzy, and he's convinced it's just the air in the Divination room after so long away from it.

But when he takes the cup away from his lips, he sees the leaves have swirled themselves into three figures - two close together, and one to the side. Human figures, unmistakably so, and a thread of leaves near the bottom of the rim that Yoongi can't help but see as a snake, coiled quietly along the bottom of everything.

He shoves his thumb into the cup and fucks up the pattern before Namjoon can see it, and then spends the rest of class drinking tea like it'll get him pissed.

***

"Dear Gerry," Damien reads aloud. "I hate OWLs. I think I want to die. Have you got any advice?" He's sitting with Yoongi's head in his lap, one hand holding up the letter and the other hand stroking rhythmically through Yoongi's hair. "Anyone else want to add to the letter?"

"Tell him to fuck off and die," Edie-Maude says cheerfully.

Jimin throws his homework at his head. "I will protect Gerry's honour with my life. Don't test me."

They start bickering across the heavy wooden table, but the sound filters through Yoongi's sleepy fug and becomes just more homely background noise. What is Hogwarts, really, without Jimin and another Slytherin trying to brutally murder one another?

"Ask him how his job is," Izzy yells across the room. "Don't be a total ass for the whole letter."

"Good idea," Damien lays the letter flat on Yoongi's forehead, the tip of his quill poking through the paper. "Fuck, Min, you're such a terrible table."

"Mmf."

"I think I'm gonna throw up," Samantha says to them both. She's got her feet up on Yoongi's knees, as though that's comfortable in the slightest, and every time the two boys move she kicks Yoongi's leg. "Keep this shit to yourselves, lads. You got a whole bedroom for a reason."

"I never want to imagine that, so stop it," Max Hastings says, looking up from his second-year charms book. "Hey, does anyone have any clue about wrist movement?"

There's a half-second pause, and then the entire Common Room starts giving him advice, Jimin in the lead with a shit eating grin. "You gotta hold the shaft tight..." while Izzy gasps with laughter and Yoongi lifts his hand to help Jimin along with useful demonstrative hand gestures.

"I hate you all," Max says. "Stop. Stop. Jimin, I don't wanna know how you wank."

"I like to get a good solid picture of Hermione Granger-"

"Jimin!"

Jimin grins languidly. "I'm passing on hallowed knowledge kept from forefather to forefather. When I was a mere child, our lord and saviour Gerry Thompson took me aside, and he said: 'son, when you're jerking it, you want to'-"

"Don't sully Gerry's memory this way," Edie-Maude says, muffled through the cushion she's pressed to her face.

"I'm writing this in the letter," says Damien gleefully.

"Aw, fuck you!"

Slytherin is a loud sort of House. Sometimes Yoongi wonders if Gryffindor is like this - if Chester Whitehall is their responsible Gerry-type seventh year, giving sage advice to Seokjin and Namjoon, if the Gryffindors are actually just misunderstood by the Slytherins. He wonders if people will write Chester letters years after he leaves, if Chester will invite people to his house in Yorkshire for summertime Quidditch practice, if Gryffindor is this little family. Gryffindor has almost three hundred people in it, though, so Yoongi highly doubts it.

With the new first years, Slytherin has hit the grand total count of twenty-three members.

Great.

Amelia and Aoife don't come out of their room much, which is probably cause for worry, but Yoongi is tired and sleepy and Damien's hand feels nice in his hair. It's only the first week back. They need time to settle in.

"Professor Malfoy keeps acting weird around me," Izzy says, once Jimin has stopped talking about wanking off and Edie-Maude has stopped trying to strangle herself.

"He's probably thinking about last summer," says Damien vaguely, finishing the letter. His thumb keeps brushing over the shell of Yoongi's ear. It's pretty nice.

"I wish he wouldn't."

"Pretty sure everyone is," Alwyn says. He's sitting holding Izzy's hand and Max's too, his hair all curling up in his eyes. "No offence, Izzy. You scared the fucking bejesus out of him."

"He looks like he's seen a ghost," Izzy says crossly.

"Don't blame him."

"You're meant to take my side."

"I have him every day for OWL and he looks at me like that too," Yoongi offers.

Damien raps his knuckles against Yoongi's forehead. "Idiot. That's because you went to him crying your eyes out when Chester broke your wrist."

"Did not."

"Did too."

"Did not."

Tomorrow is Wednesday. It's a week back into classes and it's the middle of the week and Yoongi is already exhausted, although tomorrow he and Jeongguk promised each other they'd study in the library, which is code for kick each other's shins and draw dicks on important homework scrolls. Hogwarts in tiny bits isn't tiring, but as one collective it's fucking draining. Jesus.

"I saw Chester today," Jimin announces into the lull.

(Yoongi's reminded of a moment two years ago, when Jimin stormed into the Common Room shouting about Chester and a new Ravenclaw first year that Taehyung adopted.)

(Taehyung, at least, hasn't gone for Jeongguk the way Jimin feared. Yoongi sees Jimin and Taehyung squirreled away together, and it's all good and Jimin smiles more and is slower to judge and quicker to smile and really, who is Yoongi to begrudge him?)

"I'll kick Chester in the nuts," Max says dreamily. "God, imagine the screams."

"Chill it, Maximus," Alwyn ruffles Max's hair. "Join the back of the queue."

"Of which I am at the front," Izzy says. "Take your seats, boys."

"You look tired," Damien says quietly, for Yoongi's ears alone. "You wanna turn in?"

"'M fine out here," Yoongi mumbles back. He missed the squabbling of Slytherin. "Another while."

"Sure."

"Should you tell Gerry about Quidditch?" Samantha says over the top of the Muggle Studies textbook. "Like - are we entering this year? Who's captain? Is Max joining?"

"Max is totally joining," Max says.

"Okay, so Max is joining-"

"I'll mention that the team is still together," Damien adds the scribbled postscript. "We have to win at some point, or Gerry will die a sad and penniless death and we'll all attend his funeral and his gravestone will say fuck you Slytherin or something like that. Y'know?"

"Don't be dumb," Samantha flicks a rubber band at him. "Just write the damn thing."

"Done. Although I don't wanna be captain this year," Damien folds the letter up and sets it on a side table. "Sam. 'S your turn to be captain."

"I don't want to be captain."

"Tough luck, mate."

Yoongi falls asleep in the Common Room to the sound of Quidditch practice being arranged, and he's happy. Very happy. OWLs may be kicking his ass, but he's got Jeongguk and Damien and Slytherin and all in all, it's a pretty good sort of time to have.

Pretty good.

(That film Jeongguk referenced. Something and something and something, but still good.)

Yoongi doesn't bother dreaming.

***

"Fuck off."

Shockingly, Chester Whitehall doesn't fuck off. He's loping alongside Yoongi down to the Potions room, even though he doesn't do Potions for NEWT and really should be doing something more productive. As though Chester knows the meaning of the word. "What, gonna go hide behind Malfoy's skirts?"

"Gonna go to class 'cos I wanna fuckin pass," Yoongi bites out. "Fuck off, you cock."

"Either I bug you or I get bored," says Chester. He's in his fucking seventh year, and he's tall and muscular and his fists swing closed and clenched by his sides. "What do you call that little cricket kid? Max, right? He looks like a wet blanket and a half."

"Don't touch Max," Yoongi says tightly. "Let me get to class."

"I ain't stopping you."

Professor Malfoy is standing in the doorway of the Potions room, his slim eyes narrowed when he sees Chester. "You have somewhere else to be, Mr Whitehall," he says, and it isn't a question. "That place is not here. Leave."

"Yes, sir," Chester says. He slaps Yoongi's back, hard enough to send Yoongi flying into the wall, clutching his side to stop a gargoyle from stabbing him. "See you around, Min."

"You're late," Malfoy says. "I can see why."

"Sorry, sir," Yoongi mumbles, and scurries as fast as he can down to his desk with Damien. He, Samantha, and Yoongi share this class with the Hufflepuffs - that's okay, because Hoseok is here, sitting beside Sam, and most of the Puffs don't want to raise Hoseok's ire by being assholes. Also, Malfoy, who's got sort of a reputation for being an evil bastard to people who are mean to Slytherins.

"OWLS," Malfoy says. It's the third week of term and they're still getting these talks. Yoongi thinks his brain might melt out of his ears and go dripping down his cheeks if he has to hear any more. "How many of you are considering the Potions NEWT?"

Yoongi keeps his twitching hand on the desk, looking around. One Hufflepuff raises her hand; Delilah Kerry, from Glasgow, who's Mum supplies magical tonic for ailing witches. Of course she would. Damien raises his hand - Sam doesn't - and Yoongi does too, now that he won't be the only one.

Malfoy closes his eyes for a brief second, and breathes heavy through his nose. "Three. Okay. The rest of you will need a Potions OWL for employment, as a core subject. Do not think that just because you won't be directly using it, that you can see my class as a place to slack off in. I will not tolerate it." His eyes flash over Yoongi and slide back to the Hufflepuffs. "Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir," the class choruses in displeased unison.

"Good. Open your books. We'll be brewing one of the seven common bases that will be requested of you during your OWL itself..."

Yoongi likes Potions. He really, really does. Potions is good because there's something ritualistic about it, the cutting and slicing and chopping and preparing, something that takes the responsibility out of his hands and into the act of Potion-making. When he fucks up in Charms, that's all on him. When he fucks up in Potions, maybe he just got a bad batch of bat eyes.

Yoongi is tired of fucking up.

"We need decanting bottles for this," he says, as the class starts to clatter into action.

Damien is already unpacking ingredients from the cauldron. "Are you sure?"

"Positive," Yoongi drums his fingertips against the desk, but as he looks around he doesn't see anyone else with the same idea as he does. Still, he's sure.

"I'll do the flax if you get the decanting bottles, then," Damien says, his long fingers dancing around the handles of their set of knives. "Please?"

"Yeah, sure," Yoongi slides off the stool and towards the store cupboard. "Just - lemme do the cauldron shit, yeah?"

"You're the best at it." Damien is already poking at the flax, his eyes all focused and distant, his hair falling over his face. "Go on, I want Malfoy to approve of me."

The Potions class is the double, two hours in the fumes of the classroom, but the decanting bottles are needed throughout the potion - this base is Septimus, the seventh and most difficult of the bases to complete, and it's standard practice to take drops out of each stage of the potion so that, even if the final product is wasted, there's still some left to work at. There are seven stages, as the name of the base suggests, each one precarious to pinpoint; Yoongi takes eight decanting bottles off the cupboard shelf, just to be sure.

"What are you doing?"

"Decanting bottles, sir," Yoongi holds them up for Malfoy's inspection, sliding them two at a time into the deep pockets of his robes so they won't crack on his way back to the desk. "Nothing else. We - I'm allowed in here, right?"

"You are. Why decanting bottles?" Malfoy leans against the doorway. He's a young teacher still, and he's tired all the time, and there's always grubby ink on his cheeks, not thick enough to hide the spots of blotched pink that grow there when he's tired or angry or flustered.

Yoongi thinks of the story Gerry told him - about Malfoy getting attacked by Harry Potter when he was in sixth year - and swallows down whatever it was he was about to say. "I... so if we fu- mess up the potion, we have samples to work off."

"I didn't show you that method," Malfoy says.

"No."

"So who did?"

Yoongi shrugs. "It... makes sense?"

"Potions is an intuitive subject," Malfoy says after a pause. "My - old Potions Master said it was a precise and noble science, but one that each Potioneer had to invent for himself. He used decanting bottles during impossible brews."

Yoongi shifts from foot to foot, and is inexplicably happy when Malfoy moves to one side and lets him scurry back to Damien.

"What took you so long?" Damien asks, shaking the flax into the cauldron as Yoongi unloads the decanting bottles. He presses his thigh against Yoongi's under the desk, this little soft nudge of presence, and Yoongi nudges him back.

"Malfoy just wanted to know what I was doing," Yoongi says. "Hey, decant that before it transforms."

When he looks up half an hour later, he sees a familiar painted figure in a portrait frame that looks like it fits him, hanging above Malfoy's desk. The man with the long hair and the hooked nose and the black robes meets Yoongi's eye, and leans against the painted table in his frame, and winks.

Yoongi's jaw drops open.

"You have an hour and a half to finish," Malfoy says, and if Yoongi didn't know any better he'd think that was humour, dancing around the painting's eyes.

(As they're leaving the class, an hour and a half later, Malfoy taps Yoongi's shoulder. "Keep an eye out for Chester Whitehall," he says. "It shouldn't be the case, but what happened last year could easily happen again. And I'm very pleased with your work today.")

(Yoongi studiously avoids looking at any paintings, and mumbles a thank-you, and runs as fast as he can after Damien.)

***

Nobody asks Yoongi why he has a black eye, and he's glad. Damien doesn't, none of the Slytherins do - Yoongi has long since made it clear to all of them that he'd rather it was him than them, and he's tired of Alwyn looking at him with this pinched look in his mouth, as though he could do anything. Yoongi is their senior. He should take care of them.

"Just say the word and he's dead," is all Jimin says.

"I'm good," Yoongi blinks. It hurts to blink. "Seriously, it doesn't even hurt."

"Okay. Then help me with my fuckin' Muggle Studies, mate, I'm fucked if I can't write an essay on the cultural significance of the Queen by next Friday."

And that's all they say about it. It's October, anyway, and everyone was expecting something to happen, and Yoongi's been extra confrontational any time he sees someone talking down to the younger kids. He can handle it. Max can't.

(It wasn't even fucking Chester. It was three Gryffindors in Yoongi's goddamn year, three Gryffindors that took his bag off him and then shoved him into the jut of a stone wall built funny and then took his collection of Frog cards and split them between the three of them.)

(Sucks to be them, because Yoongi has his Crowley card safe and sound in his pocket most of the time.)

(Which - yeah.)

"Sucks to be you, mate," Seokjin says, and gives him Bruise Balm. "Mum sent it. She must think I'm getting fucking battered, 'cos I get one in the package every week."

"You're a spoiled bastard is what you are," Yoongi grumbles, but the Balm is home-brewed and Seokjin's mum is an absolute demon with the cauldron, and the pain recedes. "Tell your mum she's great and I'll send her an apple pie. Asda's finest."

"She deserves only the best from Tesco's and a fuck you," Seokjin says. He tucks the Balm pot into Yoongi's pocket. "Jesus, only go on and keep the rest."

"Thanks, mate."

Jeongguk goes home for half-term break, over Hallows' Eve, so Yoongi doesn't see him until the first week of November, when the bruise has crackled and purpled and greened and looks horrendous. He avoids Jeongguk for the first day he's back, skulking around the Slytherin Common Rooms and sneaking into store cupboards with Damien, but when Jeongguk sends Friedrich the owl with an urgent message to meet in the Room of Requirement -

"He is angry at you," the painting says. "He's hurt. I overheard him telling Taehyung so."

"I didn't mean to," Yoongi mumbles. "Anyway, you can't tell me off. I know you used to be Malfoy's teacher."

"I used to teach many pupils," the painting says.

"I could find out your name if I really wanted to."

"Your Jeongguk is upset."

"He ain't my Jeongguk."

"He's upset, no matter who he belongs to."

Yoongi flips the bird at the portrait and dives for the Room of Requirement - where Kook is where Kook is where Kook is - and falls, rather than walks, into the room, right on top of a happily waiting beanbag.

"Yoongi, why did you - fuck!"

"Why did I fuck?" Yoongi says, face down in beanbag, smelling the fresh cotton with a happy smile. "I dunno. The human condition, I guess-"

Jeongguk's hands on his shoulders, then, and Jeongguk's gained more than height over the break - he hardly seems to struggle to flip Yoongi around so he's looking in his face, his teeth gnawing anxiously down on his bottom lip. "That looks really sore," he says quietly. "What happened? Fuck, jesus, every time I leave the damn castle you look like you got beat up by fucking Bear Grylls."

"I could take Bear Grylls in a fight."

"You so could not. Don't avoid the subject," Jeongguk's sitting across Yoongi's legs, his thumb tracing the bruise. "God almighty. You know you can run, right?"

"God, is that what these things are for?" Yoongi kicks his legs against the stone. "I thought they were decorative."

Jeongguk huffs out frustration. "Remember when Chester got your bag in first year?"

"Your first year," Yoongi says.

"Whatever. You coulda run away, and come back for it. You coulda run and got Dickens, or Malfoy, or someone that woulda helped," Jeongguk looks all narrow and worried. "You don't have to keep annoying them all the damn time."

"They either annoy me, or they go annoy the kids," Yoongi says as calmly as he can. "Which of the lot of us y'think can do it better? You think I wanna see Max Hastings with a bloody nose?"

"I don't want to see anyone with a bloody nose!"

"That's very charitable," Yoongi blinks at him until Jeongguk gets off his legs and shuffles across the room. "Listen - c'mon, listen. I don't give a fuck. I'm a Slytherin, and I'm not gonna run away from people just because of that. Chester's a prick, everyone's a prick, and they're going to be pricks whether I run away or not, and you saw what happens when we get Malfoy. Whitehall gets a slap on the wrist and we pull out of the Quidditch. Just... it's better me than Max, or Izzy, or Alwyn."

"Better nobody at all," Jeongguk says.

"That's the ideal world," Yoongi closes his eyes and pinches his nose. His head hurts. "They're gonna fuck with Slytherin whether it's fair or not. Just - let me deal with it."

"I am," Jeongguk says. "I'm just - worried. Can't I be worried?"

"You can be worried, but don't... don't act like this is something I can fix."

"You could go to Malfoy."

"Nothing would happen," Yoongi says. "This shit just happens to Slytherin. It's a fuckin' rite of passage for the snakes."

Jeongguk says nothing, his bottom lip bitten, worried at to the point of being swollen and plump and pink.

"Let's just - I'm going to make a cup of tea," Yoongi says. He stands up and blinks and his eye doesn't even hurt. "Do you wanna get something to do?"

"Homework, or chess," Jeongguk says after an age.

"Chess," Yoongi decides. Relief floods through him like something tangible, something good - despite everything, Jeongguk isn't going to give up on him. Yoongi doesn't think he could take that, on top of everything else. "Chess, and you be white, okay?"

"Okay," says Jeongguk, and smiles at him faintly. "Okay, yeah. That sounds good."

***

Christmas comes with a flash and a bang, in OWL year. Yoongi barely has time to think before the pumpkins from the Halloween feast are coming down and the castle is dancing its way through being festooned with tinsel and baubles and lights. The ghost choir starts following people around in the halls, singing I saw the ships come sailing in in a mournful minor key.

(Hoseok and Yoongi have been drinking a lot through December just to get to the end of term exams, and every time they see the ghosts they request another minor-key carol. Nothing is more gratifying than seeing a translucent man in period clothes weep with joy after singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.)

Professor Bloom says they're going to move on from tea in January. Yoongi has never seen Namjoon weep with joy before, and with any luck he never will again.

And Yoongi is staying at the castle over the break. His parents are going to visit cousins in Korea, and it's too close to exams for him to even consider doing that.

Jeongguk is going home - they hug on the platform, big and long, and Jeongguk looks a little bit sad when he pulls away, but he says nothing's wrong when Yoongi asks.

Damien is staying. So is Max. Izzy and Alwyn have gone home - the rest of Slytherin has, really. Max's parents are in France, so he's staying, and Damien wants to study, and that's good enough for Malfoy when they tell him three Slytherins are going to be flopping around over the break.

(Everyone else has gone home, even Hoseok, who had to catch a flight across the Irish Sea with a crazy old witch on a two-person broomstick. If I die, he'd said, in that dumb Belfast accent, tell my parents I hate them and they shoulda bought a house in Wales instead.)

"Letter from Gerry! Gerry! Gerry!"

Max comes tumbling into the Common Room three days after classes end, tinsel wrapped around his neck, his glasses steamed up from running, an owl perched on his nest of hair. He's waving the thick pile of papers in the air, and grinning wide enough to burst. "Gerry wrote! To me!"

(For reasons as yet unknown, Max has decided to idolise Gerry, despite never having been in a Slytherin with the guy. He's been to his house, but then they've all been to his house.)

(Gerry just inspires that kind of love.)

(Yoongi thinks Gerry is kind of the best.)

"Hello, Maximus My Friend, and other fuckers," Damien reads aloud, smiling when Max whoops. "I have had a very instructive autumn term doing absolutely bugger-all in Ireland, so I included lots of made up adventures about how me and the Taoiseach have tea with leprechauns and fairies and shit."

"Good to know he's still a dumbass," Yoongi says, his chin hooked over Damien's shoulder. "Keep reading."

Gerry really has included made up adventures featuring Leo Varadkar and his magical equivalent, Jane O'Keeffe. In between these he draws pictures of them all, and at the very end of the letter: "I would love to meet Maximus in the Hog's Head over Christmas break, and if any other unwanted visitors show up, it would be my job as a good Irishman to provide them hospitality in the form of cheap Firewhisky. Make up your mind, fuckers."

"I love Gerry," Max sighs, curling up on the mat by the fire. "I really, really love Gerry."

"Seems like he really loves you too," Damien tosses the letter back to Max and slips his hand into Yoongi's. "Right. You have a winter walking cloak, don't you?"

Gerry is waiting for them when they send the reply and walk the mile and a half into the village, Yoongi and Damien all bundled up with Max hopping ahead of them, drawing pictures in the snow with his boots. "You look cosy," he says, eyebrows all raised and wriggling. "Anything I should know about?"

"Damien and Yoongi are gross and they kiss all the time and my poor eyes are hurt," Max announces. "Buy me a Butterbeer, please."

"Seeing as you ask so nice," Gerry tosses him a Galleon. "Get the three of us some Firewhisky, too, 'n say it's mine so they don't ask you for your fuckin' Apparition licence."

"Sure!"

Gerry relaxes in his seat. His beard is getting ridiculous. "I'm tryna grow handlebars," he says, bouncing his mustachioed top lip. "Does it look good?"

"You look unbelievably dumb," Yoongi tells him, and smiles almost bigger than he can bear. "I missed you, mate."

"Missed you too, you sappy fucker," Gerry reaches out to ruffle through his hair. "How's the Quidditch? How's Sam getting on? How's Chester?"

"Grand, grand, and grand," Yoongi says. "First match of the season against Gryffindor next month, but I think we might actually be good this time. Max joined as spare Chaser in case somethin' happened like - last time. And the new first years are making us a cheer banner."

"Is Izzy okay?"

"She's fine," Damien says, looking down at the pictures he's been drawing in the spilt beer. "She just got shook up. Chester got detention the whole rest of the year."

Gerry swears under his breath, and smiles at Max as he slides back into his seat. "Right. If you don't win the Cup, I'll eat my scarf. Jesus, guys, I wasn't kidding about your da."

"Don't kill my da," Yoongi says idly. The Firewhisky hurts his throat a little bit, but he doesn't stop drinking. "My ma 'ud be sad."

"Heaven forbid."

Gerry is staying in Hogsmeade for another week, he tells them, and every day until Christmas Day they make the walk there and back to hang out with him, Gerry paying for lunch and Yoongi or Damien putting out for tea, and Max providing free entertainment by chirping away about how awesome Izzy and Alwyn are, and how he's learned to do a cartwheel just three seconds ago, and how he's learned how to summon owls by whistling so loud nobody can actually hear it, and how he's decided he's gonna work for the Taoiseach of Magic when he's older.

On Christmas Day, Yoongi wakes up too early. The dawn is streaming through the window of their dormitory, filtered a pasty green reflected off the lake, and Damien is snorting and snoring in the bed next to him. He swings his legs out of bed, in gingham pyjamas that are too short for him, a birthday present from a forgetful aunt.

Down in the Common Room, there are gifts under the tree. Max. Damien. Yoongi. It's nice; Yoongi smiles at the heaps for a second, and lets himself out as quietly as he can.

"Where are you going at dawn?"

Yoongi doesn't even turn his head. "I know you're Malfoy's old Master," he says. "If I wanted I could find out your name."

"If you wanted, you could ask me," the painting says. "Where are you going?"

"For a walk."

The painting is quiet for a moment, following Yoongi through the canvases, up stairs, through styles and centuries, interrupting the various Old Masters from their slumber. "Jeon has gone home for the holidays," he says eventually. "Have you forgotten?"

"No," Yoongi says. The flagstones are freezing under his bare feet; he wishes he'd put on socks.

The painting is quiet, but he keeps following Yoongi, up to the seventh floor and Barnabas the Barmy with his wacky dancing trolls. Yoongi stands in front of the wall, and wishes he knew why he'd come up here so bloody early without a thought in his head.

"I want to know what to do," he says at last, and walks back and forth. "I want to know what to do. I want to know what to do."

The door that appears is small, and iron-wrought. "Find a small frame," Yoongi says to the painting. "I wanna bring you in with me."

Malfoy's old Master wrinkles his nose. "I do not want to come."

"I can just bring this one," Yoongi says.

"I'll leave."

"Please?"

So Yoongi ends up walking into the Room of Requirement with a small painting of a bowl of fruit, a long-dead Potions master scowling from inside the bunch of pretty Impressionist grapes.

The Room is very different to what it usually is. It's much bigger, and higher, and it reminds Yoongi of big old Gothic cathedrals, stonework piled up to the roof, beautiful stained glass sending the light into strange puddles on the stone floor. There's nothing in the room, though, no seats or pews or tables or anything, just a stone plinth in the centre, and a crystal ball sitting on that, murky and white with mist.

"Take me out," comes a voice from his pocket. "Let me see."

Yoongi presents the place to the painting, and tries very hard not to walk towards the crystal ball. He's not good at Divination.

"It appears that the room thinks you are," remarks the painting dryly. Did Yoongi speak aloud? "Go on, heavens above, and then you can open gifts and I can go back to sleep."

Yoongi shoves him back in his pocket, and steps up towards the plinth, the walls of the Room leering at him all hard and faceless and unfeeling. "I'm not good at Divination," he says weakly, shoving Professor Bloom and her dumb predictions to the back of his head. "I'm not."

"Put your hand on the bloody thing," says the voice from inside his pocket, muffled by grapes. "Go on."

Yoongi does. And he does what he does in Divination, too, the thing that Bloom seems to think is premonition, or talent, or something - he opens his eyes as wide as he can, and shuts them, and holds the teacup (crystal ball) tight within his palms, and thinks about seeing something that will help him.

When he opens his eyes, the crystal ball isn't murky.

He sees Jeongguk, first of all, Jeongguk kissing someone who's face is obscured by the mist. Someone a little shorter than him. This Jeongguk is older, a little more built and a lot more confident, but no matter how hard Yoongi seeks it out, he can't see the face of the person Jeongguk's kissing. Then the crystal mist whips the picture away from him again, and it's gone, vanished into the depths of the ball.

He sees Alwyn Brydon bleeding from the nose, his eyes full of tears, jumping up and down and cheering. Alwyn's hair is longer. The mist takes him away.

He sees Damien, curled up with his hands around his knees, staring into a cup of something hot and smoking, someone holding his shoulder. Is it Yoongi? It has to be Yoongi.

He sees another misty figure, pink in the face, screaming fit to burst, a fat lip burst open, blood all down the front of his robes, his hands shaking. Yoongi can see all of his face, and he looks familiar, but for the life of him he can't recognise who it is. He's yelling at Jeongguk, though, this figure, and crying quite a bit, and as Yoongi watches Jeongguk bites out something and turns on his heel and walks away, and the misty figure leans against the wall and slides down it, beginning to mop up his lip with the end of his robes.

He sees someone else. Malfoy and someone else, shouting. Who the fuck is that? Yoongi recognises him, but he doesn't know from where. He makes Yoongi feel kind of sick.

He sees -

Jeongguk. Kissing someone again.

He sees -

He sees -

He sees - Jeongguk won't stop kissing that fucking person, make him stop -

"You smashed the ball," observes the Potions professor calmly, from inside Yoongi's pocket. Yoongi looks at the smoking chunks of glass in horror, and sprints for the door, and when the potions master tries to talk to him he just shakes his head.

"You're very good at Divination," the professor says.

"No, I'm not."

"That right there just proved it."

"It didn't," Yoongi says, and keeps the little postcard-painting in his pocket. "I - I'm not going back there."

"Go back to bed," the painting says, with a stiff sort of softness. "And if anything worries you, Professor Malfoy is very good at listening."

"Thanks," says Yoongi, and he tries to have a good Christmas Day.

Jeongguk won't stop kissing whoever it was.

That's okay. Yoongi kisses Damien, and very carefully doesn't think about it at all.

***

Samantha is a tough Quidditch captain. Where Damien bounced off the camaraderie of the House, Samantha gets down to business, and isn't above hitting Edie-Maude and Jimin with their own Bludgers to make them shut up and listen to her.

Yoongi enjoys practice. The day term gets back, she makes them all dress in their flying robes and do a halfsies practice match in the sleet and slush of pouring rain until none of them can feel their feet and Yoongi's pretty sure his nose is going to drop off.

It's good, though. Gerry's been writing her special Quidditch letters.

(Yoongi wonders when the Slytherin Quidditch Team will stop looking to Gerry for help. Probably never.)

(Gerry is the best.)

Their first match against Gryffindor is gonna go awesome. Chester might be the Seeker, and that might be - okay, yeah, whatever, but Yoongi's gonna beat him, because Slytherin is the best. Slytherin is totally the best.

Quidditch, though, isn't the only thing that picks up the pace in the January term.

"Welcome back," says Bloom, all mystical and magical through her spectacles, her bangles clacking down her wrists. She smells of daisies and incense, and when she says hello she looks around the whole room and stops at Yoongi, who wishes she wouldn't. "I hope you all had interesting winters. Some, I suppose, more psychologically charged than others."

Yoongi looks at his knees, but Bloom is still looking at him. He can feel it.

Namjoon coughs.

"Tea leaves are old news to you all at this point, and I have every confidence in your ability to pass with them in your OWL practical," Bloom says. "This term we are focusing on crystal balls. Not many of you have had experience with this medium of Divination - perhaps only one or two."

Yoongi bites down hard on his thumbnail.

"Or only one," Bloom says archly. "Maybe I am mistaken after all."

She makes tea in the biggest pot, even though none of them are reading their leaves. Yoongi goes to collect cups for himself and Namjoon, and smiles innocently at Bloom as he's filling the two cups. "Have a good break, Professor?"

"Not as stimulating as yours, I'm sure," she says, stirring sugar into her own cup with a thin silver spoon. "Tell me - what did you see? What did you use?"

Amanda comes up then, splitting them, although if she notices the awkward silence she certainly doesn't say anything. "Good to see you again, Professor," she says cheerfully. "I'm excited for the crystal balls!"

"As everyone should be," Bloom says with a smile - when Amanda walks away it only widens, turns a little stranger. "Min. What did you use? The cards, or a crystal ball?"

"Noth-" Yoongi catches sight of a painting behind Bloom's shoulder, and of the hook-nosed old Potions master shaking his head in disappointment. "A crystal ball. But I don't think I saw much important. Just - stuff. Some stuff."

"Was it important to you?"

"I guess," Yoongi stares down at the teacups. "Maybe?"

Bloom's eyes sparkle as she tips sugar straight from the bowl into her cup. "Not everyone will see predictions of future world-changing wars," she says. "When I looked for the first time into a Divining pond, I saw myself getting an O in my NEWT Transfiguration exam, which I hardly think is significant for anyone but myself. You saw something significant to you, did you not?"

"Yeah," says Yoongi reluctantly.

And Bloom smiles again. "Sometimes those are the hardest things to see."

He takes the tea back to the table feeling unsettled, as he always does after a talk with Bloom. Namjoon is busy cursing at his misty crystal ball, and accepts the tea with a dash of milk and a curse that isn't quite as vicious as the one before it - Yoongi supposes that's the best he's going to get.

Bloom's tarot cards are sitting in his trunk, still, from last Easter. He wonders if he should give it back to her.

He doesn't much want to. He can hardly work the damn things, and he has to keep referring back to this little dictionary-book he compiled for himself to stop him from getting utterly frustrated, but it's still difficult. All the same, there's something nice about the cards. Something familiar. He feels like - like how he feels in Potions, when he manages to complete a really difficult brew.

"What's your least-hated method of Divining, you think?" Namjoon asks, rubbing his crystal ball viciously with a knob of polishing wax. "I for one am fucking delighted with trying to see the future in a ball of soggy fuckery."

"I like the sound of the dowsing rod," Yoongi mumbles. When he looks at his crystal ball, he sees only fog. He doesn't want to be good at Divination.

"What, the stick thing? For finding water?"

"Yeah, that."

"Sounds kinda cool," Namjoon considers, taking a huge swig of the tea. "Would get us out of this damn room, too. Maybe we should pick that for next term's choice, huh?"

"Maybe," Yoongi says. "Maybe I'll do something else."

"What else is there?"

"Tarot cards," Yoongi says. "Like-"

"Like Mystic Meg."

"Yeah. Mystic Meg."

"Mystic Yoongi doesn't have the same ring to it, though," Namjoon says thoughtfully. "I dunno, mate, maybe stick to Meg. She's got that cougar factor, too."

"I don't wanna - that's so gross, Namjoon."

"You sayin' you never thought about Mystic Meg?"

Yoongi twitches his nose. "I, unlike you, went to look at actual porn when I wanted to wank, not the fuckin' horoscope column in The Sun. Jesus."

"Staying on topic, I see," Bloom calls out sweetly.

Ears burning, Yoongi tips the cup of tea down his throat, anticipating the burn and the tannin flooding past his teeth, the strange sweet bitterness of a brewed black tea.

"At least you don't have to read the leaves this time," Namjoon says bracingly. "And I think I see a dick in my crystal ball. D'you think that means Seokjin's gonna propose?"

"Probably," Yoongi says, vague, his gaze in the tea leaves clogging the bottom of his cup - a tall branched line, separated cleanly in two, the fractals pulling the body of the tea leaves in two different directions.

Yoongi wonders which one would have won, if he'd looked at his fortune any longer.

And then he goes to wash out his cup.

***

The night before the Gryffindor match, Max comes staggering into the Common Room soaked from the shoulders up, his teeth chattering and his bag in tatters, ink stains all over his new white shirt.

"Max!"

"Oh, no-"

Izzy and Alwyn and Jimin and Yoongi are the only ones in the room; Damien is in the library, studying with Edie-Maude, and Samantha is out talking to Professor Malfoy about her Potions essay, and most everyone else is in their dormitories. Somewhere else.

"Fuckin' Chester Whitehall," Max says, so reminiscent of Jimin two years ago that Yoongi has to blink to make sure they aren't the same person. "He - god, I'm cold - outside those haunted girls toilets."

"Dunked you, right?" Jimin tugs one of the throws off the back of the biggest sofas and flings it over Max's head; Izzy starts fluffing it up, and the noises of complaint coming from underneath it are muffled through a mouthful of bad crochet.

"I'll kill him," Yoongi says grimly, closing his book. "He - that fucker's just trying to scare us before the match."

"Report him to Malfoy," Izzy suggests.

"Malfoy 'ull do his best, but he can't do fuck against Whitehall," Jimin says. "He hurt you anywhere, Hastings? Oi."

"No," Max says, thick through the blanket. "Just flushed me down the loo a bit. I kicked him in the balls and made a run for it."

"Good job," Izzy tells him. She kisses the crown of his head; Max makes a happy little sigh, only a little damp. "Hey - Alwyn, do that thing. The spell. The dry one."

"The evaporation one," Alwyn corrects dryly, but he waves his wand and mutters an incantation under his breath and all the water clogged to Max's head rises in a big cloud of steam and stays there, hovering over him, an innocent little cloud.

"Send it to the Gryffindor dorms," Jimin says. He slumps down by the fire, poking it into a little more action. "Fuck Chester up."

Yoongi slides down onto the floor, so that all five of them are sitting next to the fire, Max cosied between them, Alwyn tugging on the little curls that pop through the holes in the crocheted blanket. "I know what we'll do to Chester," he says, and grins when the four of them turn to look. "We'll fucking win."

***

They only go and do it, too.

Win.

***

Euphoric - so happy, so elated that not even Chester’s roared threats of bodily violence can push them down - the team tumble into the Common Room and, later that night, Yoongi and Damien tumble into the fifth-year boys dormitories.

“You were bloody brilliant,” Damien says breathlessly, his cheeks high and pink with alcohol, his eyes sparkling. “You caught it! Right in front of Chester’s nose!”

Yoongi is already tugging his robes off, the heavy wool too claustrophobic, too hot for an evening even in late January, especially with three cans of Seokjin’s terrible Muggle beer settling warm and cosy in his belly. “I caught it,” he says, disbelieving hours later, “I really fucking did. I caught it.”

“Brilliant,” Damien repeats, and his hands reach for Yoongi’s cheeks, holding the back of his neck, the deepest kiss they’ve shared yet. “God, you’re awesome. We’re awesome. We’re gonna win. We’re gonna win.”

“We’re gonna win,” Yoongi breathes and really lets himself believe it. “We are.”

And then they’re undressing in all of a hurry.

Damien is taller than Yoongi by three inches, and the way he’s held together, lanky like some puppet fixed with pins, makes him seem even bigger again. There’s a bruise as big as a Bludger on his shoulder, one that’s been fixed with a bottle of Seokjin’s mum’s bruise potion and not much else - Damien winces when he twists out of his shirt, but he smiles all awkward and soft when Yoongi looks at him. “I’m okay,” he says. Punch-drunk. “You got hit.”

“Chester gave me a punch. I’m okay,” Yoongi wants to kiss Damien again, and so he does. “You’re awesome.”

“We really did it.”

“We really did.”

“We’re gonna win the Cup,” Damien says, into the hollow of Yoongi’s throat. “‘N make Gerry proud. ‘N kiss in front of everyone like they do in Muggle films.”

Unbidden, the memory of the crystal ball floats to the top of Yoongi’s brain - Jeongguk, kissing a figure with a face obscured in mist, and Damien, and Yoongi is kissing Damien in the here-and-now and he shouldn’t be thinking of Jeongguk.

He is.

“Are you - okay?” Damien’s less clothed than Yoongi is. Shirtless, bare feet. Maybe he wanted to do more.

“A bit tired,” Yoongi says. “Might sleep.”

But he doesn’t stop Damien from getting into the bed with him, lying on his good shoulder, and curling around him like some sort of possessive cat. He falls asleep quick - they both do.

“We’ll win,” Damien says. Kisses Yoongi’s forehead. “And - other things.”

“We’ll win,” Yoongi echoes.

Damien falls asleep long before he does.

***

“I need help.”

The old Potions Master - and Yoongi knows he could find his name now, but it feels strange, so he doesn’t - looks very old. “I was sixty-three when I died,” he says dramatically, “And I died sacrificing my life for the good of humanity and wizardkind. I am old and you should respect me and that means I won’t give you advice on Roadfell and Jeon.”

Yoongi winces. “I don’t need help about them?”

“Yoongi Min,” says the painting, with all the patience of a saint, “For the love of God, please do not talk to me about your boy troubles.”

“Okay,” Yoongi says unhappily, hugging his knees. He’s in the crystal ball church, much as he said he wouldn’t go back - he’s there, holding the postcard painting, the old Master crouched behind a pineapple looking disgusted. “Then… I dunno, sir. I dunno.”

“Teenage angst is always an appealing sight,” the painting says, as dry and bone-witty as the grave.

“Better get used to it.”

“I never manage to do so.” The painting makes an odd sight, curled up on top of a pear. “I remember a young man coming to me once, and bleeding all over my papers, and when I asked him what was wrong he said he was worried about his Potions NEWT. Hah! He with a hole in his side and a skull on his arm! Teenagers are strange creatures. I wish I’d never decided to work with them.”

“Now you’re stuck here for life,” Yoongi says, faux-cheerful. He shoves the finger up at the little pineapple and the man balanced on top of it. “Get used to it, sucker.”

“Fuck you,” says the painting. He smiles underneath the dappled brushstrokes. “I have not said that in a long time.”

“It’s real freeing.”

“I was fifteen once, too.”

Yoongi stands and takes a deep breath, tempered with the liquid luck - not Felix, but Firewhisky - he’d downed before deciding to come down here. “Fuck!” He shouts, and the word echoes back at him, bouncing off the curved stone walls.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

“Do you feel any better?”

“What do you think,” Yoongi snaps, and storms out of the room, down to the library to try and finish his undone Transfiguration homework.

***

February sweeps in with much the same attitude as January did - Yoongi with a bloody nose and a dizzy look in his eyes, and Jeongguk cursing Sadie to high heaven, because it was her that time, her and a well-placed little spell that thrust a bookshelf right in Yoongi's way and threw him face-first into a stone pillar.

"I heard her talking about some shit like this," Jeongguk says fretfully, pressing a wet cloth to the crown of Yoongi's head. "Shoulda figured it'd be you, Christ Yoongi you look like shit-"

"Yeah, 'n fuck you too," Yoongi says though the thickness of a bloody nose. "I'm okay. Quit. Quit, I'm fine."

"Fine would be not fuckin' headbutting walls every three weeks," Jeongguk snaps. "Let me fix your goddamn head and then go to O'Shannon and see if you got a concussion."

"O'Shannon wouldn't know a concussion if it hit him in the head."

"You're not as funny as you think you are," Jeongguk says quietly. He chucks the damp cloth to the side, and sits down beside Yoongi on one of the cushions. "Jesus, Yoongi, it wouldn't cost you no money to just fuckin' tell her to piss off. She deserves it."

"You remember what Gerry done in his last year," Yoongi says, instead of even giving that idea more than a cursory thought. "You remember, right?"

"Nah."

"Before our match with the Gryffindors, some fucker dunked him or something - I can't remember," Yoongi presses his palm to his forehead; his brain keeps bouncing with every beat of his heart, and it hurts like a bitch. "Anyway, Gerry tossed a curse back at him, like - or maybe he decked them, I can't right remember, and the fucker got away scot-free and Ger got detention for the rest of the year."

"That isn't fair."

"That's my bloody point," Yoongi says quietly, eyes closed. "It isn't fair. I'd rather it were me than Max. Chester's been on at him recently, and you know what happened to Izzy last year - Jesus, you were there."

"Yeah, but I don't rather it be you," Jeongguk says all muddled and quick. "You ever stopped to think maybe Izzy thinks the same about you that you do about her?"

"I'm older."

"Age doesn't count for fuck-all," Jeongguk says. He picks up the cloth again and hands it to Yoongi, who mumbles a tiny thank-you and presses it to the forming bruise at his hairline. "You said you'd do the same for Gerry. Fucking hell, why don't you tell Malfoy?"

"Malfoy can't do shit," Yoongi says. He doesn't say it in a bad way - Malfoy, for all that he can be a bit of an asshole around homework, and exams, is generally a solid guy. If he could do anything, he would, he would, and that makes some of it okay. But all the same. "Malfoy can't do shit."

"But that doesn't mean that you have to," Jeongguk says, exasperated. "You don't understand."

"Yeah, sure I don't," Yoongi mops up the last of the blood from his top lip and tosses the rag away. "Listen - just, c'mon. Let's not."

"We always end up just not talking about it 'n shit like that," Jeongguk says huffily. "You're a dumbass, Yoongi."

"I know."

"Some day you're gonna get into some shit and you're gonna wish you stopped poking."

"Yeah, sure."

Jeongguk kicks his ankle half-heartedly. "At least keep me in the loop, fucker. How's Damien?"

Its a conversation out and Yoongi is glad to take it, although he thinks Jeongguk might not know about the other situation, about Bloom's looking predictions, about the dumb things he keeps seeing in his cups of tea and his crystal balls. "Damien's okay," Yoongi says. "He's pretty okay."

Pretty okay, as in, still kind of weirded out about why Yoongi shoved him away after the Quidditch match, but not pushing. Damien is many things but he's not an asshole.

He's not stupid, either.

He knows Yoongi's distracted, but he doesn't know what it is.

"Exams," Yoongi says slowly. "OWLs. Kicking my ass recently. You wanna go to the library or something?"

"We look like we just had a domestic and you wanna go study," Jeongguk says. "Fuck me. You're mental."

But they go, anyway, and Yoongi tries not to feel uncomfortable about the storming disagreement he can feel building beneath them. It's not going to go well. It isn't. He's balancing on something, and that's going to break sooner rather than later, and he's going to be left with pieces to pick up.

After studying, he goes to bed. Kisses Damien goodnight, but doesn't sleep with him.

And he dreams about being in the library with Jeongguk, at one of the airiest tables next to the windows. Books are spread across the wooden table, books and bottles of ink and quill pens, and Jeongguk is laughing. There's a smell of - like, vanilla, floating through the air.

"I don't care about Damien," Jeongguk is saying.

He leans over the table.

Yoongi does, too, and he tries to think of it as though he's in a dream, and he can't stop himself, and so he does too. "Damien is okay," he says. His voice is far quieter in the dream than it would be in real life, and softer, and gentler. And Jeongguk is just as he always is.

"I want to kiss you anyway," Jeongguk says. "Damien is looking at you, but you're looking at me."

When Yoongi looks outside the dream-window he sees Professor Bloom on the grass, waving up at him. When he looks back at Jeongguk, he's smiling. "You're looking at me, like how Bloom said," and Jeongguk wasn't there for that conversation. Yoongi hasn't told anyone about that.

Oh well.

"I saw you kiss someone else in a crystal ball," Yoongi whispers. "You don't want to kiss me."

"You didn't see their face."

"Yeah."

"You don't know it wasn't you."

"Wasn't me either-"

Jeongguk takes his hand and suddenly they're in the church room, with the crystal ball, and they're kissing and it's good. All good.

"I like you very much," he says.

"Okay," says Yoongi. That seems inadequate somehow, but he can't think of anything else to say. "Cool."

And it is.

***

“OWLS,” says Malfoy.

“OWLs,” Yoongi echos dutifully. The careers meeting feels an awful lot like a box that needs to be ticked, especially now the exams are only a month away. If Yoongi wasn’t studying already, he’d be fucked, and no scare-talk from Malfoy would save him.

(Luckily he’s spent most of the year, the long slog from February to April, living and breathing schoolwork. He went home for Easter and slept for twenty-six hours, according to his mum, who was seconds away from calling the emergency Healers when he woke up and groggily demanded the full English as fast as possible, please.)

Malfoy leans back in his seat. At least, Yoongi thinks, he’s not the Gryffindors - they’re stuck with Professor Macauley, who’s loud and shouts a lot and hates everyone that doesn’t want to be a magical botanist. Macauley is mental. Namjoon went for his interview yesterday, and came back in floods of tears, several cans into a drunken stupor that Yoongi was only happy to join him in.

“You’re a driven student.”

“Yeah, Professor.”

“Good at Potions.”

“Yeah.”

Malfoy looks over arched fingers at him. “What do you enjoy most about Hogwarts?”

“Divination and Potions,” Yoongi says honestly. Malfoy just kind of inspires that sort of thing, the honesty and the loyalty - he’s kind of awesome, in a frail, delicate sort of way. He’s like a glass carving come to life, floating through the halls, dispensing advice to his jaded young students.

And Malfoy gives him the courtesy of not asking whether he’s saying Potions because of present company. “You’re good at both of them,” he says instead. “Instinctual, I see that in my class, and Professor Bloom says you’re a dab hand at Divining.”

“I seem okay, sir.”

“But no career choice yet?”

“Dunno what to do.”

“Not many people do,” Malfoy shrugs. “I’m not going to tell you, either. I hope you know the eighth year course is still an option, though, and if those two subjects are your specialties both Professor Bloom and I are more than willing to take an apprentice. Potioneering is a career to make a stab at, but it’s harder with Divination.”

“Bloom - Professor Bloom, I mean - never mentioned apprenticeships,” Yoongi says slowly. Teaching? He never thought about it. Not really.

“It’s tough going,” Malfoy leans back again, eyeing him. “I did my apprenticeship under the joint mastership of Horace Slughorn, now deceased, and my old Master, who taught me from his portrait frame. Three years of work, but at the end of it you would be a Professor through and through.”

“A Professor?”

“It’s recommended you take a break between years at the castle,” Malfoy says, and sighs. “Min - I won’t lie to you. You have an exceptional instinct for Potions. I really, truly believe that you have a place in the subject, but I don’t know how much of that belief is personal bias, and how much of it is truth.”

Yoongi shrugs.

“I said the same to him, once,” says Malfoy’s old Master, in a painting right outside the door when Yoongi emerges. “I told him he was exceptional, and that I couldn’t sort between personal bias and truth. In his case, it was truth.”

“What do you think about mine?”

The hook-nosed man, his body long dead, his spirit long ascended, gives him a slow look. “In your case, I can’t sort out between personal bias and truth, either.”

Yoongi goes to dinner feeling strangely happy about the whole situation.

***

Jeongguk says he’s acting weird.

Yoongi says he isn’t, and be quiet, and if he dreams about Jeongguk in this endless cyclical motion, of kissing on the grass and hugging in the dark and being together all quiet and fond, he doesn’t say so.

Jeongguk is still, as he’s always been, the best friend Yoongi will ever hope to have.

***

“Good luck, mate.”

“I’m fucking bricking it,” Namjoon hisses back, his eyes wild, his hair practically electric from all the times his hands have brushed through it. “Oh god. I’m gonna fail my OWLs. Mum’ll have to homeschool me NEWTs. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.”

“Fuck up and look ready,” Yoongi says. OWLs. May is here, and how the fuck did that happen? Seems only yesterday that he was messing around with Jeongguk, drawing cartoons of their least-favourite Professors and kicking each other under the tables. Now - OWLs.

“Look ready,” Namjoon mumbles hysterically. “Oh my god. Why the fuck am I friends with you? You make bad decisions.”

“It were me or Chester and you made a good choice,” Yoongi slaps his shoulder. “Now-”

“Enter the examination hall,” says a dry, crackly, old-booky sort of a voice from the front of the room. “Pick an empty desk but do not turn over your examination paper. When everyone is seated, you will be instructed on what to do next.”

Namjoon, in between hyperventilating breaths, is reciting the main events of the Third Goblin Revolt of 1785. The exam they’re about to sit isn’t even History of Magic, but at this point Yoongi is too afraid to remind him.

Potions. Starting off with a bang.

“Good luck,” Yoongi whispers, as the flood of people carry him away from Namjoon - three different voices hiss shush at him, and he shrugs apologetically. “You’ll be grand!”

Namjoon flaps his hand.

Yoongi falls into the first seat he finds, feeling all sorts of strange, light-headed. Malfoy found him yesterday and said he would only be accepting O level students into his NEWT class, a policy apparently endorsed by his old Master, because the painting smiled in a way that was all kinds of evil and shoved his thumbs up. 

So, no pressure then, no pressure at all. Yoongi can do this.

“Flip over your papers,” says the severe looking Head Examiner, and with a flick of his wand he upends the hourglass at the front of the room. “Silence until the end of this examination.”

Question one: Under preparation of a difficult base potion, what precautionary actions could you take to prevent the destruction of the entire brew?

As his classmates start swearing silently around him, Yoongi smiles and starts to write.

From one of the paintings hanging on the walls of the repurposed Great Hall, Severus Snape catches sight of him - Yoongi buried in the paper, head down, quill furiously scratching - and slides out of the frame, back down to the Potions room, to tell Draco that there’s a very good chance Min will be joining him next year, after all.

Draco smiles at the news. So does Severus.

It’s a good start to OWL season.

***

Seokjin is having a breakdown, and is talking about it in a very loud, very drunk voice.

“I’m having a breakdown,” he says, as Yoongi and Jeongguk join the rest of them by the side of the lake. “I hope you’ll accept this new stage in my life. I’m having a fucking nervous collapse. Fuck me!”

“No, thanks, I’ve got Damien,” Yoongi says lightly. Hoseok laughs. Jeongguk winces, and looks at his knees, and Namjoon and Taehyung look at each other with eyerolls that nobody else seems to notice.

“Exams can suck your dick, we get it.”

“My dick is too good for exams,” Seokjin says. It’s two in the afternoon and he’s well on his way to being royally pissed. “You know who’s dick exams should suck? Chester’s. Chester’s gross heterosexual penis.”

“Fucking gross, dude!”

“He probably doesn’t wash it,” Seokjin says thoughtfully.

“I really don’t want to be talking about Whitehall’s scummy dick. Shut the fuck up.”

“One left,” Yoongi says, into the sucking black hole of silence left as Seokjin slips a curved hip-flask out of his robe sleeve and takes a worryingly deep sip. “Come on, lads, chins up. After this ‘s our match against the Claws. Chins. Shove them up.”

“Yeah, shove them up Chester’s a-”

“Seokjin if you don’t fucking stop it-”

Taehyung and Seokjin go rolling down the hill, a tangle of blue and red and too much cheap alcohol, down to the edge of the lake where the giant squid coils curiously. Their laughter bubbles up on the breeze - it’s a Saturday, and most of their exams are over and nobody’s dead yet, and Yoongi’s as content as he could be.

(He has two problems. One: Quidditch. Two: The Damien Issue - namely, every time Damien kisses him, holds his hand, cups his cheek, Yoongi sees Jeongguk instead, and it makes him want to die a little. Damien doesn’t deserve that.)

(But apart from those Two Very Big Problems, everything is fine.)

“What’s your last exam?” Jeongguk asks quietly. Namjoon’s replaced Taehyung so that the latter can scramble back up the hill; now Hoseok, Namjoon and Seokjin are all arguing over who spilled the last of the drink, while Jimin and Taehyung murmur quiet niceties at each other.

Yoongi tries not to draw the parallels between them, and him and Jeongguk. It’s not the same. He saw Jeongguk with someone else in the crystal ball. Speaking of…

“Divination,” he says.

“You worried?”

“No.” Maybe he should be. “I think… Bloom likes me. I think she thinks I’ll be okay.”

“You’re real good at it. You’ll be okay.”

“Dunno why I’m good,” Yoongi frowns at the grass. “I never mean to be. Can’t see anything important, either.”

Jeongguk’s smile is soft, teasing. “What do you see, then? What shirt you’re gonna wear in the morning?”

I see you kissing someone else and I see Damien yelling and I see some guy with his face all misty curled up on the ground. “Yeah, shit like that,” Yoongi says lamely. “Hey - you wanna dump these dumbasses? Izzy said to catch you next time you’re around. We miss you in the Common Room.”

“Almost as though I’m a Ravenclaw, huh,” Jeongguk says, but he stands and brushes the grass off his knees. “I miss Izzy too. And Max. And - everyone. We’ll get food in the kitchens, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

It’s this Divination exam, that’s what it is. Making Yoongi wonder where Jeongguk’s mystery mist man (misteryman, heh) (shut up, Yoongi) is. Would Jeongguk move away from him, if Yoongi held his hand?

You have a fucking boyfriend. Shut up.

The house elves in the kitchen load them up with snacks - “exam fuel, sirs, exam fuel!” - and Yoongi and Jeongguk stagger down to Slytherin with their arms almost too full to open doors.

“Jeonggukkie!”

“You been keeping him away from us, you dick,” Max says, hugging Jeongguk around the waist, snacks falling everywhere. “Has Yoongi turned you? Are you a skinsuit for evil?”

“Why am I evil?”

“Yeah, he has,” Jeongguk grins at Yoongi and hugs Max back. “Isn’t he an asshole?”

“Total wanker.”

“I know.”

“Oi,” Yoongi says, to the blank air around him. “I’m being ganged up on. You have an unfair advantage on me.”

“Yeah. Height.”

“Fuckoff.”

They all slump down around the sofas, the Slytherins plus change, Max, Alwyn, Izzy, Jeongguk, Yoongi, Edie-Maude, Samantha. Max and Alwyn do a dramatic reenactment of the Fourth Goblin Revolt of 1812, with Max on his knees shuffling around screeching victory for me and my kind! and hitting Alwyn around the shins with a long wooden stick. Yoongi thinks he might throw up from the laughter, and every so often they need a goblin army, and Jeongguk lies down on the carpet and donates his screechy goblin-voice to screaming about the wizard bourgeoisie and it’s awesome. It really is.

“Free our kind from slavery!” Izzy yells, and the watching audience pelt Alwyn - representing wizardkind - with sofa cushions en masse.

Damien is watching, although Yoongi doesn’t see him. (Severus does, but he’s too old to get involved in the sort of dramatic spirals and fractals teenagers like to call relationships.)

At one point, Jeongguk smiles at Yoongi, and Yoongi smiles right back, and Damien closes the doors to their dorms, and goes back to studying for Arithmancy, and it’s okay. Honestly.

It so is.

***

Yoongi is so terrified during his Divination practical exam - crystal balls, tea leaves, tarot cards - that he accidentally predicts the weather for the coming three years, the divorce of his examiner’s eldest child from her wife when the marriage hasn’t happened yet, and the birth of an albino child to the examiner’s youngest, who’s twenty and has just met the man of her dreams.

“A little overboard, but that’s no bad thing,” Bloom tells him, outside the exam room. “I look forward to seeing you in my class again in September, Yoongi. Come prepared.”

He hates Divination.

(Yeah, right.)

***

And they lose the match with Ravenclaw, but not by much. Yoongi catches the Snitch, he really does, but Sadie and her Chasers are a formidable force - all the same, the mood in the Common Room isn’t like they’ve lost.

“We can win next year,” Samantha says.

We can.

Yoongi knows they will. How could they not? They’re getting better and better each year.

Nothing could step on his mood right now.

***

“Yeah, mum’s coming to pick me up,” Damien says, fidgeting with the strap of his bag. “I just - won’t get the train this year. But - I’ll see you over summer, ‘n stuff.”

“Of course,” Yoongi says. Standing on the platform with his luggage, he can see Jeongguk out of the corner of his eye, running on to save a carriage for them. “I’ll miss you, okay? See you really soon.”

The kiss they share is hurried - Yoongi needs to catch the train and Damien’s mum is waiting down in the village. But it’s still a kiss. It’s nice. Soft. Sweet.

Nothing is wrong.

Jeongguk and Yoongi share a carriage back to London, and trade Frog cards and talk about whether Sherlock Holmes or Merlin would win in a fight to the death between BBC characters, and it’s all good. Nothing is wrong. Next year is gonna be awesome.

Yeah.

Chapter Text

part four: sixth year (fourth year)

***

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

A bus stop, somewhere in Ireland. Possibly in the northern bit, but then equally possibly in the southern bit; Yoongi can’t remember. Gerry had wanted to take them on a day trip using Muggle transport, and got a little too overexcited and now most of Slytherin House is trapped in Meath, sending angry messages via patronus to Gerry, who’s stranded in Belfast and seems to be having a breakdown.

Yoongi and Jimin are trapped off on their own, somewhere in probably-Monaghan. At a bus stop, in the middle of the woods, with too much beer and too little patience.

“Nothing’s fucking wrong,” Yoongi says. He got his OWLs yesterday - it’s official. In September he’ll be doing Divination, Potions, Arithmancy, and Ancient Runes. The results don’t feel as important as they did, and holding the piece of paper felt like the worst in the world. Is this all there is?

“Yeah, right.” Jimin wipes his lips and sets the bottle gently at their feet, next to the crumpled cans. “Radio silence for a month, then you show up and lose Gerry’s snitch and - and have you even seen Damien? All holiday?”

Yoongi looks away, reading the timetable. Next bus is in twenty minutes, with any hope.

“That’s a no.”

“I’ve been doing stuff.”

Jimin kicks his knee. “Don’t go off the deep end, mate. Just - fucking hell. What have you been doing all summer?”

Drinking lots of loose-leaf tea, although Yoongi won’t say that. “This and that.”

“Ain’t a real answer.”

“Just stuff.”

When the bus arrives they fork over most of the money in their pockets, and Jimin whispers an angry message to Gerry, shipping it off in a wisp of silver smoke. He’s angry with Yoongi - but then, Yoongi is angry with Yoongi. This summer sucks. All July he’s been moping about the house in a daze, reading his own tea leaves, dealing out tarot cards, and eating all of the traditional food his mother cares to cook for him.

“Damien and me are going out tomorrow,” he says. Decides.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Jimin frowns, looking out the window. (It’s going to be a few hours until they reach the bus depot in Belfast, and Yoongi doesn’t want to spend it in uncomfortable silence.)

“Just don’t fuck around,” Jimin says softly, as the bus pulls into town. “Slytherin isn’t very big. I don’t wanna be a child of divorce or some shit, okay?”

“You’re dumb,” Yoongi says. “You’re not going to be a child of divorce. Me ‘n Damien aren’t like - your dads.”

“Nah, that’s Gerry,” Jimin says dismissively, and right on cue Gerry’s beaming face comes into view, waving frantic from the depot pavement. “Okay. And try not to vanish for the rest of summer, asshole. Weird as it might seem, we like hanging out with you.”

Yoongi isn’t sure whether that makes him happy or oddly sad.

***

His date with Damien, the first of the summer, is in Cornwall. They take the Knight Bus from London and Damien only mentions Yoongi’s absence once, in a light sort of way that means he’s mad but he won’t press the issue. Yoongi’s spent all of July talking to nobody, especially not Jeongguk or Damien, but he waves his hand and says family stuff, you know the drill and it sounds both vague and serious enough that Damien backs off.

Cornwall is nice, though. They go to a greasy spoon for dinner, and an old Muggle woman tries to sell them keychains with Aidan Turner’s face on it. Yoongi buys three just to make Damien laugh.

“You don’t have a car,” Damien points out over roast beef and mushy peas. “What the hell are you gonna use that for?”

“Christmas presents for my very-favourite relatives,” Yoongi grins, tapping the keychains. “You know my Mum’s best friend watches this show?”

“A witch?”

“She works in Muggle Studies for the Ministry,” Yoongi waves his hand. “But like, you should hear her go on about it. She says she wants to move to Ireland so she can meet Aidan Turner and have all his weird Cornwall babies and work in a coal mine.”

“Everyone you know is insane,” says Damien. His hand, resting on the table, covers Yoongi’s fondly.

“Doesn’t reflect good back on you, y’know,” Yoongi says. On top of the greasy table, he turns his hand around, locking his fingers in with Damien’s. “If everyone I know is insane, how crazy is the guy going out with me?”

“Absolutely mental,” Damien says. “I’d kiss you, but I taste of mushy peas.”

“And we’re being judged by the Aidan Turner keychain lady.”

“And that.”

They go for a walk after dinner, then, along the cliffs, where Damien tries to see fishing shoals under the water and Yoongi tries to braid the long sea grass into butterfly catchers and they hold hands between them and it’s nice, and Yoongi can hardly remember why he avoided doing this for so long.

“What are you doing next year?” Damien asks, walking slowly, idling along with Yoongi’s hand in his.

“Potions, Divination, Arithmancy, Runes,” Yoongi lists off. He swings their arms. “What about you?”

“Potions, History, Transfig, Charms,” Damien folds down a finger for every subject. “I dunno. Y’know, for that job in the Auror Office. Poison detection-”

“Just seems fun,” Yoongi finishes, grinning. The phrase was a Slytherin-wide catchphrase by June of last year, as Damien fought to justify his career choice against all of the juniors wailing about how Harry Potter is an Auror and what if he punches you in the face and occasionally, what if you punch him in the face? “You’re a dork, Damien.”

“I’m not the aspiring Potions professor.”

“I could do something else!”

“Yeah, but you won’t,” Damien kicks his ankle. “You think Malfoy hung the stars in the sky. And you’re good at it. Why wouldn’t you?”

“I might go travelling,” Yoongi mumbles, playing with the head of a daisy. “Start a travel blog. Y’never know.”

“And then come back and become the new Malfoy, because you love him and you love Potions and you’re a massive nerd.”

“And then maybe consider becoming a Professor.”

Damien laughs softly. “You’ll do it. You can do anything you put your mind to.”

Ignoring the sick, sinking feeling in his stomach, Yoongi lets Damien put his hand under his chin and lift his face to kiss him, and tries his best to kiss back, tries his best not to feel like an asshole.

***

The train on the way back to Hogwarts is less awkward than it might be, and Yoongi refuses to believe that's because Damien isn't coming on the Express - he's getting a lift up with his mum. They pack into a carriage, Yoongi, Max, Izzy, Alwyn, and the two new twins, all squished up together, Yoongi and Izzy pressed against windows on either side of the table. Sam, Edie-Maude, and the rest of the seniors are in the carriage across from them - for a while, they entertain themselves by playing charades through the glass.

(Yoongi wins. Film, eight words. Young soft twink takes it up the arse. His prize is to be looked at with disgust by the two youngest, and to get pelted with begrudging sweets from the other carriage.)

Max bounces up and down. "Are we betting? Can we bet? I love betting."

"Conundrum - am I a bad senior for encouraging gambling, or a bad senior for refusing to participate in time-honoured tradition?" Yoongi asks. Alwyn's elbow falls into his mouth, and so he licks the kid's arm until he screams and wriggles away.

"Betting?" One of the twins asks. Amelia or Aoife?

"Yeah," Max says. "Put a galleon on however many people are gonna be Slytherins this year. It's super fun."

"Betting," the other twin says. "Sounds dumb."

"It's super dumb."

Izzy slams a coin on the table. "Three."

"Four."

"Two," says Max.

The twins look at each other. "Five?" One ventures. The other one shrugs, pulls two coins out of her money bag, and says, "One, I guess. This is really stupid."

"No way there's gonna be more than five," Yoongi grumbles. "Why do I always end up last?"

"Fuck it, put a galleon on six, maybe we'll get lucky," Alwyn says.

Yoongi puts his coin down in the middle of the pile. "Yeah, okay, how about none?"

And everyone yells at him for being such a downer, and Yoongi holds his arms up against Alwyn and Izzy trying to strangle him with their school scarves. Lunch is a pumpkin pasty from the trolley witch, and an adventure for Yoongi, who wanders down the train to find Hoseok, Seokjin, and Namjoon.

He bumps into Sadie on the way.

Sadie, with a glimmering Head Girl badge, and a smile. "Hello, Min," she says. "I'm Head Girl."

"I can read," he mumbles, trying to pass her. "Lemme - I'm not going anywhere-"

"I'm Head Girl, so you aren't gonna get away with any of the shit you used to." She walks past him, her shoulder knocking his. "You sneak off with my juniors, huh? You and Jeon, off doing fuck-knows-what at night? That all stops this year. Head Girl has the authority to give out detentions. You know what it's about."

"Leave me alone," Yoongi says. "I'm not doing fuck all, Sadie-"

"Just don't do your shit this year. I won't be having it."

"Yeah, sure," and he manages to wriggle out from underneath her outstretched arm, and scurry down the train before she can catch the back of his robes again, and hope like hell Jeongguk hasn't seen anything, from wherever he's sitting with the Ravenclaws.

Seokjin and Namjoon are in a carriage in their own; Hoseok must be with Taehyung, or other Hufflepuffs, leaving the two Gryffindors throwing Bertie Botts' Beans at each other and cursing.

"Real mature," Yoongi says, letting himself in the door, before he sees a familiar badge on Seokjin's robes. "Real mature for the Head Boy of Hogwarts."

"Fuck me if I don't know why they gave me it," Seokjin says cheerfully, throwing the beans at Yoongi instead. "I'm gonna abuse my power. Watch out, fuckers, Seokjin is on the prowl. What perks do I get?"

"I think a better bathroom," Namjoon says.

"Awesome. Who wants fancy baths? I'll hook you up."

"Who needs drugs when you have fancy baths," Yoongi says, sliding into the seat next to Namjoon. "Met your co-worker on the way down here, though. Sadie. Can you believe it? If I survive to get the fancy baths I'll be lucky."

"We can play tug of war over you. She puts you in detention, I take you out of it," Seokjin bites down on a bean and immediately spits it out. "A li'l ragdoll boy."

"What flavour?"

"Rotten pineapple."

"How the fuck do you know what rotten pineapple tastes like?"

Seokjin taps his nose. "I have my methods."

The train rattles down the track, steadily heading away from England and up into Scotland, and the rain starts up. Yoongi stands on the seat to close the window, and tries to ignore how uncomfortably like a third-wheel he feels, between Seokjin and Namjoon with no Hoseok to temper the awkwardness. There was no room in the Slytherin carriage and he's sure the kids wanted to talk among themselves, but Namjoon and Seokjin probably did too - and he can't go and find Jeongguk. He saw him on the platform, surrounded by a gaggle of giggling Ravenclaws in blue and bronze all chatting about books and new cauldrons and owls and frogs, and Jeongguk chatting loudest of all.

There'd been lots of girls in the group. Yoongi refuses to think about that as anything other than a fact. Yeah, lots of girls, cool - whatever.

"Sit down, you fuck," Seokjin tugs the end of his robes. "What are you, acting out some drama? Close the bloody window on your way."

So Yoongi does, and he eats the chocolate frogs Namjoon provides out of his bottomless pockets, and he tries drafting an early letter to Gerry. Dear Gerry. How did you cope with NEWTs. I think I'm going to die and I haven't gotten to school yet.

Still - school is school, and Hogwarts is always going to be catharsis.

"If Sadie bothers you, come find me and I'll shove my foot up her Veela ass," Seokjin says, clapping Yoongi on the shoulder as the train screams into the school station. "Same goes for anyone else. Gotta look out for my small, defenceless-"

"Oi-"

"Baby friends."

"Oi," Yoongi hits Seokjin around the back of the head. "Watch it or I'll set Namjoon on you."

"Namjoon refuses to be used as a bargaining chip," Namjoon says from behind them, wrestling with his trunk and with Friedrich the geriatric owl. "Namjoon is taking control of his life."

Namjoon refuses to do Divination NEWT. Yoongi kind of doesn't know what to do, without Namjoon beside him making snarky remarks about the amount of tea they've been drinking in a month. Now he comes to think of it - Yoongi doesn't know anyone in their little OWL class that wanted to do the subject for NEWT.

Please, God, let there be someone else. Yoongi doesn't think he can cope with multiple hours per week of Bloom on his own. He needs something to dilute that creepy intensity.

On the walk up to school he rejoins the Slytherins, but this time with Damien, who holds his hand and talks merrily away about the Knight Bus down here, and about how his mum bought him new socks, and about how he had to get his tie dry-cleaned and how it cost an arm and a leg. Yoongi smiles and nods, a mile away.

"What's the bet like?"

"The kids put most of the money down," Yoongi says, sliding into place on the Slytherin table, against the wall so he can see all the new potentials as they shiver up the Hall.

"What did you bet?" Damien's still holding his hand, but under the table. The stares of the rest of the hall are piercing.

"Zero," Yoongi grins. "No other numbers left."

"You depressing bastard."

"That's my street name, yeah."

It's a big enough crop of kids this year. Yoongi thinks there might be a hundred, maybe a little less, in robes too big for them and generic ties that haven't yet changed colour to the house they'll be sorted into. All the Slytherins are sitting on edge, ready to win or lose the bet, ready to gain a lot or a little; Max especially seems nervous. Izzy and Alwyn are playing thumb wars under the table; Samantha looks like she's fallen asleep, her chin resting on her hand.

It's cool. Not like there's much to expect. One or two, like there always is.

As the kids go up, as more and more of them flock to blue and red and yellow, Yoongi feels increasingly like he's being stared at, but when he looks around it's just three tables clapping, and the Slytherins all huddled up near the top, forlorn and small.

"Looks like you might win the bet after all," Max says. It's meant to sound lighthearted, but it doesn't.

The last three line up, and Yoongi watches with his heart suddenly in his throat. No way will they get no kids this year. That's ridiculous.

"Willow, Jessica!"

A pause. Jessica Willow is tall and thin and shaky.

"Gryffindor!"

Hoots of applause, and when Yoongi looks at the Gryffindor tables he sees the boys in his year that gave him the black eye last term, clapping and cheering and greeting Jessica Willow to the table. She seems over the moon.

"Wandsworth, John!"

John Wandsworth is short and stout and red-faced, and walks up to sit under the hat with all the confidence and bravado of a military general. He winks at the last person to go, and sits with his eyes shut under the stool.

Come on.

"Hufflepuff!"

"Holy shit," Alwyn says. Samantha has woken up, and the whole Slytherin table watches with hungry eyes as the last girl staggers up to the stool. There's no way. Not anyone. Not anyone?

"Yaworsky, Zoe!"

Zoe Yaworksy's face is all but hidden behind a fringe of long blonde hair, and she walks like she just learned how to do it recently, her hands shoved uncomfortably into the pockets of her oversized robes. There isn't a sound in the hall - everyone's on edge. There's got to be one Slytherin.

"I don't want to win the fucking bet," Yoongi whispers when Zoe Yaworksy lowers the hat onto her head. "I really don't want to win the fucking bet."

"Ravenclaw!"

Zoe runs down to the blue and bronze with a look of pure relief on her face, and the Hall erupts into cheers and laughter, the latter aimed firmly at the Slytherins.

"I don't want the money," Yoongi says flatly.

The whole house leaves the feast early. Eighteen of them now, trooping resolutely up to the Common Room, and when Yoongi looks back he sees Jeongguk clapping Zoe Yaworksy on the back and laughing, his cheeks pink and his eyes sparkling.

Yoongi feels bizarrely cheated.

***

Yoongi is early for Potions every Wednesday morning - he's got a free period first thing, and it's only a half minute walk from the Common Room to Malfoy's class. His timetable so far is turning out pretty nice; it's the middle of September and he's been able to avoid most of the student body, scurrying around the corridors up to the towers and around the dungeons mostly.

"Early again, Min?"

"Morning, sir," Yoongi says, sliding his books onto the desk nearest the store room. He refuses to be glad about the fact that NEWT Potions is a solo subject, and that he doesn't have to sit beside Damien, because that would be stupid, because Damien is his boyfriend who he loves very much. Yeah.

Malfoy looks tired, but then, Malfoy always looks tired. There are books piled up on his desk and empty mugs everywhere, rolls of parchment falling off the table and onto the floor. "Felix felicitas," he says. "Have you tried it before?"

"No. Are we?"

"Not today, but I will have you make it before the end of the year," Malfoy says. "And - Min. What do you think about the new Head Girl?"

"Sadie? Can't say I know her very well," Yoongi says, because it is a sort of truth. Behind Malfoy's shoulder, Snape pops into his original painting, looking as he usually does - annoyed, silent, brooding. Angry bat. "Why?"

"No real reason," says Malfoy, just as more of the class stream into the room; Damien, with a soft smile, brushes his hand against Yoongi's back on his way to his own desk, and Yoongi smiles back at him, only letting his face fall when Damien's back is turned. All in all there's six people in the class - Damien, Yoongi, three Hufflepuffs and a Ravenclaw, and all but Yoongi are here in the hope of joining the Aurors.

(When they told Malfoy that, at the start of the year, he'd closed his eyes briefly and massaged his forehead right above his left eye. "Okay," he'd said. "That's fine.")

(Yoongi thinks it might not be all that fine, but it's Malfoy. What's he meant to do?)

"Today we're preparing the six elemental bases," Malfoy says. "I expect samples of each on my desk by the end of the class, labelled and named. For the next few weeks we'll be using them to create other potions, so take extra care. I won't be letting you brew them again."

Yoongi likes brewing bases - he did it so often for the OWLs that he could probably do it in his sleep at this point, and he's not feeling up to doing anything difficult this early into the year. Elemental bases. Simple.

Totally simple.

"You're adding water to the wrong brew," says Snape dryly. "Don't want to ruin the potion.

Yoongi scowls at him, but switches out the decanting bottles anyway, and hopes Malfoy hasn't seen him fuck up. He wants Malfoy to think he's good at Potions, after all.

***

"Min!"

"Aw, fuck," Yoongi looks at the bust of Merlin the Second, and wonders if it's too late to hide behind it. He tries, anyway, even as Snape-the-painting warns him from the other side of the corridor that he's been seen, but Merlin's marble back pins him to the stone wall and he's too tired to talk today, too tired to do anything but go up to the Room of Requirement and play Gobstones with Jeongguk, like he was meant to do. Supposed to do. Going to do.

"You're defacing school property," Sadie tells him, standing between the statue and the door into the main hall, her hands on her hips. She looks pretty pleased to have caught him. "You know what that means, right?"

"Like fuck am I defacing it, I'm standing behind it," Yoongi snaps, backing out. The statue of Merlin the Second turns his head, winks at Yoongi, and then blows a raspberry in Sadie's face.

"You got boot scuffs on the marble," Sadie says, ignoring the statue's middle finger pointed her way. "That means detention."

"No, it doesn't."

Merlin shakes his marble head. On the opposite wall, in the painting, Snape has his arms folded and his face set - he looks decidedly annoyed. This is the third time this has happened this term, and its barely crawled into October, and Yoongi is already sick of the silver badge gleaming on Sadie's robes. "Detention," she says again. "If you don't show me the detention slip I'll get your Hogsmeade privileges revoked, so get it signed, okay?"

"Fuck you," Yoongi says wearily, but he takes the blank detention slip she hands him. "Whatever."

She watches him go but doesn't follow him, and he settles into the Room of Requirement, where Jeongguk is already brewing a cup of tea - Snape isn't here, thankfully, but then also maybe not thankfully, because Yoongi has a sneaking suspicion the portrait goes to tell Malfoy any time Sadie decides she's going to annoy a Slytherin. It's nice, but the entire House is being babied by Malfoy at this point, and Yoongi is kind of afraid to tell Snape to leave off.

"What took you so long?" Jeongguk takes a gentle sip out of his cup, before he pours in more milk.

Yoongi slaps the detention slip onto the table. "Third time this year. Fucking hell."

Jeongguk screws his nose up. "Go to Professor Ryder, then, for fuck's sake!"

Ah, yes. Professor Ryder, the notoriously absent (in mind and body) headmaster of Hogwarts, who spends most of his days in Scotland or Ireland, returning to the school once a weekish to make an appearance at the head table and smile foolishly at his favourite students. A Gryffindor, and proud of the fact. Not likely to be any help at all to the Slytherins - in Yoongi's first year, Gerry had taken him aside and told him that whatever happened, if bad things were done to him, it was better to tell Gerry or Professor Malfoy, because Ryder wasn't likely to help.

"Ryder doesn't do anything," Yoongi says. His head hurts; they keep having this conversation, and still Jeongguk doesn't seem to understand.

"He would if he knew how bad it was."

Yoongi wants to cry. Jeongguk is so good, and means well, and he won't get it any time soon. "He doesn't care," he says, taking a sip of the tea, made just how he likes it. "I'm in Slytherin. He'll think I must have done something to Sadie to deserve it, because Slytherins are evil, and horrible, and gross. I must have done something to Sadie first, because otherwise why would she do that? She's a Ravenclaw and Ravenclaws are smart and they're not bad because if you're bad you go to Slytherin."

"Yoongi-"

Yoongi turns away, and the Room of Requirement obligingly supplies that Gobstones set he bought for Jeongguk in the summer before his fourth year. A little battered and scraped, but still functioning. "Let's just - play a game, or something. Forget it."

Jeongguk's mouth twists. "Yoongi-"

"Please," Yoongi says quietly. "Drop it." He reaches out and folds the detention slip up, shoving it into his pocket.

"I'll play red," Jeongguk says. He picks up the little clinking marbles, the acid rolling inside them, biting to get out against his skin.

"Green."

They play in stilted, awkward silence; neither of them are at their best game, and after the fourth time Yoongi finds himself wiping acid off his cheeks, Jeongguk sighs. "Maybe we should go to bed," he says. "Keep playing tomorrow."

Yoongi bites his tongue. I have detention tomorrow. "Sounds okay," he says instead. "I'll be green again." He wants to say sorry, but he doesn't know how, or what it would be for, and he is tired.

Snape is waiting for him in the paintings that line the Slytherin corridor. He doesn't say anything, but he follows Yoongi through the different frames, shoving old Masters aside, knocking still life fruitbowls off their tables.

"Not gonna say anything?" Yoongi finally asks, stopping outside the Common Room. "Should I tell Ryder, or Longbottom, or the Minister for Magic? Which one would you recommend?"

"You are many things, Min, but you are not a fool, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't treat me like one," Snape says. "Go to bed. And if I get drawn into one more teenage dilemma-"

"Yeah, yeah, you'll rip my face off and sell it to Scottish mobsters, I get it," Yoongi slips in through the Common Room door, confused when Snape doesn't follow. Izzy, Alwyn, and Max are curled up on the sofa together, sleeping, and the two new girls - second years, now, the Irish twins - are playing a game of chess, stopping every move to yawn and stretch.

Yoongi taps the chessboard. "Maybe you should go to bed," he says, and the two of them look up at him in surprise. "Long day of learning," he shoots just enough sarcasm into his voice that one of them giggles, and they both nod.

He shakes awake the trio on the sofa, then. Izzy blinks up at him. "Morning?"

"Night," he rolls his eyes, and doesn't say anything when the three of them head toward Max's dorm room. He can hardly say anything without sounding like a terrible hypocrite, even if the reality is that he and Damien spend most nights in their own beds, and they haven't gone much far past where Damien tried to take them, the night of the Quidditch match last year.

Whatever.

Damien is asleep when Yoongi gets to his own dorm room, and that's not a fucking relief. It isn't.

***

"Detention with me again," Malfoy signs the slip with a theatrical flourish.

Yoongi stares at the paper. "Thanks, sir." Sadie can't say anything against Malfoy signing the detention slips; it's a nice little loophole he found after the first detention served with Longbottom, de-potting baby Mandrakes.

Malfoy rubs that spot on his temple again. "I'll bring this up at the next staff meeting."

"Thanks, sir."

"You can help me with the junior brewing," Malfoy says. "Special cruel detention level for my least favourite miscreant."

"Thanks, sir," Yoongi says, and this time it's genuine. Brewing for Malfoy to teach the juniors isn't anything special - it's just endless Liver Tonics and Cold Cough Cures and Bruise Creams, but it's miles better than what he could be doing, and Malfoy is basically the coolest person he knows over twenty.

(Apart from Gerry. Gerry is an exception, because Gerry is Gerry.)

And from the painting above Malfoy's desk, Snape resides, telling them what a terrible job they're doing.

It's almost fun.

***

"On All Hallows Eve, seven lonely souls went a-wandering..."

Namjoon throws a liquorice swirl at Seokjin; it bounces off his shoulder and goes flying into the lake, followed by the happy crunching sound of the giant squid attacking the sugary treat with great gusto.

"On All Hallows Eve..."

"Face it, you're a terrible storyteller," Jimin yells, a pasty in his mouth and Taehyung in his lap. "Let someone else do it."

"We didn't ditch the feast for you to go all Billy Shakes and try to make this, like, a homoerotic orgy in the woods. I could be eating pie right now."

"You eat pie every day of the fucking week."

"Halloween pie."

"Same as regular pie but more orange?"

"Scary pie?"

Seokjin sighs and sits down. They've scuttled away from the Halloween feast in the middle of it, and although Yoongi's sure Malfoy saw him leaving, he's equally sure the Professor wouldn't get him in any more trouble than he already is. Sadie's giving him a detention a week, maybe two, and he's with the Head Boy, and the giant squid likes them. They're pretty much as safe as they're ever going to be, especially around Hogwarts. "If I can't tell the story, who's gonna? Everyone knows I'm the best."

"Let Yoongi do it," Jeongguk says. He sounds a little bit drunk - Yoongi thinks he might be. Hoseok has performed magnificently in the supplying-of-alcohol-illegally department tonight; cans and bottles lie all around them, to be picked up when they inevitably wake up here in the morning.

"I don't know any ghost stories," Yoongi says. He's sitting next to Jeongguk, and he can excuse their closeness on the drink, the cold, or the fear, depending on how much he wants to ruin his reputation.

"Everyone knows ghost stories."

"I know the ghost stories everyone knows," Yoongi closes his eyes, drops his chin against Jeongguk's shoulder. "Like the one about the clown that was last seen in your local town, that kind of shit. Pick someone else."

Hoseok tells a story about a farmer that cut down a fairy tree and got murdered brutally by the angry fairies that lived in it, and Namjoon tells the story of the man with the hook-hand and the car, and Seokjin tells a long story that gets cut off when everyone throws more liquorice at him.

(Some things never change.)

Jeongguk tells the story about the woman that thought her dog was licking her hand when it was really a murderer. Taehyung is asleep. Jimin tells a story that sounds disgusting until they work out it's the plot of the fourth Saw movie, and throw sweets at him accordingly.

"Go on, Yoongi," Jeongguk says sleepily. "Tell us a story and we can go to sleep."

"Your mum," says Yoongi.

Liquorice hurts when it bounces off your head, and Hoseok has good aim for someone so clearly roaringly drunk.

"Uh. There was once this guy... who fell in love with this girl-"

"Shut the fuck up, you wankers," Yoongi shoves two fingers up at Namjoon. "A guy who fell in love with this girl, fuck you, but she was married."

"He murders her horribly," murmurs Taehyung into Jimin's shoulder. "Called it."

"But she was married, so he watched her go to work every day, on the bus, right, because they both got the same bus. And they would sit and play games on his phone because she was really friendly and he was kinda lonely and sort of a loser, but she didn't mind."

"And one day the man realised he was in love with her..."

Yoongi realises most of them are asleep. "He fell in love," he says huffily. "Love is the horrifying monster. Fuck you all, I want a Bafta."

"Love is the horrifying monster. That's deep," says Jeongguk, and falls asleep, his arms looped around Yoongi, his mouth a little bit open, his snores very very loud and very very definite.

Yoongi just sighs and shifts so he's sitting on Jeongguk's lap proper, and follows him asleep, and hopes that nobody kills him for doing this when his boyfriend is sitting up in the castle, all on his own after the feast.

Yoongi feels like a fucking asshole, and he doesn't know how to fix it.

***

There is only him, only him and Amanda Reilly in Bloom’s NEWT Divination class, and Yoongi can’t help but be relieved that there’s someone else dumb enough to want to be qualified in such a horrendous subject. Professor Bloom likes them to pull up soft chairs next to her desk, and they drink tea and talk about their lives and at the end of the class Bloom likes them to share their cups, pass them around.

Yoongi takes Bloom’s and gives his to Amanda. Bloom is hard to read; her tea leaves are all stuck and swirling, but when he squints and turns the cup, he thinks he sees contentment. Or something. “You’re happy?” He says. Asks, really. “Um. Sorry. Can’t see anything more than that.”

“I am happy, so you’ve succeeded,” she says.

Yoongi sets the cup down, waiting for Amanda to pass it along. She’s blinking at his, looking confused. “Uh? Yoongi? Something about a boy. And… that you misinterpreted a prediction.”

Bloom nods, takes the cup, they pass it along. Amanda tells Bloom a bunch of stuff, and Bloom nods like it makes sense, and then tells Amanda her tea leaves make it seem like she has four ears.

NEWT Divination is, honestly, ridiculous.

Bloom gives them homework - an essay on the difference between tea-reading and tarot cards, which has Amanda grumbling because she hasn’t studied tarot cards and that’s hours and hours of extra studying to go through just to get it done for Friday.

Yoongi shoulders his bag and hums. Totally. Tarot cards. What a bitch. All the other key phrases he slips in when Amanda stops and seems to expect an answer.

Bloom seems to expect great things from him.

What was it he had seen? Jeongguk, kissing a person with a misty face, and someone crying, and Damien shouting.

“Professor?”

Amanda is gone, and Bloom is washing teacups, waving her wand, mouthing the incantation to summon soap and a washer to do it for her. Her hands are all splotchy and red where she dipped them in hot water, and her eyes are big and buggy and she looks just as mental as she always does. “Yoongi. What can I do for you?”

“What does mist mean. In a prediction.” He looks up and sees Snape, peering over her shoulder. “Uh - hypothetically.”

“Mist?”

“Yeah?”

“It usually means the diviner is not seeing what they think they see,” Bloom says; with a flick of her wand, the cups fly back to perch next to the kettle. “It means either that, or that… the mist is someone you can’t imagine. Or something.”

“Thanks.”

“Was I a help?”

“Yeah.”

Not really, but Yoongi doesn’t say that. He smiles, and then runs as fast as he can from the Tower to the dungeons, avoiding Sadie and most of the student body on his way.

***

The day before term ends, Yoongi is trying desperately to cover a bloody nose and corresponding bruised cheek with makeup begrudgingly lent to him by Izzy, before he has to go meet Jeongguk, before the inevitable shouting match and stilted argument and horrible silences. He's being watched by the ghost that lives in these toilets, a weepy sort of girl that doesn't say anything when Yoongi tries to talk to her; watched by her, and by a little mouse, squeaking next to the nearest empty cubicle.

"You don't cover bruises like that," the ghost girl says eventually. Yoongi thinks her name is Maureen - or maybe Myrtle.

Yoongi closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the mirror. If he strains his ears, he can hear the ghostly choir singing their carols, and if he tries really hard and adds a dash of imaginative fever, he can hear Seokjin and Namjoon throwing tinsel at first-years and drinking Firewhisky out of Butterbeer bottles, only stopping to kiss each other on the cheek like little kids caught under the mistletoe. "How do you cover bruises, then?" He asks. He hates this. Hates most things.

The Myrtle/Maureen ghost shows him, talking him through spreading sticky skinny stuff over his cheek. Izzy's skin is a little darker than Yoongi's, though, so it looks bad. It looks like a cover up.

"Would you be more upset to know your friend was hurt, or to know he'd tried to hide it from you?" Yoongi stares at himself in the mirror, and then starts dabbing at the blood with his shirt sleeve. He thinks this looks familiar.

(Cover his face with mist, maybe, then he'd recognise it. God, he is a fool.)

"I would be upset either way," says the ghost. "Who's your friend? Do I know him? I used to know a Slytherin boy, you know. He'd come to me and cry, and cry. And then... oh, someone hurt him. Someone hurt him. Who was it?"

Yoongi shrugs listlessly and starts washing his face. Against his skin, bitten-pale by the cold of the castle, the bruise stands out like he's a marked peach.

"Draco Malfoy," Myrtle/Maureen says dreamily. "With the pretty hair. And he wasn't eating, that year, with the stress... and he would come to me and cry his pretty little eyes out. Of course, Harry Potter ruined it all, and I had to go looking for Draco myself. All bloody and sad, he was, and ever-so pretty."

The old cautionary tale. "I know about that," Yoongi says. "We -" he breaks on a watery cough, and pretends he didn't, "We call him Harry Fucking Potter."

"I don't like him," the ghost girl says. "I thought he was my friend, but..."

"I think I'm going to hurt my friend," Yoongi tells her. He sees her over his shoulder, but when he looks in the mirror she's just a silvery glob, hardly there at all. "He's sad, no matter what I do. It's not like I want to get - fucked up, or whatever."

"Maybe he cares about you."

"Maybe he does."

"Good luck," says Myrtle/Maureen, when he's leaving, his face all streaky with makeup and tap water and no tears. "If you remember, you should tell me how it goes. It's very boring, crying in bathrooms and scaring little Muggle girls when they're washing their hands."

"I'm sure it is," says Yoongi. This bathroom is only a floor away from the Room of Requirement, and Jeongguk, and an argument, and Yoongi's tense even before he's setting eyes on Jeongguk and that isn't a great way to approach this whole thing but he's tired.

Snape follows him through the paintings, but Yoongi doesn't say anything to him, and Snape doesn't say anything to him, and Yoongi ignores him so the silence isn't awkward.

It is, though, when Jeongguk looks up from the table in the Room and Yoongi can see his teeth clenched together, his jaw tight through his cheeks. The chessboard is set up next to the teapot, which is steaming; the chess pieces are all talking to each other before the match begins, the white knight leaning on the saddle of his horse, trying to chat up the white rook beside him. "Who was it this time?" He asks, with an air of practiced calm. "Sadie? Someone else? What did you do this time?"

"Izzy was there," Yoongi says, and shuts the door. "Izzy's smaller than I am."

"And so what?"

"I'll be black, if we're playing chess."

"We're not playing chess."

"You set it up," Yoongi says. He sits down and pulls the chair out, and he can feel his nose still trickling, still throbbing with the punch, but if he mops at it it'll just make Jeongguk madder, draw more attention to it. "Would be a waste of a chess board not to play it, right? You be white."

Jeongguk's hands are fists, clenched in the robes at his thighs. "You're fucking ridiculous. Look at yourself - Yoongi, for fucks sake, fight back or something, don't just -"

Izzy had been on her own, see. Walking to Herbology, through the long corridors, and Yoongi had been hurrying to the Common Room to try and get some studying done before dinner. And Izzy hadn't seen them, three great big Hufflepuffs from the Quidditch team, but Yoongi had, and Izzy is all of five feet with nothing to spare and she cries when someone shouts at her and Yoongi has never forgotten - will never forget - Chester running away, and Izzy on the floor of the dungeons screaming and holding out her arm.

So he'd just -

"You care about your juniors, well that's just fucking fantastic, gold medal for you-"

"Jeongguk-"

So he'd just tapped one of them on the shoulder, and asked what their problem was, and he'd seen Izzy with her eyes suddenly wide, running as fast as she could for the greenhouses, her hair flowing, the green and silver bows pinning her fringe back and glowing in the sun.

Jeongguk looks all wrong, and angry. "You can care about people without just lying down and taking it, for fucks sake!"

"It's the easiest way!"

"Easiest for who? For you?"

Izzy found him afterwards and shoved the foundation into his hand, and hugged him tight and said thank you I'm so sorry and that kind of made it worth it. Yoongi shoved a tissue against his nose, patted her on the head, and watched her leave again, and that's the thing.

"I don't mind if I get - whatever," Yoongi says, willing Jeongguk to understand, "But I couldn't bear it if they - and I didn't do anything-"

"So it matters if it's anyone but you," Jeongguk says dully. "That's what you're saying. You come in here all fucked up, and I'm meant to just ignore it and play chess."

Yoongi folds his arms over his front, and doesn't move when Jeongguk stands up, and when did Jeongguk get taller than him? When did that happen? "You're meant to accept that I can do whatever the fuck I want. I'm older than you."

"Yeah, and you make bad decisions."

"You don't need to care," Yoongi says, and it's all going wrong. Wrongwrongwrong. "You don't need to care, I don't want you to care-"

And then he freezes.

It's going wrong. In the crystal ball, in the cathedral room with the pedestal, he sees Jeongguk with tears in his eyes, shouting at a man with a misty face, and he realises with a sick satisfaction just how good at Divination he is.

"You don't," Jeongguk blinks. He's crying - or, no he's not, but his eyes are all shiny and wet. "You don't want me to care?" Crying and shouting. "Yeah, that's fucking fantastic, friendship is a one-way town here, I'm not meant to give a shit whether my best friend comes in with a broken fucking arm-"

"Now you're exaggerating-"

"No, yeah, because I'm not meant to care! What the fuck do you think this is!"

“You’re not - I don’t want you to-”

Jeongguk flings his arms wide, horribly melodramatic in the worst of ways, tears crawling all shameful from the corners of his eyes. “Why - oh, you don’t need me to care, you have Damien to give a shit about you, I’m just here to - to fucking -”

“Damien, why are we talking about Damien-”

“I dunno, you tell me why we’re talking about Damien.”

“You brought him up,” Yoongi’s whole face hurts and he wants to cry but he knows the bruises on his cheeks will hate him if he moves. “I - Jeongguk-”

“It doesn’t matter, because I’m not meant to care.” Jeongguk tries to rub his cheeks clean but there’s fresh tears before he lowers his sleeve. “Isn’t that right?”

Yoongi swallows the thick lump in his throat. "Just leave it."

"I've been leaving it for four years," Jeongguk says. He's sad and hurt and angry and that's Yoongi's fault. "Four years - I can't stand it, Yoongi, I can't stand you just - acting like you don't matter as much as everybody else just because of the results of a goddamned personality test. Like-"

"That's not it-"

"Then tell me what it is," Jeongguk says. "You drive me insane."

Yoongi opens his mouth, and then shuts it again, in the long seconds that follow. His heart is beating and knocking his brain against his skull and his nose hurts, and he thinks his eye will probably bruise tomorrow, as well as his cheek, and he doesn't want to be having this fight. Not now. "I'm sorry," he begins, and Jeongguk makes a heavy noise in the back of his throat.

"I don't want you to be sorry," he says. "I want you to - not - do this - I want you to-"

"Jeongguk-"

He leaves, then, out the door all snotty and teary, blue and bronze and brilliant, and leaves Yoongi with a chess set that's mocking him and a pot of tea, still full, beside two chipped mugs. He cleans up his nose. Pokes his cheek, even though it hurts, because he kind of feels like he deserves something like that.

He goes back to the Common Room, eventually, and gives Izzy back her makeup and shrugs off their questioning looks, and Damien's company makes him feel worse, not better.

The ghostly choir sing O Come Emmanuel and if Yoongi curls up with his pillow between his legs and his sheets in his mouth so Damien won't hear him crying, well - that's his business, and nobody else's.

Whatever.

It doesn't matter, anyway. Jeongguk has a point.

Yoongi is just kind of an asshole, is all, and that’s the end of it.

***

The good thing about going home for Christmas break is some perspective. In theory. And Yoongi's missed his Muggle friends, Nathan and Josh, and he's missed not freaking out every time he goes to bed because he's sharing a room with a boy he's not in love with, and he's missed being able to go to the shops and getting, like, Haribos and Cadburys and stuff, without them either exploding, turning into frogs and hopping away, or some other magical charm that shouldn't happen to sweets.

He's a purist. What of it?

And Nathan and Josh are good for talking to, because they don't know anything about Slytherin, or Ravenclaw, or Harry Fucking Potter. As far as they're concerned Yoongi goes to some posh school in Scotland, and comes home so they can all bitch about the bourgeoisie and mock Boris Johnston by putting mop-heads over their hair.

"Dude, you need to break up with Damien, stat," says Nathan, reclining in his front room, GTA V playing almost-silently as his little brother curses into the Xbox controller. "That's, like, your big issue. Holy fuck."

Third perspective, that's the ticket. Yoongi stares gloomily at his knees. "I like Damien, though. I don't want him to be, like, hurt."

"Remember that time I fucked with Chloe and then went and started dating Katherine without telling Chloe first and then Chloe came around to my house and punched me in the balls and started crying?"

"No?"

"Oh. Okay." Nathan frowns. "Well, imagine that, but Chloe is Damien so he probably knows exactly where it'll hurt. You should probably tell him."

Yoongi cracks a smile. "You didn't tell me you were dating Katherine."

"She broke up with me after Chloe told her I was a dick."

"Oh."

Which is all well and good, and Yoongi spends a lot of Christmas break at Nathan's house, getting relationship advice from the wiser Muggles he knows and playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto and screaming swear words at twelve year olds on Xbox live in Bristol.

And then Gerry shows up at one point, on a broom with his beard all covered in frost flecks and his hands pink and blue, staggering up Yoongi's front garden. In retrospect, possibly Yoongi shouldn't have made his letter as melodramatic and vague as it was, but he never expected Gerry to show up, bearing home cooked apple tart for Yoongi's mother and a glint in his eye for Yoongi - either yelling, or more great Gerry advice. (Trademarked, of course.)

It's the day after St Stephen's day, and Yoongi's mum is so taken aback by the arrival of an Irish mountain man - and tart - that she doesn't say anything when Gerry drags Yoongi down his garden path. "Take me to the nearest pub," says Gerry. He's wearing robes. In Yoongi's nice Muggle residential area, he's wearing robes and he has a manic glint in his eye and an Irish accent, and Yoongi is sort of surprised nobody's reported them for terrorism yet.

"If you could look less insane, I totally would," Yoongi says. "Hi, Mrs. Daly - yeah, this is my friend from school-"

Gerry gives the old lady a cheery wave.

"Mate. You have frost in your beard."

"No, I don't."

"Yeah, you do."

"Not my fault the Irish Sea is cold."

"You didn't have to come here," Yoongi points to the Kings Arms and lets Gerry go through the door first, "You coulda just wrote me back and said, oh hey, that sucks, let me give you relationship advice like the mature twenty-two year old civil servant I am, instead of crossing the Irish Sea on a broom in fucking December just so you can drink. At a pub. Which you have plenty of, because you live in fucking Ireland."

"Two of Guinness," Gerry says to the guy behind the bar. "Really, Yoongi, such vitriol. I'm glad I came down. You clearly need the therapy."

Yoongi muffles his scream in the sleeve of his hoodie, but when the two pints come down to their greasy table, he doesn't complain. Might as well get free beer with a side of humiliation these Christmas holidays, anyway.

"...And that's why I'm an asshole."

Gerry hums thoughtfully, tugging on the end of his beard. (He'd been stroking his moustache until Yoongi told him he looked dumb, and now he's trying to look like an Irish Aristotle without the intelligence, facial hair, or marble complexion.) "I don't think you're an asshole."

"Oh, thanks."

"I think you're an idiot, but you're not an asshole."

Yoongi mops up beer foam with his thumb and shoves it in his mouth. "Which bit am I an idiot in? Damien or Jeongguk?"

"Damien is just because all young children are idiots when it comes to romance," says Gerry, and Yoongi decides not to bring up that time just a year ago when Gerry said he was in love with one of the museum guides in the Dublin National Gallery and tried to learn how to paint so he could woo her. "Damien - you're gonna hurt him whether you break up with him now, or in a year's time. But it'll hurt more in a year because you'll have been thinking about it for that long, and he'll know."

"What if he didn't?"

"Then you'd feel like shit," Gerry points his pint glass at Yoongi, "And you don't want to feel like shit. That's my point, here. Trying to get you to feel less shitty."

"I thought you were gonna give me advice on how to apologise to Jeongguk and Damien."

"Don't say sorry for things you haven't done yet."

Yoongi blinks. "I'm pretty sure I've already fallen out with Jeongguk. He was mad, Ger, you didn't see him. He was so mad he cried."

"And he mentioned Damien?"

"Yeah. It was weird."

Gerry shakes his head solemnly. "And you have no idea why he did that, do you?"

"No, and it's annoying."

"You're a young fool, Yoongi Min." Gerry smiles, then. "Tell Damien the truth and start telling Malfoy when people do shit to you. I wasn't able to stop fuck-all from happening, but you're friends with that Seokjin one, and Malfoy has a soft spot a mile wide for you, and Professor Bloom, and she's more influential than you think. Start telling people what the fuck is going on, and if anyone tries to pull a Potter on you, deck them as hard as you can and run away."

"That's bad advice," Yoongi says, but his ears are pink and his heart is warm. "Thanks, Gerry. You're a mate."

Gerry stays three days and eats most of the tart he brought, but Yoongi doesn't mind.

He's got shit to do when he gets back to school. And it won't be good, but it has to be done - it has to be done, even if it makes him feel sick to think about.

***

Term comes back on the 5th of January. Epiphany. "Today is the day the Wise Kings visited Jesus," Professor Bloom tells him, meeting him in the corridors as he's lugging his overnight bag back to the Slytherin Common Room. "They brought him gifts. Did you get gifts?"

"Got a new set of wishing bones," he says. "To toss."

"You must show them to me."

"Now?"

She blinks behind the glasses. "You have them with you?"

Which makes Yoongi blush, sort of, because he has the bag of them in his pocket, all rattling around. His parents must have spent a small fortune on them - they're bone, real bone, although it probably isn't human, and he's meant to take six at random and shake them out on the floor, and see what he can read from the pattern they fall in. Among the crowd of students hurrying back to dorms, Bloom pulls him into a side classroom, beads and bangles around her wrists making her look even slighter than she usually does. "Oh, they are a nice set."

"I like them," he admits, tipping the bag out on the nearest table, leaning his overnight stuff against the wall. "They're very - clear."

"Clear," Bloom repeats. "Are other things not so clear?"

"Um. I don't like crystal balls."

She smiles wryly, and scoops six of the little finger-sized bones into her palm; when she shakes it, they rattle and clack together. "Many people don't. So, then, tea-leaves?"

"Yeah, I guess," Yoongi watches her shake the handful of wishing bones. "And tarot cards. But mostly tea... and these, I guess."

"What did you see, when you first used them?"

Yoongi had seen sadness, really, when he shook them out on Christmas morning, the bones rattling onto the floorboards. Sadness and someone hurting, lots of hurting, and it had frustrated him beyond belief because no matter what he intended to do, he just kept seeing hurt. Maybe it'll happen anyway no matter what he does.

Not helpful. He doesn't tell Bloom that. "I saw my friend coming to visit, and then he did - like, two days later."

"Oh, very good." Bloom tosses them onto the desk, six little bones flinging themselves into a determined little pattern. Her fingernails trace the marks of them - they're long and pink, seashell pink, with little white daisies painted on the thumbs. "That's interesting. I do like these, Yoongi. I do like these."

Yoongi swallows. "What do you see?"

"It concerns you," she says, staring at them with the sort of disconcerting intensity Yoongi is used to by now, watching her talk to a class full of people as though it's a simple conversation. "A prediction about you, although I daresay it isn't a prophecy."

"Oh. Cool."

"Cool indeed," she hums. "The gist of it seems to be that the brightest sunshine is after the storm. I'm afraid to say your year isn't turning out very good."

"I don't need bones to tell me that," he mumbles, and takes the bag of bones from her once she sweeps them into the little satchel. "Thanks, professor. I - the homework was good. I had fun."

(The homework - go outside, and pick a person, and go back and try to divine their future. Bloom would take their word for it if it succeeded or not, and Yoongi ended up foretelling the death of a man, twenty years from now in a car accident, and it had fucked him up for most of Christmas Eve.)

(Still fun. He tried it another few times - a woman, setting up a new business, a little girl holding hands with her mother...)

Bloom leaves him with an enigmatic sort of smile, and Yoongi is left to make the trip to the Common Room on his own. He sees Jeongguk in the corridor and it makes his stomach feel sick and swooping and ill, but Jeongguk's eyes glaze past him as though Yoongi isn't anyone to concern himself with, and Yoongi is too busy trying to decide if that's good or not to actually call his name. Maybe it's for the best.

"And so I said up yours, mister, and I gave him the finger and I fucking scarpered before I got gutted," Alwyn is screeching, re-enacting something melodramatically while Max and Izzy cheer. Edie-Maude is playing chess with Samantha, and Damien is stretched out by the fire reading a book, and the sick feeling in Yoongi's chest gets worse.

He's fucked up. He really has. He really has.

"Hey, you," Damien says, scrunching up his nose, smiling fondly. "How was your holiday?"

"It was good," Yoongi says. Damien tries to kiss him, but Yoongi pretends he hasn't seen, and points towards the dorm. "I'm gonna - unpack-"

He scurries away, followed by Max's cheering, and Izzy trying to demonstrate with a banana and a packet of ginger biscuits just exactly the sort of films she found in her brothers room over the break.

The bones rattle in Yoongi's pocket. Gerry said he should tell Bloom or Malfoy, and he will, just as soon as Damien is sorted out, and - the Quidditch, oh, God the Quidditch. How are they going to play with the team split down the middle? How are they going to play at all?

Yoongi pinches his thigh hard, and throws the wishing bones on his pillow. Six of them fall out of the bag.

Maybe it's chance, that number falling out, that pattern forming on his pillow, but Yoongi has found himself too damned good at Divination to believe in coincidence. When he cranes his neck, he thinks he can read it; hopes he can, anyway. No matter which path you take, there lies sadness. But the little crook of a bone in the centre points towards hope, and good times.

Yoongi's never been one for optimism.

"Are you okay?"

Damien. "Hi," Yoongi croaks, the back of his eyes crawling. They make it look so easy, in books. And in films, even if Yoongi's main experience with that is Colin Firth shouting, dressed in period clothing and soaked through for dubious reasons. Irrelevant. Neither he nor Damien are Colin Firth, and it seems a lot less fun. How do you start?

Damien sits on Yoongi's bed, his legs swinging. He's still dressed in Muggle clothes, the big hoodie, the jeans, and he looks soft and cute and Yoongi could make it work. Falsely, but he could.

Don't be a pig, the Gerry that lives in the back of his head whispers.

"Seriously," says Damien. "Are you okay? You seem - did you sleep?"

"Damien," Yoongi whispers, voice all scratchy and thin. "I think we need to break up."

***

"I brought you hot chocolate."

Yoongi, with a horrible crochet blanket over his head, grunts at Izzy through the holes in the stitching. She's in her nightgown, all patterned with Peter Rabbits because Izzy is the baby even if there are kids younger than her, and the whole House has long since got used to Officially Ignoring the kettle that Max hides in his room, so they can all have midnight tea parties when they want to. They've also taken to Officially Ignoring how Izzy, Alwyn, and Max all sleep in Max's room, because honestly there are some things Yoongi really doesn't want to imagine. "Thanks," he says, wrestling out of the blanket. "I feel like your mum 'n dad have fallen out. I'm on the couch."

Izzy smiles softly. Her hair is down, but all wavy from being caught in the two plaits for so long, and it tumbles over her shoulders all pale and washy. "You're the best House Dad."

"Yeah, sure." It's proper Cadburys' stuff. Max's parents are loaded, and send him care parcels in the post full of the proper brand sweets, a fuckton of chocolates and fizzy coke bottles and gummy strawberries, and Max shares because Max is god's gift to juniors everywhere.

"Really!"

Yoongi frowns over the rim of the mug. "I am not having this talk with you."

"You told me to run away that one time. And that other time. And you called Malfoy, that time with Chester."

"That's just normal, like, stuff people do."

Izzy tugs his pyjama top. "Shut up, you dickhead. I'm trying to have a moment with you."

"Yeah, sure."

She's quiet for a bit. Then: "Did you really break up with him?"

Yoongi's only just finished crying, and he really doesn't feel like starting up again, so he shrugs and tries not to talk too much. "I had to."

"And he kicked you out?"

"Feels weird to cry about your ex-boyfriend in the same room as you when he's doing the same thing."

Izzy kicks his foot. "Stop being so damn sad, you fucker."

"I'll be sad if I damn well please."

"Asshole."

Yoongi dips his finger into the thick chocolate paste at the bottom of the mug, licking it off, letting it sit rich on his tongue. "Izzy..."

She kisses him on the cheek, soft and sweet. "My dorm isn't in use, currently," she says. "You know that. Sleep in it, okay? We don't want you getting arthritis when you're already such an old man."

"Fuck you," he says. She grins, and gets up to leave, and he catches her around the wrist. "Wait - Izzy - thanks. Really."

"You're not a bad guy, Yoongi," she says. "And you're the best senior we could have."

"I'm no Gerry."

"We don't want a mad Irish bastard," she says fondly. "We got you, and we're okay with that. You should be too."

"Mm." He drags himself, crocheted throw and all, into Izzy's dorm - which looks as though it hasn't been slept in for months, and probably all year - and her bedsheets have a pretty rose pattern and the pillow is dark enough that when Yoongi lifts his head, he can see the pattern his tears make on the sheets.

He punches the pillows, and buries his head in them, and tries to catch a few hours. Everything sucks. He's never taking Gerry's advice about anything ever again.

***

Seokjin and Namjoon get together in the middle of January, which does nothing to help Yoongi's plummeting mood. They try to keep the PDA to a minimum, but there's only so many times Yoongi can walk in on Namjoon grinding on Seokjin's lap before he starts avoiding their homeworks by the lake - hardly helped by the fact that Jeongguk is still friends with Jimin and Taehyung, and Jeongguk no longer meets Yoongi's eye when he tries to talk. It's as though, to Jeongguk, Yoongi has dropped off the face of the planet.

And the Common Room is awkward, too, unbearably so. Damien leaves the room every time Yoongi enters it and the kids - the juniors - watch them move around like spectators of a tennis match, eyes wide and curious. Yoongi's getting sick of the sight of Damien's swishing robes. He's moved most of his clothes out of his dorm and into Izzy's, which means Max has taken it as a given that nobody will protest about the three of them being gross and sappy and in love, and wherever Yoongi looks he sees happy couples. It does nothing for his mood.

"Which base would you use for a Liver Solution?"

"Water," Yoongi mumbles. He's sitting in the customary studying position, on Jimin's bed with his legs stretched up the wall. "Water... or vinegar, depending."

"Yeah. Depending on what?" Jimin turns the page; the rustling is loud in the empty room.

"Depending on... solution strength? No, fuck, that's wrong. Uh. Solution... speed. Speed of effect. Yeah."

"You got it." Jimin closes the book and drums his hands on the cover. "Why are you studying? You know this shit off by heart."

"Be prepared."

Jimin sighs, and Yoongi's glad he can't see his face. "Mate... I don't know what went down with you and Jeongguk, but if that's what's bugging you - or if it's Damien, just... you gotta fucking talk to them, not study Potions like a massive nerd. You can't, like, bury your emotions in NEWTs."

"I can try," Yoongi says, more to Jimin's roof than to Jimin.

"Yeah, see how that's going for you."

"Fuck you."

Jimin sighs and opens the book. "Method you would use to make the most effective Cough Cure."

"Double-distilled."

"Yeah, great. Well done."

Yoongi gives him the finger, but there's no energy in it, and he's not imagining the sadness in Jimin's sigh as he turns the page.

***

When Yoongi stumbles into the library one day in February, he sees Jeongguk and he wants to just talk to him, hang out with him like they always did, always used to. But someone behind him yells "you’re a crazy Death Eater, Min!" and Jeongguk's face tightens and Yoongi turns around, flips the bird to the Ravenclaws after him, and scarpers.

***

Gerry tells him he's an idiot, but that he did the right thing. Yoongi thinks Gerry's just being nice about it, but he hasn't the heart to point it out.

***

The Room of Requirement hasn't moved, but when Yoongi's pacing back and forth he thinks about the cathedral room and the broken crystal ball, not about the soft, cosy little room with the kettle and the Gobstones sets. That place has Jeongguk written all over it, and as long as Jeongguk means to stay away, so does Yoongi - that's a problem for another time. For now, he takes the painting off the wall, Snape squinting out of the bunch of grapes, and walks into the room with far more confidence than the first time.

The crystal ball is still there, shattered on the floor, and there isn't a replacement on the pedestal. There's a long, black stone table in the centre, and it wasn't there before.

"It's for your bones," Snape says, when Yoongi holds the frame up for him to view. "The wishing bones. Shake them out and see what you see."

"I'm sick of Divination," Yoongi says. "I don't wanna do it."

"Divination doesn't care if you want to do it or not."

"I thought you were a Potions master, not Divination," Yoongi sets the frame down on the table, plunging his hand into his pocket to fiddle with the bones in their bag. "I don't care about Divination, okay? I don't want to do it and I'm not good at it, and -"

"Divination doesn't care if you don't want to do it," Snape repeats, placid and frustratingly calm. "You're good at it regardless of your personal feelings on the matter."

"I don't care!"

Care... Care... Care... echoes through the cathedral room, bouncing up to the curved ceiling and off the heavy mosaic walls. When the word reaches Yoongi again, bouncing back to them, he feels very small and stupid and dumb, but it doesn't matter. What's done is done.

"That's fantastic," Snape drawls. "You don't care. I'm so happy for you."

"Shut up," Yoongi shakes six random bones in his hand, casting them angrily across the table. "Look! Sadness, death, brokenness, it's all I can bloody predict these days-" And he breaks off, looking at them. "Hey - that's weird."

Snape is balancing on the top of an orange, trying to peer into the pattern. "Read it for me."

Yoongi's finger traces the outer bone, the one closest to him. "Mending things," he says. "It says mending is on the way, if I want it to be. Mending and no more mist."

"Sadness and death, I'm sure."

Mending. Yoongi looks at the wide cast of bones, trying to take the whole picture in his head, the whiteness of the polish against the black stone. Mending, but some of them are crooked, an off sort of pattern; mending, but only if he looks for it, or so it seems. But mending is still better than nothing, and nothing is what he was getting before, and...

"Start with Damien Roadfell," Snape says.

"Don't be prissy."

"Don't be rude to your elders."

"You're a painting," Yoongi says. "You aren't an elder."

"I was."

"Not now."

But what about Jeongguk? A bit of Yoongi asks the rest of him. Mending, sure, but what about Jeongguk?

***

The Draught of Living Death perhaps isn't the best potion to try and brew while upset and tipsy, but Yoongi hasn't ever been good at making decisions, and this is supposed to be the hardest potion they do at NEWT level. Today, Taehyung told him that Jeongguk missed him, as though that would make Yoongi feel any better, and Damien passed the jam down the dinner table when Yoongi asked the room at large to do it, but neither of them are making eye contact with him and Sadie is still piling detentions on his head and he keeps getting caught by those Chester-wannabes in Gryffindor and he's pretty sure he doesn't have it in him to pass his NEWTs.

Therefore, Draught of Living Death. If he fails, he can drown himself in the cauldron. If he succeeds, he can cheer, or drink the potion, and everything works out in the end.

(He's only half sure he's joking.)

Snape is watching, maybe, but he isn't saying anything, and Yoongi doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of showing that he's looking around. He'd said something like one of the most challenging potions, even to real Potion-brewers, and that had annoyed Yoongi because he can brew potions better than most, and so he'd slugged the half-pint Jimin has magically cooled under his bed and stormed down to an old Potions room, unused now, to prove Snape wrong.

The fumes are heavy. They remind Yoongi that, yeah, while the potion mostly kills people, it's meant to be for the endless sleep - and the smoke, rising from the cauldron, makes him want to lie down, possibly forever.

On the plus side, that means the potion is working.

The door opens as Yoongi is adding the asphodel; blonde hair, thin frame, tired eyes. "It's past time students should be in their dorms," Malfoy says, his eyes travelling up to the shiner around Yoongi's right eye. He doesn't seem too phased about his statement. "You shouldn't be brewing that."

"Your old Professor said I could," Yoongi says sullenly. The asphodel turns the liquid black, pure black, like distilled ink perfectly silent, not moving, although the flames under the cauldron are blue with the heat.

"I did no such thing," Snape says, from a frame next to the bookshelf. "I advised against it, as a matter of fact."

"False."

Malfoy peers into the cauldron, and makes a satisfied little huff. "Even if you are an idiot, this is very good. You've got to the later stage. It's a concentrated poison, now."

"Fantastic," Yoongi says. The poison is meant to boil for half an hour before the lockroot is added, turning it from a brew that will definitely kill you to a brew that will merely knock you out, probably for all eternity. "I do try my best, sir."

"Sarcasm pardoned on account of drunkenness," Malfoy says drily. "What did you do to your eye?"

"Nothing."

Snape coughs from the frame, and Malfoy moves around to the side of the desk closest to Yoongi, taking the knife and starting to slice the lockroot with a practiced, easy hand. "You and Damien Roadfell have fallen out."

"Yeah," Yoongi says uncertainly. He may like Malfoy, but not enough to willingly seek out, like, couples therapy. Or whatever Snape and Malfoy think is gonna work. "Yeah, we have. We - like. Broke up."

Malfoy scrapes the lockroot heads into the bin and wipes his fingertips on his robe. "What did you do to your eye?"

"I - wait, you don't think Damien did this?"

"I'm a responsible teacher," Malfoy says, so bare that Yoongi almost misses the sarcasm. "Damien Roadfell couldn't kick a puppy if it was down, but I was under the impression our Head Girl restrained herself physically. Detention slips are one thing."

"Sir, with all respect," Yoongi slices through the lockroot a little too aggressively, "You gotta know it's, like, workplace hazards for being a Slytherin. No offence. Um. Like Izzy, a few years back. Right?"

"Workplace hazards," Malfoy repeats.

"Yeah, or something."

Yoongi's chopped a little too much lockroot, but he couldn't be bothered weighing it out, so he topples the whole thing into the cauldron and watches the black goop absorb the pieces. A wafting smell, like sleep in the morning, rises thick with the fumes and the ripples, and Yoongi has to fight to break his gaze from the searing depths.

"Min," says Malfoy, his thumb swiping up the wet blade of the chopping knife, "What does it mean to be in Slytherin?"

"Means you get the stuffing kicked out of you."

"Serious answers."

Yoongi raises his eyebrow. Malfoy is less - professional after hours, with his sleeves rolled up and insomnia pulling his face down. "Stuffing kicked out of you in a serious way, sir."

"Ten points to Slytherin if you tell me, really."

Hah. Slytherin hasn't won the House Cup in living memory, practically; when they walk past the hourglasses, there's hardly enough emeralds in the bottom to show what jewel represents the House. Yoongi still gives the question the courtesy of thought; he sees Snape, in the corner of his eye, pretending not to listen out of the gilded frame. "It's like... cunning, right? And, uh, evil..."

"'There isn't a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't from Slytherin'," Malfoy quotes softly. "But no, you're wrong. One more chance."

Yoongi glares at the wet lockroot knife. "I dunno. Sir, it's late, I'm-"

"Cunning, yes, that's a big one. Resourcefulness. Ambition," Malfoy plays idly with the knife, reflecting candlelight along the length of the blade, "Determination, cleverness, pride, self-preservation... fraternity. Loyalty. The capability for a deep and lasting love." At that, Snape shifts in the frame, but Yoongi only looks at him for a second before he's back to staring at the balancing knife. "Nowhere do they tell you that you are irredeemably evil if you're placed in Slytherin. Nowhere do they say that you have place at the bottom of the school."

The potion between them stirs itself, as quiet as the death it promises to bring.

"I made the mistake once, and many others before me," Malfoy says slowly, staring at the juice beading at the point of the knife, "Of assuming that the House I had been placed into made me who I was. I take it Gerry Thompson spread that story of Potter."

"The ghost in the bathroom told me, actually, "Yoongi says before he can stop himself.

Malfoy smiles thinly. "Myrtle, she was. And she was a Slytherin, too, and she died running away from people who thought that gave them the right to be cruel to her. But - Min. Where, in that list of traits, do you see evil?"

"Voldemort was in Slytherin," Yoongi says quietly.

"And so are you."

Yoongi bites the inside of his cheek. "But I wouldn't - never in a million years-"

"And neither would Park or Roadfell or Isobel or even Gerry Thompson. But they're still Slytherins. So what do you get, comparing these things?" Malfoy looks at him, eyes bright and intent.

"I dunno. Just - bad luck."

"Reputation goes a long way." Malfoy sets down the knife, next to the stone cutting table. "But you don't deserve what you get because of the House you were Sorted into when you were eleven."

"Yeah, but that's the perfect world," Yoongi says before he can stop himself. "Nobody does shi- anything. Only you, sir, which is great and all, but-"

"When I notice. You'll find I have the power to deduct House Points just as good as any other, and you'll find that the other three Houses care very much whether they win or not, but you have to tell me," Malfoy stands and Yoongi can't help but be relieved that the moment, apparently, is over. "And remember what Slytherin is, and not what people think."

He leaves the room, leaving Yoongi all shellshocked beside the cauldron.

Inside the painting, Snape laughs - a sound so unfamiliar that he looks startled to have made it. "That boy was always a loose canon, even when he was younger."

Determination. Loyalty. Fraternity.

The capability for a deep and lasting love.

Yoongi takes a deep, deep breath, and when he goes to the Common Room he goes to his old dorm and pretends he doesn’t notice the way Damien’s breath hitches in surprise. Fraternity. Loyalty.

Yoongi can be a Slytherin and do it right.

***

NEWTs are hard, but Yoongi isn’t imagining the glimmer of humor in Malfoy’s eye when he tells them to try brew the Draught of Living Death, and the exaggerated surprise he shows when Yoongi presents him with the finished product, only a little over an hour from the assignment.

Essays and parchment, parchment and essays. In March Gerry comes to stay in Hogsmeade for two whole weeks, and he pulls Yoongi aside and hugs him tighter than Yoongi’s been hugged in a long while, and he says I’m proud of you and Yoongi doesn’t make fun of him for a whole fifteen minutes.

And Damien’s stopped leaving the room when Yoongi enters, and the House has stopped walking on eggshells. Max and Izzy and Alwyn start acting all soft and cute in public again, and falling asleep in front of the fire.

(Nobody mentions forming the Quidditch team, and in any case, it’s far too late to enter the league.)

And when Yoongi mentions to Malfoy, off-hand, the names of the three Gryffindor boys that have been scrawling death eater on the door of the Slytherin Common Room, Malfoy grins. Next time Yoongi finds himself on a trip past the hourglasses, Gryffindor has a significant dent in the pile of rubies, and Ravenclaw is ahead, and there’s the usual little puddle of emeralds in the Slytherin jar.

It’s a nice feeling.

Bloom tells him the crystal ball forsees a future of hope for him, and even the fucking bones seem to be on his side these days, although he doesn’t go back to the cathedral room in the Room of Requirement.

Or his and Jeongguk’s room. Jeongguk seems to be drowning in OWLs - Jimin and Taehyung certainly are, and Jimin’s taken to pacing around the Common Room, chanting charms at the top of his lungs with swears between each of the phrases. And Yoongi wants to talk to Jeongguk, but -

“I’m scared he’s still mad.”

“You’re a pussy,” Seokjin says. He’s conducting a Very Serious Experiment to see if it’s possible to get drunk off rum chocolates; he’s eaten a box and a half so far, and sees no sign of stopping, while the rest of them look on in mingled disgust and admiration.

(Not the kids. They’re drowning in OWLs. Yoongi and the older ones have stopped having fucks to give, really.)

“I may be a pussy, but I care about his feelings.”

Hoseok and Namjoon are studying for Ancient Runes. Or - Hoseok is, and Namjoon is drawing miniature penises in the margins of Hoseok’s textbooks when he isn’t looking, trying to get him to laugh. Some of the dicks are wearing sunglasses. Yoongi particularly likes the one in the matching lingerie set, though, and tells him that.

“I like him in matching lingerie, too,” Seokjin says to his box of chocolates, and the textbook hits him on the head. “Oi!”

“Back to me, please,” Yoongi says, tucking his hands behind his head and lying down. “More attention. I feel neglected.”

“Cos you are,” Hoseok says without looking up.

“Yeah, just wait ‘til you see my will. You’re gonna get neglected then.”

“You promised me at least a Galleon.”

Seokjin eats the rest of the box and pronounces himself slightly tipsy, and disappointed in the overall results of the test. Also a little bit sick. “And about your dilemma,” he says, when he’s finished dry-heaving rum chocolates into a bush, “Just talk to him, you wanker. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“He won’t talk to me back,” Yoongi says gloomily.

“Exactly.”

March, and April, and May, and exams.

There are plenty of opportunities to talk to Jeongguk. Yoongi doesn’t take a single one.

***

After his Divination end-of-year exam, Yoongi falls asleep right there and then in Bloom’s classroom, surrounded by incense and tea and the satisfaction of knowing he’s done well. Bloom asked him to predict where a beaded bangle she had hidden was, and he found it; then she asked him to look three months into his future, and he’d seen Jeongguk in Diagon Alley, facing him outside the ice-cream parlour and talking.

Yoongi didn't mentioned that. He’d just said hanging out with my friends and Bloom had smiled and said I see no reason you shouldn’t receive top marks. We shall see how you perform in the written exam.

Because what Jeongguk really meant was that he couldn’t sit back and watch Yoongi fuck his life up, but Yoongi’s trying not to, and kind of succeeding so far.

Kind of.

Kind of.

“You should talk to him,” Jimin says. “Seriously. He’s a stubborn motherfucker, otherwise he’d have talked to you himself. Just - I can’t tell you what he wants to say.”

“He yelled at me about Damien,” Yoongi says; one exam left, and they’re all congregated in the Common Room, sans Damien, cramming until academia pours out their ears. “I don’t - I understand most of the rest of it, because I was a dick, but not Damien. I dunno what it was about.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot,” Jimin tells him. “Quiz me on Transfiguration if you aren’t going to fix your life.”

But Yoongi doesn’t know why he can’t look at Jeongguk anymore without flushing and looking away. He keeps thinking about big eyes, crinkling with laughter and filling with angry tears, and hair all mussy and sleepy after a nap, and mouth drawn up all pouty after he loses a Gobstones match, and cheeks red and flushed after a few drinks, and the laugh and the way his ears look and the way he never minds when Yoongi curls up on his lap. Yoongi thinks about it all the time. All the time.

***

In the Potions end-of-year, Yoongi is tasked with brewing Amortentia, the most powerful love potion in the world. When he gets a whiff of it, bottling it up for Malfoy to grade at the end of the three hours of exams, his mind grinds to a halt. “May I be excused, sir,” he says as politely as he can, and then he runs - sprints - for the door.

He smells his true love. Vanilla, and hot chocolate, and the distinct, comforting smell of Jeongguk’s hair.

“Oh my god,” Yoongi whispers to his reflection in the mirror. “Oh my god.”

***

On the last day of school, lugging his trunk into the train, Yoongi steels himself to talk to Jeongguk, to properly talk to him. He’ll catch Jeongguk in a carriage on his own and explain himself, and - and maybe mention the Amortentia smell, the way Jeongguk seems to be his true love, the way he thinks about Jeongguk when he leasts expects it, the way Jeongguk makes his day better in every way it can.

He’s gonna talk.

But then he sees Damien - for once, not getting a lift with his mother - idling into a compartment on his own, flickering through Frog cards splayed out in his hands. Nobody is following him in.

Yoongi does. Damien - thinking of him, seeing him - leaves a pit in his stomach.

“Hi,” says Damien, measured but awkward, when Yoongi sits down. “The others are in the carriage over, I think.”

“I know. I wanted to talk to you,” Yoongi says, hesitantly. “I can leave if you want?”

“It’s okay.”

“I was a dick,” Yoongi leaves it half a heartbeat and when Damien doesn’t immediately start cursing him, he relaxes. “I was a dick, a total asshole, and you deserved better, and I’m sorry. And I ruined Quidditch and, like, the year, and you have every right to hit me over the head with the History of Magic textbook and pull my ears and, like, end me-”

“It’s okay,” Damien repeats. “I mean - yeah, you were a total fucking ass-”

Yoongi nods. Hurts, but true.

“But nobody has a perfect, like, breakup. I’m over it.”

“Okay.”

“Really,” Damien shrugs. “Listen. You’re a great friend, but you weren’t a great boyfriend. And you fancied that Ravenclaw kid, anyway, and I figured it was only a matter of time. It was just a shock when it happened.”

Yoongi ignores the Ravenclaw kid bit for now. “Just -”

“Just, next time, try not to do it at Christmas time,” Damien says, and there is humor in his voice. “It’s okay, Yoongi. Really.”

And Yoongi figures this is something he has to do, before he can find Jeongguk. And he doesn’t mind, and he’s missed Damien in the months since January, and it feels weird but good to get back to how they were before any of this happened.

And at King’s Cross, Yoongi pulls a Frog card out of his pocket and peels the pink sticky note off it. “Friends,” he says, offering it to Damien. “Is that okay?”

“Friends,” Damien says, smiling at the Aleister Crowley card in his hand. “This one’s really rare - the fuck did you get it from?”

“Around,” Yoongi says. He sees Jeongguk, walking out of the station through the wall, trunk in hand. Too late to catch him now.

He has all summer. It’ll be okay.

It’s looking up, after all - and finally.

Chapter Text

part five: seventh year (fifth year)

The smell of Amortentia - of vanilla and hot chocolate and Jeongguk's hair when he hugs him - haunts Yoongi for the first three days of summer inactivity, sitting in his room stewing about it or throwing empty beer cans with the Muggle kids he's friends with. Then, he does what any sensible Slytherin would do with a problem, and writes to Gerry about it.

Gerry, predictably, sends him a Howler.

In his defence, the Howler has Kind But Loud Advice written on the outside of it, and Yoongi honestly doesn't know what he was expecting.

On the third of July the red envelope arrives in the mouth of Gerry's hyperactive screech owl (officially called James, unofficially called Mental Bastard.) Yoongi recognises the smoke around the wax and the writing on the mouth of the paper, but it's too late to dive for cover, and he sits in his back garden staring in horror as Gerry's rough approximation of good advice is yelled cheerily at him.

"What do you mean, you're not sure? What the fuck does that mean, you absolute plonker? Are you insane? Has the world gone mad? Go to him and tell him his hair smells like true love and all that shite - you can do it, you idiot, write to him and say you want to meet somewhere romantic like, like, I dunno, Paris or Cornwall or Hobbiton or a fancy ice-cream place in Rome or some shit. Yeah, that's the idea. Go. Go get your man, you beautiful anxious bastard!" And then, as the envelope is burning up and Yoongi is contemplating his own death, a slip of paper falls out and smiles at him through crinkled dead-tree teeth. "Sending my love to you always, Gerry Thompson."

All of this is screeched at a terrible level across Yoongi's nice middle-class English neighbourhood. His friend Nathan shoves his head out a window, looking at him weirdly, waving an Xbox controller at him.

"Is that Gerry?" His mum yells out the kitchen window. "Tell him hi!"

So Yoongi catches that little piece of motherly wisdom in a Howler of his own and sends it by a borrowed Friedreich to Ireland, because Gerry deserves love even if he is totally mental.

Then he sits down and writes a much better, much nicer letter to Jeongguk.

Hi,
I know its been a while since we talked, but I wanted to talk to you about something I can't write to you about because I'd sound like an ass over letter. Do you want to meet at Florean Fortescue's sometime and try not to kill me?

Your friend, Yoongi

He debates adding a heart and then doesn't, and sends it before he can change anything else, and then spends two days desperately dwelling on the ramifications of not adding that little less-than-three symbol after his name. Dwelling until Jeongguk's reply, at least.

Hi,
Sounds good. I'm looking forward to seeing you again. Friday at 11?

jk x :D

Which is good. Really good.

(Jeongguk added an emoticon. Should Yoongi have done that?)

But that gives Yoongi three days to scream into his pillow and Face-Floo Namjoon and cry into his fireplace ashes and gets dust all in his mouth.

Totally in control.

Yeah.

***

"The flannel in grey and red, or the flannel in white, grey, and... is that maroon?"

"Yoongi, I can honestly say I do not give a single fuck," Nathan says, on his phone. "It's not even a date, not officially, right? And you're going to miss the train if you change one more time, and I am going to lose my bloody mind for much the same reason. Keep what you're wearing and chill the fuck out."

"Thanks, man. Real supportive," Yoongi drawls, staying with the maroon and snatching the red cap off Nathan's head. "Does this make me look like a cock?"

"Yes! Yoongi! Train!"

"Oh, shit..." Yoongi scrambles for the door, and has to wait until Nathan has left before he can use the Floo to get to the Leaky Cauldron on time for his not-a-date with Jeongguk. He'll apologise for being a giant wimp and hopefully not blurt out the Amortentia thing he's been sitting on since the Potions exam. Vanilla, hot chocolate, and the smell of Jeongguk's hair.

Yeah, not talking about that. Avoiding it completely.

"Have fun!" His mum says cheerily.

"I'm going to die," he says, kissing her on the cheek. "Love you bye Diagon Alley!"

He arrives with a mouthful of ash, a cough, and a feeling of intense dizziness, in the wide open hearth of the Leaky Cauldron. The people at the bar don't look up - arrivals are more than commonplace here, especially over summer when most of the British wizarding population under eighteen is free to spend all the money they've saved at Hogwarts. The bartender does give him a nod, which Yoongi returns, before he dusts off his knees and heads for the back door, towards the hidden wall behind the bins. Jeongguk. Ice cream. Rejuvenated platonic friendship.

Yoongi sort of feels like he can't breathe, a little.

At least the rumble of the bricks folding back into the wall is familiar, and it gives him a moment to close his eyes and focus on not exploding before he even sees Jeongguk.

Florean Fortescue's ice cream parlour is now owned by two Fortescue nieces, since the man himself retired back to Italy a few years back. The ice cream glitters and sparkles and pops on the tongue, and some of it tastes of feelings rather than flavour, and some of it is so expensive that only, like, Harry Potter would ever be able to afford it.

And Jeongguk is there, sitting outside, eating a mint ice cream - normal but for the shining chunks of chocolate in the mint - and reading a Muggle paperback novel, nibbling on the end of his thumb as he turns the page. The sun of early July shines in his hair, on his cheeks, and he's filled out even in the last two weeks since Yoongi's seen him last. His lips are all bitten and his hair is all ruffled, a little longer than he usually lets it grow, a little lighter with the bleach of the sun.

Yoongi's missed him a lot more than he realised.

"Hi," he says, knocking on the table but not sitting down yet. "Uh. Hey. Long time no see."

Jeongguk smiles at him - a little stiff, a little awkward, but a smile. "Yeah. Sit down, mate, you look dumb standing up."

Yoongi draws the chair out from under the table and thinks about that time he lost a jigsaw puzzle piece when he was younger, and how the picture had been so painfully incomplete without it. He'd looked everywhere for the thing, and found it three days later sitting happily inside the box, and - okay, okay, so maybe the metaphor isn't a perfect one, but when Jeongguk offers him the rest of the magical mint ice-cream, Yoongi thinks it's pretty much all there.

"I just wanted to say-"

"Yoongi, I-"

They stop. A glob of ice-cream drips onto the table, and Yoongi swipes it up with his sleeve, looking at Jeongguk in confusion, seeing the feeling reflected back at him. "Let me apologise first."

"I want to apologise," Jeongguk says, his brows furrowed. "Is that not what this is about?"

"I - no?"

"What?"

"What?"

Yoongi looks at Jeongguk and Jeongguk looks at him, shoving the rest of the ice-cream over. "I was a dick," Jeongguk says. "I - you were hurt and I yelled at you instead of helping, and then I ignored you for six months. What part of that is your fault?"

"Listen," Yoongi pauses to lick the spoon clean, and he can't help but grin at the flavour. "I was an idiot? Like - you were right."

"No, I was an asshole. And I kept being an asshole." Jeongguk kicks him under the table. "I had no right to say that shit, not with - Izzy, that one time, and you're being a better senior to them than I am to my first-years."

"What kind of example am I setting by constantly getting beat up to hell and back?" Yoongi shakes his head. "I just look like a doormat and, yeah sure maybe I stop Max from getting a shiner in the short term but in the long term I just get more shit thrown at me. So I told Malfoy."

"You said Malfoy couldn't do anything," Jeongguk frowns.

"Yeah, maybe he can't put them in detention without the other teachers overriding it, but he can deduct points," Yoongi shrugs, smiling a little. "He started doing that. I'm - yeah. He's a solid guy, Malfoy."

"And...?"

"And I'm sorry for being a shit."

"And I'm sorry for being a terrible friend," Jeongguk says, and across the table the tips of his fingers cover Yoongi's and the gentle breeze blows a waft of Amortentia across his nose. "I - you deserved better than what I gave you, no matter what you say. And I'm sorry. I really, really am."

"Fine, then," Yoongi finds himself saying, and this isn't the right  time for the Amortentia - it isn't. It can't be, not when Jeongguk is looking at him so open and trusting and happy that they're back to normal. There'll be a time for it, soon, but not now. "Okay, then, we make this year one to remember."

"I'm glad," Jeongguk says, and the tiny smile dancing on his face is far better than anything Yoongi's seen in a while.

Dear Gerry,

You were right but you still suck.

Love, Yoongi.

***

"So, does this mean the Quidditch is back on?"

Damien, Yoongi, and Sam are all in one compartment, just across the hall from Max, Izzy, Alwyn, and Edie-Maude, who are making faces through the glass. The three of them, three seventh years, on the Hogwarts Express for the last time - every September, no matter what, they'd ridden together and done the Slytherin bet and slung a summer's worth of shit and talked about the Quidditch and now they're doing it again. Start of the last year.

Feels more like an ending than a beginning.

(Don't think about it.)

"Quidditch is back on," Yoongi shoots Sam his best set of finger guns, "My turn to be captain. I'll knock the pair of you right outta the water, just you wait 'n see."

"Your turn," Damien says. "I wonder what Gerry'll say."

"Probably tell us to get our shit together and win," Sam breaks a lump off a bar of chocolate, splitting that in half again and handing it to the two boys. "This is - this is our last year, right? We gotta win. We gotta make it count."

"We owe it to the mad Irish bastard," Yoongi says, smiling. When he looks out the window all he sees is the speed of the scrubby brush speeding miles behind them. Scotland. Hogwarts. This is the last time he'll be catching this train, unless he takes Malfoy up on that careers offer.

(Don't think about it.)

Quidditch, Jeongguk, Potions, Divination. Yoongi'll make the most of the year, this time.

"Bet! Bet! Bet!"

"Fuck off, gremlins," Sam throws the chocolate wrapper at the door as the other four flood into the compartment - with seven people in, it becomes uncomfortably crowded, and Yoongi ends up squished against the window with Max bracketing him in, opposite a giggling Izzy.

"Jimin bet three," Max says, taking a near-empty moneybag out of his pocket. "He's with his Hufflepuff man - the pretty one. What's his name? Kim something. I bet one, anyway, and those three bet two between them, and the twins told us we were dumb and gambling is bad and they gave us a galleon anyway, and so there's not many numbers left. Place your bets, people!"

"You'd wanna stick to the day job, mate," Damien tells him, setting a galleon on the compartment table between them. "I'll nick Yoongi's technique from last year so's he can't be a sad dick. Zero. That's my bet."

"Boo."

"Valid bet."

"Still. Boo."

"Still valid."

Izzy sticks her tongue out at him."Yoongi, what you gonna pick now Damien's filled our quota of depressing bastard?"

Yoongi leans his head against the window, closing his eyes, seeing clattering bones in the darkness behind his eyelids. "Gimme a second and I'll tell you."

In the meantime, Sam bets four, grinning at Yoongi as though she's won. "No way there'll be more than four. You won't win this year, you prat."

Max giggles, and digs his elbow into Yoongi's side. "Right, mate, what'll it be? Ten? Twenty?"

"Six," Yoongi says decisively, handing over the galleon to the sound of the kids booing in the background. "My winning streak shall continue, oh ye of little faith. Just you wait."

"it's totally cheating if you got an O in your OWL Divination, you prick."

"How is me succeeding academically a cheat in any way? And anyway," Yoongi beams, "That was a simple coincidence. Six was just a shot in the dark. Swear on my life."

The younger four dissolve into giggles and, with a heavily dramatic sigh, Sam pulls another chocolate bar out of her bag to pass around.

The last year.

Six Slytherins. Yeah, totally. They can totally pull that off.

Jimin joins their little train of Slytherins on the way up to the castle, smiling happily and as they flood into the Great Hall Yoongi catches Jeongguk's eye - Jeongguk beams over the glimmer of a thousand candles, dancing on top of the wooden tables. Namjoon is there, wandering in at the head of the Gryffindor line - Hoseok, behind Taehyung, the Head Boy badge glimmering on his chest. Seokjin's gone, entering his first year as an apprentice reporter for the Daily Prophet. Everyone else is still here - Sadie's gone, and without her the mass of blue and bronze Ravenclaws look far less intimidating, especially with Jeongguk in their midst.

"I bet three," Jimin says as they sit down, watching the flood of prospective first-years walk through the central aisle. "Money my way this year. What did the mini-Bloom bet on?"

"Six," Sam replies before Yoongi can.

"Hah! You lost already, mate. Three is the way to go, I feel it."

From the top table, Malfoy is smiling, but when he notices Yoongi looking he coughs and fiddles with the goblet at his elbow.

And in one of the portraits, of course, Snape is pretending not to watch.

The first fifteen kids go to the other three houses, and Damien and Jimin begin to look increasingly smug, and Alwyn has started flashing Yoongi the bird when the top table isn’t looking.

Yoongi raises an eyebrow in what he hopes is a just you wait sort of fashion.

“Davidson, Keith!”

No Divination at the dinner table,” Max snarks at Yoongi, kicking him under the bench. “Bets this one’s a Puff. He looks like a Puff.”

“Puff, yeah.”

Keith Davidson has his eyes closed under the hat, which is taking an absolute age to decide. Yoongi finds himself holding his breath, fingers crossed under the table, and he wishes he wasn’t.

“Slytherin!”

“Holy shit,” Sam says, and now all nineteen of them are on their feet, clapping and hooting as Keith Davidson - looking faintly stunned - slides into place beside the two youngest twins. “Holy shit, Yoongi, you little bastard.”

“What did I do?”

“One down, five to go,” Izzy says. “You won’t win yet, just wait. Me ‘n Alwyn are coming home this year-”

“Slytherin!”

“What the fuck-”

Robert Elias staggers down to the table, and Yoongi begins to grin despite his very best efforts to do otherwise. Alwyn and Max lean over, beaming at the two new kids and trying to shake their hands at the same time, and Elias at the very least looks - well, not-unhappy to have been landed in this particular house.

Sarah-Kate Foster, Esther Mae, and that brings it up to four and Yoongi smiling smugly every time Max’s elbow jostles the moneybag and the entirety of Slytherin House riding some sort of high as the first years become some sort of scary - well, not majority, but a huge chunk of the table.

Jason McDonald joins them, then, beaming broadly and flinging a high-five at one of the other new kids, and the rest of them are on cloud nine. Damien’s staring at the table, chanting what the fuck what the fuck, and Sam has started loudly bitching about how OWL Divination so totally is cheating and it isn’t fair in the slightest and fuck off, Yoongi.

“One more,” Yoongi says, grinning victoriously at Izzy, who beams at him. This - this is a good feeling. Slytherins, so many that it’ll be pretty damn hard to give them a rough time. One more and Yoongi’ll be a three-time winner of the Slytherin Sorting pool.

Carol Wilkinson walks down to the Slytherin table with a self-assured confidence reminiscent of Jimin himself, the heartbreaker of the house in his time, and with a cheer Yoongi leaps to his feet to shake her hand and wave the bag of galleons over his head. He sees Jeongguk laughing, two tables away, and Professor Malfoy hiding his smile behind his sleeve.

“Six!” Damien yells. “Six! Gerry’s gonna fuckin’ lose it!”

“Language, Roadfell!” Professor Ryder shouts down from the top table, and the room falls onto the most crowded welcoming feast Yoongi can remember having in a long, long time.

***

The first Quidditch practice of the year takes place in the middle of September, watched by a miniature crowd of the six new kids, Max waving his hand-made little banner, and Jeongguk all bundled up in his blue scarf, his red nose peeking out between the wrapped layers around his face. When he sees Yoongi and the others trooping onto the pitch, brooms in hand, he waves, and there’s no - no hurt, that Jeongguk doesn’t know about the love, the vanilla and the hot chocolate. Yoongi doesn’t feel like he’s missing anything. He just feels warm, and happy, and good.

“We’re gonna win this year,” Yoongi says. He doesn’t think he needs to say much else, and he’s never been one for the sort of drunk dramatics Gerry used to perform. “Uh - I guess Gerry’ll be pissed if we don’t win, okay?”

Around him, the six players nod solemnly. Gerry, in the four years since he’s left, has gained almost godlike status in the Slytherin House - just look at Max. He practically idolises him.

“Do it for Gerry,” Alwyn says. “Like the Simpsons episode, right?”

“Right,” Yoongi agrees.

(He has no idea what Alwyn is talking about, but that’s nothing new.)

They’re practicing at a normal time of day, for once - Malfoy’s battled hard for the Slytherin spot, nine in the morning on a Saturday, and it feels good to not be doing it at the arsecrack of dawn for once. There’s not much else to say - they get on brooms and fuck around in the air for a bit, pulling robes and tossing Beater bats at each other until Jimin and Edie-Maude get their hands on the equipment, and then Yoongi throws the Bludgers at the pair of them until they’re yelling for him to piss off Min you bastard and, meanwhile, Damien leads the Chasers in a little exercise in seeing how many Quaffles they can lose.

“Coach us, dickhead,” Sam yells, flinging their last Quaffle to Izzy and catching it again on the rebound. “What do we do, c’mon, Damien’s depressing me.”

Yoongi looks over the stands. “Well, we could do a practice match.”

“Oh, no,” Damien says. He’s smiling, though - another thing Yoongi’s missed. “I know that look.”

Five minutes later and there’s fifteen people in the air, and lots more screaming, and a lot more danger around the place too. They split roughly in two, two teams, Jeongguk seeking among the first-year team, Max doing absolutely nothing but chasing after Izzy and Alwyn and trying to get in their way as much as he possibly can.

“Good training plan!” Damien shrieks from the goals, dodging five Quaffles at once. “How is this useful, exactly?”

“It isn’t!” Yoongi shouts. “But it’s bloody good fun - jesus!” As a Bludger comes soaring past his cheek.

And it really is, for all the danger there is of being brained. One of the new kids, that Robert Elias with the smile and the chubby cheeks, is Muggleborn and hasn’t the first clue how to fly a broom, and they waste a happy half hour showing him how to move through the wind, and how to bend across the broom - like a bicycle, but in the air, going very very fast, with the possibility of falling a thousand feet and cracking something vital in the sand and grass of the pitch.

Yeah, totally safe.

“I’ll do seeking next year,” Robert Elias declares, as soon as he can fly without wobbling dangerously. “You’re going next year, right? I can seek? You look super cool. Is it hard? I bet it’s easy for you or something. It looks so cool.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome,” Yoongi can’t help but grin - enthusiasm is catching. “You gotta work out how to go fast, first.”

“He can Seek, but I bag chasing,” Max waves across the pitch at Sam. “Had my eyes on your job since first year.”

“Whatever, you tosser,” she flings the Quaffle at him.

The first match they’ll play is against Hufflepuff in three weeks time, and honestly Yoongi isn’t worried. Maybe he should be, since Hoseok’s still the captain of the Puffs and his tactics are so tight as to be almost unbeatable, and the Slytherin team is out of practice what with the year out, but there isn’t any tension anymore - no pressure to perform. Have fun. Like what Gerry said, way back. Have fun, you fuckers.

“The Puffs ‘ull be tough,” Yoongi says, when it nears eleven in the morning and they haven’t done anything useful at all. “But Hoseok focuses on the Quaffle, yeah? McDonnell on Seek - he ain’t all that. So we don’t give a shit about our Chasing offensive, right, we just help Damien Keep them and stop them from being too overwhelming, yeah, and I’ll take McDonnell and we’ll all come home in time for tea.” He takes a deep breath. “Sound all sound, or does someone else have a better idea?”

“Sounds solid,” Damien says, clapping him soundly on the shoulder with a smile. “We’ll knock them outta the water, just you wait and see.”

Jeongguk is smiling softly when Yoongi looks over at him, and Yoongi looks away as fast as he can, hating how he knows he’s turning pink.

(And Robert Elias and five other Slytherins are looking at Yoongi like how three little kids looked at Gerry Thompson seven years ago.)

Beginnings and endings are all just too fucking hard to cope with.

Yoongi points at Jeongguk. “You - come with us, too, and we’ll all head up to the dungeons and let’s see if anyone’s left any whisky in the Common Room from June.”

***

Robert Elias tries his best to get his hands on the Slytherin whisky, and Damien and Yoongi up the ante in the hiding places they find for it. In the three weeks between the first practice and the Puff match, Yoongi is either practicing, desperately doing late homework, drinking tea with Jeongguk in the Room of Requirement, or hiding alcohol in increasingly ridiculous places with his ex-boyfriend.

And that’s the other thing. Yoongi - although he feels bad, and he’ll always feel bad, for the way he treated Damien - thinks there’s less there, too, like they’re back where they were. Damien is his friend, his oldest and maybe his closest through his whole time at Hogwarts, and that never vanished.

“The little shit just learned Accio in Charms,” Damien says, Levitating the half-full bottle onto the top of the canopy on his bed. “Just you wait, we’ll have a dorm full of pissed twelvies before the end of the week.”

“Remember when we nicked Gerry’s booze?”

“Yeah,” Damien laughs, all reminiscent and soft. “Oh, fuck, do you remember when Katie Jeffries spiked the pumpkin juice and didn’t tell us and we thought we’d got food poisoning?”

“Sam got blackout drunk on Halloween night!”

“Fucking hilarious.” Damien shoves his wand into his pocket. “I’m gonna miss this place. Christ.”

“Don’t act like it’s over yet, mate. Only October,” Yoongi says, ignoring the uncomfortable feeling of ending in the back of his head. “We got plenty of time. And it’s not like we won’t stop. Hell, we all still talk to Gerry.”

“True.”

Robert Elias says his little sister wants to be a witch, and she’s written him several letters since the start of term about how she wants to be in Slytherin because she thinks her big brother is the coolest guy in the whole world. Yoongi’s written that one in the letter to Gerry he’s slowly composing, aided and abetted by Max. Gerry would like the new kids.

“Match tomorrow. How’ll we do?”

“Good,” Yoongi says, staring at the ceiling. “I have… fuck, so much work for Bloom. And Malfoy on my ass about practicing more.”

“Same,” Damien flops down onto his own bed. “I thought free periods would mean, like, rest. Not going and brewing Liver Elixir every five bloody minutes, y’know?”

“Ugh.”

Divination and Potions are at the forefront of his mind. Malfoy, in a low voice at the end of yesterday’s lesson, told him he would accept nothing less than an O in Potions NEWT before he would consider Yoongi for an apprenticeship, and that Bloom would no doubt expect the same. But Yoongi - he doesn’t know if he can teach. If people can find him someone to respect, and listen to.

“I’ve fucked up a lot,” he says to Jeongguk, later in the library when they’re bent over their books. “I don’t - think. Things. I don’t think I would be great at that.”

“You haven’t, though,” Jeongguk says. Under the table he kicks Yoongi’s ankle, and taps his finger against Yoongi’s knuckles, and Yoongi aches. “You haven’t. Like, sure, you had a messy breakup, but - but you’re great with your juniors. Like - like, like Max and Izz and Al, and even the new kids, they think you’re the best ever. Hell, I think you’re the best ever. You’d be a wonderful teacher,” and his eyes are so big and soft and Yoongi wants to kiss him.

“I don’t know,” he says, instead of anything else he might want to. “I just… gotta think about it.”

“You’ll make the right choice.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Jeongguk kicks him again. “You will.”

Yoongi shrugs. He can’t stop thinking about Damien, and all the things he messed up there, and the whole messy mess with Jeongguk last year. “What else do I do? Malfoy’s done all my thinking for me. I have, like, zero clue of where I want to go next year.”

“Why is teaching such a bad plan?” Damien asks in the dorm late one night. “You’d be okay.”

Yeah, and the guilt bubbles up all the while.

“I’m no good,” Yoongi says, as soon as he thinks Damien’s gone to sleep. The dorm room is dark and murky, the light cast in from the night of the moon, and with only a week to go until his first match as Quidditch Captain - and two weeks until the Halloween break - he feels like this is it, in some sort of weird way. Like he can’t move forward with Jeongguk or Damien because he fucked up so badly with both of them.

And who does he talk to about this? Snape, the dead Potions master, who’ll tell him to shut up and stop being a teenager? Malfoy, who looks like emotion is a thing he’s long lost contact with? Namjoon and Hoseok, who’s solution to everything is to see if it looks better from the other side of a bottle?

“You’re good,” Damien says, five minutes later, in the dark. He sounds muffled, like he has a pillow pressed to his face. “Yoongi, you’re a fucking idiot, but you’re not a bad person.”

“Mmf.”

“Seriously.”

Yoongi balls up his duvet in his fist. “I’m a dick.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yeah I am.”

Damien sits up; Yoongi hears the rustling of sheets and cotton pyjamas. “Look, Yoongi, it takes two to bloody tango. You can’t take all the, all the, all the blame for a failed relationship, that’s just - it’s just mental, and stupid.” If Damien hears Yoongi’s soft noise of protest he doesn’t acknowledge it. “Don’t act like I was the only one that got messed up in that shitstorm last year.”

“Just - don’t, Damien,” Yoongi mumbles into his pillow. “I said I’m sorry and I’ll keep saying it as long as I want to. I just - fucking hell, let me feel bad, c’mon.”

“I don’t fucking want you to say it in the first place.”

Yoongi faceplants into his bedsheets.

“I want my friend back,” Damien continues, relentless in the harsh whispers of the night. “Not - not Yoongi full of fucking sorries all the time when I don’t give a shit about any of that, about any of them. I just want us to go back to how we were without bloody apologising. Get used to it. I want you to stop feeling like an ass, so stop fucking acting like you should be an ass and be my friend again.”

Yoongi breathes in fresh cotton; breathes in for a long time.

And then gets the breath knocked out of him as Damien’s pillow hits him in the back.

“I’ve forgiven you, you wanker. Do us all a favour and forgive yourself.”

This time, Yoongi is definitely sure Damien’s asleep before he exhales. “Okay, whatever,” he says, and rolls over, and goes to sleep.

***

The party after they win the Hufflepuff match is insane.

For one, Yoongi remains adamant that he’s dreaming, and that the match hasn’t actually taken place yet, and therefore any attempts to cheer are met with blank eyes and shrugs. Damien starts singing in his ear, and Max and Izzy and Alwyn have vanished into a store cupboard, shedding Quidditch robes and giggling and Yoongi really, really doesn’t want to know.

At seven in the evening, when the entirety of Slytherin House plus the handful of others they’ve befriended over the years - Namjoon, Hoseok, Taehyung sitting on Jimin’s lap having grapes fed to him, a girl probably called Janet who’s in some sort of loose arrangement with Sam, a set of twins from Hufflepuff who have befriended the Slytherin twins and who sit in the corner, drinking Butterbeer and playing Go Fish - all of them pile into the Common Room, half of them drunk, the other half reaching it, and melt onto the floor.

“You’ll win this year,” Hoseok says, all tipsy, his accent so thick and strong that it’s almost hard to hear him. “I know it. I don’t even mind it. You’re good.”

“You old bastard,” Yoongi says. “Gimme beer. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

In the corner, Namjoon is telling a similarly-pissed Sam all about the details of his long, complicated relationship with Seokjin. Sam is nodding. Namjoon looks like he might cry.

“I love him three,” Jeongguk says, passing out cans of beer from the stuffed grocery bag Hoseok brought with him. (Snape sees all, but it’s a long-accepted fact that the kids are gonna drink no matter what the teachers do, so he might as well accept it. Drinking. A time-honoured tradition.)

“I love you the most,” Yoongi kisses his thumb and then tries to touch Jeongguk’s neck, but he misses and ends up falling on his shoulder. “Holy fuck, did you see when we did that thing and we won? We’re awesome. Nobody give that Elias kid any drink.”

“Too late!” Damien shouts. “I gave him something. Possibly vodka. Maybe lemonade.”

“Definitely vodka,” Robert Elias says, lying in front of the fire, hugging an empty plastic shot glass. “I want some more.”

“No,” six different people say at once, and Namjoon ends up confiscating the vodka bottle for the ‘good of the rest of the house’. The rest of the first years still manage to nick Hoseok’s beer, and sit in a circle playing Gin Rummy and giggling for the rest of the night.

“I love you,” Damien begins, and burps. “No. Shut up, shut up, I’m talking, shut up.”

“Nobody said anything.”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“Shut up.”

Yoongi locks his lips and throws away the key.

“You’re, like, my best friend,” Damien’s hand lands heavy on Yoongi’s shoulder, “Like, ever I think maybe, and I love you, okay? And we’ll win the Quidditch and I love you and you should probably kiss that kid you like, because I love you and I’m giving you permission. But, like, soft love. I don’t wanna fuck you sorta love.”

“I love you too,” Yoongi agrees. “Same way. Don’t wanna fuck love.”

“Don’t fuck love.”

“Abstract concepts,” Namjoon says, and falls off the couch.

“To Slytherin!” Yoongi holds his cup in the air, and across the room, he sees Jeongguk’s smile in the haze. Plastic cups, beer cans, and in one case a vase empty of flowers and full of whisky are all thrust in the air, but Yoongi’s only looking at one person as they all yell to Slytherin and down whatever drink they’ve found in their cups.

Drinking receptacles.

Things.

***

Predictably, when it happens, it’s as understated and quiet as their friendship always has been - soft moments playing Gobstones in the hidden rooms of the castle, and studying together on rainy days, and eating hot fudge and talking about the Quidditch.

Malfoy is working hard on Yoongi this year, and Yoongi’s giving back as good as he gets. None of the seventh-years go home for Christmas; between Quidditch and NEWTS, Yoongi’s drowning under tactical plans for their Ravenclaw match, and star charts for Bloom, and endless memorised recipes for Malfoy, and letters to and from Gerry and chess matches and silent moments snatched with Jeongguk and time to drink and complain with the rest of his House.

So - scene. The day before Christmas Eve and he’s in the dungeons on his own, brewing Amortentia and hoping that this will be the time it goes right, so he doesn’t have to spend more time scrubbing dried goat liver from the inside of his cauldron.

“Yoongi?”

“Hey,” Yoongi doesn’t look around at the call of Jeongguk’s voice; he’s busy trying to cut an onion root perfectly in half. “Sorry - if you wanna, like, sit down - my shit is everywhere-”

“I got it,” there’s the sound of rustling papers and the scrape of a wooden stool against flagstones, before Jeongguk’s hand appears in the corner of Yoongi’s vision, holding a knife. “This one is better for cutting onions.”

“Huh,” Yoongi takes it without question, pleased when it actually works. “How’d you know that?”

“No Potions talent. I just like cooking with my dad,” Jeongguk grins; Yoongi can hear it in his voice. “What are you making?”

“Attempting Amortentia for the thousandth time,” Yoongi tosses the onion hairs into the cauldron - the method calls for the shaved part of the bald onion, which is a fucking riddle, which isn’t fair to find in a Potions textbook. “It’s hard as hell. Malfoy will kill me if I can’t do it right by January, though.”

“You seem to be doing it pretty good,” Jeongguk mumbles, propping his chin on his hand as he stares into the cauldron. “Potions looks stressful.”

“Not really,” Yoongi takes up the knife again, fiddling with the lilywort in his hand. “It’s - once you get the hang of it, right? I like it.”

“I could never,” Jeongguk says. “Transfig and Charms all the way.”

“Intuition and practice,” Yoongi says absent-mindedly.

“Huh?”

“Bloom always says there’s two kinds of magic, and they’re intuition and practice,” Yoongi wipes his sticky hands on his robes and starts stirring, as carefully as he can. “Like… working hard and learning charms and movements and stuff, that’s practice, and that’s awesome. And intuition is feeling shit, which is - less than ideal.”

“Yeah, but you can do Divination,” Jeongguk says. “That’s pretty awesome.”

“Only some of the time.”

“You won the Slytherin draw.”

“Pure chance,” Yoongi grins.

“Yeah, for sure.”

The Amortentia is turning a shade of pale pink, slowly but surely, with a sweet smell of vanilla and hot chocolate and Jeongguk flooding into the room that Yoongi is too used to now to react to. He inhales, and smiles in satisfaction, and when he looks at the wall he sees Snape looking at him with what could be called pride, if that painting ever admitted to feeling emotion in the first place. “Well, sir?”

“Good,” Snape says. “Very good.”

“What - does this potion do,” Jeongguk asks. His cheeks are all pink and blotchy, and his hands are clasped together so tight the knuckles are white. “It’s not, like… what?”

“Amortentia is the strongest love potion there is. Side effects include smelling like your true love,” Yoongi dips a decanting bottle into the cauldron and corks it, setting it in the centre of Malfoy’s desk with his name on the label. “It can be - uh, disconcerting, I guess.”

“Disconcerting,” Jeongguk repeats. He’s bright red. “Like - cut grass and tea and-”

And the door is swinging shut behind him before he can say anything more, and Yoongi -

“He’s going to the Astronomy Tower, if you want to catch him,” Snape says dryly. “Confess your undying love or whatever it is young people do these days.”

“Thanks,” Yoongi gasps, and he’s scrambling out the door after him.

***

“I’m in love with you,” Yoongi says, when he bursts out onto the top of the Astronomy Tower, when he sees Jeongguk’s tipped neck staring up into the stars. “When I make that potion it reminds me of you and I’m in love with you and that’s why I’ve been so weird and all last year, too, and I - oh my god, I’m taking Gerry’s advice, I’m fucking up - no, okay, I’m in love with you.” He inhales. Jeongguk isn’t moving, but he is looking around, his eyes all big and soft. “I’ve been in love with you for a while, I think,” Yoongi says, quieter. “I dunno when. I just - if you don’t, then that’s okay, because whatever you can be to me is all I want. But. But I want you to know, I suppose. That I love you.”

“Okay,” Jeongguk says. “I love you too.”

“And I don’t - wait, what?”

He laughs like Yoongi’s said something worth laughing at, giggling until the tears puddle in the corners of his eyes. “I love you too, you nutcase. I, unlike you, know what feelings are and how to deal with them.”

“How dare,” Yoongi says, but he comes closer, and sits down, and Jeongguk’s shoulder brushes his. “I am in control of my feelings.”

“Your reaction to anything is to either drink yourself into a coma with Jimin Park, or talk to Gerry for advice, when he’s genuinely the craziest guy I know. Control,” Jeongguk crooks his fingers playfully, “Yeah, sure.”

Yoongi knocks him back. “Shut up. I worked hard on that confession.”

“It was sweet. Very you.”

“What’s that meant to mean?”

“All over the place, unplanned, kind of a trainwreck, but it all worked out in the end,” Jeongguk nudges Yoongi’s hand with his, and their fingertips cross, watched by the twinkling constellations. “You ruined mine, though. I was going to write a pretty letter and confess in the Room or something, and it would have been really sweet, y’know?”

“Oops,” Yoongi says. He’s holding Jeongguk’s hand. Or - their hands are kind of crossed over one another, fingertip-to-knuckle, but still. He’ll take what he can get. “I panicked. Kind of still panicking. Sorry about ruining your cheesy Muggle movie plans.”

“You’re terrible,” Jeongguk says, and they sit and watch the stars and their hands creep closer together until Yoongi falls asleep, right there, against Jeongguk’s shoulder, and doesn’t wake when Jeongguk moves back inside.

(It’s winter. Still cold, even if they are trying to be romantic.)

(And they have the rest of the year to be sappy.)

(And then Jeongguk, very quietly, gives himself five minutes to panic about being in love with his best friend, and then when he’s done panicking he thinks he’s pretty okay with the way things have turned out, what with all the potions and the studying and the Quidditch and the mint ice-cream in the summer.)

(All good, all good.)

***

Really, it’s just like their friendship has been for years.

The kissing is a pretty good bonus, though.

***

Really, Divination is the only NEWT subject that isn’t actively contributing to Yoongi’s death wish. Ancient Runes is just a lot of bookwork, studying, translating, and shoving his head into books ten times as old as he is - he can just about deal with Runes, which is just memorisation and regurgitation among the interesting nuggets of information, but it’s still a lot to try and learn. Potions, much as it is falling into the method, is still a very - precise, exact sort of subject. Yoongi’s trying to learn all ten NEWT potions for the practical exam, not to mention the potioneering history he needs to know for the written.

But Divination is fun.

“Miss?”

“Yes?” Bloom pours them two cups of tea, the black liquid pooling against the thin china. “You appear to have had a wonderful Christmas break.”

Yoongi slaps his hand to the side of his neck. “Um-”

“I meant emotionally,” she says, eyes twinkling, tipping the sugar bowl into her own cup. “Clearly you think there have been other benefits.”

“Um,” Yoongi repeats, scarlet to the shoulders, shrugging further into his shirt collar to hide the splotchy hickey on his neck. “No? Um. Can I ask you something?”

“Of course. Ask away.”

“If you see something in a crystal ball, does it really have to come true?”

Bloom sits down, eyes narrowed, slender fingers folded under her chin. “Why do you ask?”

When he opens his eyes, the crystal ball isn't murky.

He sees Jeongguk, first of all, Jeongguk kissing someone whose face is obscured by the mist. Someone a little shorter than him. This Jeongguk is older, a little more built and a lot more confident, but no matter how hard Yoongi seeks it out, he can't see the face of the person Jeongguk's kissing. Then the crystal mist whips the picture away from him again, and it's gone, vanished into the depths of the ball.

He sees Alwyn Brydon bleeding from the nose, his eyes full of tears, jumping up and down and cheering. Alwyn's hair is longer. The mist takes him away.

He sees Damien, curled up with his hands around his knees, staring into a cup of something hot and smoking, someone holding his shoulder. Is it Yoongi? It has to be Yoongi.

He sees another misty figure, pink in the face, screaming fit to burst, a fat lip burst open, blood all down the front of his robes, his hands shaking. Yoongi can see all of his face, and he looks familiar, but for the life of him he can't recognise who it is. He's yelling at Jeongguk, though, this figure, and crying quite a bit, and as Yoongi watches Jeongguk bites out something and turns on his heel and walks away, and the misty figure leans against the wall and slides down it, beginning to mop up his lip with the end of his robes.

He sees someone else. Malfoy and someone else, shouting. Who the fuck is that? Yoongi recognises him, but he doesn't know from where. He makes Yoongi feel kind of sick.

He sees -

Jeongguk. Kissing someone again.

“A few years ago I looked in a crystal ball,” he says, even though that’s totally inadequate - what does he say? A few years ago he found a cathedral to the future, and tried to read himself with only a small portrait for company? “I just - some of the things have come true, but not all of them. And - I was wondering. What. What exactly-”

“What do you think the future is?” Bloom interrupts, eyes all narrow and catlike through the steam of hot tea. “What would you define it as?”

“As -” Yoongi stops, nonplussed. “As - I dunno. It’s the future.”

“But is it fixed?”

“I dunno,” he says again, gazing into the depths of his own teacup. If he focuses he could probably read something in them, but he doesn’t much feel like it. “I guess… the existence of Divination means it must be? But then - what’s the point of doing things if you’ll always end up the same?”

Bloom doesn’t say anything.

“The future is both fixed and fluid at the same time?”

“A paradoxical statement,” she says.

Yoongi shrugs. “How else are we meant to exist?”

Bloom stares at him another half minute, and then smiles, her cheeks crinkling. “I’m impressed, honestly. That is the basis of Divination theory, although many choo

se to discard it to believe in their horoscopes and their blood types and their Hogwarts House. The future is fixed and fluid. If you saw something in a crystal ball a few years ago, and it hasn’t come to fruition, but other things have, what do you think that means?”

“I dunno.”

“Think, Min. I can’t do your NEWT for you.”

Yoongi’s foot taps an anxious tattoo on the ground. “Uh… fixed, fluid… a few years ago my future was - fixed… but... but actions I took made it fluid and fixed a different future, and therefore…”

“And therefore,” Bloom nods. “Therefore the actions you took avoided the outcome you saw. You changed your future.”

“But I saw a future,” Yoongi says. Alwyn, with a bloody nose - that never happened. But the yelling, the fat lip, the blood… that happened, and Damien curled up on the floor, someone comforting him. It must have been Izzy, back when Yoongi was sleeping in her unused dorm and nobody was talking. “Did that future still come true? Somewhere?”

“I believe the Muggles have more theories for that than we do,” Bloom says. Again, she smiles. “But let me tell you - if you continue on the fixed future you have set yourself, I see only goodness for you. And I shall be seeing a lot more of you in the future, so don’t fall off the path you’re on now.”

And Jeongguk is waiting for him at the bottom of the tower and they go to eat lunch and study and throw chips at Jimin and Taehyung and Yoongi thinks he’s quite happy with the path he’s on now, really, if he’s honest.

Jeongguk smiles and Yoongi kisses him on the cheek, because he can.

Pretty good path. Pretty good, indeed.

***

The second Slytherin match of the year is in mid-February, against the Ravenclaws, and Jeongguk spends a lot of time among his housemates - apparently they want him to ask Yoongi for insider strategy, which Yoongi refuses to reveal, and any conversation even approaching the Quidditch ends in the two of them arms-folded staring angrily at opposite walls, before one of them pokes the other and they fall into a game of Gobstones, or a long half-hour of sharing sleepy kisses and avoiding any mention of the dreaded topic.

Yoongi’s favourite pastime is becoming the drag of Jeongguk’s lips against his, the way they both giggle, the way they can never find a comfortable position, the way their teeth knock together when they try to move, the way they’re learning how to be.

And Quidditch, of course.

“Gerry wrote yesterday,” Damien says, the morning of the match. None of them have got much sleep, and the atmosphere in the Great Hall is much more unfriendly this morning than it usually is. Nobody really wants to give Slytherin a winning shot at the Cup, which they have if they win this match.

“What did he say?” Robert Elias, one of the new kids, is eating marmalade by the spoonful, and chewing happily on cheekfuls of orange peel. “Is he the cool one? Is he coming?”

“He said he’d shove a broom up Yoongi’s arse and kick him to Timbuktu if we don’t win,” Damien says, in the same glum voice. “And he said he was coming to the village to stay for Easter break.”

“Doesn’t Yoongi get a say in what gets shoved up his arse?” Yoongi asks, taking the marmalade off Robert and dumping the rest of the jar onto his toast. “Oi, you scrawny kicker, you ate all the marmalade.”

“Use marmite instead.”

“I would rather die.”

“Yoongi gets no say in what gets shoved up his arse, according to Gerry,” Damien hands the letter over. “He’s listed broomsticks, the wrath of his mother, and the country of Wales, with more to come if we lose.”

“Forgive me for not feeling very inspired.”

“I’ll hit you with a Bludger if you don’t catch the Snitch,” Jimin suggests from down the table. “Oh! I’ll tell Taehyung to tell Jeongguk to stop making out with you for a week if we lose.”

“Do that anyway,” Alwyn says, squinting at Yoongi. “That bloke is a fucking vampire, mate, if I didn’t know any better I’d think you had a really bad rash.”

“There are children present,” Yoongi says as haughtily as he can manage, tipping his collar up to his jaw. “Kindly shut the fuck up, ‘cos I know you have a thing-”

Which leads to a breakfast tussle, which leads to a threat of detention from Malfoy, which leads to a lot of giggling-behind-hands and kicking-under-tables and a general atmosphere much lighter than the one that they brought from the Common Room.

Right before they have to march out to the pitch, Jeongguk runs into the Slytherin rooms, pink in the face and bedecked in the Ravenclaw colours. “Good luck,” he squeaks, and dives into a kiss with Yoongi to the accompanied hooting and whistling of the rest of the Slytherins. “I’ll be cheering for you,” he says, scarlet to his toes, before he runs out again and back to the Ravenclaw stands.

Samantha wipes an imaginary tear from his eye. “Do it for your sweetheart, Min. Are we in a fucking Muggle film?”

Yoongi wipes the spit from his lips - it wasn’t a very neat kiss - and shoves his broom in the air. “Let’s win!”

“Yeah!”

And so they do.

With bells on.

Fuck yeah.

***

“I sucked that Quaffle’s dick!”

“That doesn’t make sense, mate-”

“I sucked it-”

“Nah, man, it sucked your dick-”

“Ravenclaw can kiss my ass-”

“We’re gonna win the cup-”

“We’re gonna win the cup-”

“We’re gonna win the cup-”

When they spill into the Common Room at night, drunk on adrenaline and the cheers of - okay, the boos, but Malfoy was cheering and so were the kids - and also drunk on a considerable amount of pre-drinks stashed in the changing room lockers, there’s pastries sitting on the table, with a little note signed be awake in class tomorrow and the wax seal that matches the silver ring on Malfoy’s thumb. Yoongi grins at it, because it means more when he’s wobbly with drinking, and folds it into the inner pocket of his robes, and rips a Danish in half with his teeth. “Mffuckyeah!”

“We’re gonna win the cup, we’re gonna win the cup,” the six youngest sprawl next to the fire, half-chanting and half-singing and squabbling over the jam donuts. “We’re gonna win the cup…”

Sam vanishes into her room and when she reappears, she’s wielding cans in packs of six, condensation rolling down their cool sides from the icebox that nobody officially knows about. “Fuck yeah we are,” she says, tossing a drink to Yoongi and Damien before letting the younger ones have at it. “My god, imagine the look on Gerry’s face.”

“He’d die.”

“He’d die.”

In the corner, whooping and yelling, Izzy and Max are hauling out the great big gramophone Izzy’s mother had sent to them, complete with pressed records of Muggle songs and wizarding hits. Hazy with the shots and the beer, Yoongi slumps in his seat - no Jeongguk tonight, he’d be slaughtered if he left the mourning Ravenclaws - and this is a more intimate celebratory party, all slow and loose and Alwyn fighting with the gramophone as he tries to get Iggy Pop to work.

“Another,” Damien hollers, and cans of beer fly through the air.

“Accio great big shot of whisky!”

“Not how magic works,” Sam yells, and Yoongi bursts out laughing when she ducks to avoid the flying bottle. “Oh, fuck you!”

Esther Mae and another of the new kids, Carol Wilkinson, are over by the records when someone puts on Great Balls of Fire, of all the fucking things, and Yoongi topples off the sofa with laughing, clutching his stomach as the little trio try a bizarre Frankenstein version of the jive.

“Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!” Damien screeches. “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain…”

“Accio another great big shot of whisky!”

“That’s not how magic works!”

And more drinking. More pastries. At one point they bother Alwyn and Izzy into running down to the kitchens to tickle the pear and ask the elves on night duty if they could kindly have whatever food is lying about; they end up listening to Penny Lane and the Beach Boys and eating cold sausage rolls with the Firewhisky they begged off the elves.

“Someone’s gonna have to do a booze run,” Yoongi says, when he holds up his hand and his vision spins. The night is winding down. Sam and Damien are asleep, pillowed on each other and their Quidditch robes, and someone has put George Harrison on the record player. Yoongi is talking to himself.

Around the Common Room, his friends are mostly sleeping, mostly knocked into a drunken stupor. The first years are in a sugar coma puppy pile by the fire, covered in a light layer of sugar frosting, fingertips glistening with jam. In his sleep, Robert Elias is humming goodness gracious great balls of fire, a beaming smile on his face.

Yoongi takes one last swig of the whisky, in honour of Gerry and the headache he’ll have in the morning, and happily passes out leaning against Alwyn’s shoulder.

A good night.

They won.

(And everyone booed.)

A good night.

***

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I love you,” Jeongguk says. Yoongi has his legs flung over Jeongguk’s lap, sucking on the end of a sugar-spun quill as he doodles pictures of Malfoy’s nose in the margins of his study notes. They’re in an abandoned classroom on the Transfiguration corridor, in theory because Jeongguk wants to revise for his practical, but in reality because they want a change of scenery but without having to go to the library and start whispering among the stacks.

Yoongi hums, leaning his forehead against Jeongguk’s shoulder. “Love you too. Why?”

“Why do I love you?”

“Why now, you dumbass,” Yoongi dips the tip of the quill back in the ink bottle Jeongguk is holding up for him. “I love you all the time, you know I do.”

“I like saying it,” Jeonguk says. He presses his nose into the crown of Yoongi’s head. “Let me be a sap.”

“You’re always a sap, whether I let you or not.”

“Mm. Love you.”

Yoongi hasn’t kissed many people. He kissed Yasmin Taylor, his neighbour, when he was nine and wanted to know what it felt like, and he kissed Sam in first year on a dare, and he kissed Damien consistently for, like, a year. The first two don’t count, but Damien does, and Jeongguk doesn’t kiss like Damien did.

His thumb brushes Yoongi’s chin, and Yoongi sighs and eats the rest of his quill and sets his revision out of harm's way before wriggling fully into Jeongguk’s lap, letting the wandering hand land on his jaw and pull his face around to face Jeongguk’s. “Hi, there.”

“Fancy meeting you here,” Jeongguk says. He has warm hands, and he doesn’t mind holding Yoongi’s, and he likes touching things. Yoongi’s hair - his cheeks - his hand. “Mind if I proposition you?”

“How very forward,” Yoongi says.

Jeongguk giggles, and his hand falls to the back of Yoongi’s head and his fingers twist a little in the curly hairs there and he pulls Yoongi forward - Yoongi lets himself be pulled - and brushes his lips against Yoongi’s, as soft as summer and as sweet as sugar.

Jeongguk kisses like he knows Yoongi will always be there to kiss him back. Yoongi could do this for hours, and he has; sitting in Jeongguk’s lap, hands on his waist and in his hair, soft little noises murmuring out of their bubble of intimacy. Jeongguk’s lips are warm and wet and every so often, with a soft giggle, he nips on Yoongi’s bottom lip and tugs it, because Yoongi always whines when he does.

“Hey,” Jeongguk says, when they surface for air.

“Hey,” Yoongi says. With the absence of Jeongguk’s mouth, he trails down from his lips to his jaw to his neck, leaving wet open-mouthed kisses there. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Jeongguk says, and tugs on Yoongi’s hair as light as he can. “My eyes are up here.”

“Don’t wanna make out with your eyes.”

“Fuck you, that came out wrong. I was trying to be smooth.”

“Yeah, and failing,” Yoongi looks up to see the unbearable softness creasing Jeongguk’s face. “You could just ask, you nerd.”

“I’m being flirtatious,” Jeongguk says. “I have spit on my neck, now. Look what you did.”

“I was making out with you.”

“Improve your technique, then come back to me,” Jeongguk kisses him. “Mm. I love you.”

I love you too. “I love you too,” Yoongi hums at the flat tongue, the scratching teeth Jeongguk scrapes against his throat. “Izzy’s getting sick of - oh - me borrowing her foundation.”

“Then don’t.”

“I’m a respectable adult. I can’t walk around with - owfuck - hickeys on me like a horny teenager.”

“You are a horny teenager, you fucker,” Jeongguk pokes his side and they bend into laughing, warm and nice. “Just gotta play the part you were born into.”

“Gimme a gold medal.”

“Will a kiss do?” Jeongguk asks him, and Yoongi smiles - well what do you think written all over his face - and tilts his head forward to accept his reward.

***

“Name three common substitutions you would make if foxglove was not available to you during the brewing of the Cold Cough Cure,” Snape says.

Yoongi wipes his brow; the potion is hot, and the condensation keeps cooling on his cheeks and the tip of his nose. “Um. Dandelion root, docken leaves, or the left lung of an Irish Elk,” he says.

“What would you do in the event of an exploding Liver Salt?”

“Shove my fingers in my ears and hope for the best,” Yoongi sets the silver spoon to self-stir and runs his fingertip down the well-worn pages of his Potions book. “Ask me some proper questions, go on, you weren’t a Potions Master for nothing.”

“There’s no point in asking you any more,” Snape says, with no small amount of exasperation. “You know that book inside out and then some, even with all the mistakes in the methods, and you’re a natural even at the most difficult of potions. Hell - look what you’re doing now!”

“Practicing questions never did any man any harm,” Yoongi says. The potion, which he’s been working at on and off for three months now, is finally starting to thicken, turning translucent in the very base of the cauldron. Within the month, he thinks, it’ll be gold. “Either you help me study or you bugger off.”

“Don’t be rude to elders and betters.”

“You’re only one of those, and even that’s debatable - that frame you’re in looks pretty modern.”

Snape rolls his eyes, the action exaggerated through the - very modern, in truth - painting of a dog he’s currently inhabiting. “I never thought I’d say this, but you’re actually preferable when you’re sniping about your love life.”

“You’re petty as hell,” Yoongi says, wiping his damp hair out of his eyes. “Go on, hush, you wanna see if I can get this right too.”

Snape obligingly shuts up, but Yoongi can feel his judgemental stare though layers of canvas and splotched paint.

Yoongi is brewing - or trying to brew - a working batch of Felix Felicitas, although he knows it’s way beyond the level of skill he’ll need to do well in the NEWT. He started this lot in January, and now it’s March and he hasn’t fucked it up yet, and it isn’t much more than something to keep him occupied, but he knows if he can do this, he can do anything. And Bloom said he would succeed if he stays on the path he’s on, which means studying until his eyes fall out and become an essential ingredient of whatever potion he’s working on at the time.

Which means luck potion, and Snape endlessly grilling him about Potions trivia.

“What on earth are you doing? No, don’t answer that, I know exactly what you’re doing - why on earth are you doing that?”

Yoongi looks up from the cauldron to see Malfoy leaning in the doorway, looking bright and intrigued, his robes unbuttoned down his neck. It’s after hours, but Malfoy never really relaxes - Yoongi wonders if he knows how. “I don’t think this potion is on our syllabus,” Malfoy says, moving into the room and shutting the door behind him. “How far through are you?”

“Three months,” Yoongi says, letting Malfoy peer into the cauldron. “But it’s just - like, for fun. Not real.”

“Some of these ingredients are only available to people who have a license, and who have sat a vetting exam in the Ministry,” Malfoy says.

“Yeah, but your old Master knows the password to the restricted cupboard, and he likes me.”

Malfoy flings a half-hearted glare at Snape. “Traitor.”

Snape just shrugs.

I actually do want to talk to you, Min,” Malfoy says, as Yoongi gives the mixture one more stir before sliding the pewter lid back over the cauldron. “Have you given any more thought to what you would do after Hogwarts?”

“Nope,” Yoongi says. He has. Lots of thought. Usually they end with him getting incredibly drunk with Namjoon, and debating whether it’s too late to rejoin Muggle society and become investment bankers.

“I have.”

“Sir, you already left Hogwarts,” Yoongi says. “You don’t need to think about it.”

Malfoy blinks at him. “No - thinking about your case.”