Nox
one/one.
When an aging woman wearing peculiar robes and a funny hat shows up at the Badwan’s door when Faris is eleven, claiming to be a teacher at some school (Faris wasn’t paying attention, to be honest), and says that Faris has ‘remarkable talents, definitely surpassing that of the average muggle’, pretty much everyone is confused.
- - -
Faris warms up to the idea of magic quickly, dumping his childish magic kit, with a top hat and coin tricks and even a furry rabbit, into the bin out on the curb, definitely not disappointed in the slightest when it gets taken away by the bin men (Faris smugly thinks that if he really wants a new one, he can just magic one up).
- - -
He buys his cauldron and his robes and his potion ingredients and his wand in Diagon Alley, with money the goblins at Gringotts begrudgingly exchanged for muggle money. He feels awkward and out of place, surrounded by all the people who obviously grew up knowing everything about themselves, but after he runs into a messy boy called Joe, who mutters something about Floo Powder, before happily introducing himself, Faris feels so much better about being there.
- - -
Faris gets sorted into Ravenclaw house. He’d done a lot of reading about the school between finding out about it, and actually coming there. Ravenclaw apparently values things like wit and intelligence and creativity - and Faris can live with that, definitely. Joe gets sorted into Ravenclaw, as well, and so does one of Joe’s good friends, Rhys Webb.
There’s speeches from the headmaster, which Faris is enthralled in, honestly, and then a feast appears (like magic, Faris scoffs in his head), and he can definitely get used to the whole magic thing, because it’s kind of brilliant.
- - -
Faris first hears the term mudblood when he’s in his fourth year at the school (when Joe’s trying to comfort him about it, he comments that he’s surprised it took that long. Faris doesn’t talk to him for a week). There’s some Slytherins that are smirking and making snide comments about the fact that Faris’ parents are muggles, until one of them hushes them all up and laughs that Faris can’t help that he’s a ‘mudblood’.
Joshua, another Ravenclaw that just kind of attached himself to Faris and Rhys and Joe’s group somewhere during first year, tells Faris what it means and kind of awkwardly hugs him, before going down to the great hall to fetch Joe, because Joe just kind of knows how to comfort Faris best.
- - -
There’s a boy called Tom and he has nice eyes. He’s a Gryffindor, and in two of Faris’ classes. Faris talks to him and they swap books, because Faris reads alarmingly fast and Tom doesn’t really have money for new ones. Tom is intelligent and often lets Faris know lots of random things, that most people wouldn’t even want to know. He also tells Faris that Joe is not quite as unattainable as he might think.
That leaves Faris baffled for days.
- - -
During their fifth year, Faris and Joe seem to get in trouble a significant amount more than they used to. They suspect it’s because of the new teacher, Professor Parkinson, a former Slytherin student that seems to greatly dislike anyone who’s not in her former house. Anyone who’s not in Slytherin gets in trouble for nothing in her lessons, so Faris and Joe find themselves in detention on a regular basis.
They make their way to the same detention room almost every night, down in the dungeons where Professor Parkinson’s office is. They were to be cleaning the stone walls of random potions stuff that ended up on there, that night. Joe slows down his walking after they reach the bottom of the stairs in the entrance hall.
“We’re going to be late,” Faris hisses, grabbing the sleeve of Joe’s black robe, trying to rug him along. It’s a bit of a cold night, even in the castle, and Faris just wants it all to be over and done with so he can go back to the Ravenclaw common room and sit in front of the fire and ignore everyone, as usual.
Joe smirks slightly; a signature smirk that Faris knows means trouble. Joe wraps his fingers around Faris’ wrist deftly and he drags him across the entrance hall, away from the door to the dungeons, to the broom closet. “We’re not going to detention.” He shoves Faris in and slides in after him, shutting the door and locking it with a hiss of ”Colloportus.” He shrinks down to the floor and sits on his arse.
“So what now?” Faris asks, sliding down next to him.
Joe shrugs, obviously not having got that far.
- - -
They’re three days into their sixth year when Joe kisses him for the first time. Faris squeaks, somewhere in the back of his throat and flails his limbs, the ones that seemed to have gotten ten feet longer over the summer and more like spaghetti than ever. When Joe pulls away from him, he says a cocky thank you to Faris for letting him stay for a week in the summer before sauntering away to their dormitories, winking at the third year girls who are gaping at them.
- - -
Joshua tells him across a large cup of butterbeer that Joe was just screwing with his head. Tom kicks Faris in the leg, apologises bashfully, then presumably kicks Josh, his actual target, before telling Faris the contrary. Rhys just sits there and eyes them all like they need to go to St Mungo’s or something.
- - -
Faris is good at charms. Faris is excellent at charms, in fact. Top of his class, Flitwick says quite often. He uses this to his advantage all the time, usually just for kicks - he likes to move things on first years all the time, shutting their books and levitating them to sit places they can’t reach; it never gets old.
- - -
Tom is lying on the floor with Faris and Rhys outside the Gryffindor common room, with his wand pointed to the roof, levitating a quill in lethargic circles. After some time of the three of them doing absolutely nothing, while Josh and Joe and a couple of other…acquaintances are off somewhere else (studying, Faris reminds himself), Tom stands up and wanders over to the stair railing, the floating quill following like on a string. Rhys and Faris follows, and then Rhys pipes up,
“I bet you can’t hit Ainsley, yeah?” Rolf Ainsley is a painfully annoying fifth year Gryiffindoor whom almost everyone has a dislike for. Faris spots him three floors down on a motionless staircase, talking to one of the portraits, as he often does (the portraits have told the boys a number of times they struggle to stay awake). His hair, blonde and contrasting perfectly with his black robes, is painfully obvious and he could be spotted from a mile away.
“Bet I can,” Tom retorts. He flicks his wand once and the quill spins in the air once (reminding Faris oddly of when his dad revs his car when he starts it), before saying ”Oppungo!”
- - -
Joe asks Faris what he wants to be when he’s older, once, and Faris shrugs, before asking Joe the same question back. “Healer would be good,” Joe mutters, picking at a thread in his scarf. Faris agrees - it would be good for Joe.
- - -
The tri-wizard tournament brings out the worst in people regarding their egos and how much money they’re willing to bet on peoples’ lives, but the Yule Ball is definitely the highlight, for Faris at least. He does not have a date - he doesn’t wish he had a date, either. He sits there and watches Joe and tries not to stare as he dances with his date, a girl in their year who’s lovely, Faris admits. He watches Josh and Rhys and Tom, too, but not as much; they all have dates, as well.
Finally, the Great Hall empties, until there’s pretty much only Joe and Rhys and their dates, and Faris. Rhys quietly offers to walk his date, a chirpy fifth year with red hair, up to her Hufflepuff common room, which she politely accepts, and they leave. Then there were three.
Joe doesn’t offer to walk his date, merely kisses her cheek and says he’ll owl her. He won’t. Quietly, he sits down next to Faris, and Faris tenses, before Joe speaks.
“Do you want to dance?”
- - -
It’s the end of their last year there when Faris and Joe kiss for the second time. It’s their very last day and headmaster is has given his speech while everyone looked on in awing appreciation, they’ve thrown their caps and said their goodbyes to everyone, with promises to write and catch up as often as possible, knowing that they’re going to lose contact with most of their peers.
Faris is sitting alone in a compartment on the Hogwarts express. A lot of magical parents had come along to Hogwarts to watch their children graduate with tears in their eyes, and then whisked them off to exotic places for the summer. Faris didn’t bother inviting his parents, so he’s one of the students left to take the train back to London.
Joe enters quietly and Faris startles, unknowing that Joe was even on the train - he was sure he saw Joe’s parents at the graduation ceremony.
“Hey,” Joe says after a moment, sitting down across from Faris. “So we’re finished,” he looks at Faris carefully through blue eyes and Faris tries not to think about the double meaning behind that, because it feels like Joe is severing something. Possibly the tension between them, cutting that so it’s all slack and there’s absolutely nothing left, because there’s been something between them that neither could explain since they first met.
“Yeah,” Faris agrees, hollowly, because he knows it really is the end. It’s the end of him and Joe, it’s the end of Hogwarts, and now Faris has nothing at all to do. He’s not like his friends; he doesn’t have his whole life set out for himself. He has no idea what he’s going to do. No plan. And he feels like he’s going to drift away from his friends like everyone else is.
Joe leans forward and lays his hand softly on Faris’ knee, rubbing his thumb across the skin where his jeans are ripped. And then Joe is on top of him, straddling his legs awkwardly and pressing his cold hands to the sides of Faris’ face. Faris wants to ask what he thinks he’s doing, because really! But then Joe is eating up Faris’ words with his tongue, sliding it across Faris’ lips and inside his mouth, and Faris thinks okay, what? because he’s never quite been kissed like this before.
Eventually Joe pulls away, panting, lips wet and shiny and god, that was pretty amazing. He looks at Faris through dark eyes, and Faris notices the slightest bulge in the front of Joe’s jeans, and then his own, and his cheeks feel really hot all of a sudden, but all there is in Joe’s eyes is…adoration, plain and simple. And he leaves. Just as quickly as he came in and was all over Faris, Joe leaves, sliding the compartment door shut after him, and he really is severing their…whatever it is.
- - -
Faris gets a summer job in Zonko’s joke shop. Tom and Rhys and Josh and Joe all come in and see him now and then, but those visits slowly become less frequent as they all start up their lives outside of Hogwarts, and summer leaks into Autumn then Winter then Spring and Faris finds himself not really wanting to grow up properly, and keeps working in Zonko‘s. Josh is in some wizard band that Faris thinks sound ghastly, but hey, ghastly was always his style. Tom works for the ministry, doing something that Faris isn’t sure about, because he’s not really allowed to say, but it’s not like he’s that high up in rankings anyway, so what’s the matter with letting a few details slip? But Tom remains tight lipped about the whole thing, when he does bother to owl Faris. Rhys becomes a writer. He starts out at the Daily Prophet, which Faris thinks is pretty good, but he doesn’t really do much. As the time passes, he becomes a front page writer, and everyone always wants to read ‘what Rhys Webb has written today!’ He and Rhys owl each other even less frequently than He and Tom do, but the letters are always lengthy, because Rhys never misses a detail about anything.
He finds out from Rhys about Joe. Faris and Joe don’t talk anymore. They never really spoke too many words to each other again after what happened on the train, even when he did come in to see Faris over the first summer after Hogwarts. Joe is a Healer at St Mungo’s, just like he always wanted to be (Rhys comments that the green robes look terrible on Joe, but Faris can’t really imagine anything looking at all bad on Joe, so he doesn’t believe him).
He see’s Joe pass by the front window of the shop in Hogsmeade every now and then, but Joe never comes in and says hello. He always has the same pretty brunette girl on his arm, anyway; Faris doesn’t think he could stomach talking to Joe with that there. Rhys informs him in a letter that the pretty brunette girl is his soon to be wife.
Faris’ heart clenches and flutters when he reads this and he feels so very happy that Joe has found someone he wants to spend his whole life with, and he only cared a little bit that it wasn’t him. Bittersweet, is the word he uses in his journal to describe the sensation.
Bittersweet.
- - -
Faris warms up to the idea of magic quickly, dumping his childish magic kit, with a top hat and coin tricks and even a furry rabbit, into the bin out on the curb, definitely not disappointed in the slightest when it gets taken away by the bin men (Faris smugly thinks that if he really wants a new one, he can just magic one up).
- - -
He buys his cauldron and his robes and his potion ingredients and his wand in Diagon Alley, with money the goblins at Gringotts begrudgingly exchanged for muggle money. He feels awkward and out of place, surrounded by all the people who obviously grew up knowing everything about themselves, but after he runs into a messy boy called Joe, who mutters something about Floo Powder, before happily introducing himself, Faris feels so much better about being there.
- - -
Faris gets sorted into Ravenclaw house. He’d done a lot of reading about the school between finding out about it, and actually coming there. Ravenclaw apparently values things like wit and intelligence and creativity - and Faris can live with that, definitely. Joe gets sorted into Ravenclaw, as well, and so does one of Joe’s good friends, Rhys Webb.
There’s speeches from the headmaster, which Faris is enthralled in, honestly, and then a feast appears (like magic, Faris scoffs in his head), and he can definitely get used to the whole magic thing, because it’s kind of brilliant.
- - -
Faris first hears the term mudblood when he’s in his fourth year at the school (when Joe’s trying to comfort him about it, he comments that he’s surprised it took that long. Faris doesn’t talk to him for a week). There’s some Slytherins that are smirking and making snide comments about the fact that Faris’ parents are muggles, until one of them hushes them all up and laughs that Faris can’t help that he’s a ‘mudblood’.
Joshua, another Ravenclaw that just kind of attached himself to Faris and Rhys and Joe’s group somewhere during first year, tells Faris what it means and kind of awkwardly hugs him, before going down to the great hall to fetch Joe, because Joe just kind of knows how to comfort Faris best.
- - -
There’s a boy called Tom and he has nice eyes. He’s a Gryffindor, and in two of Faris’ classes. Faris talks to him and they swap books, because Faris reads alarmingly fast and Tom doesn’t really have money for new ones. Tom is intelligent and often lets Faris know lots of random things, that most people wouldn’t even want to know. He also tells Faris that Joe is not quite as unattainable as he might think.
That leaves Faris baffled for days.
- - -
During their fifth year, Faris and Joe seem to get in trouble a significant amount more than they used to. They suspect it’s because of the new teacher, Professor Parkinson, a former Slytherin student that seems to greatly dislike anyone who’s not in her former house. Anyone who’s not in Slytherin gets in trouble for nothing in her lessons, so Faris and Joe find themselves in detention on a regular basis.
They make their way to the same detention room almost every night, down in the dungeons where Professor Parkinson’s office is. They were to be cleaning the stone walls of random potions stuff that ended up on there, that night. Joe slows down his walking after they reach the bottom of the stairs in the entrance hall.
“We’re going to be late,” Faris hisses, grabbing the sleeve of Joe’s black robe, trying to rug him along. It’s a bit of a cold night, even in the castle, and Faris just wants it all to be over and done with so he can go back to the Ravenclaw common room and sit in front of the fire and ignore everyone, as usual.
Joe smirks slightly; a signature smirk that Faris knows means trouble. Joe wraps his fingers around Faris’ wrist deftly and he drags him across the entrance hall, away from the door to the dungeons, to the broom closet. “We’re not going to detention.” He shoves Faris in and slides in after him, shutting the door and locking it with a hiss of ”Colloportus.” He shrinks down to the floor and sits on his arse.
“So what now?” Faris asks, sliding down next to him.
Joe shrugs, obviously not having got that far.
- - -
They’re three days into their sixth year when Joe kisses him for the first time. Faris squeaks, somewhere in the back of his throat and flails his limbs, the ones that seemed to have gotten ten feet longer over the summer and more like spaghetti than ever. When Joe pulls away from him, he says a cocky thank you to Faris for letting him stay for a week in the summer before sauntering away to their dormitories, winking at the third year girls who are gaping at them.
- - -
Joshua tells him across a large cup of butterbeer that Joe was just screwing with his head. Tom kicks Faris in the leg, apologises bashfully, then presumably kicks Josh, his actual target, before telling Faris the contrary. Rhys just sits there and eyes them all like they need to go to St Mungo’s or something.
- - -
Faris is good at charms. Faris is excellent at charms, in fact. Top of his class, Flitwick says quite often. He uses this to his advantage all the time, usually just for kicks - he likes to move things on first years all the time, shutting their books and levitating them to sit places they can’t reach; it never gets old.
- - -
Tom is lying on the floor with Faris and Rhys outside the Gryffindor common room, with his wand pointed to the roof, levitating a quill in lethargic circles. After some time of the three of them doing absolutely nothing, while Josh and Joe and a couple of other…acquaintances are off somewhere else (studying, Faris reminds himself), Tom stands up and wanders over to the stair railing, the floating quill following like on a string. Rhys and Faris follows, and then Rhys pipes up,
“I bet you can’t hit Ainsley, yeah?” Rolf Ainsley is a painfully annoying fifth year Gryiffindoor whom almost everyone has a dislike for. Faris spots him three floors down on a motionless staircase, talking to one of the portraits, as he often does (the portraits have told the boys a number of times they struggle to stay awake). His hair, blonde and contrasting perfectly with his black robes, is painfully obvious and he could be spotted from a mile away.
“Bet I can,” Tom retorts. He flicks his wand once and the quill spins in the air once (reminding Faris oddly of when his dad revs his car when he starts it), before saying ”Oppungo!”
- - -
Joe asks Faris what he wants to be when he’s older, once, and Faris shrugs, before asking Joe the same question back. “Healer would be good,” Joe mutters, picking at a thread in his scarf. Faris agrees - it would be good for Joe.
- - -
The tri-wizard tournament brings out the worst in people regarding their egos and how much money they’re willing to bet on peoples’ lives, but the Yule Ball is definitely the highlight, for Faris at least. He does not have a date - he doesn’t wish he had a date, either. He sits there and watches Joe and tries not to stare as he dances with his date, a girl in their year who’s lovely, Faris admits. He watches Josh and Rhys and Tom, too, but not as much; they all have dates, as well.
Finally, the Great Hall empties, until there’s pretty much only Joe and Rhys and their dates, and Faris. Rhys quietly offers to walk his date, a chirpy fifth year with red hair, up to her Hufflepuff common room, which she politely accepts, and they leave. Then there were three.
Joe doesn’t offer to walk his date, merely kisses her cheek and says he’ll owl her. He won’t. Quietly, he sits down next to Faris, and Faris tenses, before Joe speaks.
“Do you want to dance?”
- - -
It’s the end of their last year there when Faris and Joe kiss for the second time. It’s their very last day and headmaster is has given his speech while everyone looked on in awing appreciation, they’ve thrown their caps and said their goodbyes to everyone, with promises to write and catch up as often as possible, knowing that they’re going to lose contact with most of their peers.
Faris is sitting alone in a compartment on the Hogwarts express. A lot of magical parents had come along to Hogwarts to watch their children graduate with tears in their eyes, and then whisked them off to exotic places for the summer. Faris didn’t bother inviting his parents, so he’s one of the students left to take the train back to London.
Joe enters quietly and Faris startles, unknowing that Joe was even on the train - he was sure he saw Joe’s parents at the graduation ceremony.
“Hey,” Joe says after a moment, sitting down across from Faris. “So we’re finished,” he looks at Faris carefully through blue eyes and Faris tries not to think about the double meaning behind that, because it feels like Joe is severing something. Possibly the tension between them, cutting that so it’s all slack and there’s absolutely nothing left, because there’s been something between them that neither could explain since they first met.
“Yeah,” Faris agrees, hollowly, because he knows it really is the end. It’s the end of him and Joe, it’s the end of Hogwarts, and now Faris has nothing at all to do. He’s not like his friends; he doesn’t have his whole life set out for himself. He has no idea what he’s going to do. No plan. And he feels like he’s going to drift away from his friends like everyone else is.
Joe leans forward and lays his hand softly on Faris’ knee, rubbing his thumb across the skin where his jeans are ripped. And then Joe is on top of him, straddling his legs awkwardly and pressing his cold hands to the sides of Faris’ face. Faris wants to ask what he thinks he’s doing, because really! But then Joe is eating up Faris’ words with his tongue, sliding it across Faris’ lips and inside his mouth, and Faris thinks okay, what? because he’s never quite been kissed like this before.
Eventually Joe pulls away, panting, lips wet and shiny and god, that was pretty amazing. He looks at Faris through dark eyes, and Faris notices the slightest bulge in the front of Joe’s jeans, and then his own, and his cheeks feel really hot all of a sudden, but all there is in Joe’s eyes is…adoration, plain and simple. And he leaves. Just as quickly as he came in and was all over Faris, Joe leaves, sliding the compartment door shut after him, and he really is severing their…whatever it is.
- - -
Faris gets a summer job in Zonko’s joke shop. Tom and Rhys and Josh and Joe all come in and see him now and then, but those visits slowly become less frequent as they all start up their lives outside of Hogwarts, and summer leaks into Autumn then Winter then Spring and Faris finds himself not really wanting to grow up properly, and keeps working in Zonko‘s. Josh is in some wizard band that Faris thinks sound ghastly, but hey, ghastly was always his style. Tom works for the ministry, doing something that Faris isn’t sure about, because he’s not really allowed to say, but it’s not like he’s that high up in rankings anyway, so what’s the matter with letting a few details slip? But Tom remains tight lipped about the whole thing, when he does bother to owl Faris. Rhys becomes a writer. He starts out at the Daily Prophet, which Faris thinks is pretty good, but he doesn’t really do much. As the time passes, he becomes a front page writer, and everyone always wants to read ‘what Rhys Webb has written today!’ He and Rhys owl each other even less frequently than He and Tom do, but the letters are always lengthy, because Rhys never misses a detail about anything.
He finds out from Rhys about Joe. Faris and Joe don’t talk anymore. They never really spoke too many words to each other again after what happened on the train, even when he did come in to see Faris over the first summer after Hogwarts. Joe is a Healer at St Mungo’s, just like he always wanted to be (Rhys comments that the green robes look terrible on Joe, but Faris can’t really imagine anything looking at all bad on Joe, so he doesn’t believe him).
He see’s Joe pass by the front window of the shop in Hogsmeade every now and then, but Joe never comes in and says hello. He always has the same pretty brunette girl on his arm, anyway; Faris doesn’t think he could stomach talking to Joe with that there. Rhys informs him in a letter that the pretty brunette girl is his soon to be wife.
Faris’ heart clenches and flutters when he reads this and he feels so very happy that Joe has found someone he wants to spend his whole life with, and he only cared a little bit that it wasn’t him. Bittersweet, is the word he uses in his journal to describe the sensation.
Bittersweet.
♠ ♠ ♠
feedback is well appreciated, loves.