ren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
necessarian) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
twodongs2017-07-23 05:21 pm
necessarian) wrote in twodongs2017-07-23 05:21 pm
Entry tags:
round five: prompts (july 23-29)
TOP LEVEL COMMENTS ONLY
| DAY | PROMPT | PUNISHMENT |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday (July 23) | Something very odd was happening to Zacharias Smith. | not allowed to dm (one/both) |
| Monday (July 24) | Character A wants to buy something that Character B says no to | write 300w of kurotsukki |
| Tuesday (July 25) | Secret Dating | not allowed to dm (one/both) |
| Wednesday (July 26) | Kissing lessons: character A has never been kissed so character B teaches them how | write badfic (with epithets) |
| Thursday (July 27) | Takes place entirely in the space of an hour | not allowed to dm (one/both) |
| Friday (July 28) | High School AU Pining | not allowed to tweet in general (includes replies, does not include dms) |
| Saturday (July 29) | Fake dating with a twist | not allowed to dm (one/both) |
* feel free to edit/add new comments if more is written on the day; comments are meant to encapsulate everything that is written, not just the part that fulfills the prompt
** clarification - "not allowed to dm" is a punishment for the day after, not a preexisting condition
isy's a/z (1/?)
“I know I’m charming,” he joked, “but I never knew I could do this.”
“It’s not you,” Zacharias said very quickly. “I mean—I’m sure you’re very charming, that’s not what I meant—I think someone else is doing it.”
Anthony had to laugh. “Of course someone else is doing it. I was kidding.”
“Oh,” Zacharias said. He pursed his lips in a straight line, and did not say anything else.
The culprits were easy enough to spot—their training space was like a cathedral’s crypt, low vaulted ceilings held up by great stone pillars, and hiding behind one of them were the Weasley twins, practicing not on each other but on Zacharias, from a distance.
Anthony did not find it funny.
“You two seem good at this already,” he said. “Maybe you can quit it.”
He wondered if he ought to be more intimidated, by their reputation if nothing else. But then again, the twins were just troublemakers, and Anthony was a Prefect. If anything, they ought to be intimidated by him.
“Just having a bit of fun,” one of them said. Anthony couldn’t tell which was which.
“That’s right,” the other said. “No harm meant.”
In fact, it took Harry Potter telling them off to convince them to stop, but Anthony fancied his authority had something to do with it too. Satisfied, he returned to Zacharias, who for his part had gone oddly quiet.
This was someone else with a reputation—Zacharias was the bad boy of Hufflepuff, insofar as Hufflepuffs could ever be considered bad, because he had a sharp tongue and wasn’t afraid to hurt feelings. Case in point, the first Hog’s Head meeting. The twins had picked on him then, too.
But Anthony didn’t know Zacharias very well at all. They had worked together in potions a couple of times, where Zacharias was quiet and proficient and never said more than he needed to. Anthony had always found this passingly strange, because whenever Michael and Terry had been stuck working with Zacharias in some class or other, they said he took every opportunity to say something rude to them. This, Anthony supposed, was why he was a Prefect, and Michael and Terry were not.
“Thanks for that,” Zacharias said.
“Not a problem,” Anthony said. “I can’t stand it when—”
Well, it wasn’t bullying as insidious as he’d had the misfortune to experience at the Muggle schools he went to before Hogwarts, but it nevertheless rubbed him the wrong way.
“—when people do stuff like that,” he finished lamely.
Zacharias, if he picked up on Anthony’s hesitation, did not comment. “Go on, then. Disarm me.”
It seemed like Zacharias Smith was a veritable magnet for odd things, little inexplicable curiosities that followed him around and altered his behaviour in near-imperceptible ways.
Luckily, Anthony had always been a very observant person.
In the second meeting of Dumbledore’s Army—“Stupid name,” Zacharias had said, catching up to Anthony and the others as they walked to the Room of Requirement, “so bloody sycophantic,”—the two of them ended up working together again, practising Impedimenta. Anthony wasn’t overly fond of the idea of being forced to slow down, like walking through the middling end of a swimming pool but filled with honey instead of water, so he volunteered to go first this time.
The problem was, Zacharias didn’t seem to be able to perform the spell at all. He opened his mouth and stuttered out the jinx and haphazardly waved his wand. It was amateurish, sloppy. There was no way Zacharias would’ve made it to fifth year without being able to cast a simple jinx.
“Is everything alright?” Anthony asked. He often prided himself on his delicacy, but when Zacharias didn’t answer, he decided to push it a bit, talk to Zacharias in the way he was supposed to talk to other people. “You’re casting like a fucking first year.”
At least Zacharias cracked a smile at that. It faded fast, though. “Leave off. I’ll get there.”
“Are you—oh, someone isn’t performing it on you, are they? Not again. I bet it’s the bloody Weasley twins.”
“No, I’m—”
In hindsight, it’s so obvious. “I’ll find them,” Anthony says. “This behaviour is so distracting, and quite frankly a—”
“Impedimenta!”
Everything stalled at once; Anthony’s limbs slowed to a crawl, and he tried to move forward but something sticky and excruciating was holding him back. It was every bit as unpleasant as he’d imagined it being.
“Actually,” Zacharias mumbled, “I’m bloody good at jinxes.”
When the effects wore off, Anthony finally managed to turn back to face Zacharias—who was, surprisingly, blushing. Trust someone with a reputation to be full of surprises. Anthony would be blushing too if he were that good at the Impediment Jinx.
“You are,” he agreed. “So how about we never do that again? Bloody hell, but it’s uncomfortable. I suppose you already know what it feels like, but do you mind if I try it on you? Just once?”
“I wasn’t, er—I wasn’t under the effects of the jinx,” Zacharias stammered.
“Oh,” Anthony said.
“So try it on me.”
Anthony did—he raised his wand and, although his wandwork had always been substandard, he managed it on only his second try, and he and Zacharias both agreed they’d had quite enough of this jinx and didn’t need to work on it again, thank you very much.
Anthony assumed that would be it. Maybe Zacharias got nervous under pressure. Maybe he needed a push to get his blood running. Maybe it was just in the DA, because there were so many people there who were so hostile towards him.
The next time they were in each other’s company, though, was in the Arithmancy class they shared. Arithmancy only had eight students enrolled—it was officially the most unpopular subject for their cohort—so everyone in the class knew each other and chatted easily, with the general exception of Zacharias, who sat up the back and never said a word. Anthony had always assumed that this was because he was, generally speaking, a friendless dickhead. But after that second DA meeting, in Thursday afternoon Arithmancy, Zacharias came and sat in the front row, right next to Anthony, and said nothing at all.
“Um,” Anthony tried. There were still a few minutes before Professor Vector would arrive. “Hi… ?”
“Whatever,” Zacharias said. “I’m not here to socialise.” Even he must have found that weird, though, because after a brief pause he added, “Unless you particularly want to.”
“I don’t mind,” Anthony said, amused. “Personally, I also come to class with a mind to pay attention and take notes and generally, you know, not spend the whole hour chatting.”
Apropos of nothing, Zacharias said, “I think I need glasses.”
“You what?”
“Need glasses,” Zacharias said. “For my eyes. Not sure I can see so well from the back row; that’s why I’m sitting in the front.”
“Right.” Anthony took his own glasses off and fiddled with the arms. “Shortsighted, right? Do you want to try mine?”
“Try your—”
“Glasses, yes.”
This conversation was going absolutely nowhere. Was Zacharias always this painful a conversationalist? Where were all the witty comebacks Anthony had been promised? Impatient, he grabbed Zacharias by the chin and turned his face so they were eye to eye, fixing his glasses onto the bridge of Zacharias’ nose.
Zacharias went very red and screwed his eyes shut; Anthony let his hand drop. It was just as well he did, because when Zacharias opened his eyes again he flinched back almost straight away.
“Jesus fucking christ, you’re blind,” Zacharias said, scrambling to get the glasses off his face.
“No, I’m not,” Anthony said. “And you’re probably not that bad either, if that’s your reaction to my prescription.”
Also, although he wouldn’t note it out loud, he found the fact that Zacharias sweared like a Muggle weirdly attractive.
“So I guess there’s no real reason for you to sit in the front row, after all,” Anthony added.
He was half teasing, half seeing just how far he could go before Zacharias cracked and said something seriously rude to him. After hearing Zacharias swear, Anthony really badly wanted that to happen. He wanted the worst of the worst, he wanted crude and offensive and the kind of thing that gives someone a really rotten reputation.
But all Zacharias said was, “I guess not,” and stayed exactly where he was.
To be honest, it was starting to get on Anthony’s nerves.
“I can’t deal with him,” Michael said after one particularly long and torturous Potions lesson. “If I ever have to so much as work at the same bench as Zacharias fucking Smith again, I’m going to poison him myself.”
Anthony and Padma had got into class late from Prefect duty—which had nevertheless lost them each five points from Snape—so they ended up working at a bench with Sally-Anne and Megan, whereas Michael and Terry had somehow ended up stuck with Wayne and Zacharias.
“You’d get a pretty long Azkaban sentence for that,” Anthony said.
“I don’t know how you put up with him in the DA,” Terry said. “Every time I went to put something in our cauldron he’d say something like, ‘Watch your fingers, Boot.’ You’d think it’d get old to him, but no! And then when I told him to shut up, he said it wasn’t his fault I confused my hands with toast at breakfast every morning.”
Anthony snorted, refraining from laughing properly only because of the look his friends gave him. He’s definitely been missing out on Zacharias’ greatest hits. “Is that really what he said?”
“There was a lot more swearing,” Terry said.
“And then he said that maybe the reason my stirring was so tense was because I couldn’t get a girlfriend,” Michael said. “Can you imagine the nerve of it? He knows I have a girlfriend. And Ginny hates him too!”
“Seriously, Ant,” Terry said, “how do you do it? How do you work with him and not come out of it wanting to kill him?”
“Or are you just better at hiding it?” Michael added.
“I—” Anthony paused. He wasn’t sure how to phrase this; Zacharias had clearly been horrid to Michael and Terry, and in Section 4, Subsection 7c of the Boot-Corner-Goldstein Friendship Charter was a clause on supporting the other signatories through friendship and other social troubles (relationship troubles were in Section 5), even if you happened to be friends with the person causing said troubles.
Michael sighed. “Spit it out.”
“Section 1, Subsection 2a,” Terry said. “No secrets between friends.”
“I do hate it when the rules conflict each other,” Anthony said. “To be honest, he’s perfectly cordial to me. I mean, he’s kind of obtuse sometimes, but he’s never been downright awful to me like he is to you two. And, um, everyone else, apparently… ?”
For once, Terry and Michael looked to be at a complete loss for words.
“I’ve wondered if it’s because I’m a Prefect,” Anthony mused.
“He probably hates you so much he doesn’t even bother,” Michael said eventually, although he didn’t sound so sure of it himself.
“I don’t think so,” Terry said—he was very good at missing nuance and taking people at face value. “I wonder if maybe he actually likes Ant.”
“As if a curmudgeon like Smith is capable of feeling a genuinely positive emotion towards anyone,” Michael said, rolling his eyes. “I doubt he’s ever liked anyone. Does he even have friends in his own house?”
But all this was giving Anthony ideas—he’d been waiting for Zacharias to make some sort of move, to get as horrible as people thought he was, when maybe all along Zacharias had been waiting on Anthony, too. Maybe he didn’t know how to make friends, and Anthony was the only person who’d really given him a chance. All it would take was a little more effort on Anthony’s part to get Zacharias to really open up to him.
“Actually,” Terry said, “I meant like like.”
It was impossible. Surely it was! No-one would have a crush on Anthony Goldstein. He was a Prefect, but with Umbridge’s Inquisitorial Squad swanning around like they owned the place he’d never have enough authority to be truly imposing in the role. He was intelligent, but he was far better at writing essays than wand-waving, and although he had stubbornly worked at it, Hermione Granger was still top of the grade. He was tall, but nowhere near as tall as Zacharias, and he was okay looking, if you liked boys with glasses and long, pointy noses.
Zacharias didn’t need glasses and he had a small and perfectly formed nose, not that Anthony was thinking about his nose, because he didn’t have a crush, and also, that would be weird.
Still, after his discussion with Michael and Terry, Anthony was more aware of his every action around Zacharias, and as a result, they were both acting weird and there was nothing Anthony could do to snap himself out of it.