67. Quell

“How long unt--- OOF.” Fletcher put a fist to his mouth as he fought his breakfast trying to come out. After a minute of swaying and clinging to the rail of the boat for dear life, he won the small fight and was able to continue talking to the captain of the ship. “How long until we reach land?”

The captain eyed the green-faced lad and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Another few weeks at least.”

Weeks? WEEKS? How was he going to quell his seasick stomach for a few more WEEKS? “But I can’t go weeks without eating…”

81. Depression

Fletcher had never thought this day would come. He had never thought he would have a wedding day either, but it obvious that the day he signed his divorce papers was worse.

It seemed fitting that it was raining when he stepped outside. He didn’t have an umbrella and didn’t want one. He had felt numb during the whole experience, and now that it was over, he wasn’t feeling anything. He didn’t feel the cool rain, he didn’t feel his feet hitting hard pavement, he didn’t even feel sadness over Rae.

This was what depression felt like: nothing at all.

54. Dare
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“DO IT. DO IT.”

Fletcher had all of the Great Hall watching him as he took a quarter of an orange, rolled it around in a plateful of salt and pepper, and then dramatically dipped it honey mustard.

He popped the dare into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed with a huge fake grin. Oh, and the next section? Fletcher rolled it around, dipped it, and popped it too. The other half of the orange got the same treatment. Roll, dip, pop.

“How’d it taste?!” the crowd clamored to know.

Fletcher paused for effect, smacked his lips loudly, and declared: “Tangy!”

79. Author's Choice: Dad

Step step step step tuuuuuuurn. Step step step step check watch, sigh, tuuuuuuuuuuuurn.

“Mister… Fletcher?” Fletcher froze in his pacing. He looked up at the nurse and waited for the news. “It’s a girl.”

“YESSSSS!!!!!!!!” Fletcher leapt up in the air and started air-pumping, self high-fiving, and air guitaring. “A GIRL! YESSSSS. I knew it! I KNEW IT!”

He ran over and gave the nurse who had delivered the news a big, bone-crushing bear hug. “THANK YOU! BEST DAY EVER!!!!! Can I go see them?!”

“Of cccourse!” the nurse wheezed. What a hug! WHAT A DAY! Fletcher was a DAD!

75. Yodel

Fletcher had never been to Germany, but now that he was here, he LOVED it! The bratwurst, the beverages, the funny little tights the dudes wore… this was great! This place would clearly benefit from the culture clash that would come with a tattoo parlor. Weird though that the investors wanted to meet with him on top of a mountain…

“Yooooodelheeehoooo!” he yodeled as he hiked to their meeting point. “Yodelllllllheyyyyheeehooo! Paradise people, where you AT!” Fletcher started to feel breathless as he neared the peak. “Helllllllo---”

*FLOP*

Another thing he’d learned today: air is thinner at higher altitudes.

10. Arithmancy

“Arithwhatsy?” Fletcher craned his neck toward the interviewer in confusion. Were they at that stage of making up words now? He wasn’t really that comfortable here. Heck, he still had pants on. Pants AND shoes.

“Arithmancy,” the man behind the desk repeated, peering over his glasses with a skeptical LOOK at Fletcher. “Did you study Arithmancy at Hogwarts? We like our cursebreakers to have a foundation in numerical divination.”

Fletcher nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I know a Nancy. She was real good at crunching numbers, lemme tell ya.” He laughed, but the interviewer didn’t laugh with him. “What’s Arithmancy again?”

22. Kneazle

Fletcher poked the glass surrounding the sleeping kitty with his index finger, then gave it a sharper poke when the cat still didn’t move. “What’s so special about it? The big ears? Sleeping ALL the time?” He looked over at the pet store owner. “My daughter’s going to want it to DO something, you know, like chase yarn balls.”

“Sir,” the shopkeeper cleared his throat politely, “all cats sleep… a lot. Much of the daylight hours are spent in rest, as kneazles and cats in general tend to have nocturnal tendencies.”

“Whatever that means,” Fletcher snorted. “But I’ll take it.”

51. Act

"How do your friends know when you're putting on a show and when you're being genuine, though?"

Fletcher studied her as he asked this question. She was pretty, sure, but how did he know she was actually enjoying talking to him? How did he know this wasn’t just an act?

His suspicions were confirmed by her squirmy answer. They don’t know! So no one knew the real Jessa. "And if there was a way to know for sure, then by all means I should know it! A good actress must deal with it."

Wellp, he’d just bought into her act.

53. Chase
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Fletcher was all about the chase. The chase for gold, that is: the never-ending quest for wealth. He loved it, loved having it. He loved nothing else these days, besides his daughter. But the gold? The cash? The bank? The bones? The Benjamins? The moola? The dough? Dat dime?! He adored it.

So when he handed in a stack of casino chips for roughly five thousand dollars of cold, hard, American cash, he was in high heaven. Fletcher could have sat by the hotel safe all night if he hadn’t had something else to chase.

Women: his only other vice.

78. Author's Choice –All Kinds of Hearts
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Looking at the cards on the table, Fletcher let out a small laugh. “We’re both showing hearts,” he pointed out to his companion, gently tapping the corner of his cards and then hers too.

“NO TOUCHING ZEH CARDS!” the dealer immediately barked as if on cue, her nostrils flaring and eyes GLARING at the dark-haired man.

“My b, my b!” Fletcher held up his hands in a surrender gesture with an obvious smirk on his lips. Geez, he should have stuck to the roulette wheel. Who knew that party places like casinos were SO STRICT when it came to hearts?!

84. Angry
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“Daddy?” Mallory was crawling up into his lap again. “I had a dream that bats came outta your nose.” She sniffled and rested her head on his shoulder. “You made Mommy so angry that she used magic on you. On your nose.” As if to make sure his nose was okay, Mallory gave it a stern poke. “Is that even poss’ble?”

Stifling a laugh, Fletcher nodded slowly. “It’s called the bat-bogey hex. I could…” teach it to you? “…never make your mum that angry.” He winked. “Besides, that curse doesn’t hurt!”

Leave it to the Egyptians to use it though.

66. Pace

“So is this all you do all day?” the teenager getting a henna tattoo at the WWN festival wanted to know. She had been eyeing Fletcher all morning.

“No.”

“Do you get like bored of henna, cuz it takes fooorrrrrreeeeeverrrrrrr?”

It was hard for the 29-year-old NOT to roll his eyes. What a difference ten years made.

“You have to pace yourself,” he swirled a bit on her arm and oops’d loudly, “or it will turn out looking like crap.” Fletcher paused to stretch his hand and smirk at her attempt to look at the back of her arm. “Pacing.”

30. Feast
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I knew from the first instant I saw her that my dad would fall for this woman. She was tall, thin, and had a strange grace about her that wasn't at all imposing. She was wearing a beautiful red dress with her long hair down, and just from looking at her, I felt a hot, angry surge of jealousy course through me. I slammed the door in her face and stomped off to deal with this in my own way: by pretending that no one was at the door for our Christmas feast and that nothing at all had changed.

74. X-tinguish

“DADDDDDDDYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!” Mallory squealed, falling out of her chair with her foot straight up in the air. The foot, interestingly, was engulfed in blue-purple flames of the magic variety.

Fletcher leaped up immediately. “Holy ----” He got down on his knees, trying to bat the flames out with a napkin but of course it wasn’t working. And where was his wand?!

"Jessa!" he yelped, "Wand! Please!" Help! Mallory was dramatically screeching like a howler monkey over here with her foot on fire and what did his girlfriend do first?

Silence both father and daughter, and THEN extinguish the flame. Figures.

42. Portraits

“Pssst, you there!”

As usual, Fletcher was one of the last to leave the Great Hall. He was munching on a really delicious, really cheesey thing on a stick when a whisper called his attention to the portrait of a curvy blonde cradling a cheese wheel.

He paused and raised an eyebrow at her.

“Wanna learn how to charm your own cheese, luv?”

Fletcher glanced at the elf-made cheese treat on a stick currently in his hand, and shrugged. “Nah, thanks, I’m good.” Much to the portrait’s dismay, he turned toward the kitchens to see if they had any more.

57. Gape
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Toddling out of the second task of the Triwizard Tournament, little!Fletcher stared up at the stands and all the tall people. Not a single person watching this event was shorter than him. He wanted to die.

“LiL Lockhart,” he joked, “looks like I am the little one now, eh?” Thank Merlin for Treyen though. After brewing his shrinking solution antidote wrong, Fletcher had become convinced that he would be tiny forever. His friend knew just what to do though: Get Healer Moretti. She resized Fletcher in a jiffy.

Everyone else could stop gaping now. Six-foot-Fletcher was back in the game.

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Setting: Fletcher’s room. The dark-haired entrepreneur is sitting on his bed, writing in a fancy Christmas card. He looks up, hearing a noise down the hall.

“Do you mind?”

Oh. He’s talking to us.

“Just gimme a minute.” He goes back to scribbling something --- maybe a poem? “It’s my PRESENT,” he corrects us. “Not JUST a poem.” A present for his present-day companion?

Fletcher finishes writing and snaps the card shut, then remembers the two tickets, and closes the card again. “That’s none of your business. This is for Jessa’s eyes only.”

So much for breaking the fourth wall.

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“BOO!” Fletcher apparated to the kitchen in his new Invisibility Cloak pajamas on April Fool’s Day. Only his hands and his head were visible, as the pajamas had long sleeves and long trousers for full effect.

Mallory nearly spat out her cereal. “EEEEEEEK! SOMEONE DECAPITATED DAD!!!!!!!” she SCREEEEAMED and ran from the kitchen. “CALL ST. MUNGO’S!!!!!!”

“I didn’t even get to explain how they work!” a shocked Fletcher jogged after her. “Wait, Mal!”

“APRIL FOOL’S!” his grinning daughter jumped out from around the corner. “You taught me well, Dad.” And she didn’t even need invisibility to pull off her prank!

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They were getting a dog. ANOTHER dog. Why did Fletcher need another big, fluffy, girl-loving, dude-hating DOG in his penthouse? Somebody remind him how the cuteness of this white puppy had melted his frozen-snowman, anti-animal heart?

"I think we should call him Snowball, see, because he's SO FLUFFY,” his daughter had decided on their very first encounter. Then they had played with the dog, with Jessa of course taking Mallory’s side, and the next thing he knew, he was pulling out his wallet to buy a leash, a cage, and another doggy bowl.

Why couldn’t it have been an owl?

“…and after your internship at Gringos, you won the Triwizard Tournament of 2073?”

Fletcher couldn’t help yawning. He shook his head at the literal ghost writer penning his autobiography. “The internship at Gringott’s was AFTER I won, but before I graduated.”

“Mmm.” A floating quill fixed the narrative, while a second adjusted Fletcher’s timeline, and a third came to rest behind the ghost’s ear. “Now where was this bank located?”

“Gringotts?” Fletcher blinked as another quill nudged his hand. The ghost didn’t know ancient Gringotts?! “Diagon Alley…”

“Ah-a. I don’t get out much anymore.”

Or he was just a featherbrain.

Alright, here they were, in the Department of Mysteries. Fletcher had enjoyed the trip to level nine, but now that they were surrounded by doors, he was feeling a bit queasy and confused; never a good combination.

Suddenly, a door opened, and the Mysteries Department Head appeared. Why was he wet? Were all the teens with him interns? AND WHY WAS THE ROOM SPINNING AGAIN?! Fletcher was jostled uncomfortably against Airey and was then left to dry his tie as the irascible department head dismissed him and Jonathan.

Rude. Someone was feeling snappish today… well, someone BESIDES him.

Fletcher busied himself with untying the hanging basket he wanted to nick for Level One, a lovely netted contraption with a plant that reminded him of Jessa’s long locks. Green heart-shaped leaves spilled over the edge of the pot like her curls spilling down her back, with a pot that was tied up in some hippy basket weave? He wasn’t sure how to describe it, but it looked like a shawl she would wear, and he adored its whimsy, but not all the knots tying it to this café. Could someone come HELP HIM, please, before he became tangled too?

Fletcher knew his way into work and thus wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings as he walked into the atrium that day. His nose was buried in his newspaper as he tried to catch up what he’d missed over break. Other than a general barnlike odor in the air, he didn’t notice anything different about the Atrium. It certainly wasn’t enough to make him give a hoot, even as he stepped in a puddle of owl excrement and went sliding, crashing, and falling to the floor.

Hooooot hoooooot. Were the owls laughing at him?! Why WERE there owls here?!

“The best Defense class,” Fletcher was narrating to his ghostly ghost writer again, “was the one where Tatertot let us have a food fight in the Great Hall.”

The ghost murmured and repeated what he was writing. “A POTATO-SPONSORED FOO FRIGHT. What year was this?”

“2072? 2073?” Fletcher scratched his chin and leaned forward to see what the ghost had down so far. “No no, the SHE-Snakes were the ones ganging up on me, and it was Headmaster Tate’s FOOD fight, not potato foo fright.” Thank goodness Fletcher was a good spellchecker, right? Had this ghost even gone to school?