Chapter 3

Lovino had spent the week leading up to his eleventh birthday in a distracted haze, forgetting to wash his plate after dinner and lying awake late into the night. Nonno had been evasive when he first asked about his Hogwarts letter, and remained so beyond insisting that Lovino not get too disappointed if he wasn't able to go and asserting that it really didn't matter how much magic a person could do. There were no high expectations on a letter coming, but that little whisper in the back of his mind coaxed him with a tempting what if?

What if he had a secret potential that even Nonno didn't know about? What if he was just as special as Feliciano was, or maybe even more special? What if everyone around him had written him off his whole life, only to realize that Lovino was just as good as the rest of them-just as clever, just as talented, just as deserving.

During that week, before the eventual climax of soul-rending disappointment, Lovino sat and dreamed about the first thing he would do if-if--his letter came, too.

His imagined responses always shifted flavors depending on the day, but all were pretty far from what actually happens, which is this:

Lovino Vargas, at thirteen years old, throws the unholiest tantrum known to man.

It's slow, at first, a steady inhale of the tide to some dark, pulsing thing off the coast. It's easy for Lovino to drift. The words on the letter roll through his brain and off to wherever useless words go, and he stares at the book list for an unreasonably long time, taking in none of it. He feels emotion trying to crescendo into something, rumbling off in the distance as the sand is sucked hungrily into the vortex. Feliciano is babbling. Nonno is babbling. One, or both, of them cry in happiness.

The shape of it takes form over the horizon, imposing and vengeful, a natural disaster, breaths away from smashing the sandcastles below, waiting for that last little tug of gravity to set it into motion.

"Lovi," Feli squeals delightedly, "We'll be able to go together!"

Lovino fucking loses it.

His fists clench as the wooden floor splinters and violent tremors shake the house. Lighting fixtures shatter like starlight, spitting broken glass everywhere, the water in cups boils and froths, melting through the plastic, and Lovino wonders if it's possible to die from feeling too much.

His voice rips out of his lungs in a half-demented wail. "I'm—not—going—with—YOU!"

Because how fucking perfect. It's wonderful, isn't it? Now he can spend every day in public, under his brother's shadow, having been robbed of the chance to make his name mean something on its own. Isn't it so fucking great that he's allowed at stupid school that only wants him when he can be dragged in on Feliciano's coattails.

Going to Hogwarts as an asterisk under his brother's arrival is worse than not going at all.

Stuck in the eye of the hurricane, Lovino is ripped unceremoniously out of his dark thoughts when his grandfather upends a pitcher of lemon water over his head. All havoc in the apartment stops abruptly as he gapes in shock.

"Lovino," Romulus says, trying for a firm tone despite the tremble in his voice. "You need to calm down."

Shaking and dazed, dripping wet and lemon-scented, Lovino manages to say "I'm-I'm not going."

His Nonno's eyes narrow. "Passerotto, it's not a choice. If this kind of magic is bottled up in you, it isn't safe for you to leave it unchanneled."

"I'm not going," Lovino says, dazed, absent, and unresponsive as he wanders into his room, "and you can't make me."

Four days pass, with the door locked. His grandfather will open it occasionally with an 'Alohamora', only for Lovino to reach over from his bed and flick the lock again. If he picked the lock manually, Lovino thinks, he'd be screwed. Can't lock a door with a key still in it. Luckily, Lovino is probably the only wizard who has put any stock into doing things with his own hands.

His grandfather leaves meals for him on the floor, but Lovino isn't hungry, so he takes all the trappings of beef and lamb to give to Bambi-she, accommodatingly, eats them out of his hands. He's got to figure out how to get her some exercise, he thinks to himself. Things...aren't going as he planned. Haven't been, since that owl came by with that goddamned letter and ruined everything.

Day six. Day seven.

On day eight, there is a knock on his bedroom door. Three sharp, polite raps in quick succession.

This isn't his grandfather, and believe it or not, it apparently is possible for Lovino to hate someone even more than he hates Romulus Vargas.

"Fuck off," he snarls, pressing his face into Bambi's flank. The same three raps. He ignores them, strokes his fingers listlessly along the cold obsidian of hooves. Every fifteen minutes or so, the knocks return. Even after four hours, they don't seem to tire.

Grabbing his Swiss Army knife, he creeps along the floor, radiating a sort of dull hostility. After ten or so minutes, the knock sounds again, and the moment it does, Lovino throws open the door and presses the knife to the person on the other side.

It's...a girl. Which, uh. What the buggering fuck?

The young woman across from him looks unbothered despite the blade he's got pressed against her gut. In fact, she's got a slight smile tweaking her mouth when she tells him, "you've got the bottle opener out."

He looks down to realize that yes, in fact, he does. Nonplussed, and feeling kind of stupid, he blurts, "I'll, uh, open your stomach up like a bottle if you try to fuck with me. It's symbolic. Bitch," he adds lamely.

"Noted," the girl says, not intimidated in the slightest. "If you aren't going to finish your beef braciole, I'd like it, please."

Lovino turns to look at the plate on his floor, and tries to decide if he wants to go through the bother of saying, 'actually, I was trying to pick the good bits out of that for my invisible horse.' He isn't feeling particularly social though, so instead he just waves the bottle opener in front of her eyes menacingly and says, "If you try anything…. Watch out."

The girl cocks her head to the side slightly, deep green eyes crossing as she tries to follow the army knife dancing erratically in front of her. She nods once and says, "I'm going to eat it now."

And, sitting on the floor, she does.

Lovino sinks beside her to watch her eat, but she seems to be unruffled by that, too. She has short, dirty-blonde hair that curls at the end, and a wand holstered to her side, despite wearing an aqua blue muggle dress and matching headband. On top of that dress is a red and gold bolero.

"You're wearing some dumb Gryffindor shit," he accuses.

"I'm wearing a dress," she replies, taking an elegant bite out of the braciole.

"The-the fucking-jacket thingy!" He flails his hand at her ensemble, never having known too much about women's fashion. "You're a Gryffindor and you probably were sent here to piss me off until I joined your smoldering hellschool."

She pauses in her eating but, to her credit, doesn't look at him. "Kind-of," she says, and despite himself, Lovino wants to like her honesty. "They wanted to send someone from Hogwarts to talk to you, 'cause your grandda asked them to, but I said it should be me, since I'm the head girl."

"Why?" Lovino asks challengingly. "To get my brother's autograph?" The girl glances at him, looks back to her food.

"Because I heard you were powerful, and I wanted to see," she says, matter-of-factly.

Oh.

"Oh," he says faintly.

"I also figured that we'd have more in common. I'm muggle-born, and I never really cared about going to Hogwarts, either. People in wizard families...don't really get what it's like to have to change your whole life plan at 11. I imagine it's even harder for you now."

Lovino closes his mouth, opens it, closes it. "Y-yeah," he croaks, tears welling up in his eyes. "It's...it's really hard."

"D'you want to talk about it?" And weirdly, he kind of does. She's open and unassuming in a way that nobody else has been when talking with him about this shit. Not prying about his feelings, not gazing at him expectantly, but listening and responding all the same. She hasn't, he realizes, talked about his brother even once.

He loosens his posture one vertebrae at a time, and picks an orange slice off the plate.

Even wanting to say something, he isn't sure how to begin. He's spent so long not talking about it that it's hard to start, even when he wants to, and he's afraid that saying anything at all will suddenly burst this dam and he'll blurt every ugly thought he's ever had. He turns the orange slice over and over in his hand. The girl still doesn't say anything, just slows down to better savor her food.

Finally, he says, "I wanted to be a vet. Before the, uh. Magic shit." The girl says nothing beyond a hum of acknowledgement, apparently accustomed to dealing with reticent types. He cultivates courage from the silence. "People...kind of look through me." It's an understatement, to the extreme. "But animals...don't care. They like you-or don't like you-for what you do. I've been studying science, and I'm not very good at it, but I'm the stubbornest arsehole anyone's ever met, they say, and I know I can get into a good University if I just keep pushing."

The girl looks at him, smiles. "That's a lovely goal," she says warmly. Not simpering, not sympathetic. Matter of fact and warm. "I think you'd be a wonderful vet."

Tears threaten to spill down his face again, but he bites them back. "Th-thanks, uh…"

"Manon," she provides, offering him a piece of braciole. Realizing how hungry, he actually is, he takes it. "You know, magical creature care is a thing. You can take whatever electives you want in your later years of school. You could be a magical vet-or even just a regular one. A crup and a dog aren't that different, I should think."

"It's nice of you to try to make me feel better about this bloody nightmare," he sighs. "But I know it doesn't matter. Nonno can make me do whatever he wants. At the end of the day, I'm going to Hogwarts, whether I like it or not."

"What's so bad about going to Hogwarts?" Manon asks, resting her chin on her hand. "Unless you've got a lot of friends at your old school."

He's got, like, one and a half. "I don't want to talk about it."

"You'll feel better," she coaxes. He wrinkles his nose.

"Fuck off."

"Okay," she says easily. There's silence for a while longer. The Gryffindor has finished eating his food and is licking stray remnants of sauce off her fingers. She's very pretty, he realizes in a detached sort of way, and he'd probably be making an absolute fool of himself if she were in his room under any other circumstances. "I'm done now."

"Great," he grouses, pressing against Bambi while trying to pretend he isn't. "Get the hell out of my house."

"Do you want to go shopping together?" she asks suddenly, and Lovino is thrown.

"For-what?"

"Women's knickers," she says with a flat expression, beaming in mischievous delight as he chokes on his own spit and his face flashes though a spectrum of reds. "Nah, I'm just taking the piss. But if you have to go to Hogwarts anyway, then your options are to shop with your grandda or to shop with someone else. So d'you wanna shop with me?"

He could go shopping by himself, he wants to say. It would be easy enough. But, well-for whatever reason he likes Manon, even though it feels like the dumbest fucking decision ever. So even though his gut tells him 'just run before she picks Feliciano over you', his mouth apparently hasn't got the memo.

"Fine," he says instead. "Let's do it together."

Author's Note:

Manon is Belgium. And yeah, that's about it for this one. Let me know if you guys have any pairings you want to see! The only caveat is that I won't write teacher/student, and I've screwed around a LOT with the canon ages, so if two people turn out to be drastically far apart, I might not agree to write 'em together