...and so i went and let you blow my mind

"You have to get out of bed."

"No!" Charlie snapped stubbornly, burying her head under her pillow and pulling her duvet high over her shoulder. "I'm not going anywhere!"

Len sighed and seized hold of the pillow, trying desperately to pull it out of her vice-like grip. "Charlie. Charlie. You cannot hide in bed forever." Finally, he wrenched the pillow free from her clutches, holding it above his head so that she would have to actually, you know, move if she wanted to get it back.

She didn't. Charlie pulled the duvet over her head and curled up into a ball.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Len groaned, thwacking the amorphous blob (and what he thought was her leg, but he wasn't totally sure) with the pillow. "Charlie. I have to go to work. Get up."

"Dejame en paz!" she growled, muffled by the blanket she was effectively trying to smother herself with, "You're wasting your breath."

By now, Len stopped thinking that this was amused and was just growing annoyed, so he grabbed onto the comforter and started pulling, sending Charlie squealing and trying to pull them back. Unfortunately, despite all her athleticism, she couldn't overpower Len -- sending them both toppling to the ground in an awkward tangle of limbs and bedding.

And then everything just... stopped. Charlie blushed, blinking down at Len and not really processing that she had accidentally trapped him between herself and the ground; he mirrored her dumbfounded expression, blinking up at her and not really processing how they had ended up here - literally, right here, in this position.

Neither moved for what felt like an eternity until suddenly both of them were awkwardly coughing and unravelling themselves, dusting themselves off and clearing their throats in jarring, uncomfortable harmony; Charlie couldn't look at him and Len couldn't look at anything but her.

"What? What're you staring at?" she mumbled.

"What?" Len coughed again. "Nothing, you just--" he started laughing, "You really do have sex hair in the morning."

Charlie hit him in the face with her pillow. "Shut up."

And just like that, the tension was diffused (though Charlie's vexation was not helped by Len's laughing like a hyena, thank you very much.)

"No, but seriously," Len insisted, ushering her out the door and towards the bathroom, "You are not skipping out on your second day of practice."

Of course, that would be much too easy -- naturally, Charlie had to struggle against him the whole way. "Len, you don't get it! I embarrassed myself yesterday. In front of Oliver Wood. I can't go back there, not when I'm the laughing stock of the whole team after one day. I was already the rookie and I blew it."

Len rolled his eyes. "Getting hit with a bludger does not count as embarrassing yourself on the first day, it's called playing Quidditch. It's not exactly like you were accustomed to professional-level Beaters and even if you were, it happens. Oliver Wood will understand if he is the all-forgiving God you make him out to be."

"They laughed at me."

"They were laughing with you."

"I wasn't laughing."

"You know what I mean," he griped, "They weren't laughing with malicious intent. And since when is Charlie Cantebaila the type of girl that would let one mishap at the first practice ruin her professional Quidditch career? This is everything you've been dreaming of. Go show them what a badass keeper you are and just why Oliver Wood himself recruited you to his precious team."

"Okay. Okay! You're right," Charlie nodded, game face on and ready to work twice as hard to make up for yesterday's incident, "This is professional Quidditch. It doesn't happen to just anybody."

"Exactly. Now... I seriously have to get to work or my boss will verbally castrate me, so, uh. Go get 'em, tiger," he teased, slapping her on the ass for added effect with a grin and a playful wink.

"Pervert!" Charlie shouted at him, laughing like the asshole he was, as she slammed the bathroom door shut.

Still, even with Len's mini-pep talk, Charlie couldn't help feeling like the weakest link on the Puddlemere United Quidditch team. In spite of her usual confidence in her Quidditch skills, everyone else on the team had been playing professional Quidditch for years, and some part of her desperately feared that Coach Wood would realize he had made a mistake in recruiting her and ask her to leave. Seeing one game wasn't really scouting material, was it? Charlie released a breath she didn't even realize she'd been holding as she laced up her Quidditch boots, shaking her head as if to physically jostle the negative thoughts out of her head.

"Is this you-and-Len-flirting-loudly-in-the-morning thing going to become a daily occurrence?" Mike drawled as he stumbled out of his room, trying in vain to rub the sleep out of his eyes, "Because if it is, I am going to have to seriously reconsider letting you live here."

Charlie rolled her eyes. "We weren't flirting, he was being an idiot."  She cocked an eyebrow at him. "I could ask the same about you and Len flirting loudly through the rest of the day."

"We do not flirt," Mike corrected her, mockingly aghast she would even suggest such a thing, "We cuddle. Totally different."

"Oh, excuse me," she laughed, heading out the door.

--

The first time Charlie spent the night at the house that had become the replacement dorm for a certain motley crew of Ravenclaw boys was the winter holidays of her seventh year, when she got so nervous about her impending NEWTs that she thought she was having a heart attack. But Baxter was vacationing in a chateau in France for Christmas, so turning to him for study help was impossible -- and somehow in the midst of her panic, she ended up apparating into the living room of the smartest bunch of boys she knew. She had been there once before, during their summer house-warming party, but she honestly didn't think she remembered the place well enough to Apparate there -- especially not on accident.

"Well, it's lovely to see you, too," Len had said, eyebrows furrowed in confusion and lips curled into an amused smile, "But couldn't the surprise visit have waited until... uh, daylight?"

At three in the morning, it was a miracle any of them were awake, never mind all of them. "Sorry," Charlie blushed, painfully aware of how absurd the situation was now that she had gone diving headfirst into it, "I-I just... I really need to study for my NEWTs... they're only a few months away."

Charlie had no idea what inspired them to actually agree to help her study, but they did, Matt and Mike and Len taking turns explaining different concepts and retreating to either gather food supplies or supplementary reading materials. They even gave her all of their combined notes from the previous year, enough to keep her  ahead and of the game; she could study concepts and spells before they even came up in class. It was nice.

But she never, ever expected she would end up moving in.

The move had actually been Baxter's idea; the Ravenclaws had bought an expensive, spacious house with Mike's parents' money as the blond's parting "gift" to his family with plenty of room to spare -- and Charlie needed a place to live in Dorset if she was going to play for the team, given that she didn't trust herself to Apparate to and from the Pitch every day.

The pieces all just fit together, somehow. She swore she would be out of their hair by the end of the summer (for their sakes and her own), but for the time being, she was rather enjoying living with a bunch of swotty pseudo-intellectuals... even if they were bizarrely affectionate with each other and had absolutely no concept of personal space (Len).

--

Len and Mike did not just cuddle with each other. Len, specifically, was the worst offender of cuddle-whoring, a master of dragging her into the entertainment room to watch a muggle film at all hours of the night whenever she didn't have practice the next day just so she would wake up inexplicably spooned against him. That sneaky bastard. She could never figure out why she let him talk her into the same thing again and again and again.

(Until that moment when she would wake up before him and roll over to see the way his long eyelashes fluttered over his cheeks, the way his mouth curved into the tiniest of smiles like he was having the most perfectly tranquil dream, the way they always ended up so close that she could feel his heartbeat -- the way his heartbeat always seemed to synchronize with hers.

Then she remembered.)

--

"You know, I'm really glad I kissed you that one time," Len confessed late one night at the bar her team rented out to celebrate their first victory of the season, taking a sip from his club soda. Charlie was glad not to be the only person at the party who wasn't drinking - she out of an inherent drive to take care of her body for the sake of her sport, he out of solidarity for his recovering alcoholic best friend.

"Que?" she asked him incredulously, turning to him with both eyebrows raised in surprise and wondering if he was lying about his four hundred and fifty-one days sober. "Do you not remember all the shit we had to put up with because of it?"

"Well, yeah," he shrugged, taking another drink, "But if I didn't, we never would've become friends."

"Oh. Yeah. I guess that's true."

"And - I really like being your friend."

Charlie looked down and smiled, softly replying, "I really like being your friend, too." Her heart slammed against her rib cage, hard enough to tell her that this kind of sincerity was bordering on dangerous; she nudged him playfully in the ribs with her elbow. "Don't get all sappy on me, Monroe. You're supposed to be a Scotsman."

In a flash, Len was laughing and his genuine smile had morphed itself into his more common cocky smirk. "I was just implying that maybe we should have another go at it," he said suggestively, one eyebrow arced high, "Never know what good might come of it this time."

Charlie rolled her eyes, elbowed him harder. "No."

"Oh, come on," he grinned, leaning in a little closer.

"No, Len."

He moved away from her in response to her firm tone, hands raised slightly as if to proclaim his innocence. "Relax, Charlie, I was just kid--"

And then, perhaps more to her surprise than his, she grabbed him by the tie and pulled him to her, pressing her lips against his. His hands went to her cheeks almost immediately and, after the initial shock, both of their eyes slid shut -- and he kissed her, really, truly kissed her, the kind of kiss that had made the likes of Lennox Monroe famous for being good with his mouth.

When they pulled away, he just looked at her, blue eyes burning into brown, searching for something. "Wh-what? What're you staring at?" Charlie asked, blushing bright and self-conscious.

"What?" he asked, eyebrows furrowed, "Nothing. You just--you're beautiful."

And she kissed him again.