HP Crossover 3 - The Classes

[scribal_goddess]

Yup. Everything that goes for the first two goes for this one (Hi, mzyra) and the wordcount is... phenomenal. Time for me to stop these for a bit and catch up on my homework, because I'm really tempted to head for some sort of resolution, though I've about written up through all of my coherent ideas. Feel free to leave guesses and ideas about what's next so I have some ideas!

After the feast, Haldir felt as stuffed as a sack of flour. Everyone had eaten far more than their parents would have permitted, and were sitting around making idle conversation and picking at treacle tarts and assorted cookies. Midina was busy secreting several in the sleeve of her robe – how she could eat anything more Haldir didn’t know, she was absolutely tiny and yet she’d out eaten both himself and Talon, skinny as she was – as the headmaster stood up to make his speech.

Despite his best efforts, Haldir was too overwhelmed to pay attention to any of it.

As he spoke, the crumbs vanished off everyone’s plates and the prefects straightened up slowly and started herding first-years towards the common rooms while everyone else started walking along lazily. Except for Viridia, who came flying over from the Hufflepuff table like a red-haired comet, despite the protests of prefects from both houses. In under a moment, she had managed to grab Midina, who had been lagging behind, by the elbow and whisk her away towards the staff table.

Haldir nudged Talon and they followed as inconspicuously as they possibly could. The only thing that prevented them from being spotted was that the prefects had twelve other new Gryffindors to keep an eye on, and one of the other children was holding up the line trying to re-tie their shoe. One of the prefects waved their wand and it tied itself, but the two young elves had already made their escape.

When they approached the staff table under cover of the older students hanging around to talk to friends from other houses, they saw that Viridia had marched directly up to McGonagall herself.

“I am sorry, miss Elvensong,” the professor was saying, “but a student simply cannot be re-sorted. It would defeat the purpose of sorting you in the first place.”

“You don’t understand, Professor – Midina mustn’t be separated from us -”

“You might let your friend speak for herself,” McGonagall replied, with a look that turned Viridia red and shut her up. Midina was staring at the professor, unable or unwilling to say anything. It felt wrong, somehow, despite the fact that she hardly ever said anything.

“She – she doesn’t talk much, Professor.”

McGonagall smiled at Viridia suddenly, and looked much less stern than before. “I promise you that as a new Gryffindor, she will be absolutely safe under my care,” she said. “I see two of her housemates here to help her find their dormitory already.”

It took a second for it to sink in on Haldir and Talon that she meant them, and more importantly knew they were standing around eavesdropping. They exchanged a mortified look at the same time as they were treated to an, in Haldir’s opinion unprovoked, glare from Viridia.

“All of your other housemates have left,” the professor told the four of them, “I suggest that you hurry and catch up.”

Viridia reluctantly stepped away from Midina, and locked eyes with Haldir for a second, defiantly, before turning and sprinting away to where Chalimyra and Eluisa were waiting in the door, clearly torn between following the other first years headed for the Hufflepuff dormitory and waiting for Viridia. Haldir and Talon headed for the door as well, with Midina following in their shadows, but they didn’t catch anything that the girls said before they disappeared through a door under the stairs, sending meaningful and uninterperetable glances back towards the three Gryffindors.

The entry hall seemed to be empty of Gryffindors. The three of them had a panicked moment – because how could you tell what house one of the older students was in? Before a tall girl with a head covered in hundreds of braids saw them.

“New Gryffindors? Head up those stairs and turn left, if you run, you should catch them.”

The three of them took her at her word and didn’t stop to thank her, and when they had raced up the stairs they nearly collided with the end of the line of Gryffindor first years. A boy in the back gave them an annoyed look, to which Talon replied by sticking out his tongue and wiggling his fingers behind his ears. Midina gave a tiny giggle of nervousness.

Up so many stairs that Haldir was certain they had climbed nearly to the roof, and down several twisting hallways he was sure he would never remember, the Gryffindors finally reached a large portrait of a lady wearing pink. Haldir felt as if his legs were about to fall off, and the yawn building in his throat might split his skull in half. The prefect in the lead said something to the portrait, which sounded like audacia, and it swung open like a door.

“What did he say?” Talon whispered.

“Dunno, I couldn’t hear him either,” Haldir replied. They clambered through – the prefect tried to give Midina a hand up because she was so small, but she ignored him completely – and they would have cheerfully all collapsed into the fluffy, scarlet-upholstered chairs where some of the older students were already sitting, if the prefects hadn’t split them up, sending boys up one staircase and girls up another, and called after them to brush their teeth.

Haldir saw with relief that his trunk was at the foot of a bed already, and there was only a little bit of negotiation between the seven boys in the room as to who wanted to be by the window and who wanted to be next to who, which resulted in a trunk being dropped on someone’s toe and everyone piling, exhausted, into bed, most of them in their pajamas and most of them having remembered to brush.

The last thing Haldir thought of, before he succumbed to yawning, was how the older students had arrived in the common room first.

“There’s got to be a faster way up here,” he mumbled towards Talon’s bed, and then the darkness and the stillness came in through the window and carried him away.

Morning, heralded by the sun through the red curtains, was a complicated mess of rumpled uniforms and the inability to find clean socks, then dashing off to breakfast in a hurry because no one was quite sure how to get there, even after patient instructions from older students about avoiding trick stairs and being able to cut through a whole wing of the castle behind a certain statue. Midina, by unspoken agreement, waited for Talon and Haldir in the common room, the long end of her robes forming a small puddle around her feet. She looked like she had tried to comb her hair and failed.

The three of them set off together, and promptly got lost, but they’d set out so early that by the time they managed, completely by accident, to find the Great Hall, there was still plenty of breakfast left. The three girls at the Hufflepuff table waved them over before they could manage to sit down, however, and since there were students milling about everywhere, as well as first-years still straggling in who appeared to have forgotten which table they were assigned to, they headed on over.

“Schedules,” Eluisa said with her mouth full of toast, waving a bit of paper in the direction of the boys, “See your head of house for them, Sprout just gave us ours. We’ve got first hour off, at least today, and we’ve got double Charms with you this afternoon. Actually, we got lucky - it looks like you get doubled with every other house at least once for at least one subject, but Hufflepuff and Gryffindor get two – Herbology and Charms. We’ve got transfiguration with the Slytherins, though, so you must have it with the Ravenclaws, because we double with them for Potions.”

“Meaning we get to stew things in vials for hours with the Slytherins,” Talon said.

“Yup,” Eluisa replied cheerfully.

“It won’t be a problem unless you bring up Quidditch, I’m sure,” Chalimyra said. “I have cousins in Slytherin, and -”

Talon’s eyebrows nearly disappeared under his rumpled hair. “Well then -”

“Cut it out,” Eluisa told him, “would you suddenly have had a problem with Chali if they’d stuck her in Slytherin? It doesn’t really matter aside from Quidditch and house points. Hufflepuff’s going to kick you guys’ butts in house points this year, though,” she added.

Meanwhile, Viridia had whipped a comb out of her sleeve with such speed that Haldir thought at first it was her wand. “What did you do to your hair, Midi?” she asked, as if Midina was her little sister.

“Slept on it,” Midina replied. But she sat obediently down on the bench and let Viridia get to work on the bottom of her hair.

“You didn’t bring any hair ties, did you?” Viridia asked. Midina shook her head, tearing several hair snarls apart on the comb in the process.  “Well, I’ll give you some of mine then, I overpacked,” Viridia continued.

“Viri, don’t comb Midina’s hair at the table, it’s going to get in our food…” Eluisa’s complaint was ignored, for the most part.

“Um, we’ve got to, you know, go to our table and actually eat,” Haldir said, shifting from one foot to the other as he and Talon stood uselessly over the hair-combing session. “And get our schedules and stuff.”

“Midi can eat while I comb.”

“But house tables…”

“Do you see a sign up?” Viridia asked, tearing apart a knot. Eluisa and Chalimyra gave her a look. “Oh, all right then,” she said, letting Midina loose with only the bottom eight inches of her hair combed, and chucking the resultant shed strands under the table, “I’ll finish and braid it after you’ve eaten.”

“Bossy,” Talon muttered under his breath to Haldir as they headed for the Gryffindor table. This time Haldir didn’t bother to respond. He had a faint suspicion that if Viridia had been placed into Gryffindor, she’d already be trying to run his and Talon’s lives as well. It never occurred to him to pity Eluisa and Chalimyra her presence, since they were both obviously capable of sorting things out on their own.

Breakfast was everything that Haldir’s heart and stomach hoped for, and he was kept busy for a while passing food, chewing, keeping the syrup from tipping over onto Midina, and generally being pre-occupied with the process of simultaneously eating, listening, and attempting to keep his robes clean: the sleeves were too wide and long to be really convenient, and he nearly dipped them in the butter more than once.

He was poked in the side after a while.

“What’s this?” Midina asked him. He looked down to find her pointing at half of a strawberry that she’d fished out of her fruit salad – her eating strategy still seemed to be taking as much of everything as she could, regardless of what it was, and eating like it was about to run away.

“It’s a strawberry,” he said, surprised. Midina hadn’t talked this much since yesterday on the train.

“You don’t know what a strawberry is?” Talon asked, loudly, “have you been living under a r-ow!” Haldir had kicked him in the shins under the table, but Midina had already clammed up again, staring at her plate.

“Way to go, genius,” Haldir said.

“What’s suddenly my fault?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he replied in an undertone. Half of the people eating near them were looking at them. “Just shut up about it for a bit, okay?” Miraculously, Talon did, and when they got their schedules they were all delighted to discover that they had first hour off with the Hufflepuffs on Mondays, so there was no real hurry for them to try and find History of Magic, which had its room listed as ‘Classroom 15, third floor, west wing,’ but given their knowledge of the castle, could have been anywhere.

Midina, to all appearances, was perfectly willing to have Viridia comb and braid her hair in the entry hall, so she ran ahead. Talon and Haldir hung back a bit.

“Look,” Haldir began, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but don’t go talking to Midina about anything that’s strange about her. I think – well, there’s obviously something not right about her being this quiet, and she’s just way too small and skinny.”

“And she eats like someone might take her food away, yeah, I noticed,” Talon replied grimly. “It’s like she’s never seen this much food, and she’s going to make herself sick if she keeps trying to eat until there’s nothing left on the table.”

Haldir nodded. “You know, when I was being sorted, the Hat said… well, it basically said that it knew I’d already decided to take care of Midina and stuff.”

Talon looked at him in surprise. “Yeah, it said as much to me. Dunno why it didn’t have Viridia do it, though, she already acts like she’s the girl’s mom…”

Haldir shrugged, but Eluisa and Chalimyra had already approached them to compare schedules, so he didn’t say much else. They didn’t have as many classes or break periods with the Hufflepuffs as they’d like, but they didn’t have few enough to cause despair. Soon enough, they’d gotten their schedules all sorted, and Viridia had finished combing and braiding Midina’s hair, tying it off with a bit of blue ribbon. For once, Haldir was able to see Midina’s eyes as more than a secretive flash of turquoise hiding behind the thicket.

A comb and a ribbon, she must have known… He sent Viridia a small smile and received one in return, before it was agreed that everyone should get their books from their dorms and try to find their first class.

Two trick doors and a stair that swallowed Midina up to the knees before Haldir and Talon could lift her out later, the three Gryffindors were late to History of Magic. Professor Binns didn’t take off points, though, either because it was their first day or because he was convinced that Talon’s name was Edgeworthy. Once everyone’s fascination with having an actual ghost for a teacher had passed, History of Magic was deadly dull. Even though Haldir had actually liked history at his elementary school, he spent most of the class doodling in his notes and poking Talon when he started to snore.  Midina started staring fixedly at the board and finished using her textbook as a pillow – Haldir actually had to shake her a bit to get her up at the end of the class.

They all fared a bit better going to Astronomy – at least one of the other Gryffindors had an idea of how to get to the classroom, and the house as a whole was headed there – but it took them nearly the whole time to dodge a bunch of erasers thrown by Peeves and figure out which direction was east. Professor Sinestra tutted at them all and told them not to use the staircase in the south tower, because it only lead to her classroom on Tuesdays. She then launched into a long and complicated lecture with the admonition that they would take notes, as Astronomy was not all about pointing telescopes at the sky, and Haldir found that he was going to be taking two classes’ worth of notes here and few if any in History of Magic. Also, she assigned them their first homework of the year, which was to follow the instructions she handed out to them in taking apart, cleaning and re-assembling their telescopes.

By lunch, they were already hungry and exhausted and wondering greatly about the other teachers and their subjects. The Hufflepuff girls met them in the Entrance Hall with wide eyes, chattering about how Professor McGonnagal had turned the chandelier into a flight of birds during their first theory lesson.

“And then she turned herself into a cat and they all flew out the window!” Chalimyra was saying. “I don’t understand how she turned herself back, though, one of my uncles got turned into a warthog while he was doing research and they couldn’t turn him back for nearly a week.”

“She’s supposed to be the best transfigurationist in the country, of course she can do it,” said Eluisa, who had apparently been very impressed, “Bet you she could have put your uncle back together in time for dinner.”

“Dang. We had Boring Binns and Strict Sinestra,” Talon said, “You guys got lucky. How did Defense go?”

Viridia shuddered. “It’s scary. We got all sorts of lectures about how some of the worst things you could ever have to face as a witch or wizard are lurking under every stone and the other worst things are other witches and wizards. We didn’t get to use our wands today at all.”

“Well, there’s Charms for that, one of the second years said that double periods are usually for practicals,” Haldir told her at the same time as Eluisa spoke up.

“I like Defense. It’s necessary and it doesn’t fool around. If somebody’s invading your village, you’re going to want to know how to make them go away.”

“Oh, like anyone invades villages in this century,” Viridia retorted, “I think Professor Periculum just likes to scare us. The Goblin riots were ages ago, and Headmaster Dumbledore beat the last really dark wizard decades ago.”

“Just because you’ve never seen anything bad happen isn’t an excuse for pretending nothing bad exists -” Eluisa and Viridia were still arguing as the Hufflepuffs split off to go to their own table, and Chalimyra rolled her eyes at them in a clear message to Talon and Haldir.

“Wonder if they’ll still be at it when we get to Charms?” Talon asked Haldir and Midina as they all sat down.

Haldir felt that he was starting to get the hang of meals at Hogwarts by the time lunch was over. You had to be careful of your elbows and sleeves, but even if the food wasn’t quite like the feast of the first night, there was far more than enough for everyone. He had to tell Midina twice to slow down before she made herself sick, and she did, though she gave him a reproachful look as she did so. Maybe he shouldn’t say anything, she’d obviously been able to handle the first night feast and her enormous breakfast, and she was about the size of a twig anyway.

Charms was the first class that they weren’t late to, probably, Haldir thought, because the universe had smiled on the four of them who would have had to listen to Viridia and Eluisa’s continued sniping about directions if finding it had taken any longer than it had to. The two of them had been completely certain that north was in two opposite directions and Chalimyra had finally asked a passing ghost, whose tonsured head shone eerily in the sunlight, for directions. When the six of them arrived in charms, Viridia and Eluisa purposefully chose seats that put the other four in between them.

Professor Flitwick started the class by announcing that they would be practicing basic wand movements for most of the hour, after a short lecture, and that their only homework before their next session on Wednesday was to read the section on wand movement and diction in the Standard Book of Spells. Haldir felt like cheering. He got partnered up with a still visibly fuming Viridia for practice, however, and it didn’t look like either she or Eluisa was too keen on following Flitwick’s instructions to focus the mind.

“You’re too jabby,” Haldir finally told Viridia, sure that if she were speaking spells she would have put someone’s eye out by then. “That flick is supposed to be really controlled, and the swish isn’t supposed to look like you’re chopping down a tree.”

“You do it then,” she replied, and he demonstrated what he thought was a pretty passable swish and flick. The diagrams in the book were hard to follow at first, but he did it how he’d always seen his mother do it, like he was trying to get a piece of dust off of the end of his wand.

Viridia snorted, and told him when he did the next figure that he looked like he was having a hand cramp. He replied, cheerfully enough, that she looked like her wand was going to leap out of her fingers and start tap dancing. Before they’d reached figure five, the argument Viridia had been looking for had turned into a competition about who could dish out the most ludicrous criticism of a form.

“You look like you’re trying to pick your nose with that one, then you don’t know where to wipe the booger,” Haldir informed Viridia as she attempted the sixth movement, “but it’s better than last time, where you smacked yourself in the forehead -”

BOOM. The explosion stopped all motion in the classroom, as everyone turned to look at the wide eyes of Chalimyra, staring up from the floor, and Eluisa, eyeing her wand in astonishment, and finally the sooty circle on the stone wall that her wand was pointing at. Flitwick was already there and both girls were trying to explain.

“I didn’t mean to professor, it just happened -”

“Really, she was doing it right until her wand started spitting sparks -”

“I don’t know how it happened -”

Professor Flitwick laughed a little. “You will not be the last students to cause an explosion in my classroom,” he told them, and the atmosphere around the room lightened several degrees. “Practice and above all, control is key when using a wand – and you aren’t going to achieve that without a few mishaps along the way.”

The class resumed, though everyone was careful not to stand directly in front of their partners’ wands for the duration. Both Haldir and Viridia had their wand grips corrected, and Flitwick finished the lesson by teaching them all to shoot different colored stars from their wands, a different color for each wand movement. Talon and Chalimrya had to use their hats to put out the paper that Eluisa’s overenthusiastic sparks landed on, but only the edges were singed. All in all, it had been a good day.

AN: Don’t ask me for a specific timeline, but Voldemort and everything connected to the actual plot of Harry Potter will not be coming up here, even if the history does and most of the professors are Harry’s professors. As to when this is set, heck if I know.

Oh yeah, questions from the last one that I didn’t answer: Just as in canon EHL, Eluisa’s mother died when Elu was nine, protecting the village from invasion. I kept that tidbit but let HP verse tweak the circumstances a little. Everybody’s a little different at eleven than they are in Canon, but given that Canon starts when they’re in their early twenties and they’re all currently pushing their 40’s or already arrived, (and hey, AU!ness) I’m having a lot of fun with what they would have been like at this age, in HPverse.