in which hollis rosier falls asleep in the wrong compartment
or the right one, depending on who you ask
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part one of two
editing closed, logged off wattpad (sorry only like half of it is edited, but its obviously still all good)
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#...
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"rebel rebel"
"No." It didn't even take half a second for her to reply to her parents with fierceness.
"I'm not going to marry that disgusting snake," Hollis repeated, her fists clenched in anger.
Mulstone and Vindia had been expecting this exact reaction. "You see Appoline, you don't get much of a say in the matter," her father said threateningly, his hand closing around her wrist. "The decision had already been made."
"As we said, you're lucky that the Notts still agreed to the arrangement after your extreme disregard of all traditional pureblood values," Vindia added. "And you should pray for your own good that your teachers will believe you when you tell them that you no longer want to become an Auror."
It was such an absurd request that Hollis almost laughed.
"There is no way in hell that I'm doing anything of the sort!" she cried, yanking her father's hand off her wrist with a surprising amount of strength driven by anger. "You don't get to control every element of my life!"
Hollis didn't notice the new four pairs of footsteps coming towards the library, and neither did her parents.
"Telling me what courses to take, what my career is to be, who to marry!" she shouted. "Are you so determined to be so perfect all of the time? And for who? For what? So that you can keep your perfect little reputation? This is the part where you ask instead of telling me, and here's my answer: no."
Vindia slowly stepped across the dark wooden floors to a few feet in front of her daughter. "You have a duty to uphold, Appoline," she seethed, her eyes shining with cruelty.
"And the more you resist to your place, the more consequences there will be until you obey," added Mulstone, placing a hand on his wife's shoulder as he joined her in front of Hollis. "It is becoming tiresome repeating the same lesson over and over. Why can't you be more like your brother?"
As the two people Hollis was supposed to call family looked down at her with menacing glares and ready fists, it came crashing down on her how real this was, how quickly the first steps to spending the rest of her life like her mother were approaching.
For every day of her life, she had been strangled by her looming future, that terrifying image always in the back of her head. She had always heard stories of arranged marriages and forced hands, but never quite grasped that it would actually happen to her, that she wasn't immune to such things. Hollis had mentally been preparing herself for this day for months and months, yet it still shocked her. Remus and she had both known it was coming soon, and that they would have to fight farther than who she sat with in the Great Hall.
