The Potion Princess

Valentine's Day

Audra had never paid attention to Valentine's day before, other than that one back in fourth year where Lockheart turned everything into hearts and somehow persuaded gnomes to sing Valentines to everyone.  She had considered it just another day, just with a more mysterious amount of pink and an excuse to eat chocolate.  But now that she'd dating Fred, she can't avoid it.

Not when he specifically asked her out on a date to Hogsmeade on Valentine's day, despite the fact that it was assumed that they would have gone together.  Not when she had to ask Ginny to check and make sure that he wasn't getting her anything.  And not when Clary insisted that she dress up, because this day was somehow different from all the other times they had been together.  Put into one, it made her pretty nervous, even if he was waiting for her by Madam Puddifoots like he had promised.

It became clear that Madam Puddifoots wasn't Audra's kind of place pretty fast.  Fred had hesitated when he first crossed into the little shop, perhaps stunned at the large amount of pink and lace, but he put on a bracing sort of smile and led the way to the first open booth he saw.  Now she was taking sips of tea that had too much sugar in it and pushing the falling confetti into piles.  All the other couples in the shop were doing something that Clary would have called canoodling (except for Harry and Cho, they looked like they were having an awful time).  She and Fred hadn't even tried to talk to each other besides the few stilted moments of conversation at the very beginning.

They watched Cho burst into tears and run out of the shop, Harry following after her angrily.  Audra suffereed through a few more sips of quickly cooling tea before bailing, digging in her pockets to throw a galleon on the table and waiting for Fred to get the hint.  He followed almost immediatly, stuffing his hands in his pockets and walking back into the snow.  "You're not going to start crying too, are you?"  It was meant as a joke, but his voice was a little too worried for it to work. 

"Of course not."  She put her hands on his shoulders, bracing herself against him as she leaned back to look at him.  "But we've never gone there before.  And honestly, I never want to again.  That tea was awful."

"It was.  It really, really was."  He ran his hands through his hair and tugged, something he did whenever he was trying to puzzle out a particularly complicated problem.  "I just thought that we should do something different now that we were dating.  And Lee said..."

Audra snorted.  Relationship advice from Lee rarely ended well.  "That there was this super romantic coffee shop where all the couples go to?"

Fred smiled sheepishly.  "Kind of."

"Listen.  I'm not expecting you to do anything different now that we've admitted that we like each other.  I don't want you to really.  You don't need to be anything different, alright?"  He wasn't looking at her, just fidgeting with the charm on her necklace.  "And I'd love you just as much at the Hog's Head as I did in that awful cafe."

He looked up at her and shrugged.  "I should have known better than to take you somewhere that doesn't serve coffee."

Audra stared at him.  That hadn't been on her list of complaints, but now that she thought about it, it was a very good reason.  "Buy me a butterbeer and we'll call it even."

It got better after that, when they stopped doing what everyone was expecting them to be doing and starting acting like themselves.  They had been to Hogsmeade together before, but it seemed different now, walking down the streets hand in hand.  She wasn't able to deny that it being Valentine's day didn't help to make things slightly more enjoyable, not when Fred had to pause and pick pink confetti from her hair and the coffee he bought her had foam that blossomed into hearts.  That's not even mentioning the shop owners that were giving them free samples of food and handing out flowers to Audra, all because they were, in their words, "a happy couple."  Apparently being young and in love was the criteria needed to access the true Valentine's day magic.