AN: Just a little drabble to help me slip back into posting my work. More on this pairing to come, if you are interested. I certainly enjoy writing them. Also my Angelina has Aspergers. Also also didn't pay attention to the wiki; I'd already given Montague a name of my own. Oops. I've been away from this fandom a long time, due to depression, lack of interest etc, as such the seven books and eight movies are my canon starting point. Tried my hand at Irish English... hope it's not too bad. If you like it, please be sure to drop a line!

Disclaimer: I don't own HP

modus vivendi

an arrangement or agreement allowing conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or until a final settlement is reached

— a way of living

It has been two years but they still look at them out of the corners of their eyes, even when their house colours are not visible. They look at him askance for his accent and what they think that makes him (Paddy, fenian); they look at her askance for the colour of her skin, the fall of her long braids, her full lips, and what they think that makes her (darkie, golliwog).

But at least he can keep his mouth shut and they won't look at him like anything. Her deep brown skin cannot be hidden. She cannot blend in with the white faces around them.

He actually seems to like that. She'll often glance at him and see him looking at their entwined hands, the contrast of tones: cream pale and walnut brown, a soft look on his face, his eyes large and glowing.

"And what're you staring at, you great whale?" Montague says, close to her ear of a rotund third year who double takes at them — triple takes even, he is so surprised. Roger Davis would have wrenched his arm from her shoulder and dove for the nearest shop front. Meyad Twick would have tried to apparate away on the spot. Anoain Bewick would have only consented to go to Hogsmeade with her, in the first place, in the dead of night. With Harry Potter's fabled invisibility cloak over them. And a mask on. They are nothing like Anraí Montague.

His arm is still slung over her shoulder. The first time he did it, out of the blue as they walked together around the Lake, surprise didn't cover how she'd felt. She could have been knocked over by a quill feather. "I'm not cold."

He withdrew his arm, running a hand though his red-brown hair, his expression unreadable. Regretful?

"I didn't say you had to — I just meant, I'm not cold."

"Oh, right." His pink cheeks flushed even pinker. "Well." His arm came back around her shoulder. "Good, I suppose." He was rambling, he never rambled. It was a day of firsts. She snuggled into him, a warmth blooming inside her chest. She didn't mind the stares and looks they got from a straggling band of CoMC students when she heard his small sigh, and was so close to him she felt his heart beating. It seemed to beat in time to her own.

She's glad the way people look at them doesn't get to him either, that he still holds her close. Her friends hate everything about them — except that. They can see he's better than the others in that way. Maybe in time, they'll see beyond his House colours. They'll see the young man who dried her tears with his sleeve, instead of mocking them, after her heart was wrenched in two for the third time. They'll see the boy who doesn't look at her weirdly when she kisses her teeth, as any West Indian does in frustration, having forgotten where she is and where this is not. They'll see the wizard who appreciates her slipping into the West Indian dialect due to his own in-no-way-Queen's-English way of speaking.

(His overcast is a soft day; he calls toilets the jacks; says amn't, meaning am not. And, a real tongue and brain twister: Amn't I after telling you that. Didn't I just tell you that? Bucklepper is an overactive, overconfident person; runners are to him what trainers are to her. He says feck — a lot. He says will I give you a back rub? meaning shall? He says affectionately of her that she will not shut up if she has drink taken — always taking her for one anyway. He loves taking her out.)

Do you know, he said once, you're the first person who's told me you like my accent. Let alone not corrected me on the English way of speaking, then calling me a bog-trotter if I don't bother.

They are in tune in more ways than one. A sigh from the Muggle world is a driving wind by the time it reaches them. Few others who are not Half-bloods or Muggleborns understand. No Irish, no blacks, no dogs.

Under martial law and the imposed curfew of Bernard Coard's regime, her Grenadian great-grandmother and grandmother were just as liable to be shot on sight as Muggles. Anraí Montague had a pall of suspicion cast over him from the first time he opened his mouth at King's Cross, eleven years old. Muggle-borns and Half-bloods have never stopped looking at him askance, fearing an Erin go Bragh, or Tiocfaidh ár lá, though the first is no threat to them. There's nothing wrong in taking pride in one's country. And besides, he is much more likely to say feck the RA, than Up the RA. They have both worried for loved ones on the other side, in the Muggles' world.

What spell is there that can stop a bullet, a bomb, a tank? The creators of the Statute of Secrecy had great foresight.

He is the only one who knows her grandmother is a squib; she's the only one who knows the same about his stepmother. Neither of them can still stand Filch though. They hate other students picking at his being a squib, and not his being a wanker — at least one of those things is mutable.

She has never tip-toed around him, blaming him for the actions of the IRA.

He has never wrinkled his nose at the smell of coconut oil and shea butter in her hair.

I'm sorry, Ange. It's not working out, it's just so different. We're just so different.

You're a bonny lass but...

It's been fun, Johnson, but I don't really think we're going anywhere, do you?

My mother wants grandchildren who look like her, I know she does, and — so do I.

Her sister said she had it coming, dating those English boys. Angelina told her one was a Lowland Scot, and another had a half-Welsh father, and had been raired there himself. To no avail.

I don't know why you don't date with your own.

What, a wizard? At her sister's look, she held out a hand — look! We have five fingers on each hand, no fur. We're not Goblins, Sabrina. We're the same race, all humans, just different ethnicities.

(And she thought but didn't say: see, how well that's worked out for you. All the boys her older sister had ever dated were Muggles, as white Britons were very much the majority of Hogwarts and the British Wizarding world. Sabrina had never dated outside of her "race", and didn't seem to want to. Most of her boyfriends came to think she was cheating on them because she kept quite a large secret from them: that she was a witch. She didn't tell them about Hogwarts, just said she went to a private school up north. No owls popping round their estates, or semi-detached, no sir. Angelina would never tell her she had it coming.)

At least her sister isn't a hypocrite; she's needled her twin brother about his own preference too, that being white girls.

Angelina had never understood the whole preference business. She's always just liked who she liked. Unlike her brother that included "her own"; even growing up in a majority Asian borough on the edge of London, she'd never thought the few Caribbean boys there reminded her of her father and brother — which was the inverse of one of Nathan's reasonings.

A boy could have been purple with blue dots and that wouldn't have stopped Angelina fancying him.

That wasn't how it went with Montague. She'd never given him a second thought except as that Slytherin, with skin like freckled alabaster, whose gaze often lingered on her — a different look than Slytherins usually threw her way.

But then they crossed paths in the Owlery one lunch. He had tears of rage in his eyes and was punching the wall. The Republican Army in Ireland had put a bullet in his grandmother's leg, almost another in her head. She pressed his shoulder in silent condolence. He looked up at her, the softest, most confused look on his face. By the end of the day, she would know what his tears tasted like, what his mouth felt like, how to hold a crying boy in her arms and stroke his hair just so. The end of their second year was just weeks away. He was her first kiss.

They both realised they were the same that day, caught between two different worlds. They gravitated towards each other. His housemates pulled away from him in disgust; hers didn't know what had gotten into her.

Angelina used to dread asking boys about Hogsmeade — lightly, teasingly, because the boy was supposed to ask, not the girl. She used to dread going down there with them.

Not with him.

Angelina loves going to Hogsmeade with Montague, always has, even before things shifted between them, her touch starting to linger like his always had, her gaze forever seeking him out, pulse quickening when their eyes met. (He sometimes doffed an invisible hat at her; she was always charmed by that gesture and a few times inclined her head in return.)

Angelina loves when he draws her closer, his breath warming her ear. His low, snarky comments when people look at them shouldn't make her laugh but they do.

"And this mister piggy went to Honeydukes's — finally. Thought his eyes were going to pop straight out his head for a minute there. And this missus fox-face nearly went flying over her arse after she couldn't stop staring at two perfectly normal teenagers." His voice gets louder at the end, carrying seamlessly to the older woman's ears.

She screws up her mouth. "That's not normal and you know it." Like Monty, she is Irish. "I'd be shamed if my brother went traipsing around with a —"

"Hold your whist, you old wagon!" Then to Angelina, "Come on, cushla ma chree, let's go. Something rotten is in the air; I think an inferi has been ambling around." And he kisses her. On the cheek. But it is such a shock, such a thrill, she thinks she has died. He is not like the others, she keeps forgetting that.

Then she asks him what he meant, and when he tells her, she stops to pinch herself, sure she is dead, or else in a very elaborate dream.

Wagon is a word for an overbearing, contrary and unattractive woman.

And cushla ma chree, which he said so surely, is another way of saying cuisle mo chroí. There is a long pause where neither of them look at the other before he says, it means pulse of my heart.

She stops walking, so does he. She finally backs up the courage to look at him and he is staring at his feet, shuffling them in the snow, cheeks red. Much more so than usual.

"Well," the lightness of her voice belies the lump in her throat, "that certainly beats the one creole word I know to describe a person. Bumbaclat. Trust me, you do not want to know what it means." She laughs, the wind stirring her braids. "It's not a compliment." People said it when they were vex.

He glances up at her, under his lashes. "I'll steel myself for it then, so I will. For when you throw it at me just after you're angry. And then I'll say," he clutches his heart, staggering back, "but I don't know what it means, Angelina. You can't just call me sum'in, I don't know the meanin' of. It isn't fair." She giggles as they start walking again. "It just isn't, I tell ya."

"You know," he says after a long but comfortable pause, his arm around her waist, "I think I'll start calling you cush now. Keep it short and sweet."

"Like you."

"Oi!" He stoops in the snow and, sensing his intent, she dances backwards, laughing.

She laughs all the harder when his snowball dissipates midway between them. "I didn't even need to dodge." She throws her own hasty snowball at him, cheering when it hit its mark. "I shouldn't know how to throw better snowballs than you," she says, giving a little happy dance. "There's no snow in the Caribbean!"

"It just pisses down in Ireland, cush. Shite's terrible. Doesn't look a thing like this." His next snowball is a bit better, going a little farther than last time. She tells him so with a sarcastic, slow clap. He sketches a bow that is just as sarcastic. "Take me there one day, will you?" He says breathlessly as he gathers up more snow. "To your islands."

"Sure," she says, scissoring from side to side tauntingly.

After that day, when they are outside, he is always reaching out and touching her cheek with his bare fingers. They are cold as winter's arsecrack but she doesn't pull away once. In a world where people think little of scourgifying library tables she's just vacated or pub tables, his free touch is a balm. And he does touch her freely. Even when other people are looking.

They are walking around the Quidditch Pitch, not at all glancing at the Ravenclaws practising above them, not even a little bit, when he suddenly stops and stares at her. She looks at him quizzically and he lifts a hand to her cheek, cradling it like it is a precious gem.

"Just," he says throatily, "your skin — it's feckin' glowing." That effusive praise makes her laugh. His thumb brushes her cheek and he comes closer. "I'm just after glowing, that's the effect you have on me, Acushla." He swallows, takes a breath like he is intoxicated, then leans into her, kisses her. She feels like she is flying, even with her feet on the ground, and loops her arms around his neck, their bodies aligning.

There are some whistles and heckles from the Ravenclaws who are watching. They do not even turn to look, trudging along in the slush until they reach the side of a Quidditch stand, away from prying eyes. He presses her into it and they kiss again, his hands continuing their slow caress over her body, her skin.

She wants to melt. He loves her skin. She'd always thought so, but hearing it is something else. It was the bane of other wizards she dated; the Muggle boys her sister said she should be dating passing her over in favour of caramel-coloured skin, or lighter — a tone Sabrina was closer to than Angelina. That was if they, like her brother Nathan, didn't already have a preference for white girls. If she was tanned a deeper, richer brown from the Caribbean sun, they never even looked at her.

Their mother, also on the lighter side, had always said stay out of the sun. Angelina has never wished for one second that she'd listened. Her grandmother would salute her. Your mother a fool, her father's mother would sometimes say. Or on that same vein, with different words: She really bright, oui. Really bright. (They've never liked each other.)

For a long time, Angelina felt she was the only one who loved her deep brown skin.

But she isn't. Montague nuzzles her nose with his. Her heart feels fit to burst.

He whispers against her mouth. "I really wanna see what we look like together in bed; I've always wondered." Brushing the backs of his fingers against her cheek. "Just the thought of it is makin' me —" she puts a hand on his mouth.

"Don't ruin the moment."

He cross his eyes and she giggles. He then licks her palm and she yelps, pulling her hand away. "Says the moment-ruiner in chief —" She stops his mouth with hers. It's effective, to say the least.

She'll be doing it as much as she can.

People don't like it, seeing them together, they really don't.

"Oi, you two!" Especially not this day. Tensions run high. "Colonials," the Ravenclaw steps up to them outside the Great Hall, "what were you up to, yesterday?" A Muggle-born, or Half-blood. Purebloods don't know what colonies are, or if they do, they don't mention them. Quite unlike their Muggle-raised counterparts.

"Yeah! We saw you around the pitch."

"You know," someone whispers, "it turned my stomach seeing them suck face. Why can't they stay among their own?"

Today's match has been cancelled. There is a strong storm toying with the school, it began last night. It is too powerful for even the Professors who had to call off 'Ravenclaw's Comeback,' as some people had taken to calling it.

"We were going to crush you," the first boy says, stepping toe to toe with her. "What in the blazes did you do?" The good news: he fails at intimidation. She is taller than him by half a head. The bad news: she can still smell his breath from up here.

"Can I get you a mint?" Some of the watchers laugh, none harder than Montague; his hand squeezes hers as he doubles over. She has always been able to make him laugh like this, eyes crinkling at the corners and white teeth flashing. He loves and loathes that about her; he can't play the enigmatic Slytherin when she's around.

The first boy spits it out, red in the face. A slur, a wretched one. Muggles painted it on her grandmother's London house in the fifties, then her parents' home in the seventies, eighties.

She cannot move, cannot speak. She has grown sadly resigned to it, in either world. She fears an angry reaction — especially here where that word isn't known — will see the labels pile on her more than usual. She will be buried under them, can expect little sympathy. Her father, also straddling the two worlds, and who had lived through the turbulent sixties and seventies, had said as much — do not react; they'll see they have won and that's just what they want, her brother had said as much — you can't do anything, Ange. Just let it go. Her hands clench into fists. Her friends are coming up behind her, asking what's going on.

Beside her, Montague stretches out a hand — his free one, she'd forgotten their others are still entwined — to the Ravenclaw and whispers something — she thinks in gaelige. A good student of Hogwarts is not supposed to know a foreign spell. A good student incants in Latin and nothing but. A good student does not want to be viewed with suspicious eyes by the faculty, and peers.

Anraí Montague has never been a good student. He cares little for rules, concerned only with the breaking of them. She loves and loathes that about him.

Angelina's always thought Ireland's magic was different to Britain's — to England's even; this is her proof. There is no visible change in the boy, save his eyes widening and a slight tightening of his limbs, like he's caught in a vice. Montague tells him to never say that word again, to never get in Angelina's face like that again, never so much as look at her sideways — or he'll be tossed into the dark mirror world of the aos sí, or daoine sìth as Scots call them, and left to wander until the flesh was rotting from his bones. He wouldn't die then, oh no, then he'll be bought back to this realm where all could see him for the wretch that he is, and not even his own mam would bear to be in the same room as him.

The plateau holds for a few tense seconds, shock and deep unease etched on the faces of the watchers, their worst nightmares given life.

Montague's hand falls; the boy does too, right into his knees, sobbing out an apology. It's barely enough.

Katie's hand comes up on her shoulder. She doesn't say a word, just squeezes. Even without knowing that vile word, it was obvious something had happened. Something often happened during her first year. And her third. And now fifth. Alicia, who been witness to it all, is angry. "I thought this had stopped." She thought the ones with those ideas had graduated, unlike Angelina who knew that —

"It never stops." There is always someone, Muggle-raised or Wizard, who wanted those different from them out, wanted the world sealed off and monochrome and uniform.

"You stepped up," Lee says to Montague. "Well — if there's no retaliation, that is." He nods at the other boy, who gives a wry smile.

"They won't," Fred comes to one side of her, George on the other, the girls in between. "If," his twin continues, "they know what's good for them." They too look at Montague; for once there's no disdain there.

More than one thing changes after that morning.

No one looks at her askance anymore. They give Montague a wider berth than usual — except conversely some Housemates of his, who seek to get closer and hold out the hand of friendship. She thinks they'll get a nice finger in their faces in return.

Her friends are a little easier with him. Not throwing out the red carpet but just not being as hard on him anymore. For being a Slytherin at least. Now they start to needle him on his terrible dress sense and personal space issues. Anyone listening would think nothing had changed, that they still disliked him. She knows otherwise. It's more than she could ever have expected.

Their kisses taste sweeter. They're fortified, almost. They are like unbreakable steel, bound up together, tighter and tighter. Gods help anyone who tries to put them asunder.