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By the time they were two hours in, Alicia had consumed an earthworm, Fred had sprinted past the Slytherin Common Room door dressed in nothing but his two Gryffindor socks, and Angelina’s hair was lime green with hot pink highlights. Katie was spread out on the rug in front of the fireplace, still recovering from her dizziness after being spun one hundred times on a low-flying broom while eating a chocolate muffin, and George, who was proudly seated on McGonagall’s stolen desk chair, suddenly turned to Oliver. Oliver looked back rather hesitantly. A team building activity, the twins had called it, without going into any kind of detail until he had already been dragged into the circle.
“I think it’s about time to turn in for the night, don’t you?” he tried. The heads of his entire team, including Katie, turned his way in one freakishly well-timed movement. It was a very weak attempt to weasel out of taking his turn, he knew, but he had to give it a shot. “I mean, Harry isn’t here. We don’t want him to feel excluded, right?”
Fred didn’t even blink. “Harry said he didn’t want to join.”
“So did I,” Oliver murmured.
Alicia took a deep breath and risked opening her mouth. She seemed about as surprised as everyone else that what came out next were words instead of worm. “Yes, but Harry is thirteen and you’re eighteen. He gets a choice, you don’t.”
George didn’t allow him to stall any longer. He put his feet up between Fred and Angelina on the sofa and tilted his chair on its hind two legs. “Oliver, mate, truth or dare?”
Oliver shifted uncomfortably in his armchair and glanced from the fire to the sofa’s armrest to the back of Percy’s head. The only upside to this entire ordeal was that it was an ordinary weekday, and everyone who wasn’t being kept up by friends with strange ideas of fun had retired to their dormitory by now. The less spectators there were for the humiliation that would undoubtedly follow, the better.
A shame, however, that the only remaining student was also the only one that Oliver really didn’t want to be watching when he would be dancing the Macarena in his underwear, because he actually cared what that person thought.
“Well?” Katie insisted. “Tell us, what will it be?”
“Dare,” Oliver said. It sounded rather like a sigh. Truth wasn’t a valid option. They would brainstorm until they found a question they knew he didn’t want to or couldn’t answer, forcing him to go for a dare anyway, so he figured it would be more painless and quicker to spare himself those added minutes of torment.
George nodded, satisfied. “Good choice. What are we going to do with him? Girls?”
A couple far too knowing looks were exchanged among the female half of the Gryffindor Quidditch team.
“He has to kiss someone in this room,” Alicia announced.
“Oh,” Fred said, “you’re softies.”
Oliver silently agreed. He’d been prepared for far worse things, but he wasn’t about to voice those thoughts, even if he thought it a little odd that Alicia, Katie and Angelina had apparently decided beforehand that they’d enjoy being kissed by him. He would have been the first to admit he was far from an expert in girls, but he had ordered them to be on the Quidditch pitch before dawn often enough that he was relatively certain he wasn’t considered a very attractive romantic partner anymore.
Angelina grinned, bumped her shoulder into Fred’s and wound a cotton candy pink curl around her finger. “But wait, that’s not all. There’s a condition.”
Fred pulled a face. “Don’t tell me he has to lose his shirt.”
“Jealous, Fred Weasley? You weren’t complaining when your shirt was being lost.”
Oliver let his head drop into his hands. He harbored a tiny glimmer of hope that it might hide how red his face was becoming. “Ange, Merlin. What’s the condition?”
Angelina let go of the lock. “It can’t be a girl.”
There was silence for a second or two.
Then George burst out laughing. Alicia and Katie managed to look very pleased despite their respective nausea and dizziness, Angelina and Fred were involved in some kind of staring contest, and Oliver was wondering what they were hoping to achieve with this plot twist, more confused than anything.
His eyes landed on the back of Percy’s head again. Percy was sitting at a table in the corner and had industriously been scribbling things on a roll of parchment all evening. It curled off the desk and he had written enough that the end of it rested on the floor by now. He looked like he hadn’t noticed the room around him had emptied slowly, and he definitely hadn’t shown the slightest bit of interest in the unorthodox team building activity taking place right behind him.
“Someone in this room?” Oliver asked, which was enough to temporarily end the giggling and complaining around him.
“And not a girl,” Alicia confirmed.
“You’re not giving him a lot of options,” Fred said, while Oliver got up and left their small group. “Hey, where are you going? I’m an amazing snog, I’ll have you know.”
Percy had a book in front of him that was bigger than Oliver’s binder with Quidditch notes and was written in a language that looked like hundreds of drawings of small earthworms. Oliver gently tapped his shoulder. “Still at work?”
There was a brief moment where it seemed like Percy would throw his quill to the other end of the room, but when he looked up and saw Oliver, he smiled. He leaned back in his chair a little and flexed the fingers of his cramped writing hand. “I’m afraid so. I meant to just get this chapter done, but it took longer than expected,” he admitted. “Did you finish your game?”
Oliver looked over his shoulder. Percy automatically did the same, so there was no way he missed the five pairs of eyes that were fixed on them intently.
“Oh heavens,” he said, and Oliver heard him and looked at his ink stained index finger and the soft jumper that seemed a little too big for him and the freckled clavicle that was visible because of the too wide collar that was all askew, and Oliver felt like he needed to sit down for a little bit, maybe.
Preferably in Percy’s lap.
“What are they asking you to do? On a scale of one to seven, how many school regulations or magical laws would you have to break?”
“Could you help me with something?” Oliver asked.
Percy was far too intelligent to just say yes to a question like that, obviously, but there was no immediate refusal either. Something in Oliver’s chest felt like it was being warmed by direct sunlight. “Can I ask what this something would be, precisely?”
Oliver had half hoped that question could have just been skipped over. “Ah, right,” he said. Behind him smacking kissing noised sounded, reminding him of the audience.
Percy looked back once again, so Oliver did the same. It seemed like all the chairs and even the sofa had moved a little closer since he’d last looked. Oliver’s empty armchair was easily a meter behind the rest, all of a sudden.
“With me?” Percy sounded so incredulous and flabbergasted that Oliver couldn’t have lied to him even if that would have been something he’d ever have considered.
“With someone in this room who’s not a girl. So that’s either you, or -”
Percy very suddenly pushed his chair back. “How do you want to do this?”
Oliver offered him a hand. Percy let himself be pulled to his feet without hesitation, a determined look in his eyes. Oliver curled his fingers around the ink stain his eye had been drawn to earlier.
“What now?”
“I think,” Oliver started, but then dimly realized he’d accidentally lied to Percy after all, because he really wasn’t thinking much of anything, actually. He decided to just do, which led to him moving forward and pressing his lips to Percy’s.
“Hm,” Percy said, which wasn’t a lie, but mostly because there wasn’t a lot of content to it.
Oliver was vaguely aware his name was being called, but he was also relatively certain he was dreaming, so he ignored the sounds and pulled Percy a little closer to him. The object that hit him on the back was a little harder to think out of existence. He jumped into the air without ever letting go of Percy’s hand, and felt a little silly about it when he spotted the red and gold decorative pillow on the floor next to him.
“Zero,” Percy said.
Oliver looked at him. “What?” His brain was still occupied for the most part with the question whether he should let go of Percy’s hand. He decided against it, for the simple reason that Percy had not yet demonstrated a desire to have two free hands at his disposal.
“On the one to seven scale of unlawfulness,” Percy clarified. “Zero. Did you know it’s illegal to kiss people against their will?”
Oliver stared a little more. Partly because he needed some time to parse the meaning of Percy’s words, and partly because Percy was nice to look at. There was another small dot of ink to the right of his nose, like he had grown a single blue freckle.
Something small and yellowy landed at Oliver’s feet. It was a lemondrop, which Angelina seemed to have acquired a bag of. “He’s trying to tell you he fancies you, snitchbrain,” she whispered loudly.
The blue of the inked freckle was even more visible when Percy was turning red underneath.
“Oh,” Oliver said. All at once he was glad he hadn’t let go of Percy’s hand, because it meant he had something to hold on to. “Oh.”
“Merlin’s hairy b-” Angelina shoved a lemondrop in Fred’s mouth, causing him to cough violently. “Beard! I was going to say beard!”
George was safely outside of Angelina’s range and didn’t use any foul language, so he managed to utter a full sentence, in contrast to his twin. “Did you three seriously play this game with us for a full evening just for this?”
Katie was suddenly far too occupied with carefully moving into an upright position to answer questions, Angelina started pounding Fred’s back a minute too late and Alicia shrugged. “It was worth the life of a worm and a loss of appetite for the coming week.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said. He was genuinely moved, even though this end result was only marginally less weird than back when he still thought the girls’ intention was to get him to kiss one of them. But he was still holding Percy’s hand, so he was prepared to overlook quite a few things. “I think I like truth or dare more than I thought I did, actually. We should do this again.”
The immediate answer was a resounding triple no.
Oliver couldn’t find it in him to be very disappointed, because he hoped he would find far better ways to spend his evenings now anyway.