Ultimate OTP Competition: Object: a muggle calculator

All About You Competition: Write about a character continuing their education post Hogwarts

The newest of the textbooks is maybe ten years out of date. Dean picks up General Physics in a secondhand bookshop, and soon he has an armful of things he would have learned in school. The cheapest are the old beat-up ones. He scans the fraying back covers and wonders, well, how often does calculus really change?

"You're a madman," Seamus says when he drops them on their kitchenette counter. He eyes the musty stack of books with distaste.

It gets down to paranoia, really, and he knows that. It's not as if someone's going to ask him to explain mitosis with diagrams and deduce that he's really a wizard when he can't. But Dean has always had a hard time with lying. To pretend he's something he's not is such a panicky, precarious feeling without experience to stand on. He can't think of anything else unless he's stable.

He tries to justify himself after the dozenth weird look from Seamus as he's working out integrals at the coffee table. "It just makes me more comfortable if I learn everything everyone else has," he says. "I don't have to be able to spit out equations off the top of my head, but I want to get a sense of things. Just a good base."

"Sure," says Seamus, watching him tap on his sister's old calculator and lean across the book to check the numbers.

"It's like figure drawing," Dean continues as he turns the page. "That's why I've got to take this class, to study the body from life so I know what I'm doing when I, you know, use it in art. In poses and clothes and different styles and things."

Seamus laughs. "You make it sound like you'll be drawing people without clothes on."

"Oh." Dean clears his throat uncomfortably. "Well, we will be. That's what you do."

"Naked?"

"Er, yeah."

"But—" Seamus seems dumbfounded by this information. "That can't be allowed, this is—academic—"

"Exactly," says Dean. "It's for study. You're acting like they'll be showing hardcore pornography."

"But still…" Seamus trails off weakly.

"I thought you knew what figure drawing was," Dean says to him, fighting a chuckle.

"I didn't know there was implied nudity," mutters Seamus. He retreats to his room shortly afterward, looking distressed.

If he's tempted to roll his eyes at Dean and his textbooks after that, however, he doesn't show it. He even offers to quiz him sometimes, or sits on the other end of the couch listening to everything interesting he's learned about the French Revolution.

The science and maths and history is followed by famous literature. He picks up everything he's heard referenced in public but doesn't know anything about, novels. His first kiss since Ginny Weasley happens in front of the library with the pretty librarian who helps him; she has long, honey-blonde hair and she likes Jane Austen. He doesn't tell Seamus he's seeing her and he doesn't tell her that he can't get five pages into Pride and Prejudice.

Dean is in his armchair in the evening with The Catcher in the Rye when Seamus shuffles out of his room to get some water. He leans on the counter by the sink and watches him over the rim of his glass. His brow furrows slightly.

"Do you need something?" Dean asks him, and he shakes his head. Confused, Dean holds his gaze for a few seconds, but eventually shrugs and returns to his book. "Okay."

"Do you regret going to Hogwarts?" Seamus blurts out as soon as he's looked away.

"What?" Dean gapes. "Of course not. Why would you think that?"

Seamus awkwardly averts his eyes before replying. "You wouldn't have to put in all this work now to have the life you want."

This is far from the worst way, in Dean's opinion, that magic ruined his life. Going to Hogwarts caught him up in the front lines of a war, inconveniencing his education was the least of it. But he can't say he hasn't wondered how he'd be if he'd been normal. That he still thinks of it as "normal" says so much. He's never been deprogrammed from that plan of what life was meant to be: he was supposed to go to university and get a job, one of the careers that he was always taught people could want to have when they grew up.

"I guess," he says, "that's true. But I don't know if...I'd want a life without everything I got from Hogwarts." Seamus nods. I don't regret meeting you sounds too mushy to say aloud, so Dean hopes that comes across unspoken if it's what he wants.

They rent the film versions of every Shakespeare they've heard of and watch one a night. At this point it's just in the guise of education. He enjoys listening to Seamus comment all through. He loves the feel of their feet under the same blanket, of the warm body next to him in constant support.