Home: Catching up.

[scribal_goddess]

So, yeah. I'll be taking care of pictures and stuff sometime next week, and I see people have been updating like the bunny rabbits of fiction last week (only ever happens when I'm gone, haha) and Yosemite was awesome. I also, and I am very proud of this, have a Christmas gift for my mom already. Normally I spend three months agonizing about shopping for her and then end up getting something two days before... but this year I have an antique, cast-iron squirrel-shaped nutcracker.

No, I'm not kidding. She liked it when she saw it, though... and at least it's not another dumb t-shirt.

Oh, and it occurred to me that I never did post part two of De's (infamous) Hogwarts fic fill, because I got very distracted... so I'll do that here, because it does not require me to brain. I'm jet-lagged like a... jet-lagged thing. 

At least puppy is happy to see me. I wish he'd sleep on the right foot, though. 

Ana and Lydia pre-teen Hogwarts five-and-one fic: Five times Ana wasn't brave, and once she was. That should tell you all you need to know, really. 

 3.     

They had to leave the Trophy Room eventually, and went in different directions for separate classes. Lydia had to run out to the greenhouses, and Ana watched her braids smacking against her shoulders all the way down the hall. Then she turned and headed for transfiguration, another class she dreaded. McGonagall may have been head of Gryffindor, but that meant that she was even harder on them than anyone else, and Ana had already been late once this week.

She skidded in just as the bell rang and had to sit next to horrible Michael Turner, who reached over and yanked on her hair.

“Late again, carrots?” he whispered.

She very much wished that she were brave enough to elbow him in the face. Then, Professor McGonagall turned around from where she’d been writing on the chalkboard, and Ana had to settle for giving Michael a glare.

It was only when they were all ready to open their books to the chapter on transfiguring teapots that Ana realized the terrible thing.

She didn’t have her book.

Feeling very obvious, she pretended to follow along with the class for a little while, but professor McGonagall missed nothing.

“Miss Elvensong,” she said, “I believe that we were reading Intermediate Transfiguration and not the Standard Book of Spells.”

Beside Ana, Michael snickered. She sat still and did nothing.

“Do you have your Intermediate Transfiguration?” McGonagall prompted her. Ana bit her lip and looked down.

“No.” I know where I left it, Professor, I must have dropped it when Madam Pince chased me out of the library, I’m sorry Professor –

“Remember to bring it next time. Being unprepared is not the way to win any house points for Griffindor. You may look on with mister Turner.”

Ana sank even lower in her seat as the boys next to her snickered, fighting the moisture in her eyes.

Crybaby, Michael wrote in the book.

4

After that terrible Transfiguration lesson, Ana didn’t head to lunch with the other Gryffindors, preferring to hang back into the hallways until all the laughing boys were gone. She kicked a statue, but it didn’t make her feel any better. In fact, it just made her toes hurt. Today was turning out to be entirely rotten.

If she’d been looking at the ceiling, she would have realized that her day was about to get much, much worse.

“Oooh, dripping like a faucet? Is it Moping, Moaning Myrtle?” Peeves cackled, zooming upside-down along the hall towards her. “Oh no, it’s an ickle firstie!”

Ana tried very hard not to show on her face how much worse her day had just gotten. Peeves, her aunt Eluisa had told her, picked on people to get a reaction from them. That was why he hardly ever bothered with the professors and the older students, because they’d either learned to tolerate him or learned enough magic to get rid of him if he got too annoying. That left Filch and the lower three years, mostly.

And wasn’t it just Ana’s luck that out of more than three hundred students in the lower years, Peeves just had to come picking on her? It wasn’t exactly fair.

Even though she hadn’t said anything, there was no use trying to fool Peeves.

“Oooh, it’s a pointy-eared elflet! It’s Annie!”

“Go away, Peeves.”

“Go away? Why would I go away?” Peeves asked, zooming up towards a chandelier. He tucked his hands in his pockets, and he came out with a handful of dried lima beans. Then he grinned.

Ana took one look and ran, but Peeves was faster than her, and he chased her down the hallways, pelting her with beans and singing.

Sniffles like a badger              

And dribbles like a hose         

Even redder than her hair      

Is her shiny nose!

Crybaby, Crybaby, Crybaby!

He screamed the last line with glee and a final shower of beans just as she pelted through a side door and ended up in the entrance hall in the middle of the lunch rush, with everyone staring, her face redder than a beet, and her hair full of lima beans.