Love Sonnets

The four of them are all rather different, when Flint thinks about it.

He’s the winner. He’s the one who will beat you until you ask - no, until you fucking beg for mercy. He’s the one who doesn’t care what the teachers say, and the one who doesn’t care what you have to do to win. He’s the Slytherin.

Roger Davies plays by the rules, but he’s good at it. He’s the one who always has the girls, the only one who could care about having the girls. The one whose team usually have the best strategies on paper, but who don’t always win in practise. The Ravenclaw, who values the theoretical over the practical.

Oliver Wood’s the one who cares about Quidditch - not about winning, which is what Flint just doesn’t fucking get - but about the actual sport, to the exclusion of anything else. He’s the one who’ll rant and rave about playing by the rules until he’s blue in the face. The Gryffindor who insists everything has to be fair.

Cedric Diggory is a Hufflepuff, and Hufflepuffs let things happen to them. Diggory’s the one you can fuck around and fuck over, and he’ll go along with it.

But then again, Diggory’s the one who all the girls talk about, giggling behind their hands. Wood’s too burly to be a looker, and Davies is always with some girl or another, but Diggory’s the one who they all talk about. Flint can’t see why. Diggory’s a damn Hufflesuck, for fuck’s sake.

Not to mention the fact he’s not even remotely bloody handsome.

Adrian Pucey minced into practice the day before they played Hufflepuff, and mentioned he wouldn’t mind marking Diggory himself, and Flint had been forced to punch him in the face. He wasn’t going to have anyone on his team lusting after fucking Diggory, that was for sure.

When they played Hufflepuff, before the game, Diggory grinned at Flint before shaking his hand, and Flint entertained thoughts about dropping his broom and decking Diggory right then and there. Even after the Hufflepuffs lost, Cedric grinned again and said “Good game,” and that was it, that was fucking it, Flint was going to kill him.

“If you hate him so much,” Adrian Pucey lisped importantly, later that night,“just hit him, or something.”

Flint glared at him until he decided to go to bed.

The next day, when Flint came into the common room, Pucey was drawing something in the back of his Potions text which looked suspiciously like ‘CD + AP’, but as soon as he saw Marcus he slammed the book shut and left, and Marcus slammed a first year’s hand in the nearest door to distract himself from plotting Cedric Diggory’s demise.

Diggory smiled at Flint at breakfast, from his place between about eight hundred girls at the Hufflepuff table, and Flint thought about going over there and choking him to death with a butter knife.

“Flint,” Draco Malfoy began, from across the table, “can you pass-“

“Just shut the fuck UP about Diggory, already,” Flint snapped, glaring at Draco and standing up, kicking the bench with his foot before he stalked away.

Behind him, he heard Malfoy asking what the hell had just happened, and Adrian replying ‘I just don’t know about him, lately,’ and he scowled, imagining the roof above the Hufflepuff table collapsing and all the little Hufflepuffs being trapped, suffocating under the weight. Yeah, he thought, that’d be good punishment for Cedric Diggory stalking him.

Later that day, after he’d mentally killed Diggory with three slow-acting potions, four random acts of nature, sixteen nasty hexes, twice just with Avada Kedavra, because it wasn’t as fun, and twelve times with being chewed and/or stomped to death by an animal, Diggory actually came up behind him in the hall and tapped his shoulder.

Flint turned around in disbelief. “What the hell do you want, now? I’m getting pretty fucking sick of this, Diggory.” Make that four slow-acting potions.

Cedric blinked at him. “Er. I was just wondering if, well, you know if Madam Hooch has posted the pitch–“

“Look, if you think I fancy you, you’re pretty bloody mistaken, you know.” Marcus nodded defiantly, crossing his arms over his chest.

Cedric broke off, and just sort of stared at him. “Right, um. Er. Guess you don’t know. I’ll just be going.”

“Good,” Flint replied, and glared at him before turning to stalk off in the other direction, which took him up a staircase that only existed on Sundays. It took him the rest of the day to find his way back to the dungeons.

When he finally did get there, he came across Adrian Pucey sprawled on a common room couch, and scowled at him. “Diggory’s all yours, you know, he asked me and I turned him down. He’s too obsessive, he’s stalking me about it.”

Adrian’s eyes lit up. “Cedric Diggory’s gay?” Immediately, he jumped up and sprinted for the common room door.

Before Marcus went to Potions the next day, but after breakfast, Cedric Diggory caught him again, a hand on his arm. “Um, Flint, I know you don’t want me to talk to you, but, er, can you tell Pucey to back off? I mean, er, the flowers are nice, but um, I don’t know why he’s sending me leather underwear.”

“Diggory,” Marcus began very patiently, because Hufflepuffs were obviously slow on the uptake, “Stop talking to me. I turned you down, get over it.”

Cedric got that stunned, glazed look on his face again. “Er. Right.” He nodded, and left. He walked about five paces before turning around. “But, um, you know, I never actually–“

“Fuck, Diggory, if you’re going to cry about it, yes, you can suck me off.” Flint rolled his eyes.

Cedric paused again, and then cleared his throat. “Um. I really think I should go now, okay?”

“Right, then.” Flint nodded. “There’s an abandoned room near the stairs to Gryffindor Tower, you can meet me there at midnight.” He snorted. “If it’s going to be worth my time to turn up.”

Without saying another word, Cedric turned and left.

Marcus waited past midnight, past one AM, past two-thirty-three and nineteen seconds, until he figured that Diggory had probably got lost, because Diggory was a Hufflepuff and they commonly got lost trying to tie their shoelaces. When he got back to the dungeons he figured that Diggory had become intimidated and would now spend weeks making it up to Marcus.

The fire was still lit in the common room, and Adrian was lying in front of it, at the bottom of a long scroll of parchment. On closer inspection, Marcus found that it appeared to be some sort of love poem. ‘Your eyes are gray like the seas, I would like to suck you like peas’. He scowled, and nudged Adrian in the ribs.

“Oh!” Adrian said, sitting up and smiling. “Flint, thank Merlin you’re back, I just wanted to thank you for telling me that about Diggory–“

“Tell Diggory that if he begs me for it one more time, I am going to break his nose,” Flint informed Adrian seriously, and headed up to bed.

It was exhausting work, being wanted.