September 2nd, 1997

The first night back went as usual. We went to the Great Hall for the welcome feast, and the entire atmosphere felt tense as Snape made a speech and introduced new professors. Then the six of us hung out in the common room until Draco and Pansy had to leave for Head Boy and Head Girl duties.

I'm in the middle of eating breakfast when all of the owls fly in. Their screeches echo throughout the Great Hall and letters and packages are being dropped all over the place.

Theo gets a letter that unfortunately hits him in the head before landing on the table right near my tea.

"Figlio di puttana," Theo mutters under his breath, reaching for the letter.

I stifle a laugh and take a sip of my tea.

Pansy had also received a letter, but hers had landed in the middle of her breakfast plate.

Professor Slughorn walked over to us. "Hello kids, I've got your timetables for the year," He says. He flips through a stack of parchment and begins to distribute our timetables. "Miss Greengrass, here's yours, and Mister Malfoy-"

Theo groans from beside me and folds back up the letter he had received, shoving it into his book bag.

"Hold on, Mister Nott, here's yours," Slughorn says, unaware of the letter Theo received.

"Uh, thanks Professor," Theo replies, grabbing his timetable from our Head of House.

Professor Slughorn finishes giving us our timetables and then moves on down the table to the next group of Slytherins.

"Everything alright, mate?" Blaise asks, half looking at Theo and half comparing his timetable to Daphne's.

"It's fine, just a letter from my father," Theo replies, taking the bacon off of Pansy's plate.

"Oi, that's mine!" She complains.

Theo takes a bite. "Not anymore," He teases.

We set all of our timetables in the middle of the table to compare them. I have every single class with at least one of my friends, and most of us have several classes together.

I glance over at the Hufflepuff table, which has about half of the people it did last year. I spot Matthew pretty quickly. He's laughing with his friends about something when Professor Sprout walks over to distribute their timetables.

"I'm just glad that Potter's not here," Pansy says out of the blue. "Danger seems to follow wherever he goes."

She's not wrong.

"Yeah, where is Potter? Weasley and Granger, too," I ask.

Everyone looks at Draco.

He shrugs, "How am I supposed to know where Potter is? Last I heard he was still on the run. Doesn't seem like the Gryffindor hero now, does he?"

The conversation shifted to the new professors until it was time for us to part ways for class.

My first class of the day was Charms, which I had with Theo. We started our trek towards the third floor while Draco and Blaise went to the dungeons for Potions and Pansy and Daphne went to the Muggle Studies classroom on the first floor.

"You seem upset," I say.

"About?" Theo asks, glancing over at me.

I met his eyes. "I'm not sure, you tell me," I say. "Possibly something to do with your dad?"

"It's nothing," Theo replies.

"Okay."

We walk a little bit further. There's not many people passing in the corridor and it just seems empty. All of Hogwarts seems empty this year.

"Bloody hell, I forgot how much I hate these things," Theo complains. He loosens and readjusts his tie before rolling up the sleeves of his white button up shirt. My gaze drifts to his tanned forearms and hands, where he's wearing a Nott family ring, before I pull my eyes away to look in front of me.

"The past month or so my father won't shut up about getting married," Theo says after a moment.

I raise my eyebrows, "Oh."

"He said if I don't find someone to his standards soon, he's going to find someone for me," Theo continues. "So father dearest wrote me a letter this morning reminding me that if I don't start "courting"-, that's the actual word he used, someone by Christmas that he's going to arrange something for me."

"Merlin, that's awful," I say, shaking my head. "My mothers been the same way recently, but she didn't exactly give me a deadline like that."

Theo bumps our shoulders together as we walk. "It's whatever, I knew it was coming soon," He says.

Our conversation trails off as we enter the Charms classroom. Since it's N.E.W.T. level, there's students from all four houses in the class. Lavender Brown, a girl from Gryffindor, stares as we walk in then turns to whisper something to a brown-haired Gryffindor girl whose name I can't remember.

I sit towards the back, and Theo sits beside me, glancing at all of our classmates.

"I think having all four houses in class is going to be an issue this year," Theo whispers.

I look around to see that everyone is segregated into their Houses-, more like all of the other three houses are grouped away from Theo and I. We're the only two Slytherins in class.

"Merlin," I complain, dropping my head to rest against my hand.

- - - - -

I spent the rest of the day half focusing in class and half thinking about Theo and his current predicament.

It came to me after dinner when I was sitting in the library with Daphne. She was rambling on about this muggle romance novel she read over the summer while we were working on homework for Defense Against the Dark Arts, courtesy of Amycus Carrow.

We worked in the library for an hour after dinner before returning to the common room.

On our walk back to the common room, I spot Theo seated on the window sill of the only window in the dungeons. He has the window open and is smoking a cigarette.

"I'll just be a minute," I say to Daphne.

"Okay," She replies, "I'll be with Blaise since Draco and Pansy are out patrolling."

"Gross," I mutter as Daphne waves goodbye.

I approach Theo and he makes room for me to sit next to him on the window sill. I sit beside him and our knees bump together.

"Want one?" He asks, pulling out a pack of cigarettes.

"Sure," I say. I grab one from the pack and Theo lights it for me. I inhale deeply, letting the smoke burn my lungs. "Why aren't you just smoking in the common room?"

Theo rolls his eyes exhaling smoke. "That fifth year prefect girl yelled at me. She said that the smoke was clouding her ability to read her to work on Divination."

I stifle a laugh and breathe in the smoke once again.

"So I was thinking about what you told me earlier, about the thing with your dad," I start, "And I came up with an idea. It's probably stupid, but it's all I could come up with."

"Go on," Theo says hesitantly.

"What if we pretended to date?" I ask. "We're good enough friends that it would be believable, and your dad likes me. I'm a pureblood, and I'm a Rosier."

Theo raises an eyebrow. "We pretend to date?"

"We lie and let your dad, and my mum, think that we're dating so that they stop trying to take matters into their own hands. It will buy you some time to find someone that you actually do want to marry."

"We'd have to make everyone believe that we're together," Theo says. "Even everyone at school, even our friends. If word gets back to my father that it's not real then he will arrange a marriage for me and probably Crucio me."

I cringe slightly at the thought.

"I know, I know. We'd have to lie to everyone."

Theo sighs, "But it would benefit the both of us? Right?"

"Right," I confirm. "We could pretend to date for long enough to get our parents off our backs and for you to find someone else, then we "breakup" and that's that."

"I like the way you think, Alex," Theo grins. "We pretend to date then breakup when the time is right." He extends his hand.

"Are we seriously going to shake on it?" I tease.

Theo laughs, "I feel like this situation requires us to shake on it."

I sigh and extend my hand, shaking on it with Theo. I finish off my cigarette and stub it out on the stone.

"Now we've got to lay down some rules," I say.

Theo groans and takes another cigarette out of the pack and lights it. "Merlin, we're going to be here awhile, aren't we?" He complains.