Chapter Text
August 23, 2001
Celestina Warbeck’s Sitting Room
London, England
There were three aspects of fame that Ophelia Prince was sure that she would never get used to: The free stuff, the lack of privacy, and the fact that she regularly had a cuppa with Celestina Warbeck. The first time it happened, she spent four hours getting ready (She had to buy a new set of robes, paint her nails, and of course it was imperative that she rehearsed pieces of conversation). She spent the entire conversation forgetting her prepared observations, too starstruck to even speak.
This did not seem to bother Celestina, who was a decent enough conversationalist for the both of them. Ophelia was confounded when Celestina invited her back-- the same time next week. And then she was invited again, and again. Celestina provided her with guidance and good company, and while she was starstruck in perpetuity when it came to Celestina, she was currently getting annoyed with the direction her questions were heading in.
“So things ended with that fiancé of yours? You let that information slip by the last time we met.” the Singing Sorceress had one manicured brow raised so high it appeared as if it were attempting to obtain citizenship in the sovereign state of her glorious updo. Ophelia peeled her eyes away and cleared her throat, in a futile effort to buy some time.
“The day my father died, a week ago, yes. I decided that I wanted to be on my own for a while. It must have slipped my mind. I have a hard time thinking of unpleasant things in your company.” She sipped her tea, begging Celestina silently to drop the subject. Of course, Celestina chose to ignore her silent plea.
“But you and Marcus had been engaged for eight years ! And you had finally set a date,” she pressed. Celestina was trying very hard to get Ophelia to say out loud what they both knew was true.
Ophelia didn’t love Marcus Flint. She never had, and she never would. Their wedding had been purposefully put off for eight years, and when Ophelia’s father finally put his foot down and set a date, she cried for days. When he died, her first instinct wasn’t to cry but to break up with Flint. Did that make her a terrible person? …Probably. Or well, probably not. There was a long list of sins before this moment that were formative in her own treachery. Perhaps this was not the making of her villany- but the product of it.
When was the last time she felt truly good in her soul? She knew better than to ask that question of herself-- as the answer would always be found in the same warm brown eyes… right before the memory turned to fire, then ash. She felt a couple of the antiquated sutures in her heart rip.
“You know the truth, why make me say it? I’m overjoyed when my world should be in shambles.” Of course, the tears in her eyes chose that moment to well up.
She hadn’t cried yet, and here she was-- not mourning her father, but a boy who had surely long forgotten her. ‘Despicable’ cried the voice in her mind. “I’ve been in shock the past two weeks with everything that’s happened that I made a fool of myself in an interview with Witch Weekly a few days ago.” Celestina’s body began to shake violently as she... laughed?
“Child, revel in the truth! You’ve spent so much time catering to others' thoughts and feelings, you’ve made a mess of your own. The best thing you can do for yourself as a person-- and an artist, is to give yourself the freedom and space to experience the authenticity of your emotions. Which is not to say that they should dominate your life. Artists like ourselves feel too intensely to live happily that way! So maybe you feel joy, but something else perhaps?” Ophelia felt her adoration for the woman grow. How could one person be so wise? She shored up the strength to say something terribly honest.
“There’s an old heartbreak. I haven’t given it much attention in years. But with everything? It’s been simmering in the background for so long that all of this has prompted it to come boiling over.” Celestina sighed.
“Ah yes, time is not always a friend to heart wounds. What happened?” Ophelia set down her cup, in an attempt to hide the quaking in her hands. She had not spoken of him in years.
“Before I was engaged to Marcus, I fell in love with a boy at school. I’ve been shutting out the hurt from how things ended, and living off of, or well, writing about that time for so long I thought I’d succeeded in turning him into an idea or a concept in my mind. I'd prefer him that way, rather than a living, breathing person that I once thought I’d never live or breathe without.” The singing sorceress’s eyes echoed an unheard but triumphant tune. It amazed Ophelia how the woman appeared to be made of music.
“I KNEW there was no way your songs were about Marcus. So now, tell me, who is the hunk behind ‘Bedroom- Eyed Wizard’?” Ophelia looked at her teacup, contemplated taking a sip, but her hands were still untrustworthy.
‘Bedroom-Eyed Wizard’ had been a risk for her, and the catchy hook and taboo nature of the song meant that it was either destined to fail, or to become an instant hit. Thankfully, the latter came to fruition. What had been a mildly successful career had turned into full-blown stardom in the past two weeks, and of course, Celestina Warbeck credited herself with discovering Ophelia.
She’d already been off balance when the song was released, and after losing her father and leaving Marcus she was completely off-kilter. She even accidentally told Witch Weekly that her songwriting tended to be very auto-biographical, right after mentioning that she hadn’t written any songs about Marcus.
Since then, everyone wanted to know who was behind her song, and that was her deepest secret. But here she was, single and in the presence of her idol, so for the first time, Ophelia considered revealing the truth to another person.
“You really want to know?” Celestina took a sip of her tea, her hands perfectly steady. She’d never beg for gossip (begging was beneath her). However, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t pry it out of her one way or another. The determined look in her eyes told Ophelia as much. Ophelia took a deep breath before mustering up the courage to talk about him.
“It’s someone I had a brief romance with when I was 16. I haven’t even spoken to the guy since before we graduated from Hogwarts.” Celestina’s eyes went wide.
“So you were a bit of a wild child, then!” A rosy blush tinted Ophelia’s cheeks, as the line ‘ He can do things with his wand, that keep me singing all night long’ ran through her mind.
“It wasn’t like that!” Celestina gave her a smug, disbelieving look. “Really, I’m telling the truth! When I wrote the song I had just seen a photo of him in the papers and he looked like such a hotshot. Really sexy, you know? A total stud. It was startling because while he’d been enticing enough back in school, I fell for him because of how sweet he had been." Celestina gestured for her to go on.
"So on a particularly lonely night, I wrote two songs about what I imagined it would be like if we were to cross paths again. One of them was ‘Bedroom-Eyed Wizard’ and the other was ‘Sorry Just Isn’t Enough’. Two very different takes on our non-existent reunion.” As she was explaining herself, a wicked grin twisted Celestina’s face and Ophelia’s stomach churned as she waited for her to pounce on whatever thing she shouldn’t have said.
“He was in the papers? I read the Prophet every day, I’m sure I know who he is. Let me guess… It would be too obvious for it to be Harry Potter, he’s always in the papers. But perhaps Ronald Weasley?” Ophelia wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“When I was 16 they were only 12!” Celestina only took a moment to recoup, before firing off names.
“Percy Weasley, the Prime Minister!” Ophelia doubled over laughing.
“Not on my life!”
“Bill Weasley,” Celestina countered.
“It’s not a Weasley!” Celestina huffed, and tried again.
“Viktor Krum?”
“Close, but not quite. He’s a professional Quidditch player.” Ophelia was surprised to feel her excitement growing as Celestina guessed. Say his name, let me hear it chanted her heart .
“Andre Kilpatrick.” Ophelia rolled her eyes, Andre Kilpatrick was a notorious playboy and the seeker for Puddlemere United. She'd never met him, but the day the news had hit that she'd broken her engagement-- his people had made it very clear that he was interested in a date.
“Right team, wrong player.” Celestina excitedly clasped her hands together.
“It was one of my boys? Well at least you have good taste!” Ophelia tilted her head back and laughed. If there was one thing Celistina loved, it was Puddlemere United. Despite all of the success she had had over the years, she’d tell anyone who asked that the greatest success of her career was when she was asked to write the Puddlemere anthem. Every year she performed it at their first home game, in what was always sure to be a spectacle.
Celestina mentally ran through the list of players, and after contemplating whether or not their age might be within range, she sighed.
“Was he older? Because there’s only one other around your age and I’m sure it couldn’t…” She squinted her eyes, as if trying to determine if it was even possible. Ophelia nodded enthusiastically her head up and down, confirming her suspicion.
“No! You didn’t write that song about Oliver Wood , did you?! That man doesn’t even know there’s a world outside of the pitch! How did you manage that?!” Thoroughly scandalized, Celestina set aside her teacup and waited for Ophelia’s reply. Her heart seemed to burst at the sound of his name.
“Our 6th year at Hogwarts was the year with that nasty basilisk on the loose, and Quidditch had been canceled for the year. He had time to focus on some… other things, then.” Celestina rolled her eyes. Oliver Wood had made a career out of being the most focused wizard in Quidditch.
The tabloids hated it because while he was insanely popular, they never had much to write about him. That didn’t stop them from trying, however. But Oliver had a gift for shutting down the press. Ophelia wished she could ask him how he did it because clearly Francine had no clue (or possibly no desire to shut them down at all, regardless of the line of questioning).
“And he promptly ended it when the matches were back on?” Ophelia swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. She’d yet to even say his name, but there it was lodged in her esophagus, trying to burst out from her heart where she’d been hiding him all these years.
“Oliver wasn’t like that. He was quidditch obsessed, for sure-- but perhaps that was because his heart didn’t know how to be anything but brave, to be anything but devoted. He wasn’t on bended knee or anything, but he pursued me fiercely and confidently. He never once made me feel like I was some way to pass the time, though our schoolmates might have thought so.
No, actually, I ended it after I received a letter from my father that the Flint family had agreed to an arranged marriage between Marcus and... well, you know, our family is on the lower end of the upper crust, and finding someone who would marry me in the aristocratic world had been a hard task for my father. I never knew how to stand up to him.
So I left Oliver and tried to make things work with Marcus. It was before the war when standing against the aristocracy wasn’t nearly as fashionable. In fact, it was dangerous . All my family, excluding me and my father, were lost to one side of the war or another.
And afterward… I do love my father. Refusing to marry Marcus after everything would have broken him. But when he wasn’t here anymore…” Celestina took a deep breath and let it all soak in. Gossip was her drug of choice. Thankfully, she could also keep her mouth shut.
“This means you can’t say no to what I wanted to ask you today.” Ophelia shook her head vehemently.
“I’m NOT going out on a date with your nephew!” Celestina examined her nails, hiding a smile. Before she had learned that Ophelia was engaged she tried to set her up with her nephew, Mortimer. Mortimer was a nice fellow… but only when compared to He Who Must Not Be Named. Celestina thought he was an angel, of course. But never had Ophelia heard of an angel who was quite so handsy.
“Oh, it’s nothing like that. I want you to sing with me for Puddlemere’s opening game!” Ophelia sat straight up in her chair. The thoughts in her head fought for dominance.
“That’s the day after tomorrow! Why didn’t you ask me sooner?” Celestina made a point of dramatically allowing her eyes to roll to the back of her head.
“Because if your wicked little manager had known any sooner she would have leaked it! Now you can tell her tomorrow when it will be too late to slip any information to the Prophet! It’s more fun as a surprise!” Ophelia took a sip of her tea. Her manager Francine was a bit out there, but she’d been with Ophelia ever since she started sneaking out of her father’s home, playing festivals and small clubs during summer break. Francine had gone to Beauxbaton’s during the school year, but during those summers they’d been attached at the hip. Francine was perhaps the only one who knew she still carried a torch for Oliver-- despite Ophelia’s vehement denials.
“So what big spectacle did you have planned?” Celestina leaned forward as if she were tempted to reveal a very big personal secret, which in a way, she was.
“You’ll see if you show up to the stadium tomorrow for rehearsals.” Ophelia felt giddy with excitement. While she had been friends with Celestina for quite some time now, she had never performed with the legend and it was something she couldn’t refuse… And maybe she’d see Oliver. The thought hollowed out a space in her stomach and promptly filled it up with glee and anxiety. She took a deep breath and pushed the thought to the back of her mind.
“Now do I get to go shopping, or did you already have something planned in place of wardrobe? I know that’s your favorite part.” Celestina folded her hands in her lap.
“I did, but now that I know that this is going to be the first time you’ve seen your ‘Bedroom-Eyed Wizard’ in so long, I think it has to be something extra special. I’ve got Laurent coming over in an hour. I’m sure he can whip up something special.” Ophelia suddenly took up an interest in her hands.
“I don’t think he’d really much care how I look, it’s been eight years. Plus, he definitely won't have any time to talk to me after the match.” Or even want to, she thought to herself. But maybe--- no. That niggling hope needed to be released. Just because Ophelia wanted to make up for lost time… time hadn’t truly been lost. It had warped and twisted and forced them to build new lives. There was a whole war that had divided the present from their past. As much as her heart yearned for Oliver, she knew it to be certain that his had long ago been turned bitter towards her.
“You are a goddess divine, and when you hit centerfield in the dress Laurent and I put you in, he will make time!” Ophelia smiled, but the broken expression on his sixteen-year-old face when she told him it was over, was etched in the back of her mind, casting a shadow of doubt.
She might be dying to see him-- but he most certainly wouldn't feel the same.