Title: Dealing With the Devil [1/?]
Author: Grevola
Rating: PG
Notes: Don't own HP or GW. Part of the Sorting Hat Arc. Follows "Anything You Can Do". Hiiro realizes he's in need of a sneaky individual with flexible morals. Too bad Duo doesn't do anything for free. Also, Hiiro fails at English in this part, fair warning.
-_-_-_-
The first week back to Hogwarts was always the hardest for Hiiro. He spent his summers training intensely with Jei-sensei, trying to cram a full year of twenty-four seven study into about two months. If he could string together a sentence of comprehensible English in the first two weeks of his return from Japan, he felt reasonably accomplished. But the first week of third year was going worse than usual. First there had been the disappointment in Transfiguration. And now, he had finally gotten a response from Jei-sensei to his request to drop Divination.
"What's that?" Meiran Long leaned over and snatched the note out of his hand.
"Give it-" he started to say, but she was already laughing too hard to pay him any attention.
Wufei Chang, a student in their same year and Meiran's reluctant betrothed, snatched the note out of her hands as he made his way to the Ravenclaw table, "Getting love letters from Yui now?" he asked.
"Hardly!" she laughed, "Read it, go on!"
Wufei looked down his nose at the note, before he too began nearly howling with laughter, "Oh, Yui, good luck!"
Hiiro made a half hearted grab for the note, but it was snatched up by Wufei's cousin Cho, who glanced at and began giggling. The note was pulled from her hands by one of the Weasley twins, who frowned at it, turned it around several times, and then handed it to his brother upside down, "What do you make of it George?"
George examined the note with exaggerated care. "Well, it's clear as day to me," he said., "It says: Spiky man in the house by the un-strung clothes line will have an encounter with a woman in a large hat. Possibly Longbottom's Nan."
By now every student in the area was laughing at him, even if they didn't know exactly why the two characters drawn in red over his carefully worded poem/request were so disappointing. Hiiro was fuming as he finally grabbed the paper back from the laughing twins. The fact that Chang and the other Chinese students could read Jei's answer didn't improve matters either. The truth about the note would be all over the school by lunch time, and he'd still have to go to Divination next week. It wasn't fair at all.
Having completely lost his appetite for the rest of his breakfast he stormed out of the hall and stomped down the stairs to the dungeons. Not even the Slytherins hung out down there in the cold, and so what if he was a few minutes early to potions? It beat being stuck upstairs where the Weasley twins were undoubtedly getting the full story about the note from Long. He wondered if they'd put it into a song, or just start giving him dungbombs whenever they saw him.
He'd spent over an hour carefully composing the poem, observing all of the rules about meter, length, calligraphy and seasonal words, and Jei's only answer to his request to drop Divination had been the rather crudely scrawled characters for "Tough shit". It was frustrating and humiliating in the extreme, and it was only Wednesday.
~*~*~*~*
Duo was slinking along the corridors of the dungeons, avoiding going to breakfast. It was his first day back since the incident in Care of Magical Creatures, and he was rather hoping to avoid running into Trowa a bit longer if it was at all humanly possible. Sure, he'd have to see the guy in potions, but hopefully Snape would make him sit with the Gryffindors or something. Surely Snape didn't want members of his house poisoning each other in his own classroom. On second thought, Duo decided, given the kind of stuff we work with in there, maybe he does. He was contemplating his imminent demise in a horrible potions accident thoroughly enough that when he rounded the corner he literally ran into some one. He wasn't moving fast enough to knock them over, but their foreheads cracked pretty hard.
"Uff!"
"K'so-"
"Hiiro!" He said, looking up to see his friend from Gryffindor rubbing absently at his forehead and scowling at him from under his dark eyebrows.
"Duo? Why aren't you breakfast?"
Duo blinked at him, "Because I don't taste like porridge? How hard did you hit your head anyway?"
Hiiro frowned again, "Sorry, it's hard adjustment. Why are you not at breakfast?"
"Ah, that's better," Duo nodded, but when Hiiro just stared at him, waiting for an answer he finally caved, "Because I'm sort of in a bit of slight difficulty with Trowa Barton, if you must know."
"What?"
"He's just a little, teensy bit pissed about the whole hippogriff thing. I don't want to talk about it."
"You mean the trouble in Care of Magic Creature where you-"
"I said I don't want to talk about it!" Duo snapped. "Besides. What are you doing down here?"
Wisely, Hiiro decided to leave this topic alone for the moment and let Duo change the subject, "I am avoiding Great Hall and Weaslys."
"Not that I can't think of a million reasons off hand," Duo said, "but can I ask what aspect of their charming personality has sent you rushing down here?"
Hiiro was quiet for a long time, trying to decided what to tell Duo. At last he held out the rather crumpled note by way of explanation. Duo took the piece of paper, turned it around a few times, and then checked the back for any extra markings. "They gave you a headache with some kind of cryptic riddle paper?"
It was only the intense training of the summer that kept Hiiro from rolling his eyes. "No Duo, they make fun of what's on paper."
The braided student hand the paper back, shrugging, "Looks like a take out menu that some jerk wrote all over. What is it?"
It was hard to stay insulted in the face of Duo's honest assessment. Of course the Weasly twins hadn't had any clue what they were looking at. "Is nothing really. But they will make it out to be much something."
"Then put honey and gnats in their trunks. No magic, so it's hard to trace, and it's and really freakin' annoying. … Unless you share a dormitory or something with them. Because then it would suck for you too."
"I don't think that is good idea," Hiiro said, "but I thank you for sentiment, Duo-kun."
Duo leaned back against the wall of the corridor, his arms folded and his eyebrows furrowed in concentration, "Well, then give me a minute and I'll come up with something better. Those two are getting way too cocky if you ask me." Then his nose scrunched up and his eyes crossed slightly before he gave Hiiro a hard look, "Wait a second. Who are you calling a raccoon?"
Hiiro's train of thought, which up until then had been focused on not laughing at how funny Duo looked when a thought struck him, was completely derailed by the question. "Ra-kun?" He asked, "I don't know this word. What is ra-kun?"
"Not Rah-koon, that sounds like an Egyptian god or something. Rac-coon," Duo waived his arms about for a moment. "It's an animal. You know? Coonskin cap, raccoon? That sort of thing"
Hiiro just continued to look slightly baffled behind his typical aloof expression.
Duo moved away from the wall, "Okay, so it's an animal. With markings, like a mask?" he made rings with his forefingers and thumbs and held them over his eyes. "And dark paws, like gloves," he mimed putting on gloves, "and a big bushy tail." He held his braid at the small of his back and waggled the tip around with one hand, while he tried to indicate how large the tail would be with the other.
The Japanese boy watched this odd dance in utter confusion for a few minutes before he nodded, "You mean tanuki?"
"Tan-what-y?"
"Ta-nu-ki," he spelled the word out, "it is creature like you describe. With stripes tail. A bit troublesome, like you."
Duo laughed, "Yeah, exactly! Tanuki. One of those." Then he grew more serious, "So why did you call me a tanuki then?"
Before Hiiro could try to explain, or even understand the question, the adjoining corridor was filled with the sounds of about thirty students trundling from breakfast to their first Potions lesson of the new school year. They hurried after the passing throng, neither of them wanting to be assigned detention on the very first day. They only barely settled at the last two seats before the bell rang.
"Cutting it rather fine, are we Yui?" Snape said, "Perhaps you and Mr. Maxwell had better stay after class and explain why, instead of going to breakfast, you encouraged Mr. Maxwell to lurk in dank hallways when he has only just been released from the infirmary after that regrettable hippogriff incident. You'll note Mr. Malfoy displayed more sense. Now open your books to page seventeen."
"But Professor-" Duo began.
"Page seventeen, Mr. Maxwell. Don't make me repeat myself."
"Yeah, yeah" Duo muttered as he dug out his book, "it's bad for my health."
-_-_-_-
TBC