character/pairing: Fred & Fred/OC

written by: LoonyLovegoodLuvr/ Loony or Roma

Dear Fred,

Your father and I just got a letter from Professor Pillsbury saying that you are failing Muggle Studies, History of Magic and Potions. We both agree that that is not a good way to start off the year. If you are going to work in somewhere other than your father's shop, you need to have decent grades. And no, an A does not count, even if it does stand for Acceptable. Your father says that he wants you to do something in life, and I agree.

So we have gotten you a tutor. Do you remember little Karen Stebbins who we used to have over for tea when you were younger? Auntie Verity's daughter? Apparently, she has remarkable grades and is in Ravenclaw. She's a very sweet girl and I'm sure you two will get along splendidly. You two will meet on Tuesday evenings in the library, and if I here that you've missed just one, you'll have me to deal with. Got it?

Love,

Mum and Dad.

P.S. Look Fred, I know school's been rough for you, and you think it will just be easier to work in my shop, but I want you to make something out of your life. Really. Mum isn't standing over my shoulder this time. We had a talk, and I realized that as good a shop owner you would be, you're my son, not my brother, and I've got to take care of you. So really try with Karen, okay?

Love,

Dad.

Fred groaned and leaned back dangerously off the bench at the Gryffindor table. He crumpled the letter and tossed it aside. "Mum and dad want me to get a tutor," he complained to his best friend Jacob. "Apparently working in the shop isn't a decent life choice anymore." He let out a disgusted sigh. "Even Dad bailed."

Jacob looked up from his book and grinned teasingly at him. "Well maybe if you get a tutor, you'll finally give a damn about the O.W.L.s; you certainly need to. I doubt a row full of fat Ps will win over any employers."

Fred punched his friend's shoulder good-naturedly and tossed a roll at him. "You're supposed to be on my side here! You can't just sit there with a book and expect me to suddenly fall in love with reading and smart stuff and all that." His face deepened into a scowl. "I don't see why you can't just be my tutor. You'd certainly be a better teacher than whatever nerdy Ravenclaw Mum and Dad can throw at me."

Jacob held up his book to block the offending pastry. "Not all Ravenclaws are nerds, mate," he said, glancing over at the table, whose occupants were glaring at Fred. "Who knows, she could be hot." Noticing that the roll had fallen onto his plate, he took a bite. "Poin' 'er ou' o me," he mumbled, his mouth full.

Fred rolled his eyes. "That's gross, mate," he said, but obligingly swiveled his legs over the bench so he was facing the Ravenclaw table. "Erm, I haven't seen Karen in about 7 years, but I'm pretty sure that's her. Or maybe not, she looks too young. Oh, there she is." He pointed to a girl with blonde hair in a ponytail that was scanning the text of a novel. Every once in a while, she would look up at her friends and smile at a joke. "Yeah, that looks like her, I recognize her smile."

"Ooh, you remember her smile," Jacob teased. He looked her up and down and gave a shrug. "She's not that bad-looking," he conceded. "Maybe it won't be so bad."

Fred scowled, "It will be bad if she does anything patronizing. Just because I'm not doing that well, doesn't mean I'm dumb." He looked at her again. "She seems like the type to think she's smarter than everyone else. When we were little, she would always charm my parents into thinking she was this little genius."

Jacob raised his eyebrows in surprise at Fred's bitter assessment of the girl. "Was she?" he asked carefully. He didn't want to offend his friend at all, but he wanted to know if Fred's hatred was simply of the situation or if it was the girl. He too looked at the girl. "She doesn't seem that bad," he said, watching his friend's reaction.

He shrugged. "She could sound smart, if that matters at all," he said, glaring at her. "Compared to her, I seemed like I'd just learned how to use the bathroom standing up."

Jacob snickered at the image of the girl at age 7, reciting Golapatt's Law and Fred just sitting there, looking shocked. "You need to relax," he told him. "You have to get a tutor. So what?" He punched his shoulder, "You're still my best mate."

Fred grudgingly gave a smile. "Thanks." The smile disappeared just as quickly as it came. "But I have to meet with her during free period right after I eat, to have a 'get-to-know-each-other session', and she's supposed to try teaching me something to see if she actually can." He rolled his eyes, "Bet you five galleons she cries when she gets her tutor position revoked."

Jacob shook his head in exasperation at Fred. "What if she actually teaches you something?"

Fred glared at her. "That's not gonna happen, mate. She'll be lucky if I even talk to her. In fact, if I change my view on school at all, feel free to shoot an Avada at me."

Jacob looked back over at the girl, who had pushed her glasses on top of her head and was animatedly explaining something to a guy sitting next to her. The guy, who was apparently her boyfriend, grinned broadly in understanding, kissed her on the forehead and walked away, waving. She pushed her books back into her bag and stood up, straightened her skirt and began walking over to the library. He grinned and turned back to Fred. "Oh but Fred dearest, how could I ever live without you?"

Fred grabbed a glass of pumpkin juice and held it threateningly over Jacob's book. "You want to take that back?" Jacob just laughed and threw a kipper at him. Fred munched it and grinned, "Thanks, I'll need it if I'm going to survive tutoring." He looked at the giant clock on the wall stood up. "Speaking of which, I should probably go to the torture session. Wish me luck!"

He wandered to the library, occasionally shooting spells at paintings and suits of armour. If he was going to be stuck in class during free period, he had to at least have fun while he was on the way. Passing through the trophy room and into the library, he looked for Karen. She waved at him nervously from a table in the back and he rolled his eyes as he sauntered over.

"So I thought that we could start with some Potions theory," Karen suggested nervously as she greeted him. Fred just glared at her. He hated everything about her: her black and turquoise glasses, her shoulder-length blonde hair that flipped out slightly at the bottom, the perfectly creased cuffs on her snow-white button down, her regulation length skirt, her black patent leather shoes with bleached socks folded neatly over her ankles, but mostly the fact that she was asking him what he wanted to do, and not being at all horrible and stuck-up.

At his cold silence, she laughed nervously and sat down in a nearby table. "Um, well, if you wanted to do Muggle Studies, that's okay too." He continued to glare at her, and didn't sit down. How dare she be kind to him after he'd just been a rude arse? Did she somehow think that she was being the better person by being nice? Because if that was the only reason she was being kind, he wasn't going to speak the whole time. She looked at him confusedly, and opened her mouth to say something then shut it. She opened it again, and that time, words actually came out. "Look Fred," she said fiercely. "I get that you don't want to be here, and that you'd rather just fail all your classes and work in your father's shop, but if you don't try, so help me Merlin, I'll-I'll-I'll tell your mother!"

His cold façade of anger shattered for a few seconds as he looked at her in shock. He hadn't pegged her to be the type to snap like that. He couldn't help but laugh at her attempt to threaten him (she looked like an angry teddy-bear). "You think I'm scared of my mum?" he asked patronizingly, and almost fell over at her fierce reply.

"Yes I do," she hissed. "I saw your expression when she sent you that Howler last month. And, and, and-" she was starting to get red in the face, "-you try to put on this actthat you don't care about what your parents think, but all you want is for them to love you for who you are. And that's the real reason you're so resigned to me tutoring you. You think that they're trying to change you!" She glared at him stubbornly, and he got the feeling that she thought she'd done a great thing, and he was going to start crying and admitting everything. Well, she was in for a surprise.

"You think you know me?" he hissed back (looking 100% more threatening). "You think that just because you used to come over to our house and charm my parents, and because you've occasionally gossiped about me to your friends, you know me well enough to say all that? Well news to you, sweetheart, you don't know anything." He glared back at her, his sides heaving, and she looked at him, frightened.

"Well," she said, looking like she was about to cry, "I'm sorry for assuming things that I didn't know were true about you. I shouldn't have tried to make generalizations." She picked up her bag and pulled it over her shoulder. "Since these tutoring sessions obviously aren't going to work out, I'll just leave. " She began to head out the door, her previous peppy demeanour gone.

He watched her go, feeling something twinge in his heart. Why did he have to be so mean? "Wait!" he called out to her. She spun around, looking hopeful. He smirked; this girl really did like teaching. "If I, uh, tried out this tutoring thing, will you stop looking like a dejected puppy? I feel kinda bad for yelling at you." She smiled and ran back. Giving him a big hug, she whispered her thanks over and over. He looked at her, perplexed. Why was she so happy that she had to spend more time with him? "I think you have something more than just tutoring me riding on this thing," he said suspiciously.

She blushed and pulled away from him. "Well, I want to teach here when we graduate, and I want to have experience. I mean, I've helped my friends study before, so I'm not entirely inexperienced, but I'd like to actually teach someone, you know?" she rambled on, then blushed even redder. "I'm sorry, I just get really excited when I think about teaching. It's my passion. Do you have a passion?"

He looked at her in surprise. Why would someone want to do something that involved staying at the school? Although it was true that he couldn't really imagine her doing something anywhere else. Already, after only reuniting for about 5 minutes, he got the feeling that she was fragile. She seemed like the type that would break if anyone so much as yelled at her. Which, he thought guiltily, he had already done. He was determined not to let anyone else hurt her; she was too innocent.

"Fred?" she asked, and he shook himself. Right, he was supposed to say his "passion." Thinking about it, there wasn't anything he really was passionate about. There was his pranking, but that was really just because he couldn't think of anything else to do that didn't require that much brain power.

"Um, I dunno, pranking I guess," he answered, scratching his head confusedly. "I'm not really a passionate person, I guess."

She looked at him disappointedly. "But there's got to be something that you really enjoy!" she persisted. "You know, something that makes you happy when you do it."

He looked at her, feeling as though disappointing her was a crime. "Um, well, I guess there's Uncle Harry's motorbike…" Damn. Why did he say that? That was his secret, and he couldn't just tell anyone (He tried to ignore the little voice in his head saying that Karen wasn't just "anyone" anymore). "I kind of like repairing it, and flying it, and you know, all that." Shut up, shut up, shut up, he told himself. Not even Jacob knew that.

She looked at him in surprise and he got the feeling that telling her wasn't the best idea. "That's really cool!" she squealed. "I've never met someone who wasn't muggle-born who liked muggle vehicles!" Suddenly, something lit up in her eyes. "Why don't we start off our first lesson with that?" She looked down at a sheet of parchment that she had pulled out of her bag. "It says here that Muggle Studies is your best subject out of the three that you and I need to work on, and you understand the theory, but you need to work on the reading. Is that right?"

He looked at her, surprised that she had even bothered to ask him. "Well that's what it says on the sheet, isn't it?"

She laughed a tinkly bell-like laugh and smiled at him. "Well obviously it says that on the sheet, but I want to hear it from you! What do you feel we need to work on?"

He shrugged; bewildered that someone cared about his feelings. "I dunno, the reading I guess. I'm not very good at reading, so it's kind of difficult for me."

She put the quill in her mouth and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. "Go on," she said, her voice muffled by the quill. "I'm just going to write it down as you talk."

He watched her with a quirky little smile on his face. "So you're going to teach me based on what I say?" he asked, a bit confused. He cringed; maybe she would think that he was stupid because he couldn't seem to understand what she was talking about.

She looked at him, unfazed by his apparently stupid question. "Yes. Why should I bother teaching you if I don't know how you learn?" She looked at him as if the way she was teaching was completely reasonable and common. He just shook his head, amazed. This girl was something else. How could someone so sweet and innocent become this mature while teaching? "But don't make yourself out to be stupider than you are so I'll teach you slowly, it won't work. I'll be able to tell."

"Well…" he started, still a bit gobsmacked by her teaching methods. "When I try to read, the words just mix up, and the letters float around. I can't always tell what the word is, so it makes understanding the reading hard for me." He hadn't ever really thought about it before. The professors hadn't ever asked him.

She made a note and smiled up at him. "Well Fred, what if you think of it like this?" She showed him a diagram that she'd drawn on the parchment. It looked familiar to him, and he looked at it closer. It was the engine of a motorbike. But the cords were all mixed up. "So you know what the final image should look like, right?" He nodded. "So show me where each wire should go. He pointed them out to her, feeling slightly childish. But she certainly couldn't be making fun of him, right? Sure enough, he was right about the wires, and the final image looked like the one he had drawn. "So think about it this way," she said, looking quite excited at her discovery. "Each cord is a letter. If you can figure out where each letter goes, you can complete the engine, right?"

He rolled his eyes. "Karen, if you're trying to speak to me in terms I understand, there's no need. I get what you're saying. If I untangle the letters, I'll get the final word. The problem is, I don't know the final word."

She beamed, looking even more excited. "But that's just it! What if you could recognize the mixed up engine's meaning, instead of the fixed engine? We'll just teach you the mixed up meanings, and you won't have to worry anymore!" She looked proud, and he couldn't help but feel proud too. He was going to read and understand what the book was talking about!

Later that night, he sat in an armchair by the fire, studying the list of words that she'd given him. She'd explained that if she gave him the regular words, no matter what mixture they turned out to be, he'd be able to recognize them. He passed his wand over one word and heard her voice clearly define it. He smiled and thought about it, ingraining it into his memory, as she'd called it.

"Do you want me to help you with the Muggle Studies homework?" Jacob asked, walking up behind him.

Fred smirked at him. "No, I'm already done. I did it in tutoring." He decided to surprise Jacob just a bit. "Karen helped me."

Jacob did a double-take, then grinned. "So it went well, huh?"

Fred smiled down at the parchment. "Yeah, I guess you could say that." It had definitely gone better than just "well," but he didn't want anyone else to be able to share that small bubble of happiness that was floating in him.

"YES!" Jacob crowed, leaping around the Gryffindor Common Room. He rolled around on the rug in front of the fire, laughing. "You owe me 5 galleons!" Fred just smiled and handed over the money. His parents weren't mad at him, he had a new friend (one of the sweetest girls he'd ever met) and he was beginning to be able to read. He would pay 100 galleons for that.