Written for QLFC Round 8, Tutshill Tornados - RESERVE Beater 2 - Main Character: Hugo Weasley

Prompts: 6. (quote) "The higher you climb, the further you have to fall", 13. (dialogue) "Where did that come from?"

It was precisely four in the morning when his sister Rose decided that she could Apparate into his flat and expect him to be awake.

"Hugo?"

Hugo, who was in fact not awake, groaned in his sleep and pulled the red covers to his chin. Rose strode towards his bedroom, the heels of her shoes slapping loudly against the floor. She called again, "Hugo?"

Her brother's room was pitch black like the rest of his house. It was also carelessly messy with clothes scattered on the ground, so as Rose's feet shuffled on the carpet, one of them suddenly got caught in the sleeve of Hugo's discarded jacket. She sprawled forward and hit the ground with a thud.

Hugo jerked awake, and his hand automatically reached for his wand. "Who's there?" he yelled as he blinked his eyes furiously in the dark.

"It's me, Hugie."

"Rose?"

"Mhm."

"What the – What are you doing here? At, what" – he rubbed his eyes and glanced at the clock – "four am?"

The only reply he received was "Can you please turn on the goddamn light?"

With a wave of his wand, the room lit up and Hugo could see his sister lying on the ground, kicking his jacket away with surprising fury.

"Don't you ever clean up?" she asked as she ripped the jacket away from her tangled legs. "If Mum saw your room now, she'd have a fit." His sister tossed his jacket across the room with so much strength that it knocked over the picture frame on his dresser. (He was reminded of why he never liked to play Quidditch with Rose as Beater.)

Hearing her voice, Hugo immediately knew something was wrong. Her voice was too steady, too controlled, and so much so that he could practically hear the struggle to keep it mediated. He squinted at her clothes. She was wearing a dress and a pretty pair of high heeled shoes – at, he reminded himself, four in the bloody morning.

"Rose," Hugo said, directing his wand to fix the frame. "What are you doing here?"

"It must be lonely for you here," she said too cheerfully, ignoring him as she looked around the room. "You have a spare bedroom, don't you?"

He paused warily. "Yes."

"It'd be nice to have company, right?"

Hugo narrowed his eyes at her as she settled on the edge of his bed. "Rose, you have a house already, in case you've forgotten. Where's S–"

"I was just thinking about you," Rose continued loudly, cutting him off. She traced the pattern on his sheets with a shaky finger. "I was thinking it must be pretty lonely living here alone."

He frowned at her. "And so you came here to tell me that. At four in the morning."

"I'm going to move in," she said simply.

Hugo's jaw dropped. "You're going to what?"

Rose bounded over to the door and dragged in a large duffel bag. She didn't meet Hugo's large brown eyes with her own as she said, "We could share the rent. I could sleep in the other room since you hardly use it anyway, and we could bake together like we used to when we were little. Remember? It'll be just like before. Oh, stupid bag–"

Her light countenance didn't mask the emotion Hugo spotted in his sister as she whipped out her wand and jabbed it furiously at her bag. "Wingardium Leviosa! … Anyway, it'll be fun. Like before. Won't it?"

He found his voice again as she smiled at him and showed way too many teeth for it to be a genuine smile. "Are you drunk? I thought you didn't like firewhisky."

"Do I look like I'm drunk?"

"You sound like you are." Hugo frowned as she opened the door to the adjoining room. "You aren't serious, are you?"

"Does it sound like I'm kidding?" she called from the other room. He heard her unceremoniously throw her bag onto the floor with a loud bang.

Definitely something wrong, he thought as he threw off his covers and followed her into the spare room. Flattening his messy hair, he leaned against the doorframe and watched as his sister transfigured a shirt into a pillow.

"You can't live here," he said when Rose attempted to put her clothes into the spare dresser. "You know that, right Rosie?"

"I'm going to," she said firmly and dumped the contents of her bag onto the floor. "Damn, I forgot my wallet–"

"Go home and get it. Actually, go home and stay home. You can come back in the morning–"

"This is my home now," said Rose stubbornly. "You know what, I'll just borrow Raccoon from you tomorrow."

"No you're won't. Borrow Scorpius's owl!"

He'd barely started to say her boyfriend's name when Rose suddenly screamed, "I won't!" Hugo jumped backwards. If the neighbors hadn't woken up at his sister's loud move-in, they would certainly wake now. His sister's face was bright red with anger, and he could tell (with equal amounts of relief and wariness) that she could no longer keep in her emotions. And evidently, she was very angry.

"I won't borrow anything of that bastard's! I'd rather hex myself, I'd rather die than go back to that bloody flat – Does he think that he can just do something like that and expect me to take it?! I'd rather die–"

Hugo clenched his jaw and grabbed his sister's wand hand before she could set the dresser on fire. Still, he was already thinking about Scorpius Malfoy's face with some degree of suspicion and anger as he demanded, "What did he do? Did he kick you out? If he did–"

"No," Rose scowled and threw herself onto the bed. "I left."

"Why? What happened?"

"Nothing!"

"If you're breaking into my house this early in the morning, there has to be a good reason!"

"No there doesn't!" Rose pushed herself off the bed, apparently unable to keep still. She began to mutter to herself with so much passionate hatred that it made her sentences quite incoherent to Hugo. "That bastard… Who does he think he is? …can't just do that… God, I'm thirsty, do you have something to drink?"

Hugo, thoroughly bewildered now, ran a hand through his hair. "I'll get you some water," he said, frowning, but his sister didn't hear him for all she was muttering. He rolled his eyes and headed out of the room to the kitchen.

To his knowledge, in the six years that Rose had been dating Scorpius Malfoy, the two fought a lot but never hard. Their fighting reminded him starkly of his parents' in the way that they would bicker over little things but still manage to be mature about larger conflicts.

That being said, his sister had never barged into his flat in the middle of the night to claim his spare room before.

He frowned again as he poured a cup of water for her. It must have been a long fight for her to come here dressed as she was at four in the morning.

A crack from behind him made his hand slip on the water pitcher; water poured to the floor as Hugo swore and turned around.

"Sorry, mate," said a disheveled Scorpius Malfoy standing next to the couch. His platinum blond hair was messed up like he'd been running his hand through it for a while, and his voice was rather mellow. "Didn't expect you to be up."

Hugo gaped at his sudden appearance. "Well. Er, lucky you."

"Sorry," Scorpius repeated and sank into the kitchen chair without another word.

Hugo stared at him for a few moments before saying cautiously, "Er, I don't mean to be rude, but what are you doing here?"

"I just wanted to ask you something, if that's okay. I know it's really late–"

"Four. In the morning."

"Yeah, yeah, sorry. Could I just take a few minutes?"

Hugo had initially thought that Scorpius came to drag Rose back to their apartment, but he was beginning to suspect that the Malfoy didn't, in fact, know that Rose was here at all. If he did, he was sure that the blond would look much less… dejected than he did now.

As a result, Hugo finally said, "Sure. Let me just–" He stared down at the cup of water and thought it might look strange if he brought it to seemingly no one in his room. Rose probably wouldn't realize whether he came back or not, he thought, so with a wary glance towards the closed bedroom door, he took the seat beside Scorpius. "Never mind."

Immediately, Scorpius turned his grey eyes onto Hugo's. Hugo nervously met the older boy's direct eye contact, since although he'd spent a lot of time with the Malfoy before, it'd almost always been with Rose.

His nervousness was diminished, however, upon Scorpius speaking.

"What are some things that Rose is afraid of?"

Hugo furrowed his eyebrows. He had been expecting something much worse. "Er, what?"

"Her fears. You know. Like how she hates bad grades, except worse."

Hugo checked to make sure that Scorpius was being serious; he certainly looked as if he was, if his drawn eyebrows were any indication. "Well," he began, wary of the reason Scorpius needed this information, "she used to be scared of the dark, like seven years ago. She's scared of Grandma Weasley during family reunion dinners. Oh! She's terrified of birds, especially whole flocks of them–"

Here Hugo stopped his list, because his company suddenly slapped his hand to his forehead. "Er, are you okay?"

Scorpius, like Rose earlier, didn't seem to be listening anymore or even talking to him. "How was I supposed to know that? She didn't bloody tell me before, or I wouldn't have done that!"

"Do what exactly?" Hugo couldn't resist flicking his eyes toward the clock. It was now 4:30 am, and he thought mournfully of his bed before shaking his head and returning to the strange present.

"She didn't tell me, how was I supposed to know? And such a random fear too… Where did that come from?"

"I dunno, Dad says she inherited it from her. Something about Mum and birds during Hogwarts. Rose just hates them."

"Merlin."

"Er, would you mind telling me what happened, because I'm a bit confused about why this made her mad enough to leave your apartment–"

Scorpius sighed. "I don't know, mate. I didn't know that she–" He suddenly paused, lifted his head, and narrowed his eyes suspiciously at Hugo. "How do you know that she left?"

"Oh, er–"

The answer came on cue from the inside of Hugo's own bedroom. "Hug? Are you talking to someone?" The horrified look on Scorpius's face would have been quite comical if there hadn't been a matching one on Hugo's own face.

Scorpius practically leapt out of his chair, whispering quickly, "You didn't tell me–"

"Shh!" Hugo hissed. He cleared his throat and called back, "Er, just to Raccoon. He wanted owl treats."

There was a pause, he was just beginning to relax –

"Uh, Hugo? Raccoon's in here. With me."

Before the horror on the two men's faces could deepen, the door to Hugo's room opened to reveal Rose, now dressed in her pajamas.

"Really, I'm not going to judge if you're talking to yours–"

Hugo inwardly groaned as his sister stopped dead in her tracks. Her face immediately blazed red with anger as she pulled out her wand and screamed, "Why in Ravenclaw's name is he here?!"

"Er, about that–"

"Are you stalking me?" she demanded Scorpius, who was pale and currently lifting his hands in surrender. "Why are you here? Who said you could come here?"

"I'm not following you!" Scorpius yelled back. "Merlin, I'm just here to talk to your brother!"

Rose laughed, and it was with reason that both brother and boyfriend flinched at the terrifying sound. "My brother? What do you want with him? I thought I heard someone Apparate; who said you could Apparate in here?!"

"I told you, I wanted to talk to him!"

Hugo stepped forward. "He didn't know you were here, Rose."

Rose glared at him. "Well you'd better keep your distance from him, or he'll do the same thing to you as he did to me!"

"I didn't know!" Scorpius insisted while Hugo, slowly beginning to piece together what might have happened, began to feel less sympathy for these two that had woken him up so late in the night. "How was I supposed to know that you hate birds?"

"You seem to know now, don't you?" Rose spat.

"Merlin, woman! I thought you'd like it–"

"What's there to like about five birds attacking me with flowers?!"

Hugo's suspicions were now confirmed, and it was with equal amounts of irritation and amusement that he said, "Well. Now that you've cleared that up, can't you two – I don't know – go back home and fix this up?"

"No!" came the simultaneous yell. He internally apologized profusely to his neighbors.

"From what I gather," he sighed, "Scorpius did some romantic gesture using birds?"

"He made them attack me!"

"With flowers! I wasn't trying to attack you on purpose–"

"Okay!" Hugo shouted and the two miraculously fell silent, though he felt sure by the look of their glares that they weren't going to stay like this for long. "Scor, mate, when I say that Rose hates flocks of birds, she really hates them. She's terrified of them, so much that it turns into a pride issue sometimes. You know how she doesn't like to have weaknesses–"

"You're not helping," said Rose loudly.

"And Rose," he said, turning his level gaze to his older sister. "How was he supposed to know that you hate birds? You never talk about your fear of them to anyone. I don't think even Lily knows you hate them."

Hugo pointed his wand towards his spare bedroom and waved it. The drawers audibly opened and he knew Rose's clothes would be returning to the confines of her duffel bag.

"Now," he said firmly, "you two are going to make up and realize that you, Rose, got far too angry because of some 3 am romantic gesture that you, Scorpius, did and should realize that you should probably never do again because my sister'll kill you next time. I guess it sucks, mate, but the more you terrified her in trying to please her, the more you'll have to suffer the fall. But anyway, both of you..." He stared each of them in the eye. "You two are going to get the hell out of my flat so I can sleep again."

"I'm your sister. You can't kick me out," Rose shot moodily.

Hugo rolled his eyes and waved his wand again. Her duffel bag came zooming out of the bedroom and landed straight in Scorpius's arms.

"Oof! Mate–"

"Go home, lovebirds," Hugo said with an air of finality. "Now I'm going to sleep so goodnight and I really hope I don't find either of you sleeping here in the morning. Or both of you, for that matter," he smirked.

He sauntered back into his bedroom and gently shut the door, rolling his eyes fondly at the neverending drama his sister and her boyfriend seemed to live on. With a Nox, the lights turned off and he hopped into bed, confident that Rose and Scorpius would make up. Sure enough, after the initial minute of bickering, a short silence outside the bedroom followed until Hugo heard the unmistakable sound of kissing.

"Oi! What did I say about finding both of you here in the morning?!"

He grinned at Scorpius's hasteful apology and his sister's laugh that followed with the sharp crack of Apparition.

And Hugo, confident that both would return the next day to give him their thanks, was finally allowed to sleep again.