...Half-Dozen (of an Epilogue)

...Half-Dozen (of an Epilogue)

Disclaimer: Oh, come on. I may dress up as Draco Malfoy on certain select, appropriate, occasions, but I am not delusional...I know they're not mine and I know better than to ask for pay to write this.

The last term was over; the Seventh Year students, no longer students, were running about the grounds, shouting and carrying on and generally reveling in their freedom in ways that made them resemble First Years. One of them...then another...ran away from the celebration rather than toward it, away from the families waiting to congratulate their grown children and collect them from school for the final time.

A familiar bit of tapestry, a familiar corridor. By now, Scorpius knew all the places to look for Rose. It helped, he was fairly certain, that she wanted to be found by him.

"Mum's going to kill me," Rose wailed. Scorpius winced. Her distress was much more impressive at eighteen than it had been at eleven.

"She'll come around," Scorpius soothed. "It'll be hard not to, with your dad over the moon and all."

"She won't even want to look at me," Rose mourned.

"Well, that's better than homicide, right?" Rose shot him an angry look made more dire by her reddened eyes. "I'm not doing this right," Scorpius fretted. "Look... I'm really happy right now. I'm first string, and my best Beater ever is going to be watching my back. But, I could be even happier... that is... Um... The least I can do..." He shuffled his feet, then dropped to one knee so hard on the stone floor that he winced. "Ow. Sorry. Rose, would you...What I meant to say is, a few years ago...around seven, or eight, I guess... I said you could stay with me, if you wanted to." He cleared his throat and reached into his pocket... only this time, instead of a handkerchief, he brought out a tiny box. "Now, um... I'm asking again."

Rose's mouth hung open rather comically for a few seconds. "Is that...?"

Scorpius hurriedly opened it lest there be any misunderstanding and almost dropped the tiny ring. "It's not very big...I had to borrow against my first paycheck, but I can get you a bett..." His words were cut off by a hug...more of a flying tackle, really.

"You'd think I'd be used to it by now," he gasped. Sometime while he was trying to recover his breath from the glomp and accompanying kiss, Rose had apparently got the ring on her finger.

"Are you kidding," she murmured, all trace of earlier upset gone. "This ring is never leaving my finger. Not even during a game." Her eyes widened and she suddenly grasped the front of his robe. "Oh... what will Dad say? He's only just got used to the idea of...well...us."

"He'll come around," Scorpius said. Rose was enough like her mother that she'd take it amiss to know Scorpius had asked permission to propose, in proper traditional fashion. It would not do at all to mention that not only had Scorpius received permission, he'd received no fewer than three letters in as many weeks from the Weasley father in question...embellished with many colorful turns of expression but whose gist was that Scorpius had better assemble sufficient stones to hand over one attached to an engagement ring for Rose.

An unearthly WHOOP sounded through the corridor, and a near-dangerous blast of fireworks interrupted Rose's attempt to reward Scorpius' apparent bravado with another kiss. "CHAMPAGNE TIME!" Al shouted.

"Albus Severus Potter! You are still a bloody, clumsy, interrupting troll!" Rose yelled.

Rose wouldn't be Rose if she couldn't change moods on a sickle to berate Al... any more than Al would be himself without being able to interrupt a tender moment, Scorpius thought with fond exasperation.

"Yeah, yeah, second verse, same as the first," Al waved it off. "Come on, you two have a lifetime to snog and such. Right now, you've an engagement party to attend, without the old folks to rain on your parade and with a couple dozen of your closest friends and classmates. Here, let me get you started." Al handily conjured a trio of champagne flutes from thin air and began pouring from the bottle he had with him...a rather decent bottle, if Grandmother's lessons in choosing festive drinks amounted to anything. "A toast--to my best mate marrying my best cousin!"

Scorpius took a sip and decided that champagne was rotten stuff, regardless of what it cost. Rose seemed happy with it though, so he took another sip and schooled his grimace into a smile. Al also wouldn't be Al if he wasn't throwing around money and status symbols... Scorpius reflected, with considerably more exasperation.

"Look, I already borrowed from you to get the ring. I don't want you to put yourself out anymore," Scorpius said quite firmly.

"Borrowed... this isn't family jewelry?" Rose clutched at her ring, her expression conflicted. She was still sensitive about their respective family histories. Scorpius decided that he ought to have listened to Cousin Molly's advice about proposing and write it all out beforehand, lest there be any misunderstandings. It was quite amazing, really, that he'd managed to surprise Rose with his proposal; the entire Weasley family seemed to know about it within a week of Scorpius buying the ring. Al attributed this to the fact that it was meant to be a huge secret.

"It's not like that, Rose. Grandmother's betrothal ring is a baroque pearl, and she said it would never survive a game of Quidditch. She's having it re-set into a brooch you can wear at the wedding. This is a ruby...practically indestructible. Besides, you can't have a pearl rose-cut." Her smile returned, and Scorpius breathed a sigh of relief. "Father and Mum are perfectly happy that we should use the family wedding rings for the ceremony." Scorpius still wished the wedding rings weren't available. It didn't matter that Father and Mum seemed content, and Mum was still at the Manor more often than not. Scorpius would always feel that Healer Pye...he couldn't think of him as Gus any more...had taken Mum away.

As usual, Al broke up his clouded thoughts before they had time to gather rain. "No worries, brother...I'd make a gift of it if you and Rose would let me, and the party's a group effort."

"There you go, 'brothering' again," Rose said. "You do realize that Scorpius is actually going to be a full-on, genuine cousin as soon as we're married, don't you? Are you the only one who gets to promote people to 'family'?" She sounded more amused than annoyed, though. Scorpius didn't understand Al's latest eccentricity, himself; he supposed it had something to do with American slang that James had brought home from his trip abroad, since that's when Al had first adopted it.

Al breezed on as if Rose hadn't spoken. "James is letting us use Grimmauld for the party, we passed the hat in the Common Room for the champagne, and Fred made up the difference. I didn't ask whether it was out of his own pockets or Uncle George's."

Al was wise not to ask too many questions where Cousin Fred's money was concerned. Apprenticing as Dragon Tamer with Uncle Charlie...it was far easier to think of everyone in the terms Al or Rose used, there were far too many Mr. Weasleys to distinguish between, otherwise...had certainly worked out all of Fred's aggression issues. It hadn't done anything to improve his taste in friends. Scorpius vividly remembered the resulting awkwardness when Uncle Ron was forced to arrest a certain fugitive dealer in flying carpets who'd been Fred's guest last Christmas. Grandmum Molly had pitched a fit more impressive than Uncle George's fireworks, and Scorpius still couldn't tell if it was because Fred had brought a wanted felon into her home or because Uncle Ron had only taken him as far as the front walk to arrest him.

"You were a lot surer that I was," Scorpius marveled. He really shouldn't be surprised at it, after all these years, but he still was. Al bloody well knew everything.

"You don't give yourself enough credit, brother." Al punctuated it with a grin and a clap on the back.

"Training dragons with Uncle Charlie certainly sorted him out," Rose said. Clearly, she was deliberately ignoring Al's eccentricities. "Still, he ought to have finished school before taking it up as a profession. Speaking of professions... Dangerous Creature Hunting? Really, Al?"

"Fred definitely looks better on a dragon than they ever looked on him," Al joked. They flinched collectively at the memory of some of the awful dragonhide outfits Fred used to wear. "And I'm only working for Aunt Luna temporarily." Only Scorpius knew that Al planned to become a Hit Wizard once he reached the minimum mandatory age of twenty-one. Scorpius still regarded this as one of Al's most questionable ideas...somewhere well worse than lunch consisting entirely of candy, though still a bit of an improvement on 'borrowing' a hippogriff. He had an inkling why Al wanted to do it, but honestly, there were easier ways to gain practical experience if one wished to become a Defense Against Dark Arts professor...

"Even so," Rose said. Disapproving of Fred was a difficult habit for Rose to break. It didn't help that, while Fred was quite tolerable these days, one still had to be very, very, careful where one sat when he was about. "Scorpius might have gone professional at the start of this Quidditch season, but he had the sense to stay on and get his NEWTs."

"You haven't told her, have you?" Al grinned...and very sensibly, ran like hell, laughing all the way. Scorpius may have been quicker to the Snitch, but no one could evade a hex, jinx, or curse like Al. It all but broke Mr. Potter's heart that he wasn't entering Auror training. He was a natural.

Still, it didn't stop Scorpius from chasing after him, firing appropriately annoying hexes, none of which landed. He turned to find that Rose had kept right up with him.

"Told me what? Scorpius?" she asked, panting slightly.

Better she find out now, in case she wants to give back the ring, Scorpius thought. "I... I was going to take the offer from the Magpies. They were offering a ton more money than the Canons... a signing bonus, even. I figured that I could even manage a few NEWTs if I studied on my own between games. A couple of other teams made offers nearly as good. I mean, there are still repairs Father can't afford yet, and we've always hoped to buy back some of the land we had to sell. I could have. They offered that much. But you see... they weren't willing to take on my favorite Beater as well." Scorpius took both her hands in his. It was still a marvel to him that those small, neat hands could wield a Beater's bat to such wicked effect. "The Cannons were the only team who liked us both, and the team owner would rather we started next season than leave school early. Said it would set that example for his niece, who's a third year."

Rose stared for what seemed an eternity. "Let me get this straight," she said very slowly. Scorpius braced himself for a dashing of all his dreams, with a homily on his intellectual deficiencies besides. "You gave up enough money to pay all your family's debts and the chance to play on one of the premier teams in the league... to play for the Cannons, with me... and you weren't even sure I would say 'yes?'" He voice rose higher and higher.

"Well, I did make sure you weren't really keen on the Harpies' offer before I turned the rest down flat," he said meekly.

As many times as he and Rose had kissed... from the first sweet, awkward, nose-bumping occasion at their first formal ball to the time Scorpius actually grasped, for the first time, the practical definition of snogging... Scorpius now understood that they hadn't REALLY kissed until just this moment. There was no magic like this anywhere in the curriculum, certainly. He was floating somewhere amid bright clouds and wondering if Rose would be willing to skip the engagement party and go somewhere with decidedly more privacy than Grimmauld Place when her voice brought him back to earth.

"Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy," Rose whispered, punctuating each of his names with another kiss, "I am going to love you until the day I die. And I am never going to be convinced that you should not have been in Hufflepuff."

A thread of humor sneaked its way through Scorpius' euphoria. He beamed at her, not interested in relinquishing his grin any time soon. "Funny you should say that..."

FIN

Note: Yes, the word 'Houses' in the title refers to both family and Sorting. I can't resist that sort of thing. Also, the title probably represents the nadir of my chapter-titling career.

I have a few days off sickroom duties, so I'm attempting to put them to good use. Next stop: answering reviews. Actually, next stop is catching up on the laundry and paying bills, but I think I can slip in a few review responses. Thank you all for the kind wishes! :)