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“He’s handing out night vision goggles,” Lucius Malfoy tells Salazar in a snotty, scandalized, semi-conspiratorial whisper, about twenty minutes before lights-out. “And he went to the Army Surplus store last weekend and stocked up on, like, grappling hooks and chili-mac MREs and amphibious camouflage gear.”
Salazar narrows his eyes and slowly removes his toothbrush from his mouth, spearmint-flavored saliva dribbling down his chin. At the other end of the sink, Mulciber and Dolohov are wrestling over what looks like a tube of Clearasil, and behind them, the younger, creepier Lestrange brother is toweling his hair dry while simultaneously trying to turn a page on one of his trashy weirdo vampire books. Malfoy already has his monogrammed satin pajamas on, the matching set, a sleek black leather toiletries kit tucked under his arm and a hilariously grave expression on his face.
“You think he’s planning something?” Salazar finally asks. “An ambush?”
Malfoy purses his lips. “I think we need reinforcements.”
Salazar leans forward to spit, wiping at his mouth with the back of his wrist, and then hesitates, considering his options. Technically, teams were picked last week, and they aren’t allowed to recruit any new members. He figures there’s probably a loophole for that—there’s always a loophole—but even if there isn’t, he doesn’t mind bending the rules a little bit. Ignoring them. Rewriting them. Willfully misinterpreting them.
The point of the game is to win, not to play fairly.
And Malfoy might be a twelve-year old boy—a spoiled, whiny, particularly god-awful twelve-year old boy—but he gossips like Salazar’s nana does after a few too many scoops of rainbow sherbet at her church’s monthly ice cream social, and he’s really fucking good at Battleship.
“What kind of reinforcements?”
The door is old and creaking and weather-beaten, with crooked hinges and peeling blue paint, humidity-swollen and sawdust-soft. Towards the top, there’s a slightly misshapen rectangular sign hanging from a long, rusty nail, its ratty plywood frame peppered with hand-carved little owls wearing glasses:
ARTS & CRAFTS
Salazar doesn’t think he’s actually ever been over here before. Not on purpose, at least. It’s on the opposite side of camp from the obstacle course—from the rock wall and the mud pit and the cargo net and his personal favorite, the rope swing—and he usually manages to pawn off his security patrols on the junior counselors who still kind of hero worship him. To be fair, they also still kind of hero worship Gryffindor, which is embarrassing for everyone, but Salazar’s sure as shit going to put an end to that.
That’s why he’s here.
Puffing his cheeks out, he straightens his shoulders and cracks his knuckles and jumps up and down on the tips of his toes, shaking out his arms, double-checking that he’s wearing the shirt with the cut-off sleeves. He isn’t charming, not really, not like—some people—but he’s persuasive. He’s fucking persuasive.
Nodding to himself, he knocks on the door.
Briskly.
Impatiently.
He doesn’t bother waiting for a response before pushing his way inside.
“No,” Rowena Ravenclaw says ten minutes later, after Salazar has thoroughly—charmingly—persuasively explained himself. She’s rinsing out a mason jar full of bright yellow starfish sponges in the sink. Her shorts are . . . tiny. Tight. Faded, white-blue denim. “Capture the Flag is stupid. Is that all?”
He awkwardly scratches at his neck, where the tender aching sting of a fresh sunburn is blossoming pink and hot. Her hair is long. Dark. Wavy. He feels vaguely like he’s been punched in the face, like his brain is rattling around his skull instead of kick-starting itself back to functionality, and he can’t seem to stop staring at the thin, barely-there strip of bare skin peeking out from the bottom of her shirt, tied-up and knotted around her waist.
He glances away.
He tries to think.
He tries to remember what he knows about her—she’s in art school, she has an antiquities focused travel blog, she likes nature and turquoise jewelry and lacrosse and astronomy and paddle boarding and speaks more languages than Salazar has letters in his name—and comes up with nothing.
Almost nothing.
Almost—
“C’mon, Ravenclaw,” he says, blood rushing to his ears as he leans casually against the chalk-dusty wall and crosses his arms over his chest and smirks. “You don’t want Godric Gryffindor and his merry band of frat bros to win again this year, do you?”
Rowena pauses, letting the water continue to run in the sink, and then slowly turns around, her head tilted and her lips quirked. The stud in her nose is square-cut and shiny, lapis lazuli rimmed in silver, and the wings of her eyeliner are smudged on one side but not the other. She has strikingly angular features, sharp, uncompromising, and a mouth that’s lush and soft and cranberry-red and apparently always on the verge of curving into a smile. Salazar imagines both the type and sincerity of those smiles might vary based on who she’s smiling at, but that makes sense.
Some people deserve to be lied to.
“It’s Rowena,” she says coolly, arching a neat, graceful brow and giving Salazar a deliberately unimpressed once-over. “And Capture the Flag is still stupid.”
“Where’s our secret weapon?” Malfoy asks in a low voice, glaring at the cabin windows, and then the cabin ceiling, and then the cabin door. Mulciber and Dolohov are bickering over a bulk bag of sour gummy worms as they wander outside, Lestrange trailing after them with the hood of his plain black sweatshirt pulled all the way up, chewed-up strings tied in a sloppy bow beneath his chin. “I thought you talked to her.”
Salazar taps his tongue against his teeth and makes an uncertain seesawing motion with his hand. “She’s not really a team player,” he hedges. “Figured we’d just get her involved when we needed her.”
Malfoy peers down at his iPad, where he has a truly, exquisitely, ludicrously detailed checklist pulled up. “Well, we do need her. Didn’t you read my email?”
“What?”
“My email,” Malfoy repeats, sniffing imperiously as he brushes an invisible speck of lint off the collar of his salmon pink polo. “I encrypted it, of course, but I attached our whole schedule, too, it’s even color-coded based on—”
“Jesus Christ,” Salazar mutters. He hasn’t been avoiding Rowena Ravenclaw, not exactly—that would be insane, and also asinine, and also counterproductive to his ultimate goal of curb-stomping Godric fucking Gryffindor hard enough that they have to rename the bottom layer of the earth’s crust after him, like, in memoriam—he just hasn’t been not avoiding her, either. Which is a totally different, separate thing. Obviously. “What do we need her for?”
“Did you really not read my email?”
“Dude.”
“What?”
“What do we need her for?” Salazar asks again, raking his fingers through his hair. “We aren’t setting the decoy up for another week, right?”’
Malfoy frowns, petulant and forlorn and visibly disappointed in him. “You aren’t taking this seriously.”
“That’s it, I’m gonna let Gryffindor’s gross little clones stuff you in a locker tomorrow.”
“No, you aren’t. I'm your favorite."
Salazar pinches the bridge of his nose. “No,” he agrees, begrudgingly fond, “I’m not. What do we need Raven—Rowena for?”
“You’re supposed to go sabotage all of the traps on Gryffindor’s side of the lake. Right now.”
“Yeah, no shit, what does that have to do with—”
Malfoy heaves a hugely dramatic, irritatingly condescending sigh, rolling his eyes heavenward, and then jerks his pointy WASP chin at the haphazard pile of shopping bags on Salazar’s bunk. One is overflowing with spray paint and screwdrivers and duct tape, but another has a bunch of costume makeup in it, green and black and gray and beige.
“Oh,” Salazar says, very carefully ignoring the microscopic kernel of dread—anticipation—excitement—wistful, hopeful, unfamiliar curiosity—beginning for form in the pit of his stomach. “Right. That.”
Rowena smells like citrus fruit and Dr. Pepper and the industrial-grade hand soap that comes out of the dispensers in the boat dock bathrooms.
She’s standing between Salazar’s legs, her brow furrowed and her mouth pinched and her gaze flatly, intimidatingly steady as she studies his face. His own gaze is wavering, darting from one innocuous, superfluous detail to another, unpredictable and clumsy and dumb-fuck fast—the straps of her tank top are twisted, plain white cotton twined and tangled with shimmering black satin, and she has three more piercings stacked along the cartilage of her left ear than she does her right, and her lips are dry, crinkled a slightly lighter shade of pink towards the middle.
She’s blending the camouflage makeup on his cheeks, his chin, his forehead, using the tip of her pinky and the pad of her thumb and a vast array of sponges and brushes and paper towels, and she’s so, so close, she’s so, so warm, she’s fucking touching him, the curve of her hip grazing the inside of his thigh, and it’s—
It’s kind of uncomfortable.
It’s kind of strange.
She makes a sound, a quietly pleased hum of acknowledgement, of satisfaction, and steps back. “All done.”
“Yeah?” Salazar has to really work to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “How does it look?”
“Pretty stupid, honestly.”
He huffs out an almost-laugh, reedy and sputtering. “Well, yeah. Duh. It’s for Capture the Flag.”
Rowena meets his eyes, then, and he’s startled to see something like amusement flashing there—but not quite, no, it’s too dark for that, too focused.
Too intense.
The Forest Service map is pinned to the wall next to Salazar’s bunk, massive and photo-copied and creased like a sheet of graph paper.
They’re sitting cross-legged in front of it, markers strewn around their bare feet. It’s silent, mostly, the only sounds filtering through the cabin windows the occasional rustle of a lukewarm summer breeze and the grizzled electric buzz of the bug zapper on the porch. Rowena is chewing on her bottom lip as she squints at the map, and Salazar’s knee is pressed right up against hers. Not on purpose—he isn’t, like, going there, not until he’s at least a little bit confident that he won't be gutted with one of those terrifying paint scraping tools if he tries anything—but because he’s squinting at the map, too, at the landmarks and the waterways and the elevation key that was a lot more helpful in theory than in practice.
Abruptly, Rowena straightens, dusts her hands off, and crawls forward, shaking out a marker and uncapping it with her teeth. “Here,” she says, drawing a glossy emerald green circle around a medium-sized clearing beside a bend in a stream. It's at the very edge of Salazar’s territory. “We put the decoy here.”
Salazar swallows, cracks knuckles, and licks his lips, forcing himself to ignore the way her shorts are riding up, clinging to the curve of her ass, the rounded, hollow, v-shaped space between the tops of her thighs—he isn’t good at this, at girls, not like—some people—and he’s never felt that more keenly, more resentfully, than he does now.
“Wait,” he says, “that’s, like, super close to where our real flag is. Why would we—”
She scoffs and flaps her wrist, dismissive. She’s extra tan today, like she’d actually gone outside for once, and her skin is a silky bronze-brown, practically gleaming in the shitty battery-operated camp light.
“Not for long,” she says cryptically.
Salazar stares at her. “Are you—you want to move it?”
“It isn’t against the rules,” she tells him, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I checked. And if Godric and his army of Chads think they already know where our real flag is . . . and are just waiting for us to let our guard down . . . it’s the perfect time to be sneaky. They’re playing war, but we’re playing hide and seek. All we have to do to win is be quieter than them. Smarter than them.”
Salazar continues to stare at her, opening and closing his mouth. “That sounds, uh, suspiciously easy,” he chokes out. “Being smarter than them, I mean.”
Rowena smiles in response, slow and sly and smug and just the tiniest bit soft, too, like she’s sharing something with him, with Salazar, and he’s struck by a sudden jolt of understanding, of awareness, of those sappy Hallmark wedding video compilations that feature otherwise normal looking guys just fucking—just standing at the altar and losing their whole entire minds when they see their girlfriends walking towards them. Crying. Sniffling. Grinning.
Helpless.
Happy about it.
The moon is high and bright in the sky, a silvery, ethereal haze that handily coats the treetops but doesn't quite bleed through to the ground below.
Rowena is walking ahead of him, her hair braided loosely down her back, her shoes—pastel blue high-tops that she’s scribbled little stars and hearts and birds all over in spidery black ink—crunching against the dead leaves and brittle twigs and desiccated wild berries. She isn’t holding a map, or a flashlight, or a compass, or any of the shit Salazar had stuffed in his backpack before heading out; she’s alert, though, her posture stiff and her steps calculated, and he’s pretty fucking sure she knows exactly where she’s going.
Somehow.
“Hey,” he calls out, hurrying to grab her arm, “we’re almost to our side, should we cross over—”
“Oh, my god,” she hisses, spinning around to scowl at him. “Shut up.”
She must have misjudged how close he was to her, because she’s blinking in surprise, her breath stuttering out hot and moist and bubblegum-sweet, and it’s instinctive, magnetic, dizzying, how his gaze immediately dips down, zeroes in on her mouth, how her lips part and her body shifts and his grip tightens around her elbow, his other hand drifting up and up and his throat bobbing and—
“There it is,” she whispers, stumbling backwards, ducking under his outstretched arm, and snatching the flashlight out of his back pocket, all in one smooth, fluid motion. Christ, she’s fast. Smart. Clever. “Salazar, it’s—there it is.”
He pries his eyes away from her, following the dust mote-riddled beam of the flashlight, and catches sight of a flag—burgundy and gold, with a big glitter-glue “G” emblazoned across the center—hanging off the railing of a splintered old ranger’s tower.
“There it is,” he echoes, a loud, relieved, triumphant, oddly heartfelt guffaw of laughter building in his chest, exploding outwards. “Holy shit, there it is.”
It’s well past midnight when they get to Rowena’s cabin.
“You didn’t have to walk me home,” she says, stopping in front of the porch steps and looking at him expectantly. Appraisingly. “But—thanks, I guess.”
Salazar tucks his disgusting, sweaty palms under his arms and rocks back on his heels, wondering if she can sense how fucking nervous he is. She probably can. Christ, that would explain a lot.
“Um,” he croaks. “You’re welcome.”
She lowers her chin and smiles, small and private. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“What?”
“For winning your stupid game.”
“Oh,” Salazar says dumbly. “I mean—you won, too. Actually, you basically won completely on your own, now that I—”
“Salazar.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t care that we won,” Rowena says, almost gently, her smile twitching wider. “I care that Godric lost.”
Salazar’s jaw goes slack. “You—what?”
She snorts, prodding at her teeth with her tongue, and rolls her eyes. “I know you know this, but he almost got me fired last summer.”
“Yeah,” Salazar says, “I know. That’s why—”
“Because of that boring bullshit prank he pulled on the junior counselors,” Rowena goes on. “With the feathers? And the puffy paint?”
“Yeah. I remember. What—”
“And I was blamed, of course, because I was the only one with a key to that cabinet, and—he never even apologized,” she says with an utterly vicious, deadpan sneer. “He never even tried.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that—is that really all that happened?”
Rowena raises both her eyebrows. “Should something else have happened?”
“No, no, I just—assumed there was more to it,” Salazar says quickly.
She cocks her head. “Why?”
“Because that’s, like, the pettiest vendetta ever,” he blurts out, unable to mask his awe. “That’s amazing. You’re—” Some heretofore long-lost sliver of self-preservation, of dignity, forces him to shut the fuck up. He coughs into his fist. “Yeah. You’re—yeah. Wow.”
“I’m what?” she asks, and it’s teasing, playful—inviting.
He cracks his knuckles, a flush creeping up his neck. “Oh, come on,” he says, biting down on the crinkled, bashful edges of a grin. “You know.”
She glances up at him, her smile flickering, and her expression is uncharacteristically easy to read, suddenly, a revolving door of exasperation and indulgence and confusion and a wary kind of warmth, too, of appreciation, like she’s not quite sure she likes what she sees yet but is still thinking, considering—
Maybe.
Yeah.
Okay.
“Yeah,” she says, closing off the distance between them. Reaching for his hand. “I know.”