-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
The result of the duel was inconclusive.
Shirou probably technically lost, since he leapt from the stage when people started screaming and scattering away from Snape's errant cobra. But no one was really paying attention to the duel in light of the... well, in light of the screaming, the scattering students, and the errant cobra.
Snape waved his wand, erasing the snake just before Shirou arrived with sword in hand.
"Calm yourselves!" Lockhart called out, waving his hands uselessly. "Calm yourselves. Just a snake, and no one was hurt."
The crowd slowly settled down under the teacher's direction until there was silence in the hall again.
"I know I said we should end with some excitement," he continued, "but I didn't think it would end with a serpent amongst the students." He chuckled lightly and some students joined in to laugh at his weak joke. "With that taken care of, I think we can draw this session of the Dueling Club to a close. Thank you for coming, and I would request that everyone please take care in getting back to your dorms.
"And remember," he spoke as if recalling something at the last moment. "What you learn in this club is not to be replicated in the hallways of this school. We are learning the fine and honorable art of dueling. The skills are not meant to be used in a schoolyard scuffle."
A chorus of agreements echoed back to the teacher as the students made their way out of the room.
Iris rejoined Hermione, Rin, and Shirou in the hallway and began to follow the wave of fellow students on their way back to their respective dorms.
At least she did until Rin held her back, preventing the group from moving until the rest of the students were out of sight.
"What the hell was that?" Rin looked sharply at Shirou as she spoke.
Shirou, in his usual unflappable way, simply raised an eyebrow at her. "What are you talking about."
"Your duel with Snape!" Rin retorted, looking to be about one second away from punching him for having to ask for clarification. "What the actual hell?"
"... Language?" Shirou replied in confusion.
He and Iris both turned to look at Hermione, who was just staring at Shirou, the infernal light of curiosity shining in her eyes.
Rin choked out a strange growl then lunged forward and tried to shake Shirou by his robes.
It didn't work. Iris was well aware of how difficult it was to make Shirou move. He looked like a twelve year old, but he always held a balanced stance, and he was denser than any human had any right to be.
"No distractions," Rin growled as she pulled herself up towards Shirou's face using his own robes. "No changing the subject." She paused to glare into his eyes, and when she spoke, she bit out every single word quickly and harshly. "What. The. Hell. Was. That?"
Shirou, for his part, just looked confused. "It was a duel?"
Rin buried her face into the cloth in her hands and let out a muffled, aggrieved shout.
"Snape had a much larger repertoire than I do." Shirou continued speaking, trying to figure out what it was that Rin wanted him to explain. "So I was on the back foot and probably would have lost eventually."
"No!" Rin said to his face. "How were you able to even last that long? I couldn't even keep track of half of the spells that were getting thrown around... But you... you were only losing because Snape could pull out tricks that you didn't know were possible. And even then, they only put you on the back foot."
"I've told you before, Rin." Shirou smirked down at her. "I'm very good at fighting."
Rin and Hermione just stared at him for a moment.
"You were holding back." Iris chose this moment to bring up what she had noticed during the match. "You didn't use any swords, and you didn't try to close with him."
The other girls turned to look at her, then back to Shirou when he smiled and nodded.
"Yeah," he said casually. "Good job noticing." Then he shrugged. "It was a good chance to learn about how Wizards duel without trying to add in my own personal flair. Also, just a demonstration match, so there was no reason to go all out."
He glanced back towards the hallway they had been traveling down. "Snape was holding back as well, so it would have been a little excessive to pull out all the stops when he was being polite like that."
"That was Snape... holding back?" Iris said incredulously.
"Oh yeah. There were a couple of times when he was clearly going to cast a different spell, then had to abort to cast a different one. Usually, when he did that, he would end up casting a stunner or one of the spells he had already used. It also tended to throw off his rhythm. My guess is that he instinctually was going to cast something dangerous, and had to hold himself back."
"Bloody hell," Iris whispered.
The group was silent for a moment while the girls digested Shirou's words.
"What was that spell you used to disperse the snakes?" Hermione finally spoke up, clearly having more questions about some of the less showy aspects of the duel.
"Blasting Curse." Shirou winced at the reminder. "I should have used something else. I didn't account for the possibility of one of the snakes surviving or being thrown into the crowd."
"It wasn't thrown into the crowd." Rin corrected him. "It was thrown clear, and only decided to buddy up to Iris when she talked to it."
Iris winced at the scolding tone in her voice. She knew that Rin didn't mind the fact that she could speak Parseltongue, but Rin had warned her plenty of times about what the European Magical communities tended to think about people that could speak with snakes.
"It was going to attack one of the chickens," Iris argued back. "And it was distracting me from the duel."
"I don't blame you for doing it," Rin reassured her while smiling. "I only wish you were a bit more careful about it." She waved her hand to the side, as if dismissing the issue. "Luckily, the language is quite quiet, and everyone was distracted either by the duel or by the chicken. I don't think anyone else heard you, or if they did, could recognize where it came from."
Iris nodded back to Rin, thankful that she was dropping the subject.
All too shortly, they reached the point where they had to go their separate ways.
Shirou broke off towards the Hufflepuff Basement; Rin towards the Ravenclaw Tower; and Iris and Hermione were on their own back towards the Gryffindor Tower.
The two girls chatted about their experiences during the dueling club as they made their way back to their dorm.
Hermione wondered aloud if she should have Shirou train her as well, if only to learn all the dueling spells he knew.
Iris couldn't hold back a few giggles from escaping her lips at the image of the bookish Hermione trying to keep up with Shirou's training.
Her friend wasn't out-of-shape, per se, but she also wasn't the most active member of their group. Shirou's brand of training would probably kill her.
She suggested that Hermione simply ask Shirou to teach her the spells instead of trying to learn them by training with him.
Their conversation quieted down and eventually stopped as they approached the portrait guarding the Gryffindor dorms and saw that it was itself guarded by four upper-year students.
Iris didn't know any of their names, but she had seen them around the dorm, so she knew them as Gryffindors.
She and Hermione came to a stop a few feet short of the gathered students, but no one made a move to engage them, either verbally or physically.
An awkward silence filled the air as the Fat Lady in the Gryffindor portrait stared down at them in confusion.
"Can we help you?" Iris finally asked into the silence.
One of the upper-year girls stepped forward then, her face twisting in displeasure.
"Iris," she said, her voice tinted with suspicion. "Are you a Parselmouth?"
Beside her, Hermione gasped softly, but Iris showed no response.
She was used to this sort of thing. Of being accused of things, whether she had done them or not. Or she had been used to it. She was probably two years out of practice, or it at least hadn't been as common since she'd left the Dursley household.
Well, except for Snape, who would accuse her of anything and everything at the drop of a hat... Or Filch, who would accuse anyone and everyone if he felt like he could get away with it...
Internally she scowled. Hogwarts was her home, and she didn't like any of the parallels she had been spotting more and more often with the place she thought she had left behind completely.
Externally, she tilted her head and fell back on years of practice with responding to random accusations.
"Am I a... what?" she asked.
-o-o-o-o-
It hadn't been enough.
Well, it had been pretty good, but still not enough.
Iris had managed to convince most of the concerned Gryffindors away from the thought that maybe she might have spoken to that snake during the duel.
It seemed that some members of the other Houses may have heard her as well, and passed word around before she could defend herself.
'Iris Potter is a Parselmouth' was officially part of the Hogwarts rumor mill. Accompanied by 'Iris Potter is the next Dark Lady' and 'Iris Potter is the Heir of Slytherin' which were quickly catching up to their parent rumor.
Luckily, said rumors were being absolutely crushed by the rampant discussion of just what the bloody hell Shirou actually was.
The current front runner was the theory that he was the descendant of Lancelot du Lac, The Knight of the Lake and Knight of the Round Table.
The previous main theory had been that he was a descendant of Merlin, but an upper-year had pointed out that he hadn't used that many different spells, he was just fast and strong. So King Arthur's Wizard had been swapped out for one of his knights.
Hufflepuff was pushing that rumor hard, since they generally loved him in that House.
Slytherin was trying to introduce a couple of rumors that he was some kind of half-human monster, and could only move like that because one of his ancestors had bred with a Magical Beast.
Illya had raged about those, and had set about shutting her table up, to little success.
Out of options, she seemed to have settled for at least making the rumors from the Slytherins as unbelievable as possible, or making it so that Shirou was related to whatever she thought would be most awesome.
Current consensus from their table was that his grandfather was somehow half vampire and half nundu. A notable demographic of the Slytherin girls were also insisting that he must be at least part veela, though Iris had no idea what that specific creature was or why they were so insistent about it.
Breakfast in the Great Hall was a rushed mess as people moved between tables, spreading their own House's brand of the current popular rumor.
Iris had made her own rounds of the tables, trying to defend herself and Shirou as much as she could, but she was getting hungry and decided to grab some food back at her own table, where she wasn't a Dark Lady, and Shirou was still the descendant of a knight, even if it was the one that probably killed the most other Round Table Knights.
As she passed the Ravenclaw table, she overheard a group of girls mentioning the rumors and one of them combining the worst of the worst of the set.
Apparently, she was already a Dark Lady, and Shirou was some kind of crossbreeding experiment she had performed to create the perfect Dark servant.
Unable to hold herself back, she stopped instead of passing them by.
"Really?" she asked, causing them to fall silent. "I know that anything's possible with magic, but don't you think that a much more simple explanation would make more sense."
One of the girls, an upper-year Ravenclaw, turned in her seat to look up at Iris.
"Oh, your Ladyship." the girl ducked her head before snorting, eliciting giggles from the girls around her.
Iris narrowed her eyes, trying to place why she recognized the girl in front of her.
"If your Ladyship is so certain, why don't you explain this 'simple' explanation to us." The girl rolled her hand towards Iris.
"Shirou trains a lot." Iris repeated the words that were practically a mantra at this point after using them all morning. "He trains to use a sword, which is why he could move so fast, but didn't have more spells to cast."
"He must train a hell of a lot to be that fast," the girl commented.
Iris had a rote response to that argument as well, and it usually tended to actually work. "He's a Hufflepuff."
A few of the girls in the group caught themselves nodding before they forced themselves to stillness.
"And what about you speaking to snakes?"
Iris shrugged and tilted her head, still trying to place the girl. "There was a snake at my feet, people just misheard where the hissing was coming from."
"You make a compelling argument," the girl admitted. "But I think the final test of a person can be seen in who they hang out with. I don't know if I can trust the logic of someone who hangs around Tohsaka and that Loony girl."
Now Iris could recall who she was dealing with. This was Wendy McNeil. Rin had been on her case because the girl had been one of the ringleaders for those who were picking on Luna.
Apparently, even Rin's sharp tongue, and some reprimands from the Ravenclaw prefect hadn't been enough to completely shut the girl down, as Luna would sometimes spend days at a time away from the Ravenclaw table when things were tough.
Now she was trying to target Iris and Shirou.
Iris considered her possible responses, but remembered that Rin had spent hours ranting about the girl, and had warned the rest of the group away from engaging with her.
Apparently talking to her was useless.
"What's the matter," Wendy taunted. "Can't keep up with my logic? Well, that's the difference between Gryffindors and Ravenclaws." The group around her started laughing. "Why don't you run along now. Come find me in a few days when you've thought up a retort."
The laughter of the group picked up, then abruptly stopped when Iris kicked Wendy in the face.
"Yup," she said cheerily. "That right there is the difference between Gryffindors and Ravenclaws."
After a short scuffle, fifty points lost for Gryffindor, two hours of cleaning the hallways, and half a dozen lectures from various teachers, Iris was still smirking from the look on their faces. Nothing was going to stop her from feeling good about defending her friends. Not even the Twins calling her Dark Lady Kickface could ruin her mood.