lunatic thirteens

“If I think about someone a lot and always wish I could see them, if I always think I see them in the hallway and then every night I replay our interactions—" Pandora started. Regulus looked at her. This was new. He chastised himself again for not having been more careful with James. All he’d done was whisper in his ear as he left that he had best never tell Sirius about what he had just done, or Regulus would kill him.

“Does that mean you fancy someone?” Dorcas finished. Pandora nodded. She and Regulus were in Dorcas’s dorm, and her large windows were charmed to show what they would if her room were 200 feet higher elevated, so the crisp October sky shone out before them. The castle didn’t usually let boys into girls’ dorms, but Dorcas had come up with a charm to counteract that for her particular dorm for a couple hours at a time. 

“Sounds like it,” Dorcas said. “Who?!”

“Should I be worried about our engagement?” Regulus asked. He hoped it sounded casual, but with what he had done the other night, the engagement was more useful of a façade for him than normal. 

“Hardly,” she rolled her eyes, and he breathed out. “It just seems weird. I don’t feel like it’s valid if I think I have a crush for the first time when I’m 16. I feel like if I were going to have crushes like a normal person, I should have started having them years ago. So on top of all the normal worries Regulus goes through about dating I also have to worry if I can even consider flirting if it should be safe, because what if it’s not real? What if I don't feel exactly what someone is supposed to feel when they fancy someone? All the same, I just want any excuse to be around her again!”

Her. The engagement actually was mutually beneficial. Regulus wondered though—Pandora might have been able to find a way to get out if it weren’t for him.

Dorcas spoke. “I’d say that pronoun does more than enough to explain why you haven’t recognised any crushes you’ve had before, Dora. I don’t think I would have realised I was queer when I did if it weren’t for my third cousin Brigitte who told me what bisexuality was.”

“But that’s the thing," Pandora insisted. "Even if I think about what I’m feeling now as real and I think about how that means I’m queer, I still don’t think I’ve ever felt like this about anyone before. So what’s going on? And I guess I could ignore these feelings, but she stands next to me in choir and I just...” She trailed off.

Dorcas bit her lip. “Your experiences might be different from mine. But I don’t think there’s any reason to think you’d have fake feelings. Especially not for a girl. It’s one thing to try to convince yourself you have feelings for a bloke, since that’s socially expected—you could potentially want to read yourself into the script you’re expected to follow. But no matter how much time you spend with Regulus and me, it’s always more socially expected to be straight. And besides, no one in your family seems to love their spouses anyway, so I’m not sure where you’d get a narrative that helped you create fake feelings. Let’s just assume your feelings are real.”

“Good, because if not it’ll be difficult to explain why I feel so nervous but also eager for choir every week.”

Regulus had been quietly listening. “I agree with Dorcas. I don’t think you could make up something like that. Who is it?” He asked.

Pandora sighed. “Er, Lily Evans.”

Dorcas teased, “Look at you two, with your twin crushes on the Head Boy and Head Girl. You really are a perfect match.”

“Like you’re any better.” Regulus glared at Dorcas, but then turned to Pandora, blushing deeply. Might as well let them know now. Pandora needed to know, and Dorcas would probably figure it out anyway. “I’d say if you want to and the opportunity arises with a Gryffindor prefect, you won’t be disappointed.”

Dorcas turned to him. “Regulus, what happened with James? Did you snog him?”

He could feel his face turning redder. “I’d say more he snogged me.”

“When did this happen? How?” Dorcas asked.

“I’m going to guess it was last Sunday night. You’ve been less grouchy over the past week,” Pandora said.

He rolled his eyes, as if in affirmation. “He was drunk though, so I don’t think it counts.”

“Dammit. Dora, do you want to practise snogging a girl?” Dorcas fluttered her dark eyelashes at her.

“Yes,” she reached out and grabbed Dorcas’s hand. The girls pulled closer to each other.

They did that sometimes, and Regulus had thought it was their odd attempt to get him to feel better about himself by normalising queerness, but it was frankly just uncomfortable. “I’m leaving,” Regulus said.

“No, wait, we need to hear what happened with James! You’ve been going off to the astronomy tour so many nights, ever since he first found you there. Has anything happened since?” Pandora asked.

“No, nothing! I just talk to him about the most innocuous things—quidditch, mostly. He’s so passionate about it… and then one day he came up drunk, and he just got so close to me, and reached for my face.”

“Like this?” Dorcas asked, cupping her hands around Pandora’s face. Really, why were his friends like this?

“Sure.”

“And then he snogged you?”

“Yes?”

“Like this?” she pressed her lips to Pandora’s for a couple seconds.

“A lot more than that,” Regulus said.

Dorcas whistled, but Pandora moved her lips back to Dorcas’s, and kept them there a bit longer. They did this occasionally, ever since Regulus casually complained to them both about Barty once last year.

“Wait, she knows?” they’d said at the same time. Dorcas had known for a couple years, and Pandora complained that she was the last to know.

“Second to know, Dora, and I don’t know how to handle the fact that I sort of want to marry you despite everything. And what should I have done if you had fancied me?”

Dorcas had added, “I watched him stare at James Potter for a while, and I told him he’d watched me staring at a girl the whole night, so I thought he’d know it was safe to tell me something like that.”

“Staring at who?” Pandora had asked.

“Marlene McKinnon.”

“She looks a bit like Dora, actually,” Regulus had said. Dorcas had blushed.

“Well, I’m happy to snog you and you can pretend it’s her,” Pandora had replied without thinking.

Regulus looked at her, questioning, and she raised her eyebrows at him to tell him to mind his own business.

“That’s kinda weird, Dora. And I can’t snog you; you’re like the straightest person I know!” Dorcas had said.

“I’ve never had any feelings at all for any boy! How is that straight?”

“You’re almost betrothed to a boy.”

“Regulus is equally almost betrothed to me, and that doesn’t make him straight!”

“Yeah, but look at you!”

“I literally don’t dress myself.” Pandora either wore her uniform or she wore outfits her mother had planned for her, even going so far as to send Pandora to school with lists of exactly what to wear and how to do her hair for each event at school until the next vacation. It was the one way Regulus didn’t envy Pandora.

“Well do you want to, then?” Dorcas raised her eyebrows and giggled. Regulus left the room.                            

"This would be a lovely moment if I weren't in the room with you," Regulus interrupted.

They broke away.  “Sorry. So he was drunk. Does he remember?” Dorcas asked.

“I haven’t seen him since!”

“Oh he definitely remembers,” Pandora said. “He was staring at you in the Great Hall Monday.”

Regulus felt his pulse quicken. He’d been telling himself James wouldn’t have remembered it. He ought to have done so much more to keep James quiet—if he told Sirius about this… “I was avoiding looking at him.”

“Well thankfully for you, I’ve been looking at the Gryffindor table for an unrelated reason.”

Dorcas wiggled her eyebrows. “How did you get to know her, Dora? Did this all come about after you healed her from the Cruciatus curse? Got some kink for playing nurse or something?”

“Merlin, I was just focused on seeming slightly intimidating so she wouldn’t tell anyone about that, but not so intimidating that she wouldn’t follow me into a broom cupboard.”

“Little Dora, all grown up, alone with girls in broom cupboards,” Dorcas joked.

“It wasn’t like that! I was also preoccupied dealing with Avery and Mulciber.”

“They’ve been asking me why the Dark Lord doesn’t want them hexing students in the halls,” Regulus complained. “Thank Merlin he said something at the meeting I went to about how he doesn’t want to spill unnecessary magical blood. That’s bullshit; He loves spilling magical blood; but it was like an hour in and he was just talking to hear his own voice.”

Dorcas pursed her lips. She hated reminders that Regulus had been to a Death Eater meeting.

Regulus stared at the ceiling. “I hate it too, Dorcas, but it’s the only way I can get them to harass students in the halls less.”

“You’re a bloody prefect.”

“You know my situation,” he said icily.

“I don’t, really,” she said. For once, she was equally cold. “I know there’s something you’re both keeping from me.”

Neither Pandora nor Regulus said a word. “I assume James Potter won’t like it if you get Marked.”

The tension was palpable. “I know everything is over if that happens.” Regulus used the word if with Dorcas. When he was alone with Pandora, he said when. “Dorcas, you know we’re both trying to make the best of what our families would do to us. And you know I don’t care if they kill me, but they would kill Sirius too.”

Dorcas was silent for a while, but then said, “You say that like you won’t have to kill plenty more people to please them.”

“I’ve avoiding getting Marked so far. I’m trying to keep it that way,” Regulus stared into Dorcas’s eyes as he spoke. He was too good at lying to his friends. It was a flimsy excuse since he was going to meetings, but Pandora knew it was the best he had.

No one said a word for a long time. It was incredible they went from talking about crushes and snogging to fighting about the war.

There was a ticking time bomb on Regulus and Pandora’s friendship with Dorcas—until Easter—and Regulus knew Pandora desperately wanted to keep it from going off early. “So I suppose you all don’t want to hear about how I got Lily Evans to teach me about sight-reading music?” Pandora finally asked.

“Please,” said Regulus. Usually he wasn’t as interested in gossip, but he was desperate to stop talking with Dorcas about his plans.

“We’re both in the soprano section, but we sing different parts. And I’m on the melody, but she’s not—well, sometimes—and I wanted to ask how she knows what to sing, since I just sing the highest note, so it’s easy enough to pick out. Apparently she sings in a Christian choir over the summer.”

“She’s a Christian?” Regulus said, surprised. “I thought most students from religious families left that if they came here.

“She said it was complicated. She was trying to explain how the church worked, but I didn’t really get it.”

“All those Muggle novels for nothing then,” Regulus said.

“They’re so confusing.”

Dorcas finally spoke again. “You might want to be careful with her then, Dora. I think some of the Muggle world is better about queer people than Purebloods, but religious Muggles are often homophobic.”

“Dammit,” Pandora said. “I don’t even know how to flirt, so how am I supposed to do that while hiding it from everyone and figuring out if she’s homophobic?”

“What, you don’t think your techniques of looking like you’re flirting with Regulus will be impossibly seductive?” Dorcas joked. For the moment it seemed she had forgiven them, if only enough to support Pandora as she figured out her sexuality.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Regulus said sarcastically. “A couple times she’s looked at me with almost as much passion as how she looks at her arithmancy textbook.”

“Not my fault it’s the only well-written textbook we’ve ever had!” she argued.

Dorcas laughed, “That might be the weirdest thing you’ve ever said.”

“It should go in your vows,” Regulus said. He put on a higher voice, ‘“I like him almost as much as a well-written textbook.”’

Pandora glared at him, and Dorcas only just stopped herself from giggling.

“Anyway,” Dorcas said. “No one ever thinks girls are flirting with each other, so you probably don’t have anything to worry about on that front, unless you just declare that you’re queer. Circe, I made out with one of the older Clearwater girls for like half an hour and she thanked me for the practice. She said it would help her with blokes. And… I play quidditch and don’t have the mannerisms you do. Not to stereotype, Dora, but you’re engaged and look like a princess. People think you’re straight.”

“So then… what do I do?”

“Like I’m the one to give advice here! I haven’t ever talked with Marlene off the field.”

“Regulus?”

“Hm?”

“How do I flirt with Lily Evans?”

“Why in Salazar’s name would I know what you should do?”

“Apparently you’ve been successful with Potter,” Dorcas said.

“I don’t know why he keeps following me. Probably something Sirius put him up to, to see I’m not a Death Eater.”

“Sirius already had sent Pettigrew to check that. And besides, why would Sirius have James snog you?” Pandora asked.

“Check to see if I’m bent?”

“Kind of random thing for him to care about… And he sent James when he was drunk… why?” Dorcas continued.

“Because that’s what James needed to do it,” Regulus suggested, his voice bitter.

“Sirius hasn’t talked to you in a year and a half, right?” Dorcas questioned.

Regulus nodded.

“So why would he suddenly be interested in your sexuality?”

“He wants dirt on me? Or he’s just discovered his own, and wants to see if it’s hereditary?” Regulus supplied.

“He and Lupin do spend a lot of time looking at each other,” Dorcas noted. “But you know what you’re saying is bullshit, Regulus. I don’t know James Potter well, but I know he couldn’t fake feelings… If you can’t believe he has feelings for you, you’ll have to go back to the astronomy tower, and when Potter comes you ask him something about Sirius and see how much he flips a shit.”

“Ugh,” Regulus got up and left the room. He had to talk to James, he resolved. He needed to make him understand how serious this was.