Yeah. Another one.

Disclaimer on first.


They got in a boat, and were joined by the bushy haired girl, who managed to chatter almost the entire time across the lake. Her name was Hermione Granger, and she had read and practically memorized all the course books by heart, and wasn't the black-haired boy Harry Potter? She'd read about him in three different magic books, and why didn't he know the things about himself that she knew about him? If it'd been her, she'd read all she could find out.

"I got my school books less than a week ago." Harry finally said. "I looked through them, and then kept them packed." This shut the girl up for a little while, and then they reached the grand castle at last. Lloyd nearly capsized the boat when he leapt off, apparently now used to the robes. The brunette seemed thrilled with the castle, the ghosts that wandered through the room where stern-faced McGonagall left them for a few minutes, and he nearly walked into the boy before him due to staring at the floating candles and the ceiling of night sky.

"It's bewitched to look like the sky outside. I read about it in Hogwarts, A History." Hermione whispered to them as the first years formed a long line between the teacher's table, and four that held students with a scattering of ghosts. A stool sat before them, and a battered hat upon that. Lloyd cracked a grin when the hat began to sing, and Harry paid more attention to the words than Lloyd did, the brunette humming the tune.

"When I call your name, you will put on the hat, and sit on the stool to be sorted." McGonagall said. "Abbott, Hannah!" A pink-faced girl with blonde pigtails stumbled out of line, put on the hat, which fell down to her eyes, and sat down. A moment's pause –

"HUFFLEPUFF." The hat shouted. The girl took the hat off, put it back on the stool, and moved to sit of to the far right.

"Aurion, Lloyd!" Lloyd blinked, and moved forward. McGonagall blinked at the boy once as he flashed a wide smile, and grabbed the top of the hat. Before he could even put it on his head, or lift it more than a foot off the stool, it trembled.

"GRYFFINDOR!" the sorting hat shouted, which resulted in Lloyd dropping said hat, and moving to the wildly cheering, far left table to sit near the twins. Two dozen names later, and Harry's name was called. The great hall went abruptly silent, with murmurs reaching the black haired pre-teen on the stage of students, about if Harry was The Potter.

"Hmmm... Difficult." A small voice said in his ear as the hat dropped over his eyes. "Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. A nice mind. There's talent, oh my goodness yes, some that is being tapped, expanded on, some still latent. Those people you live with know what they're doing, strangers though they are... hmm... Ah, where to put you..." Harry remembered the boy Malfoy, and the Slytherin table looked full of sorts he'd rather not meet. Not Slytherin, not Slytherin. "Are you sure? You could go far in Slytherin.. Well, if you're sure, it better be GRYFFINDOR!" the hat roared that out loud. Harry joined the table with Lloyd and the Weasleys a little shakily, almost unaware that he had received the loudest cheer yet, and that Lloyd was partially the cause of that. Ron joined them shortly, and then the last boy was called to Slytherin. Albus Dumbledore stood and gave a short welcome speech, which was to say, the silver-haired old man said two sentences, then four random words before sitting again.

"He's mad." Lloyd says, although the preteen looked thrilled with the ghost next to them. "Not as mad as Yggdrasill, but mad all the same." Food appeared before the Weasleys or Harry could question this person Lloyd mentioned, and Harry, who had been eating fairly well for the last four years, was astounded by the sheer variety on one table. Lloyd seemed thrilled as well, although he picked much smaller portions of everything than Harry did.

"That does look good." The ghost in the ruff said, eyeing the students as they shoved their faces.

"Can't you-?"

"I haven't eaten for nearly four hundred years." The ghost said mournfully. "I don't need to, of course, but one does miss it." Lloyd flinched, and slowed in his eating, looking a bit... down, if not exactly mournful. "Sorry, I didn't mean to put you off your dinner."

"It's not that. I'm just not very hungry." Lloyd says brightly, finishing off his plate before watching and listening to everything he could.

"I didn't introduce myself, did I?" the ghost asked rhetorically. "Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington at your service. Resident Ghost of Gryffindor Tower."

"I know who you are!" Ron blurted. "You're Nearly Headless Nick! My brothers told me about you."

"I would prefer you call me Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-" the ghost began stiffly.

"Nearly headless?" Seamus Finnigan, a sandy haired boy who had stood near Harry in line, asked. "How can you be nearly headless?"

"Plenty of ways." Lloyd shrugged. "Someone probably didn't do the job properly, with a blunt weapon, or they weren't strong enough to completely wrench his head off." As the people near the brunette stared at him, Lloyd blinked. "... What? I read a lot of war books, fiction and non. Did you know that someone can live for several days with their intestines spilled out, chained to a cliff face?" Some of the Gryffindors turned a little green. "Supposedly, you'd die from either starvation or exposure, because the big predators of the sea can't get to you. Only gulls and crabs and that like." Nick stared at him.

".. No wonder you weren't feeling off your food by the conversation. You're bloodthirsty, aren't you?" Nick says, eyeing Lloyd.

"Only when I need to be." Lloyd says with a cheery grin. "By the way, Ron, you going to eat that?" the red-head shook his head, looking green yet, and Lloyd took the remainder of the other boys steak.

"He was right, you know." Nick grabbed his left ear, and his head flopped onto his shoulder, held there by a sliver of skin. Lloyd leaned over to look, fork with steak in his mouth, while the others looked stunned. Nick flipped his head back up properly, coughed as Lloyd returned to his steak, and said "So, new Gryffindors! I hope you're going to help us win the house championship this year? Gryffindor has gone so long without winning. Slytherins have got the cup six years in a row! The blood baron's becoming almost unbearable – he's the Slytherin ghost." Harry and Lloyd twist to look over at the table of green and silver, spotting terrible ghost sitting there, with blank staring eyes, a gaunt face, and robes stained with silver blood. The platinum blond, Malfoy, didn't seem that pleased to be sitting next to them, and his nose looked a little crooked yet.

"How'd he get covered in blood?" Seamus asks with great interest.

"Why'd the blood stick around? Yours didn't." Lloyd asks. "I mean, there's a main artery in the neck, you should be stained too." Some of the other Gryffindors look a little oddly at the brunette. "Fine, fine. I'll shut up." He may have fallen silent, but he still glanced about, listening and watching with warm brown eyes that held faint hits of red.

"I've never asked." Nick says. "And never really thought of it." Regular food vanished, and was replaced with deserts. Harry helped himself with a tart; as Lloyd took small bits of everything he could, to best try everything in reach. The talk turned to family.

"I'm half and half." Seamus said. "Dad's a muggle, mom didn't tell him she was a witch 'til after they married. Bit of a nasty shock for him." Some of the others laughed, and Neville recounted how he found he had magic.

"What about you, Lloyd?" Some of the Weasleys in earshot blinked, turning to the brunette as he paused in eating a bite of ice-cream. They knew, Harry knew, but what would Lloyd say? Lloyd chewed thoughtfully.

"Dad's a mage." He didn't say wizard, something some of the others noticed. "He uses.. Slightly different magic, and doesn't like the robes. Dresses, he thinks them." Lloyd clarifies. "But, he's a bit specialized. Mom, mom was almost normal. She had a little bit, I think. She was a little startled when he finally told her, but they got married after that, so she was fine with it." Lloyd's expression was a little down, and Harry realized that this was the first time he had talked of the absent woman. His right hand moved to cover his left, squeezing a little. "She died when I was three." His eyes were on his plate as he said this, away from the others. "Some sort of accident."

"Ah..."

"Sorry." Percy and Hermione were talking about classes, as people began to slow due to food. Harry was looking over the high table again. There was the large man who had shown them to the boats, drinking deeply. The woman, McGonagall, was talking to Dumbledore. A young man, in a turban, was talking with a man who had greasy black hair, a hooked nose, and sallow skin. Harry noticed Lloyd's attention wandering to the table as the hooked nosed man looked straight at Harry, and pain flickered in his scar.

"Ouch." Harry puts his hand to the scar. Both Lloyd and Percy turn to him, the brunette worried.

"What is it?" Percy asks, while Lloyd simply watches, his brown eyes flicking over Harry's hand, expression, almost like he was searching for something. Whatever the boy was looking for, he didn't find, and seemed relieved.

"N...nothing." that made Lloyd frown a second, but he hid it as Harry dropped his hand. "Who are those two teachers?"

"That's Professor Quirrell, the one with the turban. No wonder he looks so nervous, that's Professor Snape he's talking to. Snape teaches potions, but everyone knows what he wants to teach is Defense Against the Dark Arts, Quirrell's job. Knows an awful lot about the Dark Arts, Snape does." Lloyd shrugs.

"Looks vaguely unpleasant looking." Lloyd says, turning back to the deserts. "Now, what is this.." before he could snag it, the deserts all vanished, and Professor Dumbledore got to his feet once again. When the elderly man mentioned a forest being out of bounds, Harry wasn't quite sure he liked the light that sparked in Lloyd's eyes. He really didn't like the look in his brother's eyes when the old man mentioned an area being off limits on pain of painful death. There was a song, sang by students in different styles, tempos, and tunes, before they were dismissed. Following the eldest Weasley in attendance, they were showered with walking sticks by a ghost named Peeves, whom Lloyd watched in annoyance as Percy threatened him off, before he grinned widely. The moving pictures shortly got the brunette's attention, and he watched them all curiously before they reached one of a plump woman in a pink dress.

"Password?" she asked, peering at the lot of them.

"Caput Draconis." Lloyd blinked, looking at the woman as her portrait swung out. Percy directed them inside, and then up one staircase for girls, another for boys. Lloyd was pleased to find at the top, his bags were at the foot of a bed as well, much to the surprise of the others, who had full sized trunks. Lloyd seemed even more pleased about the colors – red. He flopped onto the bed that had been claimed by his belongings, more awake than the other preteens as they all changed and went to bed. Harry noted that after watching them quietly, his brother had closed the curtains about his bed before changing.


When he woke sweating, Lloyd was next to his bed, hand outstretched to shake his shoulder. For such a loud boy, Lloyd could talk quietly when he wanted too.

"Alright, Harry? A nightmare?" without his glasses, Harry almost thought the brunette looked the age he should have been, rather than 11. Harry nodded, rubbing his eyes, and then wiping his hands on the blankets to clear sweat. Lloyd offered him some scrap of cloth that seemed dark in the night, and he wiped his face with that. "you going to be okay?" Lloyd asks, apparently having noted his shaking. Harry nods, and passes Lloyd the cloth back.

"Sorry if I woke you." Harry whispered back. Lloyd smiled, but it wasn't one of his blinding, full blown ones.

"I just take a while to go to sleep. Sleep well." Lloyd heads back to his curtained off bed.


Despite the fact that the brunette was secretly into his twenties, Harry discovered that Lloyd wasn't much help in classes. He constantly got talked to by teachers for his view on things – "Mr. Aurion, stop moving both your arms. It's only the wand hand that goes through the motions." "I'm learning it with both. Just in case my main hand breaks, or gets tired. I'm Ambi, I use both." "stop talking back, Mr. Aurion." – had had at least one detention a week for his blunt, borderline rude way of speaking what was on his mind. Fortunately, although the plants were something new to him, Harry's brother had a natural green thumb with the Herbology class, and Stars were also something anyone could ask him on, and get a quick, detailed answer. He also fell asleep in history of magic, but had managed to charm his way into getting to read Hermione's notes for the class within the first week. Harry was slightly relieved to find that he wasn't incredibly far behind his magically aged brother, whom he thought would be years ahead of him due to the fact of his strange family. In fact, it seemed Lloyd couldn't get very much right. When told to counter a spell with one they'd been practicing for a week, Lloyd had fallen into a defensive crouch with a word. "Guardian!" had sent a glowing green bubble about the brunette preteen, one that split and deflected the spell about him, sending its weakened parts to fly behind him, before Lloyd had lunged and pressed his wand to the underside of the teacher's jaw. Lloyd had been told that this was an interesting way to do it, but not what was asked, and Lloyd had said that it was more effective, because he had noticed most of them didn't move very fast, and getting close was going to get him in their armor, his words. Quirrell hadn't been best pleased with this, but let it go.


Friday morning had the post come in again, with Hedwig dropping two for him, and Aeros dropping two for the brunette. One was the same sort as Harry's two, and the other looked a bit different. Lloyd fed the large owl while reading the paper from his father, while Harry marveled at the almost print like script of Yuan and Kratos. They both said basically the same things; that they hadn't sent a letter before this because they weren't quite used to sending letters to anyone other than each other, and Aurian had been of no help since the elf wasn't one to write. They would send regular letters on Fridays, and it would be likely to be from one of the males rather than both. Harry looked at Lloyd's letter, and was surprised to find it in an entirely different language, although the hand looked almost the same as Kratos's letter. The brunette was dragging a finger under the lines, mouthing what apparently were words as he translated the letter in his head with some apparent difficulty. The other, was incredibly untidy.

"who's that from?" Harry asked, looking at the untidy writing that asked if Lloyd wanted to head to tea with 'Hagrid' that afternoon, after classes were over.

"Hagrid. He's the big guy who led us to the boats. He lives in a small house by that forbidden forest. He's nice. And I like tea." Lloyd says around eating. Looking sneaky, he pulled out a regular, Muggle 'ball point' pen, and scrawled his answer with his free hand, before sending Aeros back. "We'll all come." They had to go to 'double potions' with the Slytherins, which was taught by the greasy haired teacher that Harry was sure didn't like him. Of course, getting to the class, he was fairly sure that Snape hated him. The Malfoy boy was there as well, with his twin lackeys of Crabbe and Goyle, and when Lloyd smiled cheerfully and waved at the trio, they stopped their snickering. It seemed that they remembered the brunette. Snape read the roll call, and cracked a jab at Harry's name. When the Slytherin trio snickered, Lloyd, who was looking straight at the teacher, yawned, and slouched in his seat. Snape gave a speech, and then suddenly turned to Harry.

"Potter!" Snape said. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?" Harry blinked, his mind racing, and he barely caught Lloyd's whisper. He repeated it for the class.

"A very good narcotic." He hoped he pronounced the word right, wasn't one he had been completely sure of.

"Sleeping potion, Potter, not a simple Muggle drug. It's powerful enough to be known as the Draught of Living Death. Let's try again. Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?" Snape asked. Lloyd's whisper reached him again.

"Gut of a goat." Snape wasn't looking very pleased at this point.

"Stomach. And it will save you from most poisons. What is the difference, Potter, between Monkshood and Wolf's bane?"

".. there is one?" Harry once again repeated what Lloyd had said.

"there isn't. it's the same plant, also goes by the name of aconite. Well? Why aren't you taking notes?" there was a scrabble for quills and parchment, where Snape looked vaguely annoyed. The class ended with Neville making a casualty of Seamus's cauldron, although the boy had managed to only get a little splashed due to the fact Lloyd had nearly stepped in it to move the nervous boy out of the way. Lloyd had been spared due to the fact he continued to wear gloves and a jacket under his robes. Snape had snapped at them for this, and rounded on Lloyd and Harry after sending Neville to the hospital wing, taking a point from them each. Lloyd almost lost a second one for himself by looking bored with the scolding.

"Cheer up." Lloyd and Ron were of the same mind. "If it's even something you can fix, some people just dislike others. If it's nothing you can fix, then just ignore it. You can't fix it, so it's simple discrimination, and has no point other than to make him feel good about himself." Lloyd said that all so fervently that Ron blinked at him, before checking the time.

"Hey, shouldn't we be heading out to Hagrid's? You did say you wanted to bring us." Lloyd's face brightened. They left the castle, heading their way across the grounds to a small wooden house, Lloyd enthusiastically leading the way. A crossbow and a pair of galoshes were outside the front door. Lloyd thumped it, and a frantic scrambling and booming barks came from inside.

"Back, Fang- Back!" a man's voice boomed.

"he's got a big dog." Lloyd says. "they may look scary, but they're really nice. Not like Dad-scary-nice."

"Hang on." A large face, with a thick beard and small dark eyes appeared in the door as the large man inside opened it a tiny bit. "Back, Fang." He let them in struggling to keep a hold on a large black boarhound's collar. It was a one-room affair, with some birds and hams hanging from the ceiling, a kettle boiling over the fire, and a massive bed with patchwork quilt in the other corner. Lloyd started distracting Fang, getting dog slobber over his arms. "Make yeselves at home." Hagrid lets go of Fang's collar.

"Hey, Hagrid. This is my brother Harry, and Ron." Lloyd said, surfacing from under the large dog. Hagrid nodded, before he blinked at Harry.

"but yer Harry Potter! Lloyd, yer Aurion." Lloyd grins at the startled, large man.

"Aurian, my step mom, brought him home a few years back. He doesn't live with the mundane humans anymore. So, he's my brother." Lloyd says it like there couldn't be anything else to say about it.

"And a Weasley?" Hagrid leaves it at that, something about the cheery brunette telling him not to push it. "I spent half me life chasin' yer twin brothers away from the forest." The rock cakes Hagrid sets out were shapeless lumps with raisins that almost were rocks, but all three pretended, or at least Harry and Ron pretended, to like them as they shared their view on the week's classes. Fang rested his head on Lloyd's knee, where he got scratches, and proceeded to drool. The three were delighted to hear Hagrid call Filch 'that old git', on the account that the man's small cat, Mrs. Norris, stalked him whenever he went into the castle. When the subject went to Snape's class, Hagrid was on Ron's side – the man just didn't like many students. He swapped the subject to Ron's older brother Charlie then, and Ron was happy to tell him about Charlie's work with Dragons. Harry spotted a paper cutting, about a break in that had happened on his birthday, at the bank belonging to the goblins.

"Hey, look at this." Harry passed it over to Lloyd, who read it quickly, then passed it to Ron. "After we went."

"I remember reading about this." Ron said.


So. People who know Lloyd. There's a reason for his iffy-smarts. think about it for a moment. he gets iffy smarts now.

I think Lloydy'd know that type of stuff by now.

ermm.. again, reveiw if you've got questions or what not.