Chapter 10
Lupin had sent a message to Dumbledore explaining the situation. Dumbledore, therefore, had a quick meeting with Professor McGonagall and Madam Pomfrey.
"By all means, pull Harry aside, before he enters the Great Hall to check up on him. But I want the first year boy to be able to attend the sorting with the other children," said Dumbledore. "First impressions are important, both for him and for the other students. Besides, Remus Lupin said that every time he went in to check on the child, he was meditating and was seemingly fine."
"Seemingly fine and actually fine are two different things!" protested Madam Pomfrey. "He could be putting on an act. What eleven year old boy even has the patience to meditate, let alone the knowledge of how to do it?"
"Which is why you'll have a chance to look at him before he even gets on the boat," Dumbledore assured her. "I asked Remus to keep the boy in his compartment on the train until you could look at him. If he's not up to sorting, you can whisk him away to the hospital wing and we can sort him in private later. I would just prefer he is given the chance to be sorted with everyone else."
Madam Pomfrey grumbled but reluctantly agreed to Dumbledore's plan. Even Dumbledore's plans are not fool proof though.
When the train pulled up to the station, everyone started getting up to leave. The corridors on the train were flooded very quickly with students all trying to get off at once. Lupin cursed to himself as he fought through the narrow passage to reach the compartment with John Smith. Really, he should have been there already, but he wanted to check in on Harry one last time.
One burly seventh year accidently shoved Lupin into an empty compartment. Lupin, knowing better than try and fight it, went with the motion and controlled his fall so that he landed on a seat rather than the floor. Sitting down, he put his head in his hands. There was no way he was reaching John Smith before he left the train.
When the train had ground to a halt, and the Weasley twins started gathering their things, Jack nudged the Doctor. There was no response, so Jack pushed him a little harder. Still nothing. Fred was watching curiously to see what would happen. Jack sighed. Well, there was only one thing for it. He brought his hands together near the Doctor's ear and clapped.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
Each time he got a little louder. George was watching too, now. The Doctor came out of his mediation all at once. "The Master! What? Ack!" In his attempts to get away from the source of the rhythm, the Doctor fell on the floor. He glared at Jack who was doing his best not to laugh. "What?" the Doctor asked again from the floor.
"We're here."
"What?" The Doctor looked around in confusion.
"You've been meditating for several hours. We're here now."
"Oh." The Doctor rubbed a hand across his face. George and Fred traded a look, shrugged, and left, waving at Jack and promising to see him inside.
"Feeling better?" asked Jack as he helped the Doctor up.
"A bit, not one hundred percent yet, though," replied the Doctor as the two time travelers made their way off the train.
Madam Pomfrey was fuming. Remus Lupin had just informed her that he missed John Smith. She approached Minerva McGonagall's office. Taking a breath to compose herself, she hid her anger and bustled into the room. Potter groaned slightly as she proceeded to check him, teasing him gently as she did so. One day, she thought to herself with some amusement, he might realize that I'm teasing him out of affection and not actually angry with him. She smirked and forced some chocolate into his mouth.
After making sure he was all right, she left, hoping to reach the first years before they were sent in for sorting. Unfortunately for her, she reached the waiting room the same moment the last of the first years were entering the Great Hall. She could have screamed in frustration, but the doors were not entirely sound proof, and she had a reputation to maintain.
The Doctor was still a bit woozy, but he even as he was waiting, he was recovering. He studied the room they had just entered. There were four long tables filled with students, then a dais with another table where the professors were seated.
He watched with interest as Flitwick, the tiny professor who led them into the room reappeared with a stool and an enormous hat. Moments later, the hat broke into song. While the Doctor's subconscious filtered the song, gathering and analyzing all it had to say, he personally was more interested in how it worked. Perhaps nanobots animating it? No…. A really skilled ventrilaquist? Definitely not. Magic then. What kind?
Before the Doctor could figure it out, Flitwick started calling students up to put the hat on. The hat would sit on the student's head for a few moments, then shout out where the student belonged. The Doctor suddenly paid attention to the analysis of the song he had been ignoring. The hat read minds?
"Jack!" he hissed. The immortal turned to look at him, questioningly. "A while back, I showed you how to block off entire portions of your mind from psychic intrusion, remember?" Jack nodded. "Do it now, anything that would suggest you're more than an eleven year old from this time period." Jack frowned in confusion, then his eyes snapped open wide and he stared at the hat. He nodded again to the Doctor then started concentrating as he shut down portions of his memory.
The Doctor started on his mind as well. As he had told Madam de Pompadour, it was a simple task of imagining doors in front of anything that needed to stay hidden and then shutting it. The complicated stuff started happening when it was a non-friendly force in one's mind. The Doctor was taking no chances. First, he imagined locking the doors. This was hardly enough, though. A skilled mind reader could easily pick the lock or just knock down the door. Carefully, the Doctor started covering the doors, disguising them so that they looked like part of his mental landscaping. By the time he was finished, his mind really did appear like an eleven-year-old human.
He was just completing his final check, when he heard Flitwick call out: "Harkness, Jack!"
Jack hesitated a moment, finishing his own security system, before strutting up to the hat. Everyone in the hall was watching him, and he loved the attention. The Doctor rolled his eyes. With a head as inflated as his, it's a wonder that hat doesn't fit, he thought to himself as Jack plopped the huge hat over his head.
The hat took a while to make a decision, much longer, the Doctor noted, than the average for the students. Finally, the brim-mouth opened. "Slytherin!" The hall burst into applause, though the Doctor could detect some confusion. Most students were somewhat perplexed, since Harkness was not a standard pureblood name. George and Fred were specifically confused having met Jack. He had not seemed Slytherin material.
Jack seemed to pick up the mood of the room, and he shrugged and swaggering over to the Slytherin table. The Doctor rolled his eyes; Jack really loved being the center of attention.
The Doctor zoned out again. Like all ceremonies, this whole thing seemed needlessly long and pointless. Out of boredom, he started to calculate the exact coordinates he would need to pilot the TARDIS into geosynchronous orbit around a planet with four moons in a tertiary star system. It can therefore perhaps be forgiven that he missed his name being called… twice.
"Smith, John?" Flitwick squeaked out again. Dumbledore, sitting at his place at the head table pursed his lips. Perhaps John Smith was still ill from the dementor. Suddenly though, a smaller boy at the end of the line looked over at Flitwick.
"Did you call for John Smith?" he called out.
"…Yes," responded Flitwick.
"Sorry," said the boy and trotted up to the Sorting Hat. The entire hall broke out into whispers, discussing the strange boy and his apparent lack of focus.
As the Doctor made his way up to the Sorting Hat, he finished shielding most of his mind. Gallifreyan children, especially those to later become Time Lords, were exceptionally bright, and while the Doctor had no problem showing off his intellect, he felt the Hat really did not need to know the extent of it. Thus, when he put the Hat on, he appeared to be nothing more than a normal genius… if such a thing existed.
A/N: Woo! Long chapter today. And we've finally reached Hogwarts! I was originally going to post a big, long, farcical chapter poking fun of how it's taken 10 chapters to reach the castle, but in the end, it seemed more work than it was worth (also, it would have thrown off the chapter numbering system...). Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this! Please review!