Scratches (Fred Weasley)

(44) Fixed It

Florence had received another letter after a few days, right after breakfast. She had decided to trash the letter addressed to Nicolai in the last minute, not because she still held grudges but because she felt like it wasn't a good time.

In addition to that news was her slowly coming out of her room during the past two days, as Emmy was far too busy doing other things or assisting her mum in her tasks that she hardly had any time to bring her food upstairs.

So she resorted into mustering up enough courage to come out of her room. The first few days were quite jumpy, as she would almost always get startled when she would come across Remus or Sirius down the hall, but eventually she had gotten used to it and had even sat down with them for dinner at one point.

She sneezed, Sirius mumbled a 'bless you'. It was still weird, even if it was the smallest attempt in striking up a conversation.

The letter was from Alexander, who wanted to meet up at Floreen Fortescue's ice cream shop that afternoon. The heat was begginning to turn unbearable as the days went by, but Florence did not turn down his request.

Diagon Alley was barely even packed with people during the summer. It wasn't a fairly famous place during break, as others preferred out of the country visits and what not.

Alexander was sitting at a four-seater table by the time Florence arrived, the small bell dinging as she pushed the door open. Her eyes scanned the shop; There was an elderly couple at the far back, and a brunette girl at a table beside Alexander's.

Nicolai.

Florence didn't walk out, and surprisingly plopped down at the table with Xander. The blond boy was nervous, the look on Florence's face unreadable.

"Okay," he began, "I'm sorry if I didn't tell you about the bit where Nicolai's tagging along with me, for obvious reasons."

Florence shrugged, "Well, I should just get used to people not telling me stuff from now on, yeah?"

"Flo, I'm sorry." huffed Nicolai, "I really am. And by now I do not know what else I could do to prove that I know what I did was shitty and I know that it was a total invasion of privacy...."

She was still seated at a separate table, however her chair was scooted as closely as possible as she talked, and Xander was just sure that she might topple over at some point.

"I'll get the ice cream then," he informed the two, who were still staring intently at each other. "Same old flavors, yeah?"

No reply.

Xander got up from his chair soundlessly to go up to the front and order some ice cream, also occasionally looking back to see how the two were doing.

"Flo, talk to me, please." Nicolai pleaded, moving to occupy the seat that Alexander had just vacated, "I promise, if you forgive me I will never ever do anything as stupid as what I did..."

"And I think the reason why I did what I did was because I was convinced that what George thought was right—"

"What did George think?" was the first thing that she's said. Nicolai sighed.

"Well, for one he thought that you were fond of Fred, and he was fond of you as well. It was really transparent that you liked each other... I thought it was a great plan as well—I just didn't expect that it would take a rough turn."

Florence made an incoherent noise, "Fred doesn't like me. If he did then he had a funny way of showing it."

"He's a git, I'm a git. And again I'm also very sorry, Florence." Nicola took out a paper-like thing from her pocket, gently laying it on the table in front of her.