𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙨-𝙧.𝙖.𝙗

𝟮𝟲-𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀

JO MAKES A SUDDEN AND ABRUPT REALISATION.

More like an admission, really.

It comes after a long while of thinking about the way Regulus holds her face in his hands and the gentleness he treats her with and how he is the only one who can make her feel less on edge after the incident. A Tuesday afternoon, sunny outside but dim and dusty in the dungeons where Jo peers over a silky pink cauldron of Rat Tonic. She bites down on her lip as she examines it, waiting for it to darken into a rich garnet. A strand of hair falls loose as she stares, dangling in front of her face, almost dangerously close to the swirling potion.

Before she can reach up and tuck it behind her ear, Regulus does it for her. He lifts his fingers to her temple and gently pulls the strand back, tucking it behind her ear, touch grazing against her scalp. Jo, with wide, surprised eyes, looks up at Regulus. He smiles down at her, kind and warm, and says, "Careful."

And Jo wants to kiss him.

She almost does.

She almost leans up on the top of her toes and pushes her lips against his right in the middle of their Potions class, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. But she doesn't. She has to clench her fists to stop herself. Jo stays still, for a moment, and swallows the beating heart in her throat, and turns her attention back to the Rat Tonic.

There's no going back from there, really. That's it.

And once Jo admits it to herself, retrospectively, everything seems to make sense. The dryness in her mouth, the buzzing in her gut, the inexplicable need to be near him as much as she can and the admiration that glosses over her eyes every time, she looks at him, or even thinks about him. She can't say for sure when it started, his late-night summer visit or the hug on the train, her birthday or as he sat by her side in the Hospital Wing or even that first night she caught him crying. Jo just knows that as she sits there in Potions, hands suddenly shaking, it feels like it's been forever. She realizes why Dorcas asking if she fancied him felt so wrong-it feels so trivial to Jo. It does not feel like her infatuation with Remus, giddy and light-hearted. It does not feel like whatever fleeting sweetness she had for Ivan Reed for just a moment. It feels heavy, burdensome, like an ugly truth she must disguise and conceal. It feels dangerous in her consciousness.

Jo wants to kiss him. She wants to kiss him and hold his hand and make him feel better when he's upset. She wants to hurt the people who hurt him, and she wants to make his life better and she wants to bite everything she feels for him down, swallow it until it is nonexistent.

If she's afraid of how it feels, she can imagine what Regulus would think of it.

Jo doesn't even let herself ponder.

So she makes the admission. Makes the admission that she wants to kiss him and hold him and that she be with him in any way she can and then she pretends that she didn't. And she tries to go back to normalcy.

She tries to move on from the Crouch incident-avoiding him in corridors as best she can, an intense fixation on his name on the map her brother left her. She lets Dorcas caress her hair and tell her, "He'll get what he deserves," and does her best not to cry. She rants to Hestia and Emmeline and apologizes for dragging them into it. She listens to their insistence that it's not her fault and that they love her and care for her. She tells James and Sirius over floo and watches them both go blind with rage and feels some sort of vindication at it.

It has left her more shaken than she would like to admit. Sometimes she'll dream of it, waking up in a cold sweat with panic ripe in her chest, breathing heavily and failing like she had been trying to knock herself back into reality.