WHO: Gilbert Ollivander & Imogen Montague. WHAT: Come to a decision. WHEN: Thursday, 4 January 2018 - evening. WHERE: The Gentle Green. WARNINGS: None.
"Are you going to be super annoying all night if I admit you were right?" Imogen asked, looking up at Gilbert as she finished putting down the last scrabble tile on a triple word score, ironically smirking as she counted out her points.
“I'm never annoying,” Gilbert countered, scowling at the fact that, once again, she was winning. “Though since you always beat me at Scrabble I need a bit of an ego boost, so what was I right about this time?”
"You said don't go easy on you!" she pointed out and smiled more easily than she had done of late. Maybe it was the wine. Or, more likely… "I needed a change of scenery. This is nice."
“I like the Gentle Green,” he agreed. “And Nora and Rhys are great too. I figured a surprise night away wouldn't hurt, at least. And a long weekend. Who doesn't love a lie-in on Friday?”
A lie in. Imogen felt like she hadn't had a proper lie-in since the last time she'd been in the Meadowsweet room with Gilbert. Had it really only been a couple of months ago? Before everything went to shit?
She tucked a lock of her hair back, shaking off those thoughts and dug out more tiles from the Scrabble bag. Gilbert was trying — really hard, at that — to ensure that she didn't slip back into her sad Graham-related ruminations. "True. We should get as many of them in as we can. We're getting old."
“Nah,” he countered, brow furrowing as he was only able to add an 'O’ after a 'T’ and pathetically added two points to his score. “We're not married with kids or homeowners, and I definitely had chocolate cake for breakfast the other day. I don't think we count as old yet.”
"I'm two years from 30." Imogen put down a couple more letters on the board and then lay back on the bed, shifting her gaze to the ceiling. "That's so weird to think about. In two years I'm going to be in my third decade of life."
“Fourth,” he countered, happy for an excuse to abandon the game and settle next to her instead. Ticking the numbers off on his fingers, he demonstrated. “Zero to nine, ten to nineteen, twenty to twenty-nine, and thirty is your fourth. You lost ten years of your life and didn't even notice.”
Imogen wrinkled her nose at this. "Has anyone told you that you're a massive nerd, Mr. Ollivander?"
He laughed. “Massively hot nerd? I've heard that once or twice, yes.”
She turned on her side so she could collect a blank tile off the board and flicked it at him.
Grinning, he rolled on top of her, pinning her down. Gilbert gave her a quick kiss, then seriously studied her. “Love you.”
Imogen was mid-laugh when Gilbert looked down at her seriously, and the laughter caught in her throat while he held her gaze. She freed her hand from under his weight and reached up to brush her fingers against the light 5 o'clock shadow along his jawline. "I love you too."
He kissed her fingers lightly, and then her again, more deeply this time. After a moment, though, he pulled away and took a deep breath. “Let's just do it. Now. Let's just… do it.”
"Do what?" she asked, sitting up, trying to search his eyes for a clue.
“Get married,” he said, sitting up and taking her hand. “I wanted to wait until we had the shop open again, and I wasn't working at the ministry, and could afford a down payment, and the war was over but… what if we just did it now? I mean, we're going to get married anyway, right? So what are we waiting for, really?”
"You're—" She looked down at her hand clasped in his, and then back up to his face again. "Being serious."
“I am,” he nodded, giving her fingers a squeeze.
Imogen took this in, aware of his touch, and his patient, hopeful, yet nervous gaze as she processed.
The nights leading up to now, she'd sat on her couch at ungodly hours of the morning with a pot of camomile tea, sitting with the realisation that nothing was ever going to be the same. That there was nothing that was ever going to undo what had been done: she wasn't going to be talking to her parents any time soon, she could have nothing more to do with her brother.
Anything could happen between now and the impending future, that much had been proven painfully clear via Graham.
And most importantly, Gilbert had been there. Sitting with her, fighting the urge to fix her as he learned that she couldn't be fixed right now. Loving her when she didn't know which was way up or down anymore.
So what were they waiting for?
"Okay," she nodded, at last. "Let's do it."
“Yeah?” he asked, surprised in spite of himself. This was unlike them - both him proposing so spur of the moment, and her accepting. Especially her accepting. He knew she'd been through so much lately - they both had. He didn't want them to make this decision casually but he also knew this wasn't coming out of nowhere.
A grin started to grow across his face, excited. “You can take some time to think about it, of course. Now doesn't have to mean this weekend, or this month, even. It can be this summer, maybe? How long does it take to plan a wedding?”
She leaned closer and slipped her other hand around his neck. "Gilbert, shut up," she informed him before kissing him, signalling they could work this out later.