Emerson Wilmore was an exemplary Ravenclaw student, known for her unwavering dedication to academics and an unyielding moral compass. However, things took a twisted and deviated turn in her life after her boyfriend, Cedric Diggory, was murdered by L...
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An hour later, the UNO game had somehow not only continued, but escalated into something far more competitive than any of them intended. It was the exact kind of chaos Enzo wanted from the start, though even he would probably have admitted that it went gone more beautifully wrong than expected.
The pile of discarded cards in the middle of the table had grown unruly, half-sliding into the next round every time Enzo dealt too dramatically or Olivia laughed hard enough to bump the edge of the table. Several glasses were refilled more than once, though not evenly. Theo's remained almost untouched, which felt both irritating and deeply in character. Emerson and Olivia sat in that glowing middle ground where everything felt a little funnier and a little lighter with their cheeks warmer and their smiles easier. Mattheo had lost enough hands to earn a noticeable edge of heat beneath his collarbones, though even that felt secondary to the far more dangerous distraction sitting opposite him.
Enzo, meanwhile, was unquestionably the drunkest.
It wasn't ruined, incoherent or incapable of functioning, but he was loud. He was intensely loud, making every victory sound like a royal decree and every defeat like an act of treason. At some point, he began commentating on his own turns in a half-whisper that somehow still carried across the entire common room, and by the third time he loudly accused Olivia of "weaponising domestic innocence," Theo lifted his wand and wordlessly cast a set of muffling wards over the room.
"Did you just silence me?" Enzo demanded in horror.
Theo, who was arranging his cards with the calm of a man playing for bloodless sport, did not look up. "I protected the rest of Slytherin House from hearing you."
"That's worse. They're missing out on my genius being expressed at full volume."
"It wasn't genius before," Olivia told him.
"It was being repressed," Enzo defended.
Emerson lost track of how many rounds they played, though she knew enough to recognise the shape of the evening by then. Theo was winning in the most understated way possible, never appearing invested and never seeming to care, all while somehow keeping his hand low and his glass nearly full. It was sinister, frankly.
Olivia was competitive but gleeful, occasionally forgetting to hide her reactions and then laughing at herself when someone used it against her.
Emerson did better than she expected, though the slight buzz in her system made concentration more fluid than precise, and every so often, she caught herself studying the colours in her hand like they were more profound than they actually were.
Mattheo had become the second-worst after Enzo, but not because he was bad at the game. He simply kept looking at Emerson.
Across the circle, he was trying not to, which only made it more obvious to everyone who knew him. His attention would sharpen at the wrong moment on the way her brown hair fell over one shoulder, on the slight flush in her cheeks from the drink and on the fact that every time she laughed she tilted her head back just slightly before catching herself. More than once he discarded the wrong card because she said something to Olivia or smiled to herself over a Draw Four pile, and Theo noticed every single time.
