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Some students were already up and running around into other people`s rooms quite early in the morning. Breakfast was to be served downstairs at 7:00, but most older kids were once again going to be resorting to vending machines and owl delivery for that.
"I really don`t feel like going downstairs," Harry moaned, dragging his feet to the TV to go turn it on.
"Yeah," Neville agreed, looking around at everyone`s faces. "You all look pretty shitty."
Hermione, for once, was the only outsider hanging out in the boys` room, and she and the others were sitting on the floor. Walter had crashed on the couch the night before and was still sleeping there, so they had used a charm to make the couch weightless and move it so they could sit close to the television.
Hermione yawned. "What I really feel like is having a nice home- cooked meal. The idea of eating eggs from that buffet downstairs is really nauseating right now."
"We`ve got eggs in the kitchen," Neville offered.
"But who would cook it? We need a mother," Ron laughed. "Hey, Harry. Can you cook? Didn`t you say your aunt and uncle make you cook them breakfast all the time?"
"Yeah, I can cook pretty well," Harry said. "If it`s breakfast."
"Can you make an omelette?" Ron asked eagerly, starting to sound excited about the idea.
"Can I make an omelette," Harry repeated the question, pretending to ponder. "Can I make an omelette, yes I think I can make a bloody omelette."
"Oooh! Can I have poached eggs?" Hermione asked, her hands rubbing together excitedly.
"You can have eggs any way you want, sweetheart," Harry said with more stature than affection. "What about you, Neville?"
"I`m fixed," he answered. "I just ate a lot of chocolate frogs."
"Allright," Harry said, standing up. He was smiling, realizing this was in a most pleasant way like nothing he had ever done before in his life.
Hermione and Ron started to get up. "Well, you don`t have to do it all by yourself. We`ll help-"
"No no no, you stay put," Harry insisted, pushing them gently back down onto the floor. "I`m going to cook. You guys can sit and chill."
"Harry, all you do is work your ass off at home," Hermione said. "The last thing we want to do is put you to work."
"No! No!" he said before they got up again. "Please. I have never ever made anything for anybody before without secretly hoping they'd choke on it! For just one time in my life, I`d like to prepare a meal for good people! Think of it as helping my karma."
Harry`s eyes fell and lingered on the face of Ron, who he knew as a complete coward who would run away from danger before stopping to help someone. So many evil things that had come out of that mouth.
"OK," Harry said. "Maybe not good people. People that I care about, though. This is completely different than at the Dursleys`. You`ll be the ones spoiling *me*."
So Harry got to work in the kitchen, making a lot of noise with pots and pans. Harry went into a different world; he could whip eggs like a freak robot and toss pans artfully. He was like some Betty Crocker breakfast version of a Teppan cook. All his friends heard from the other room were vigorous noises of working.
"Neville!" Harry called, and the round-faced and admittably good- intentioned spaz appeared in the kitchen doorway. "I need bacon."
"What do you want me to do about it?" Neville asked.
"Go downstairs to the buffet and steal some."
"How?"
"Here."
And Hermione and Ron saw a plate fly out of the kitchen which Harry had thrown like a frisbee, and Neville just barely caught it.
.
Neville felt very self-conscious, walking away from the buffet with a plateful of just bacon. He didn't see Fred and George coming up on his side, and when Fred loudly greeted, "Ahoy, Neville!" almost right into his ear, he jumped and dropped the plate, which crashed into several pieces.
"Hey, sorry, Neville." George had the kind heart to kick the broken pieces under a table for him. "What's with all the bacon?"
"Harry's making breakfast for his friends upstairs," Neville explained. "He didn't have any bacon, so he sent me."
"I get it." George, as if for no good reason except wanting to look ridiculous, had thrown a bathrobe on over his casual clothes.
"So now I don't have a plate," Neville added.
"Hey, we'll help you out," George stole off to the buffet, ruefully cutting in line, and started packing several strips of bacon into the breast pocket of his robe. Fred thought it was ingenius.
Fred and George invited themselves to accompany Neville upstairs. Out in the hallway of the first floor George glanced over his shoulder and suddenly halted, stopping the other two with an outstretched arm. "Hey, look at this."
The three turned to see a group of six Slytherin members all lined up in a stern row next to a stairway, with their backs to them. Professor Linus, who they then realized they'd seen very little of during the trip, was pacing back and forth in front of them.
Fred was trembling with excitement. "Ooh! Ooh! Let's get closer so we can hear!"
"But not enough so that it's obvious we're listening," George advised.
"Right there, we'll sit on that couch," Fred said, but abandoned their strategy by frollicking up to it a little too eagerly. George followed, and though Neville realized it was probably a bad idea to take after a guy with bacon in his pockets, he also walked over to the couch. When they sat down they noticed that while Linus was barking at the students, Snape was also there, standing a few steps away from the students and looking quite a bit embarassed.
"I hope you all had fun last night," Linus's voice was grim and more scratchy than usual, and though the twins weren't in any trouble they got the chills just from hearing the lecture. "Because you seem to have forgotten that your ability to leave the hotel premises was a PRIVILEGE, and neglected to make your curfew. All SIX of you were nowhere to be seen at your lights-out check. Perhaps your Head did not make it clear enough to you that you were to be in your rooms, sober and at the least SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE at exactly 11:30. And yet, even though no one reported to have seen you on your floor until well over two hours later, you still did not feel any obligation to return to your assigned rooms. You will ALL be sent home, will answer to Dumbledore, and will not be allowed outside of your dormitory after five in the evening for the rest of the year. In addition, sixty points will be subtracted from Slytherin house. Understood, you wallowing holecakes?!"
Then Linus shot a look at Snape. The three couldn't see Linus right then, but they could see the unsettled look that registered on Snape's face. And then it was his turn.
Snape's boots chucked slowly over the ground in front of these students, and if Linus wasn't aware of it, Fred and George were quite sure he hadn't really figured out what to say.
After a while, Snape finally turned to them and demanded, "Might ANY of you explain the reason for such a misdemeanor?"
The children seemed petrified. None of them had uttered a peep the whole time they'd been lined up for this humiliation.
"Anyone?" Then Snape did what he always did. He picked a student and halted in front of him. "How about you, Mister Dragonfly?"
He had stopped in front of Holmost Dragonfly, who simply gulped. For what seemed like forever, Snape just stared at him, and he just stared back, until the onlookers felt bad for him, wondering why he didn't offer any kind of stupid answer.
"Well?!" Snape snapped. "Cat got your tongue?"
Then he spoke. Or tried to.
"No' esackly."
"What?" Snape was no longer up in his face, only batting his leg with his wand impatiently.
"Shee...Uhm twyin to..."
Then Snape jerked as if he'd seen something terrible, and he yelled, "Oh, my LORD..." He walked back up to the boy and rudely grabbed his jaw. He yanked his mouth open, and immediately grimaced with sheer disgust.
"Oh, GOD...Linus, you better have a look at this."
.
Ten minutes later Neville came with the bacon, followed by Fred and George. They all had smiles on their faces that showed quite transparently for those in the room that knew them well enough that they had just seen something hysterically funny.
"It`s the Ravenclaws and Slytherins," George burst. "A whole bunch of them went to body piercing and tattoo parlors last night."
"Oh no," Harry said, who had come out of the kitchen with oven mits on to hear what was going on.
"Yes," Fred said, laughing. "A bunch of Ravenclaw kids have got black feathers tattoed on them. But, that's really just the beginning...The Slytherins..." He was laughing too hard to finish.
"They`re more snake-like than ever," George explained. "Four of `em got their tongues split."
Hermione gasped. "Euww..."
"Also, Malfoy`s got a tattoo of a serpent coiling around his arm. He`s showin` it off like crazy. Crabbe and Goyle both have a fancy 'S' for Slytherin on the backs of their necks."
Harry shook his head. "You know, somehow I don`t think Malfoy`s dad could possibly be OK with that."
"The professors are all lining up these kids to look at them," George laughed. "You should see the looks on their faces. They`re *terrified*."
"You think they'll get in trouble with parents?" Hermione asked.
"Nah, parents mostly regard anything that's not magic-related as being the kid's fault," Fred said, voicing from experience. "Besides, I'm sure there's some potion from the makers of Skele-Gro that will fix it up when these people get sick of not being able to talk right."
"That's punishment enough," Hermione said. "Everyone knows those healing potions taste awful, and as far as tattoos? The spell for removal is rather simple, but uh...it doesn't exactly tickle."
This got a laugh from the rest of them, and Harry went back into the kitchen, still rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shuddering at the thought of it.
"I can`t believe it," Ron said, shaking his head. "A tattoo parlor...I never would have imagined those kinds of businesses to exist in magic establishments. Even with this place being so modern and muggle- influenced."
"Probably a shabby multi-business store for people obsessed with muggle culture," Hermione explained. "Lots of people in this city specifically are starting to imitate muggles in their style and everything. I think I even saw a raver walking around yesterday before we came into the hotel."
The twins were somehow getting a kick out of Harry's food service, and when no one was looking they pulled an empty cart they found somewhere in the hallway into the room. They also worked together to pull Walter off the couch and toss him onto Harry and Ron's bed without waking him, so Ron and Hermione could sit there. They managed to do all this while the two breakfasters were on the lower level browsing through the gift shop.
Ten minutes later Ron and Hermione came back into the room, and everybody seemed to have left. Without really thinking about it, they both took Walter's new location as a cue to sit on the couch while Hermione made fun of a cheesy magnet Ron had purchased at the shop.
Then the kitchen door popped open and a cart came out, followed by Harry pushing it smoothly around the corner and toward them. He looked strangely cheery as he stopped the cart with their meals right in front of them. Hermione noticed a rose sitting on the arm of her side of the couch, and wondered whether it had been a fork or a quill pen five minutes ago.
Unlike Hermione, Ron wasn't impressed enough to hesitate before shoving a heap of eggs into his mouth. His eyes immediately widened. "Mmm...Oh, this is good. Harry, this is really, really good."
"Why thank you, Ron," Harry said. He looked over at Hermione, who had a forkful in her mouth. Stunned, she nodded in tacet agreement.
George had returned to the room during all this, and said, "Lemme try some..." As soon as he approached the two of them they both snapped up their plates protectively.
"Oh," was all he said.
"Mom, not cabbages again...," Walter grumbled in his sleep. Ron and Hermione paused to register this, and then kept chewing happily.
A half-hour later the students were checked in their rooms again by their house Head, who told them that the entire school was meeting in front of the hotel entrance at nine o' clock to walk to the museum. They were also told that wands were not allowed in the museum, and any seen by a teacher would immediately be confiscated.
The students were only told to look "decent", but a message was passed among Gryffindors to dress up a little just for fun, so they could seem like the most proper house at Hogwarts. Harry layered a scarlet tee over a collared shirt, and during a visit to Fred and George's room Lee Jordan offered him a skinny black tie which he borrowed. He was glad he did, because as soon as he walked up to Hermione outside of the hotel she smiled and clapped with glee, telling him how handsome he looked. He also complimented her outfit, which was a long grey skirt with layers of black lace trimming at the bottom, and a black sweater with bell sleeves.
Ron wore the pants.
Upstairs, the completely ignored Walter Birdman was just waking up. Everyone else was either at the meeting spot or on their way there, but he calmly sat up as if everything was going to plan and he had woken up exactly at the right time. He brushed his brown hair out of his eyes, stood up and scooped some pants up off the floor to change into. A few minutes later he emerged from the bathroom with brushed teeth and combed hair, and was grabbing his jacket when he noticed the plate that Ron had eaten off of sitting on the TV. He went over to it, grabbed a neglected piece of bacon, and popped it into his mouth. In mid-chew, he thought aloud, "Is that...lint?" Then he shrugged, swallowed the rest and headed out the door.
.
Some students were already up and running around into other people`s rooms quite early in the morning. Breakfast was to be served downstairs at 7:00, but most older kids were once again going to be resorting to vending machines and owl delivery for that.
"I really don`t feel like going downstairs," Harry moaned, dragging his feet to the TV to go turn it on.
"Yeah," Neville agreed, looking around at everyone`s faces. "You all look pretty shitty."
Hermione, for once, was the only outsider hanging out in the boys` room, and she and the others were sitting on the floor. Walter had crashed on the couch the night before and was still sleeping there, so they had used a charm to make the couch weightless and move it so they could sit close to the television.
Hermione yawned. "What I really feel like is having a nice home- cooked meal. The idea of eating eggs from that buffet downstairs is really nauseating right now."
"We`ve got eggs in the kitchen," Neville offered.
"But who would cook it? We need a mother," Ron laughed. "Hey, Harry. Can you cook? Didn`t you say your aunt and uncle make you cook them breakfast all the time?"
"Yeah, I can cook pretty well," Harry said. "If it`s breakfast."
"Can you make an omelette?" Ron asked eagerly, starting to sound excited about the idea.
"Can I make an omelette," Harry repeated the question, pretending to ponder. "Can I make an omelette, yes I think I can make a bloody omelette."
"Oooh! Can I have poached eggs?" Hermione asked, her hands rubbing together excitedly.
"You can have eggs any way you want, sweetheart," Harry said with more stature than affection. "What about you, Neville?"
"I`m fixed," he answered. "I just ate a lot of chocolate frogs."
"Allright," Harry said, standing up. He was smiling, realizing this was in a most pleasant way like nothing he had ever done before in his life.
Hermione and Ron started to get up. "Well, you don`t have to do it all by yourself. We`ll help-"
"No no no, you stay put," Harry insisted, pushing them gently back down onto the floor. "I`m going to cook. You guys can sit and chill."
"Harry, all you do is work your ass off at home," Hermione said. "The last thing we want to do is put you to work."
"No! No!" he said before they got up again. "Please. I have never ever made anything for anybody before without secretly hoping they'd choke on it! For just one time in my life, I`d like to prepare a meal for good people! Think of it as helping my karma."
Harry`s eyes fell and lingered on the face of Ron, who he knew as a complete coward who would run away from danger before stopping to help someone. So many evil things that had come out of that mouth.
"OK," Harry said. "Maybe not good people. People that I care about, though. This is completely different than at the Dursleys`. You`ll be the ones spoiling *me*."
So Harry got to work in the kitchen, making a lot of noise with pots and pans. Harry went into a different world; he could whip eggs like a freak robot and toss pans artfully. He was like some Betty Crocker breakfast version of a Teppan cook. All his friends heard from the other room were vigorous noises of working.
"Neville!" Harry called, and the round-faced and admittably good- intentioned spaz appeared in the kitchen doorway. "I need bacon."
"What do you want me to do about it?" Neville asked.
"Go downstairs to the buffet and steal some."
"How?"
"Here."
And Hermione and Ron saw a plate fly out of the kitchen which Harry had thrown like a frisbee, and Neville just barely caught it.
.
Neville felt very self-conscious, walking away from the buffet with a plateful of just bacon. He didn't see Fred and George coming up on his side, and when Fred loudly greeted, "Ahoy, Neville!" almost right into his ear, he jumped and dropped the plate, which crashed into several pieces.
"Hey, sorry, Neville." George had the kind heart to kick the broken pieces under a table for him. "What's with all the bacon?"
"Harry's making breakfast for his friends upstairs," Neville explained. "He didn't have any bacon, so he sent me."
"I get it." George, as if for no good reason except wanting to look ridiculous, had thrown a bathrobe on over his casual clothes.
"So now I don't have a plate," Neville added.
"Hey, we'll help you out," George stole off to the buffet, ruefully cutting in line, and started packing several strips of bacon into the breast pocket of his robe. Fred thought it was ingenius.
Fred and George invited themselves to accompany Neville upstairs. Out in the hallway of the first floor George glanced over his shoulder and suddenly halted, stopping the other two with an outstretched arm. "Hey, look at this."
The three turned to see a group of six Slytherin members all lined up in a stern row next to a stairway, with their backs to them. Professor Linus, who they then realized they'd seen very little of during the trip, was pacing back and forth in front of them.
Fred was trembling with excitement. "Ooh! Ooh! Let's get closer so we can hear!"
"But not enough so that it's obvious we're listening," George advised.
"Right there, we'll sit on that couch," Fred said, but abandoned their strategy by frollicking up to it a little too eagerly. George followed, and though Neville realized it was probably a bad idea to take after a guy with bacon in his pockets, he also walked over to the couch. When they sat down they noticed that while Linus was barking at the students, Snape was also there, standing a few steps away from the students and looking quite a bit embarassed.
"I hope you all had fun last night," Linus's voice was grim and more scratchy than usual, and though the twins weren't in any trouble they got the chills just from hearing the lecture. "Because you seem to have forgotten that your ability to leave the hotel premises was a PRIVILEGE, and neglected to make your curfew. All SIX of you were nowhere to be seen at your lights-out check. Perhaps your Head did not make it clear enough to you that you were to be in your rooms, sober and at the least SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE at exactly 11:30. And yet, even though no one reported to have seen you on your floor until well over two hours later, you still did not feel any obligation to return to your assigned rooms. You will ALL be sent home, will answer to Dumbledore, and will not be allowed outside of your dormitory after five in the evening for the rest of the year. In addition, sixty points will be subtracted from Slytherin house. Understood, you wallowing holecakes?!"
Then Linus shot a look at Snape. The three couldn't see Linus right then, but they could see the unsettled look that registered on Snape's face. And then it was his turn.
Snape's boots chucked slowly over the ground in front of these students, and if Linus wasn't aware of it, Fred and George were quite sure he hadn't really figured out what to say.
After a while, Snape finally turned to them and demanded, "Might ANY of you explain the reason for such a misdemeanor?"
The children seemed petrified. None of them had uttered a peep the whole time they'd been lined up for this humiliation.
"Anyone?" Then Snape did what he always did. He picked a student and halted in front of him. "How about you, Mister Dragonfly?"
He had stopped in front of Holmost Dragonfly, who simply gulped. For what seemed like forever, Snape just stared at him, and he just stared back, until the onlookers felt bad for him, wondering why he didn't offer any kind of stupid answer.
"Well?!" Snape snapped. "Cat got your tongue?"
Then he spoke. Or tried to.
"No' esackly."
"What?" Snape was no longer up in his face, only batting his leg with his wand impatiently.
"Shee...Uhm twyin to..."
Then Snape jerked as if he'd seen something terrible, and he yelled, "Oh, my LORD..." He walked back up to the boy and rudely grabbed his jaw. He yanked his mouth open, and immediately grimaced with sheer disgust.
"Oh, GOD...Linus, you better have a look at this."
.
Ten minutes later Neville came with the bacon, followed by Fred and George. They all had smiles on their faces that showed quite transparently for those in the room that knew them well enough that they had just seen something hysterically funny.
"It`s the Ravenclaws and Slytherins," George burst. "A whole bunch of them went to body piercing and tattoo parlors last night."
"Oh no," Harry said, who had come out of the kitchen with oven mits on to hear what was going on.
"Yes," Fred said, laughing. "A bunch of Ravenclaw kids have got black feathers tattoed on them. But, that's really just the beginning...The Slytherins..." He was laughing too hard to finish.
"They`re more snake-like than ever," George explained. "Four of `em got their tongues split."
Hermione gasped. "Euww..."
"Also, Malfoy`s got a tattoo of a serpent coiling around his arm. He`s showin` it off like crazy. Crabbe and Goyle both have a fancy 'S' for Slytherin on the backs of their necks."
Harry shook his head. "You know, somehow I don`t think Malfoy`s dad could possibly be OK with that."
"The professors are all lining up these kids to look at them," George laughed. "You should see the looks on their faces. They`re *terrified*."
"You think they'll get in trouble with parents?" Hermione asked.
"Nah, parents mostly regard anything that's not magic-related as being the kid's fault," Fred said, voicing from experience. "Besides, I'm sure there's some potion from the makers of Skele-Gro that will fix it up when these people get sick of not being able to talk right."
"That's punishment enough," Hermione said. "Everyone knows those healing potions taste awful, and as far as tattoos? The spell for removal is rather simple, but uh...it doesn't exactly tickle."
This got a laugh from the rest of them, and Harry went back into the kitchen, still rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shuddering at the thought of it.
"I can`t believe it," Ron said, shaking his head. "A tattoo parlor...I never would have imagined those kinds of businesses to exist in magic establishments. Even with this place being so modern and muggle- influenced."
"Probably a shabby multi-business store for people obsessed with muggle culture," Hermione explained. "Lots of people in this city specifically are starting to imitate muggles in their style and everything. I think I even saw a raver walking around yesterday before we came into the hotel."
The twins were somehow getting a kick out of Harry's food service, and when no one was looking they pulled an empty cart they found somewhere in the hallway into the room. They also worked together to pull Walter off the couch and toss him onto Harry and Ron's bed without waking him, so Ron and Hermione could sit there. They managed to do all this while the two breakfasters were on the lower level browsing through the gift shop.
Ten minutes later Ron and Hermione came back into the room, and everybody seemed to have left. Without really thinking about it, they both took Walter's new location as a cue to sit on the couch while Hermione made fun of a cheesy magnet Ron had purchased at the shop.
Then the kitchen door popped open and a cart came out, followed by Harry pushing it smoothly around the corner and toward them. He looked strangely cheery as he stopped the cart with their meals right in front of them. Hermione noticed a rose sitting on the arm of her side of the couch, and wondered whether it had been a fork or a quill pen five minutes ago.
Unlike Hermione, Ron wasn't impressed enough to hesitate before shoving a heap of eggs into his mouth. His eyes immediately widened. "Mmm...Oh, this is good. Harry, this is really, really good."
"Why thank you, Ron," Harry said. He looked over at Hermione, who had a forkful in her mouth. Stunned, she nodded in tacet agreement.
George had returned to the room during all this, and said, "Lemme try some..." As soon as he approached the two of them they both snapped up their plates protectively.
"Oh," was all he said.
"Mom, not cabbages again...," Walter grumbled in his sleep. Ron and Hermione paused to register this, and then kept chewing happily.
A half-hour later the students were checked in their rooms again by their house Head, who told them that the entire school was meeting in front of the hotel entrance at nine o' clock to walk to the museum. They were also told that wands were not allowed in the museum, and any seen by a teacher would immediately be confiscated.
The students were only told to look "decent", but a message was passed among Gryffindors to dress up a little just for fun, so they could seem like the most proper house at Hogwarts. Harry layered a scarlet tee over a collared shirt, and during a visit to Fred and George's room Lee Jordan offered him a skinny black tie which he borrowed. He was glad he did, because as soon as he walked up to Hermione outside of the hotel she smiled and clapped with glee, telling him how handsome he looked. He also complimented her outfit, which was a long grey skirt with layers of black lace trimming at the bottom, and a black sweater with bell sleeves.
Ron wore the pants.
Upstairs, the completely ignored Walter Birdman was just waking up. Everyone else was either at the meeting spot or on their way there, but he calmly sat up as if everything was going to plan and he had woken up exactly at the right time. He brushed his brown hair out of his eyes, stood up and scooped some pants up off the floor to change into. A few minutes later he emerged from the bathroom with brushed teeth and combed hair, and was grabbing his jacket when he noticed the plate that Ron had eaten off of sitting on the TV. He went over to it, grabbed a neglected piece of bacon, and popped it into his mouth. In mid-chew, he thought aloud, "Is that...lint?" Then he shrugged, swallowed the rest and headed out the door.