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MIDNIGHT
ft. Dennis Creevey
—
Dennis was lost.
Again.
He'd gotten lost a lot his first year at Hogwarts, and he'd had good reason for it, too. The castle was gigantic, there weren't any useful maps of it (Dennis had tried, okay? He'd sketched out a map one afternoon and the next day everything was in different places!) and all of the corridors looked the same!
Some of the corridors had paintings here or there, but half the time the frames were empty, the portraits within off chatting or exploring. Or worse, they'd be sleeping in their frames when Dennis looked at them, and as soon as he turned around they'd snicker and call him names for getting lost.
Now that he was in his second year, Dennis didn't have any excuses for getting lost!
… and there he was, lost somewhere in the dungeons in a hallway covered in moss and standing in a puddle of stale-smelling water. Worse, it was Halloween. Everybody knew that Things happened in Hogwarts on Halloween.
Even worse, he'd joined Harry's DA earlier that year! He should know better than to get lost!
Colin would have said that it wasn't like Dennis could magically un-lost himself… or could he? There had to be a spell for that! Except, like Harry always said, spells were only useful if you knew them… and Dennis didn't know a spell for getting himself un-lost.
So Dennis wandered down the tunnel, shoes squelching wetly with each dejected step and sorely wishing he'd remembered his robe. He wondered how late it was — it got real cold in the castle at night, and Dennis was really cold. And lost. Merlin, he wished someone would just—
"What do you think you're doing out of bed at midnight, little lion?" the Bloody Baron rasped, old voice echoing through the dim corridor.
Dennis whimpered.
On second thought, he'd like to go back to being lost.