Harry sat with his head in his hands in his favorite squishy armchair by the fireplace, obviously depressed.

"What's the matter?" piped up a small, tentative voice whose owner Harry could not see. This was mostly because his head was still in his hands.

No one ever said the boy had a drop of common sense. He's risked his life how many times since he was a year-old? You'd think he'd learn that pain, was, y'know, bad for you…

Having realized, after a period of three minutes, that the voice was not, in fact, coming from within his head, he removed his hands, and saw a small first-year staring up at him, her eyes wide with awe, mainly because she had managed to form a coherent sentence in front of what (she assumed) was the great, glorious, and insanely good-looking Harry Potter.

"Excuse me?" queried the raven-haired, emerald-eyed, bespectacled lad, whose face bore the marks of his hands, which had been pressing much too harshly into his pale, angular cheeks.

"W-what's the matter?" stuttered the first-year, decidedly less confident now.

Tough Potions homework (Snape was a slave-driver, the bastard!) and a lack of sleep due to dreams about a certain snake-faced Dark Lord with a penchant for wanting his head on a stick had made Harry a tad bit sarcastic.

"Gee, I have no idea," he began, the timbre of his voice rising. "I'm an orphan; I've been neglected at the hands of my morbidly obese uncle, my horse-faced aunt, and their whale of a son. I'm in love with my best friend's little sister, but I can't tell him cause he'll be a massive prick about it, plus he's banging a girl other than the one who loves him. I have a giant gash in my forehead because a mad man just barely failed to kill me, and now has somehow managed to resurrect himself and continue his quest for my demise. Oh, and I have a hangnail. That's pretty much the gist of it."

He paused for breath, his cheeks flushed. "That, kid, is what's the matter with me. Why do you ask?"

The girl's eyes were now popping out of her head. Harry Potter had spoken an entire paragraph to her! Oh, she was going to write in her diary and tell of all her friends, and write home to her mum, and-

The Boy Who Lived cleared his throat, and she jumped.

"Um, well- me mum always said that if someone looks upset, you should cheer 'em up. That's what good people do." She nodded her head vigorously, her Liverpudlian accent only slightly fake-sounding.

Harry's eyes were now bugging out of his head, as he was staring at her in bemused disbelief.

"Cheer me up? You? I don't even know you. What could you possibly do that would cheer me up? No one's been able to make me truly happy in sixteen years. I'm emo, I'm miserable. That's just me. I bitch and complain, and then I save the world at the beginning of what always is a dreadful summer. Just try to get me to be happy."

Now smiling, the first year took out her wand and pointed it at Harry's head, casting a simple Cheering Charm. As the placid, contented grin spread over the Chosen One's face, she began to hum a few bars of an American Muggle song from the late 1980s. Harry, recognizing the tune from the credits of Aunt Petunia's workout tapes, got out of his chair and began to walk toward the boys' dormitory, dancing in time to her tune.

Admiring her handiwork, the first year plopped herself down into Harry's recently vacated chair, and stared contemplatively into the fire. A Cheering Charm. It was so simple; how come no body had ever tried it?

After a few minutes, she herself got up to head to bed, cheerily singing aloud the song she had previously been humming.

"Don't worry; be happy now."