[flitwick's office] by special request

Sam had been increasingly distracted over the past few days, though it was doubtful whether his students, excited by the impending summer holidays, would have noticed. Divination's reputation meant that a slight vagueness in class was pretty much expected, anyway. Not that Sam had been shirking his duties, his head was just increasingly full of wedding plans. When he'd proposed to Louise, he hadn't had any real expectations beyond them spending the rest of their lives together, but then their mothers had learned the news and things had sort of snowballed. His original vague thoughts of a small service in his home village had morphed into a full-blown celebration at the biggest wizarding venue in Notting Hill.

His daughter and nieces were delighted, of course. Naturally they had completely failed to keep quiet about their excitement at being bridesmaids and thus the whole school was now so used to the fact that professors Dickinson and Ellington would be getting married that it wasn't even news any more. That, at last, was a good thing. And he supposed it was particularly fortunate that two giggling fourth years had asked who his best man was going to be, because until that moment Sam hadn't really given it a lot of thought. Truth was, he didn't really have many friends outside of school, which just meant he didn't have to worry too much about who to ask, but the question was how to ask.

And what if the answer was a resounding no?

This was why Sam was walking very slowly along the corridor to Filius' office on a warm Tuesday evening after dinner. Mentally, he was running over and over in his mind how he was going to ask and feeling more uncomfortable with every passing minute, even though he wouldn't have been able to say why he felt uncomfortable if anyone asked. If he'd thought about it, he would have felt honoured if a colleague had asked him to be best man, but his mind was so full of everything else that he'd forgotten how to think logically.

He reached the office door and knocked, feeling as nervous as a kid bringing a late piece of homework.

N.E.W.T.s and O.W.L.s were over – thank Merlin – and so the tide of students attending Filius’s office hours had ebbed back to its usual trickle of book-borrowers, overachievers, students working on personal projects, and the rare underclassman who still hadn’t made any friends their own age. He and one of the sixth years in his house had spent about an hour and a half – going well into their lunch break – trying to fix a mortar and pestle she’d enchanted (the pestle was overenthusiastic and had nearly ground through the mortar).

Really, he ought to start making a blanket announcement at the start of every year: please don’t magically modify your personal property without consulting a professor first. (Though he would have loved to think that most students had the common sense to consult professors when they wanted to overreach, he had – of course – been exactly the kind of student not to do so. Teenagers could be so intoxicated by independence.)

He was enjoying a squeaking sugar mouse when there came another knock on the door – he quickly slurped up the mouse’s tail and said, his voice coming out even squeakier than usual, “Come in!” The door creaked open to reveal Samuel Dickinson, looking very sheepish. Filius waved his wand to push out the chair opposite his desk, and sat up slightly straighter.

Samuel Dickinson, though he had always seemed to take his position at Hogwarts very seriously, was in many ways an untraditional professor, and so Filius liked him, though – as usual, with the colleagues he had previously had as students – he had to stop himself before he called him ‘Mr Dickinson’ (often, with these new professors, he had to spend a month or so referring to them exclusively by ‘Professor’ to get used to it.) “Ah!” he said, adjusting his thick glasses on his nose. “Samuel. What brings you by today?”