Roses and Riots | f. weasley

Chapter 18: The Burrow

A/N: Apologies for the delay with updating, uni is kicking my arse :) I hope you enjoy this one, I had a lot of fun writing it! Xx

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A month after helping Sirius to escape, Emilia was lying in the garden of the Burrow, under the hot July sunshine down over the fields of Ottery St Catchpole. Emilia knew she couldn't tell any of the Weasleys the truth about Sirius just yet, so she decided to just relax and enjoy her summer as if the night after the OWLs had finished was completely uneventful.

The Burrow was practically a tropical resort that week, the air was stifling without so much as a cool breeze to give some relief, and an occasional dip in the lake was the only thing to cool them down.

Emilia was lying on a large picnic blanket that was spread across the grass, reading her book, while the twins sat next to her, otherwise occupied.

"George, give me back my pencil," Fred snapped suddenly, attempting to snatch his pencil back from his twin.

"Mine broke, and I can't be bothered going inside to get a sharpener, so suck it up," George responded, stretching back across the picnic blanket to avoid Fred's reach.

"You're such a prat," Fred grumbled, snatching the sketch paper away from George in retaliation.

"You're a whiny prick," George retorted.

Emilia put down her book and scowled at her two best friends who were sharing the large picnic blanket with her, "honestly, you two. The heat is making you both bitchier than usual."

"Sod off, Emilia," they muttered in unison, before returning to their fight over the pencil and sketch paper.

She rolled her eyes and turned over onto her front, opening her book back up in front of her and doing her best to ignore the twins.

George got up with a grunt and a few swear words, and walked back to the house, flipping Fred off as he went.

"You got your pencil back then?" Emilia asked Fred, not looking away from her book.

He chuckled and bumped his shoulder against hers, also propped up on his elbows with sketch paper in front of him, "what do you think of this?"

She looked down at the paper in front of Fred on the grass and pulled it towards her to get a closer look, "is this another recipe? Ton-Tongue Toffee- well that one's new. What is it?"

She looked over her shoulder at him and felt her cheeks growing warm at the proximity to him, though perhaps it was just the summer heat.

She still couldn't shake the fact that something felt different between them in the last few months, ever since the night of the Valentine's party. They'd bickered over silly things a lot less than normal, and they were opening up to each other a bit more than they ever had before.

She couldn't quite put her finger on what it meant, and it wasn't exactly something she could ask him about, so she ignored it.

He grinned at her and waggled his eyebrows, "it's just another little project we've been working on."

"'Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes'," Emilia read Fred's messy scrawl on one of the pages, "your mother is going to kill you. She got rid of those order forms for a reason, Fred."

He shrugged and then smiled across at her, and she held his gaze for a long moment before clearing her throat.

"You're really serious about this then?" she asked and he nodded with a grin.

George came back from the house and plopped down on the grass in front of them, "sharing our trade secrets, Freddie?"

Fred pushed himself off his front and crossed his legs, "just trying to incorporate Emilia into our list of potential test subjects-"