Summary: Tem's first day at Hogwarts.
Disclaimer: I own Tem, Alan, Fay, Alyssa, any other people I may happen to make up just to keep the story going, and the plotline (unless I stole it without knowing it. If so, sorry). Hogwarts Mistress J.K. Rowling owns everything else. You've heard the schpiel before. I'm poor. Get over it.
Harry's Neighbor-Part
5
The First Day
Tem leaned back in his chair, having finished his third helping of Treacle Tart. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until the golden plates had filled with all of his favorite food. Now he was on the verge of bursting. A small burp escaped his lips. Now that he was finished, he began to realize just how tired he was. Tem's eyes began to droop as the people around him finished also.
Finally, the feast was over, and a Ravenclaw prefect led them in the opposite direction of the Gryffindor tower. Tem waved goodbye to Harry, and turned towards his new friends. They marched through hidden walls and tapestries, fake stairways and mirrors, finally coming to a stop in front of an old coat of armor. It snapped to attention as the large group walked up. "Password?" it squeaked through a rusty visor.
The prefect identified the new
password as "clandestine" and the armor stepped aside, revealing a small
passageway behind. Tem crawled into the little passageway, following Alyssa and
Fay. He entered a large room filled
with an eclectic collection of furniture all arranged in front of a roaring
fire. Beanbags and old, worn, squishy
couches and chairs were scattered about, interspersed with mismatched tables
and lamps. The common room reminded Tem
of a coffee house in London his parents had taken him to once. He could imagine poetry readings and
intellectual conversation floating around the room. He could see himself sitting the corner writing in his
journal. He really felt he belonged
here.
One of the prefects led the boys through a passageway on one side of the common room to their dormitories, while the girls were led the opposite way. Tem and Alan waved goodbye to Alyssa and Fay after agreeing to meet up in the morning for breakfast. They entered the room labeled "First Years" and found their trunks and other belongings already waiting for them in front of the four-poster beds that had been assigned to them. Tem and Alan entered together, along with four other kids that Tem recognized from the sorting. Introductions were quickly made before Kevin, Shea, Oakley, Caleb, Alan, and Tem changed and went to bed. Tem had barely slipped beneath the sheets before dropping immediately asleep.
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The next morning, Tem woke much
later than he had meant to. Four of the
boys had already left, and only Alan was left in their room, hurriedly pulling
on his robes. Alan jumped at the sight of
Tem's head peeking out from between his bed curtains. "Man," he exclaimed. "I
thought you had left ages ago! Hurry
up, we were supposed to meet the girls in the common room five minutes
ago!" Without a word, Tem jumped out of
bed and quickly threw his robes on.
Five minutes later, they were running through the passageway to the
common room. They skidded to a halt at
the sight of the two girls. Fay sat on
the edge of a table, trying to look angry and impatient; Alyssa, on the other
hand, was sprawled across a beanbag chair. She looked as if she were about to fall asleep again, her short red hair
falling in soft layers across her freckled face.
"S-sorry we're late," Alan stuttered, looking fearfully into Fay's
stormy brown eyes. "Tem woke up late. I was just waiting for him…"
"Hey!" Tem yelled in his own defense. "You were already late when I woke up! Don't blame this on me!"
Fay just burst out giggling. "You boys are hilarious! Always
making excuses!" Relieved that she
wasn't really angry, Alan walked over and lightly dug a foot into Alyssa's
ribs. "Wake up sleepy-head," he
whispered. She made a small squeak of
surprise and jumped straight onto her feet, looking wildly around like a cat.
"Who did that? I'm up! Really!" The three others burst into a fit of laughter and simply turned away,
walking towards the crawlspace on their way to the Great Hall. Alyssa ran to catch up.
Down at breakfast, they received their schedules for the start of the
term. Their first class was Potions with
Snape and the Hufflepuffs. "Man," Tem
cursed silently under his breath. "First period Monday morning wasted in the dungeon with Snape. What a great way to start off a week!" he
said sarcastically. Harry had told him
plenty of stories about his Potions classes. Some of these he related to his friends, who were wondering what could
possibly be so bad that Tem would swear like that.
Tem was interrupted from his tirade when he heard a sudden rustling of
feathers towards the back of the hall. He was very startled to see several hundred owls flying in, all carrying
letters and packages. Ogilvy landed in
front of Tem and accidentally stuck his scaly, clawed foot into the eggs. Tem decided he was done with those. Gill dropped a hastily scribbled note into
his lap and was rewarded with a small piece of bacon and a scritch on the
head. He then flew back to the owlery
with a piece of scrambled egg clinging to a back talon.
Tem turned to the note. It
read:
Tem-
Meet
me at the girl's bathroom on the second floor tonight at sundown. I'll explain everything then.
-Harry
He had barely finished the note when
the bell rang and they had to get going to the dungeons. Potions passed pretty much without incident,
even Snape wasn't that bad. He had managed
to get out a few insults to a short pudgy Hufflepuff student, but it wasn't
like anything that Harry had told him. He decided it must have something to do with the houses. Obviously, Snape had something against
Gryffindor, and Slytherin was his own house, and the fact that Gryffindor kept
beating Slytherin in everything couldn't help matters. He seemed to Tem like the kind of person to
play favorites.
Next was Herbology with the
Slytherins. They spent most of the time
learning their way around the greenhouses. One of the Slytherin girls found what she thought was a huge bucket of
pumpkin seeds and spent the period spitting them at Fay, Alyssa, and the rest
of the Ravenclaw girls. They didn't
mind the seeds in their hair, however, when the Slytherin girl accidentally
swallowed one of them and grew vines out her ears. She was led away to the hospital wing with the rest of the
Ravenclaws behind, pointing and laughing.
After lunch, they had double
Transfiguration with Professor McGonagall. None of them managed to change all of their matches to pins, but Tem did
manage to turn his matches silver. At
dinner, they all sat around talking about their first day of classes,
especially the incident with the Slytherin girl and the seeds.
"Did you see the look on her face
when the first leaf sprouted out of her ear? That was priceless!" Alyssa did
an animated imitation of the girl screaming and trying to pull the vine from her
ears. The rest of the table
laughed. All in all, it had been a
pretty good day. They had even managed
to get a few points for their house when Alyssa answered a surprisingly hard
question on the properties of the Benzoin root.
Right after dinner, Tem left his
friends in the common room to go meet Harry. He made his way down to the bathroom from directions attached to the
note, hiding behind a tapestry as Mrs. Norris, the caretaker's cat, walked
by. The cat sniffed suspiciously at the
lump in the tapestry, but ignored it when she saw a potential rule-breaker down
the hall. Tem breathed a sigh of relief
then slipped out before the Hellcat could come back and investigate
further. He stopped outside the
bathroom, eyeing the "girls" sign on the front dubiously. Before he could question his ethics too
much, an unseen hand grabbed his arm, wrenched the door open, and pulled him
inside. Tem gave a shout of
surprise. Suddenly, Harry's head popped
up in front of him, floating and grinning. This time, Tem gave a shout of horror.
"Oh, my God! Harry,
what...?" Harry's head moved forward
and the unseen hand clamped over his mouth, muffling his confused cries.
"Shhh! Do you really want Mrs. Norris or Filch finding us in here? This is one of the last sacred rooms in the castle. They don't think that anyone would come in here." Tem's eyes were still large and round, looking fearfully at Harry's lack of body. Harry looked down and realized that he was still in the cloak. "Sorry," he said, shrugging out of it. "Invisibility cloak. I forgot that you didn't know about it."
Tem's breathing calmed as a neck appeared in front of him, and finally a torso and legs. Harry's head was no longer floating. Harry handed him what looked like silver liquid fabric. Tem held it up, looking at it in wonder. "Where did you get this?" he breathed, sliding the cloak over his arm. His arm disappeared, along with the section of cloak covering his arm. He could see right through it. "Wow," he muttered.
"It was my father's," Harry explained. "He gave it to Dumbledore for safe keeping before Voldemort got him," Harry said this almost naturally, with only a slight hitch in his voice concerning the early passing of his father. Tem, however, didn't fail to notice the flicker of pain in his face. It was a look that was permanently embedded in his friend's eyes. "Anyway," Harry tried to lighten the suddenly stifling mood in the room. "It's great for sneaking around, going places you aren't supposed to."
Suddenly, there was a gurgling sound from the stall farthest away from them; something was coming out of the toilet. Tem turned swiftly around, looking for a place to hide, sure that they had been caught. He forgot the invisibility cloak in his hand. The gurgling sound turned to a very wet sobbing and a high-pitched woman's voice swearing revenge on the living. Harry sighed and rolled his eyes, as if ghosts rising from toilets were an everyday occurrence. "Hello, Myrtle," he said simply. The blubbering immediately stopped, and a translucent young woman floated through the wall.
"Hello, dear," she said almost happily. "It's been so long! I thought that you had forgotten about me. I'm so happy you came to visit! And who is this young man?" she asked, turning her attention to Tem. Harry shuffled uncomfortably, looking down at his shoes.
"Er…this is my friend Tem. We just needed an out of the way place to talk," at this, Myrtles face fell considerably. "…And to see you!" he said quickly, recovering. "Um…Tem's a first year, and I wanted him to meet you, since you're such a…er…nice…ghost, and all. But it's been a while since I've visited because, well you know the holidays and all, and it is a girl's bathroom so we're not supposed to be in here…" he trailed off and looked sheepishly up at the ghost, who had a single silver tear running down her face.
"It's so sweet of you to think of me like that!" Myrtle burst into tears and floated up to embrace the boys in a hug. Tem felt as if he had been plunged into ice water. "Thank you so much for visiting! Nobody ever thinks of poor Myrtle stuck in here all by herself. Nobody ever wants to be seen with poor old Myrtle." Her tears of happiness turned to those of bitterness. "But don't worry. Someday I will exact my revenge on those who made fun of me. They'll never get away with it! I guarantee that!" With that, she stormed straight back to her stall, there was the sound of flushing, and she was gone.
Harry turned to Tem. "Sorry about that," he said. "Myrtle's a little bit sensitive. She died in this bathroom and hangs out here a lot. That's why everybody avoids it. If you don't humor her a bit, she goes all to pieces. Anyway, I really wanted to talk to you." Harry found a seat the row of sinks, taking the first one. Tem noticed that he pointedly avoided the one in the middle. So he led himself to the third in the row, and sat on it.
"I'm really sorry about not telling you about my past this summer. It's all kind of complicated, and I just wanted somebody to like me for me, not hero-worship me. I don't really get off on the whole attention thing."
Tem nodded. "I kind of figured that. It took me a while, but I got the whole story. I understand, don't worry about it."
Harry snorted. "The whole story? From who? That kid from the robe shop? Nobody but Ron, Hermione, and me actually know the whole story. Well, maybe Dumbledore, but other than that, nobody. It's too complicated, like I said. Almost none of the truth has actually gotten out to the school. Again, I'm sorry about the way I behaved on the train. I tried to pass it off lightly, but I just didn't really feel like explaining it all then." Tem shook his head.
"Really, it's OK! I don't care about your past, I just wish that I had known a little bit when everybody looked at me like an idiot when I claimed to be your friend and didn't know that you were famous. But I'm over that." Tem seemed to take a minute to think, obviously regretting his choice of words. "Ok, I take that back. I do care about your past. It'd be nice to know that somebody out there lives an interesting life."
Harry gave him a look that clearly said, "You have no idea" and began his story. He told Tem everything from his first year and the Sorcerer's Stone to the Chamber of Secrets (including why he avoided the second sink) and the Polyjuice Potion, to Sirius and the Firebolt, and finally the events of the Triwizard Tournament and the duel with Voldemort of last year.
When he finished, he was out of breath and it was almost midnight. "…And now you know the whole story," he croaked, his voice starting to go. Tem was dumbfounded. He had never heard such an incredible story in his entire life. Tem and Harry parted ways, Harry with his mind finally at rest, having atoned for his crime against his friend, and Tem with his mind racing. He had a hard time getting to sleep that night.
\\\\\\\\\\\\A/N: I'm not sure if I got the location of the bathroom right or anything (was it on the third floor?) or the number of sinks, technical stuff like that. So please don't flame me for that kinda stuff. I had to try to remember (my dad left my copy of Chamber of Secrets on the airplane!! Aaagghhh!) I know it was kind of boring, but it will pick up.
I'm only saying this because only one person reviewed the last part: PLEASE REVIEW! I'm kinda stuck as to where I'm going to go after this. Reviews make my fingers itch to type and my brain remember where I put things.