| Puffskein
Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Canada
Posts: 2,438
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Chapter 4
The Library
I closed the book shut and walked around the book-filled table, taking my seat in front of the scattered piles. I flopped down on the chair, curling one leg beneath me, and opened the book again. As soon as I finished the first chapter, I pushed the book forwards and pulled my parchment to the empty space in front of me and began writing about transforming animals into stuffed toys.
“Hey.”
My quill flew over my shoulder as I jumped in my chair.
“Oi, watch it – those things hurt!”
I turned around and saw a tiny red dot already beginning to turn darker on Harry’s right cheek.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to make the word not sound as forced as I was making it.
He picked up the quill and passed it to me. I took it and turned around, continuing to write. The sudden sound of a chair dragging across the hard floor made my hand twitch and mess up my word and a couple others.
“Oh, sorry. I’ll fix that.” Harry pulled out his wand and did a little wave and flick and the word I just wrote disappeared, along with the long splotch I made over the others. A couple spare letters from those words disappeared too.
“Uh... is that normal?” I asked, looking at the half-written words.
“I just learned the spell today, actually, from Hermione.”
“Ah.” I responded as elusively as I could, nodding.
I still didn’t that highly of his friends, especially Granger. She was a rather annoying show-off in class. While thinking about the classes I had with her in them today and her continual one-hand-up-after-the-other antics, I kept writing. She kind of reminded me of an octopus with her arms waving around so much. The suction cups could easily be her way of grabbing onto her teachers and keeping a firm hold on them...
I have to stop drinking three cups of tea at lunch.
The minutes passed as the silence grew between Harry and me, the only noise being my quill scratching against the paper as it made words. He just kept looking between my parchment and me. Most of the time I felt his eyes burning into me.
“You’re in Transfiguration?” he finally asked.
“Yep,” I responded as I continued to write.
“Isn’t it really difficult?”
“Not really. I’m kind of into changing things.” I looked up from my paper and pointed to my hair. Today it was streaked with white-blonde and blood red colours.
Harry laughed. “True.”
“And a lot of fun stuff happens in that class. Today we were transforming pet cats into stuffed animals and... well, you know Finnigan?”
“Seamus? Still blowing things up?”
“Well, its head and front legs were perfect... but the twitching back legs and tail that was still swishing is no longer fluffy.”
Harry smiled and shook his head. I smiled back at him for a moment and turned back to my parchment. I was on my last sentence when Harry finally spoke again.
“So, Slytherin?”
I stopped writing, sighing lightly. Of course that was on his mind. As breezy as he was trying to be about it, I could sense and hear the unease to his tone.
“What about it?” I answered calmly, still looking down at my paper.
“You don’t seem like a Slytherin.”
Translation: I don’t come off as a maniacal, blood-crazed Death Eater. That’s always a good sign. Then again, I’m not acting entirely myself around Harry...
“I guess it runs in the family,” I responded, shrugging.
“But Sirius, your father, was in Gryffindor. Was your mother in Slytherin?”
“Yes,” I responded. I finally turned and looked at Harry, holding his confused eyes.
“Sirius Black... with a Slytherin girl?” his eyebrow rose skeptically.
“Not everyone that comes out of Slytherin is totally evil. She never told him, he never asked or assumed.” I shrugged. “We don’t go around asking each other what house we’re in when outside of school after all.”
“She didn’t hold it against him he was Gryffindor?”
“She didn’t know him in Hogwarts,” I said as if it was obvious.
His suspicious expression dropped and he nodded. “That makes sense then.”
He was so easy to manipulate. I really wished there was more of a challenge; I haven’t had one in awhile. I turned back to my parchment and quickly scribbled the rest of my sentence. Scanning for spelling errors, I deemed it worthy of being seen by an adult and rolled it up and tying it shut. I turned back to Harry and looked down at his wrist.
“What time is it?” I asked.
He listed his arm and checked his watch.
“6pm.” He then looked at me. “Hungry?”
“A little, yeah.”
He looked at the piles of books that fortified the table and then back at me. “Are you done here then?”
I nodded. He got up, and I followed suit. I grabbed my scroll and hurried behind him. As soon as we appeared from behind the last of the shelves, I recognized a bushy excuse of hair standing by the librarian’s counter, taking out a pile of books that she could probably just barely see over. Hermione turned around.
“Harry?” One book slid off the top of her pile. I heard her mutter a simple levitating spell and she put it back on top of her pile. “What’re you doing here?”
“Studying,” he responded.
I snorted. “See you later, Harry.” I patted his shoulder as I passed him and left the library, heading for the Great Hall.
“Hey!” Aurelia suddenly materialized beside me. “How was your first day?”
“Finnigan blew up a cat in Transfiguration, Weasley made a potion that petrifies people... for who-knows-how long – Slughorn assumes one week by the smell of the potion - instead of making a Felix Felicius.” Then I sighed deeply. “And I have Draco in Potions and DADA.”
“Very climactic,” Aurelia drawled sarcastically as we turned a corner and joined a few more students heading towards the delicious smells of dinner.
“If you knew how Draco and I are in the same room, you’d understand,” I sighed in response as we turned into the Great Hall and headed towards the Slytherin table.
“Oh believe me, I’ve already gotten the gist,” she responded elusively and sat down.
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