Chapter Text
Why was life so complicated? Okay, maybe not so much life —why was dating Theodore so complicated? That is if the two of us were even a thing. It was okay at first, now it's just plain out exhausting.
I like him and he knows it. And he likes me, and I know it. So why was things so complicated? We've kissed before, multiple times actually. We've gone on dates where we spent a majority of the time talking about the books we read —although it's more like me talking and him listening with that stone cold face of his, but that was just who he was and I would never change it about him.
What I do want to change though is whatever is going on between us. I've already embarrassed myself in front of him once and I would rather die than do it again. So what should I do in this situation? Talk to my friends apparently.
"I don't get it," says Hermione with a frustrated tone. "You both like each other and he acts like your boyfriend." I nod slowly and she continues. "But he isn't actually your boyfriend."
I nod again. "Yup."
"He didn't ask?" Ginny asks, now having joined our little friend group. Ron and Harry listen reluctantly, not enjoying the girl talk all too much.
"You have to ask?" Ron asks suddenly, obviously clueless. And when Hermione, and Ginny shoot him a look. He turns to his plate, mumbling. "I thought you'd be boyfriends and girlfriends after the third date."
"That's normally how it goes," I said. "After the third date the two of you are technically a thing but it isn't official until one or the other asks to make it official."
"Why don't you ask him?" Harry says suddenly, immediately regretting it when all our attention was fixed on him. "I mean maybe, he —like Ron and I— don't know about these things so he just assumes—"
"That's not excusable," Hermione cuts him off. "He's friends with a girl, Parkinson, so I'm sure she's filled him on this stuff."
"But what if she didn't?" I ask. Okay maybe I had a soft spot for Theo and is trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. And in my defence, I liked him, like a lot, and when you fancy someone, like really fancy them, the red flags tend to look like a dark shade of pink and I'd like to think that pink was a pretty colour.
Plus —and this isn't just an excuse, if I really thought about it, I don't think I've ever seen Theodore go out with anyone before he went out with me. So if he was a rookie at this dating thing, maybe I should be the one leading this relationship.
"Okay then go ask him," Hermione says pettily, she wants me to be happy, she really does, but she can't find it in herself to support me dating someone who can't make it clear what his intentions with me were. "Ask him 'what are we?' Or 'why did you tell me to not smile at other people?' I can't let you be with someone who doesn't know their place with you."
"And what makes you think he doesn't," Ron chimes in between a bite of his snack, when did he get one, I didn't seem to notice.
"You see her?" Hermione asks, she then says my name in the same questioning tone. "She wouldn't be talking to us about this if he did."
"Wait, aren't you supposed to be on a date with him right now?" Ginny says suddenly. "Why are you here?"
"He had last minute plans with Malfoy," I say, and I know, even without looking at her, that Hermione was disappointed with me. "And it wasn't a date."
"Yeah, just two people who fancy each other hanging out," Ron snickered, now being on Mione's side of disapproving of Theo.
"Did he tell you what he was doing with Malfoy?" Harry asks, curious as to what the Slytherins might be up to.
"I don't know," I told him. "I'm already stressing about this whole situation with him that I just accepted and went to find you four. I think I'm just going to take off my makeup, spend the day with you, then try to sleep good tonight."
I then added. "Unless you had plans that didn't include me in it?"
The four shook their heads. "We were just going to go watch Harry and Ginny practice." Hermione says.
"Great," I mumbled, standing up. "I'll come with."
"Wait," Ginny calls out, and I pause in my step, turning to where her voice came from. "I'll be quick."
She points at her shoe and it's then that I notice that it's been untied. Ron, Hermione, and Harry, who seemed to have not heard her, continued their way towards the quidditch pitch. I waited by her side, offering her a hand when she had to get back up.
"You know," she says lowly, "I heard that you're the only person Nott didn't reject, apparently he's pretty popular with the girls."
I shook my head. "That's not true," I say with a slight frown. "When I first asked him out, he just stared at me."
"Which technically isn't a rejection," Ginny smiles sweetly. "More like you rendering him speechless."
That was exactly what Theo told me after my first date with him. "I guess."
"Bloody hell, will you two please speed it up?" Ron shouts at the front of the quidditch pitch, only now realising that we're far behind them.
I felt half the urge to walk even slower, and from the small grin Ginny wore from the corner of my eyes, I'm pretty sure she was thinking the same thing. But Harry and Hermione were also waiting with him, and it was only a matter of time before they started bickering about it as well. So we sped up with our steps.
But just before we reach the pitch, Ginny stops me, yelling for them to go ahead without us. "You want to know a secret?" she asks, I nod. "Since I was Harry's first real girlfriend I had to be the one to ask him to be my boyfriend."
"Are you saying I should be the one to ask?" I murmur. I don't think I would mind doing so, but there was something more romantic about having your date ask you to be your boyfriend.
"No," she says kindly. "Just saying you should nudge him in the right direction."
"So guide him?"
"Yep."
Okay. That is surely something I can do. Now, for me to draw up a plan on how to do it. If I've managed to help take down a dark wizard then surely I can get Theo to ask me to be his girlfriend.
Both Ginny and I step into the quidditch pitch. Slightly taken aback to see more than six players in the field (with Ginny being the missing member), it didn't take us long to register why though.
Neither did it take me long to notice Theo, standing right behind Malfoy as he bickered with Harry. What was happening? And did Theo really ditch our (not) date just to watch his friend's quidditch practice?
"Badger," Blaise says suddenly, drawing everyone's attention to Ginny and I by the entrance. "I see you look pretty as always."
Theodore doesn't even bother to subtly smack his friend in the back of his head. It doesn't affect Blaise though, only finding it amusing to witness.
"What's going on?" Ginny asks.
"We booked this pitch," Malfoy says before Harry could get a word in. "And now you're trying to take it from us."
"No, we booked the pitch." Harry says sternly. "You're the one trying to take it away from us."
Despite Gryffindor and Slytherin (somewhat) friendship after the war ended —and the fact that our friend groups were now mixed because of whatever Theodore and I have going on. They were still competitive people. And they want more than anything to win this year's cup.
"I have an idea," I say, quite honestly done with their stupid rivalry. "How about you practise together?" I say off-handedly, knowing full well that they'd agree to come for my throat. "Just an idea."
"And have they found out about our strategies?" Malfoy scoffs. "I thought you were smarter than this."
Considering that I did better in classes then him, and that Ron agreed with his words. I technically am smarter than him. "Well if you're so sure about your strategies working then it wouldn't hurt if you gave up the pitch for just one practice right?"
Draco was on the brink of agreeing when it hit him, blinking at me. "Oh you're good," he murmurs. "Fine, have the pitch for all I care."
I was more than sure that he was only giving it for my benefits. Sure that if it had been someone else who had said it, he'd only double down and insist that he'd reserved the pitch (he didn't, not a single Slytherin booked the pitch for today). But it seemed as though he had a soft spot for me.
The theory of Slytherins having soft spots for Hufflepuffs gets proven right once more. And I'm more than glad to know that I was the beneficiary of this theory.
Blaise was the first to leave, waving at me as he went as the other Slytherins followed after him, the players grumbling under their breath with their brooms in hand. Theo was the last to leave, lingering just so he could pull me to the side.
A hand on my left arm leads me to a quieter corner of the pitch, just below the benches as the players start to get ready for practice. I don't look him in the eye when I ask him, "what?"
The hostility in my tone wasn't missed by Theo and if I didn't know him the way I did, I would've missed the flash of hurt in his eyes. "What do you want, Nott?"
And Theodore feels as if I was stomping on his heart. He hasn't been called Nott since the two of us started going out. "Are you mad at me?"
My brows furrow. "What do you think?"
"Did I do something wrong?" He follows up, his tone doesn't show it —neither does his face, but he was worried, scared, and quite honestly pissed with himself. "Is it because I cancelled on you? Doll, you said you were okay with it."
"No," I shook my head. Confrontation wasn't something I was fond of, nor was I good at it. So I'll settle with just being upset for now. "I'm not mad at you."
Theodore blinks, seemingly getting whiplash from my words. First I ask him what he thinks, in a —if he wasn't wrong— passive aggressive tone, and now I'm telling him that I'm not mad at him? What.
But he decides to take my words as is, trusting that I'd tell him how I feel despite him not telling me that he honestly feels like he'd fucked him over; ruining his only chance at love —oh, and that he doesn't even know what he did. "I'll see you at dinner?"
"No," I say with a slight shake of my head. "I think I'll have dinner with my friends tonight." Theodore fails to mention that Blaise, Draco, and Pansy were also my friends by now. "Next time?"
Theo nods, agreeing. "Next time."
It has been three weeks and 'next time' has yet to come. He's starting to realise it now: realising that I was actually mad at him when I said I wasn't and it'd be a lie if he said it didn't hurt him. He has somehow made me mad and he wishes more than anything that he was dead —because, quite honestly, he can't stand living if I was mad at him.
He needs to recruit help, he decided. And who better to help him with relationship problems than his friends (who he thinks has more experience with relationships than he does) and my friend (whom he knows has more experience in relationships then he does —take Granger and Weasley for example, the two have been together since fourth year).
"So you think she's mad at you and you don't know why?" Weasley comes to the conclusion after Blaise, who he'd already told the whole story to, summed it up for them. "You seriously don't?"
Theodore nods slowly, there was a slight shift in his stone cold expression, barely catchable by the eye but it was there. And it was that slight shift that reassured Hermione that Theo did actually have good intentions when it came to her friend; he was just clueless on what to do.
"She's upset with you because you said you were busy and left her to watch your friends practice," Ginny offers, it was clear that she was also mad on my behalf.
"That's it?" Malfoy mumbles questioningly. "Something as mundane as that is what we're meeting here for?"
"It might be mundane to you but it's not mundane to her," Harry jumps to my defence. "She's not you, Malfoy."
"Okay, so she's mad at Theo because he ditched her for us?" Blaise asks, trying to get them back on track.
"Don't say it like that," Ginny scoffs. "Phrasing it that way makes her seem selfish, which she's not. She just wants to know where she is with Theo and for him to at least try to prioritise her."
"I do prioritise her," Theo says dumbfounded-ly. He really did, he's spent the last however many months of his life reading cheesy books just to annotate them in hopes that I'd love them, he'd even picked up on cooking just so when (or really, if) we ended live together I'd always have a nice home cooked meal waiting for me. "She said she was okay with it."
"She said she was okay with it thinking that it was something important," Pansy explains, understanding exactly how I feel. She's been placed in the same position before, by no one other than Draco himself. "Thinking that Blaise had a heart attack or something, not a stupid quidditch practice."
"Careful," Draco warns. "You were also at the practice."
Pansy rolls her eyes. "Bite me."
"What do I do then?" Theo asks after a while, picking the topic back up.
And the Gryffindor's try their best to remain normal, never —in the last seven years they'd spent studying in the same castle as him— had they heard him spoken for such a long period of time.
"Well let's take you to the basics," Hermione says. "Where are the two of you right now? In terms of relationship that is."
"We're dating?" He answers slowly.
"No you're not," Ron says loudly. "You haven't asked to be her boyfriend yet."
Draco, clearly befuddled, says. "You have to ask?"
Pansy nods. "Of course," she says. "I thought you knew?" And then, after a beat, she adds. "Maybe that's why we didn't work out."
Draco rolls his eyes, mumbling something along the line of his fathers as he does so. "So what should he do then?"
"Apologise for what he did then make it clear what the two of you are." Harry explains, he's done this before, he did it when he first went out with Ginny —so really, he's speaking from experience. "From then on you take things slow so you can work out the kinks of your relationships.
Okay, he thinks he gets it. He has to apologise, make things clear, then take things slow. Surely he can do it.
Now for him to actually do it.
STEP ONE: apologise
Which is, more often than not, easier said than done. Theodore has half the heart to buy something nice in order of winning me over but he knew me better. And he knew that I wasn't with him for his money. So he ought to do better. And he thinks he knows how to do it.
To apologise he should do something heartfelt, which was why he'd found himself learning to plant my favourite flower. He'd rather die than apologise to the one person he cherished more than anything empty handed.
He sees the few cuts on his hand from his attempt at gardening and he hopes that I don't notice it. He doesn't want me to notice his imperfections when I was (to him) perfect in every sense. He likes me every time he sees me, I was exactly his type and he hopes I know it.
He doesn't want to mess this up. He doesn't want to mess us up. And he's really trying his best not to.
With our shoes almost touching, Theo stood tall from my seat on Hogwarts many benches with a planted pot in hand. "I'm sorry," he says first and I mask my surprise at his words. "I won't do it again."
He doesn't bother beating around the bush, with a gift in hand, safe to say I'm impressed. If not a little bit amused by how frustrated he looks.
"Why?" I ask, a hand reaching for the plant and Theodore hesitatingly hands it over, his own fingers brushing against my own. "Why are you sorry?"
"Because I ditched you for—"
"Sweetheart, I told you that it was fine."
Theodore's pretty sure his brain is short circuiting. He's heard every variation of his name by now. All of which he can recall from the top of his head. Theodore, Theo, Nott, even Teddy from that ex-girlfriend he had back in kindergarten. But sweetheart is different.
And he thinks he likes it. He thinks he likes it when he's called sweetheart. He thinks he likes it because he likes me. And I was the one calling him sweetheart.
"But your friends—" he pauses, correcting himself "—our friends said that you were upset."
Relationships are built on communication, and I know that it was hard for Theodore to do so. So I won't make it harder for him and lay it all out. "I was upset, yes. But I also said that it was okay for you to spend time with your friends."
And after a second, I added. "And it's not like I'm your girlfriend or anything."
Theodore frowns, taking a seat on the bench besides me.
STEP TWO: make things clear
His chest feels heavy at my words. He doesn't like knowing that I think I wasn't his girlfriend. Because, if I really wasn't, was it normal for him to like me as much as he did?
He has to say something.
"But you are, aren't you?" He asks, brows furrowed.
His heart is leaning, waiting and waiting for an answer. His eyes flutters shut, and he doesn't know it. Wishing and wishing that I would say something.
"Theo." My voice comes out softer than I intended for it to be. "Do you want me to be your girlfriend?"
His heart is speeding up. And he thinks that there should be a guide book on how to be in a relationship with pretty girls. But he guesses that he's being guided by one right now.
THE BASICS ON HOW TO DATE PRETTY GIRLS (FOR ROOKIES) by Theodore's and I friends.
His words get caught in his throat. Isn't it so incredibly obvious? He wants to say. Isn't it so incredibly obvious that I've bewitched him? He doesn't say it, but he does nod. And he hopes his nod conveys just how much he wants to be mine.
"Okay," I said first. "I'll be your girlfriend." But of course, things can't always be that easy. "If you ask me properly."
STEP THREE: take things slow
He blinks at me slowly. As if he's only just learning how to properly function; a shift in his eyes caught my attention though, knowing that he's finally processing my words.
He doesn't know why he's scared, he knows that I like him just as much as he likes me but he's nervous about it all. Forgive him for being new to this dating thing.
With as much care as he could muster in his tone, he asks. "Will you give me the honour in courting you?" And then, as if he was realising he's supposed to take things slow —even though his intention was, and will always be, courting me— he corrects himself. "Will you give me the honour of being my girlfriend?"
What a way with words he has. I'd like to think it has something to do with the romance books he'd been reading just so he could have something to talk to me about all these months.
"Do you want to be my boyfriend?" I counter after a beat.
Theodore stayed quiet for the briefest second before: "yes."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"You're my boyfriend."
"Oh." There's a second of silence where neither of us spoke before my face breaks out into a smile, one that he doesn't bother to hold himself back from reciprocating it. "Okay."
"Okay." I nod. "So what should we do first boyfriend?"
Theodore mulls everything over before he turns to me, his hair falling into his eyes. "What do you want to do girlfriend?"
I can't tell whether his hand reaches for mine, or mine his, but I knew that our hands found one another. "Go on a Date."
Theodore lifts our intertwined hand up, placing a careful kiss on my hand as he nods. "Let's go on a date."
STEP FOUR (UNOFFICIAL): kiss, go on dates, be happy!
note: if this guide works, please take the authors (Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron and Ginny weasley, Pansy Parkinson, Blaise Zabini, and Draco Malfoy) out to dinner, all expenses paid by guide user (Theodore Nott).