Gahd, I've run out of different ways to say hello. Hi.
And oooomigosh I am so sorry I just let this story dangle right there, lol. I really did get writers' block that time. I'm serious, I wrote practically nothing in the month and a half or so after that last chapter - my English paper on To Kill a Mockingbird (GOOD book, BAD overanalyzation, sheesh) sucked it all out of me. It was almost 40 pages long, the thing I had to write. (That's why I hate double-spacing. Makes everything huge. I prefer single spacing or at most, half-spacing.) I think I uploaded one new original fiction on fictionpress in that time (May 4th I did so), wrote two poems and a zillion stupid poem fragments, and did nothing else writing-wise (though I just now wrote a song... getting my creativity back yay!). But now school's over and I get to worry about Hogwarts, Switched (wait, can I italicize it? ...It's longer than the novel I'm halfway done writing, lol...), and my job (website designer grins), which is nice. 9th grade next year! Oh, and I started karate, it's so cool, you should start karate too! :D Lol.
Some notes about this chapter:
-Er, so much for fast.
-It jumps around a bit, because I wrote the chapter on about six
different days. (But hey, from where Harry rejoins the class to the
end... I wrote that today! The 10th of June 2004! Yeah mon!)
-There
is little plot development in this chapter, but it's like a recovery
sort of chapter. Bringing up things that will be brought up more
importantly later.
-I have a bit of odd angst in here. I don't like
writing angst in long stories, gah, I just want to befuddle my
characters but then make 'em happy. --"
-Have you ever read SSNL?
Lol, I was looking at odd pairings the other day... and there's only a
small number of 'em. I might write one someday, but it won't be
connected with Switched and it will probably be short and one-shot. "
-Don't you just wonder who Trelawney is? May be a sidefic, haven't decided if I want to write it or not yet.
-You know, I think I've screwed up a few of my facts. At one point they
say they're in 7th year, but they're really in 6th. Also, with the
Slytherin common room... I don't picture it like the Gryffindor one in
the books or movies. I think I've changed my idea of it several times
(cough... at one point it's like Gryffindor... at another the dorms are
under the common rooms, which makes sense in some ways but not in
others... and in these past few chapters, there's one stairwell that
has stone steps and is rather wide, with the rooms for the Head Girl
and Head Boy underneath. The steps lead up to an open hallway (there's
a railing and you can see the common room, which is two stories high,
from there). Each side of the hallway leads to a small corridor with
doors to the dorms. On the left are the boys' dorms and on the right
are the girls'. Tada. I'll draw it at some point, it'll make more sense.
The characters we know of are (body - person IN body):
Blaise Zabini - Harry Potter
Crabbe - Padma Patil
Goyle - Dumbledore
Neville - McGonagall
Ron Weasley - Blaise Zabini
Draco - Lavender
Padma - Ron
Harry - Draco
Pansy - Snape
McGonagall - Hermione
Snape - Neville
Thank you to my wonderful reviewers!....
Kaaera - Thanks! And happy late bday.
ApathyArtist - Thankies! :)
Cliffe - Hehe, guess you liked it then? ;) Sorry this chapter took so long!
Devona Wolfe - Grins hehe, thanks!
LeeLeePotter
- Lol. I'm not sure about the little text separators... they really bug
me when I read fan fiction, as well as author notes in the middle of
sentences (don't those bug you? I hate when you're reading an exciting
story and you're just to the good part and then there's a little (AN:
blah blah blah BLAH blah...)... hehe)
ataraxis - Thanks!
risi - Me too. Lol.
Necromant - :D
Clay
Moni - I know, isn't he? He'll get a clue, someday.
penny
Ruth
- Not yet, the Death Eater meeting will be within the next few chappies
though. I'm kind of worried, I don't think I'll write it that well...
but I've never tried anything involving Voldemort and his cronies. We
shall see. As for the water... you notice when it's lunch or breakfast
and they ate by the lake, there's no reflection? It's just something
I've noticed, reflections usually only show up as more than an outline
or blob when it's dark. Dunno if there's anything scientific behind
that besides the fact that at night water is dark and people are
generally "glowy" with light skin. Hmm.
Winnie2 - Thanks. :)
Doneril - I would prefer a happy ending too, lol.
Katie Lupin Black - Oh well about updating fast... :S I wonder if I have any reviewers left, lol.
Saavik13 - I know, isn't it? XD
Ronda-Silverpaw - You'll seeee....
Elmindrea-al'Thor - Thanks! :D
Kouryou Sanomi - xx Er... soon... yeah. Cough.
BURN THE R.U.M - Awww, that's okay, thanks for reviewing anyway. :) I feel honoured to have loyal fans, hehe.
botherreader
- MUAHAHA! You are the savior of the story that kicked my butt and got
me writing again. Thanks for the review, lol, I needed it. How's two
days for you? This fic shall not die. Er, at least I hope not, for my
own sake, my reviewers might come after me with torches and
pitchforks....
Ah yes, this is slash, male/male romance... between both Blaise-in-Ron/Draco-in-Harry and Harry-in-Blaise/Snape-in-Pansy (whew confusing)... just to enlighten the unenlightened. Potter belongs to JK Rowling. I'm not JK Rowling. I'm just a girl who lives in the United States who happens to enjoy terrorizing JKR's creations.
..
Chapter Fourteen
"What am I going to do?"
Students milled around in the courtyard, on one of the last nice days
of the year. Padma and Harry walked together near the doors, waiting
for Hermione.
"Well, it was Snape, mate, it was destined to fail."
Red rose out of nowhere and stained Harry's Zabini-ish cheeks. He groaned.
"I'd still rather have him not knowing who I am," he said, looking the
other direction. The Ravenclaw next to him grinned as he spoke.
"You're blushing," he told him, grin never fading.
They turned around for the third or fourth time, turning the corner
around an edge of the castle, and were faced with Pansy.
They
both stood there for a few seconds, oblivious to Padma watching them
with a confused expression. Pansy eyed the blush and her lip curled.
"Potter. Get out of my way."
She spoke his name like it was a piece of trash. He was rooted to the spot.
"Sev–"
"Either call me Parkinson or call me professor, Potter."
"Severus."
"Potter–"
"As funny as this little bickering argument is, Hermione's over there,
Harry, and I want to meet with her before lunch ends."
"Then go,"
Harry said, eyes not leaving Pansy's. It was a silent challenge between
them, who could keep from breaking the stare the longest. Padma looked
from Harry to Pansy and back again, and shrugged, thrusting her hands
in her pockets as she walked away.
"What're you trying to keep
doing, Potter?" Pansy stepped closer, muttering in his ear. "Can you
not see that I have no..." here she smirked, "interest in you?"
"Stop–it–" Harry muttered through gritted teeth, trapped between the
wall, the 'squick', and Pansy, and not being able to will himself to
push her away. It would involve touching her.
As if she could read
his mind and tell what he did not want, she leaned in tantalizingly
closer, not quite touching, but warm breath tickling his ear as he
spoke.
"You will never amount to anything, Potter. Nothing that
you earned purely through trying, at least. You just have fame that
makes you important." She backed away, lip still curled in sadistic
amusement. "And that particular importance may make someone weaker than
I attracted to you, but I am, unfortunately for you, immune."
Harry
opened his mouth to retort, but it caught in his throat when she
finally touched him, holding his chin and keeping his gaze level, not
that it would have sunk at this point anyway. Her moves were mocking,
just like when Padma–that idiot, Pansy added in her head–had
claimed she'd been trying to seduce him. "Hmm," she commented mildly,
as if she were speaking of the weather. "You are so easily affected."
And she walked around him, disappearing around the corner.
McGonagall
and Padma were waiting for him when he caught up to them, heart
flopping around inside his chest as he ran as though it had no real
attachment to anything inside. By now it probably didn't, he figured,
slowing down. It just sits in there making me nervous on occasion.
"What'd Snape say?" was the first thing out of Padma's mouth.
McGonagall turned to send him a glare before looking back at Harry. She
couldn't withhold her curiosity completely, but she did so much more
effectively than Padma.
"Nothing," Harry said, tramping along next to them, making them walk again.
They didn't press him any further, at least after McGonagall glared at Padma's open mouth.
Tuesday morning was rainy.
The owls were slow, coming in all at once and milling around before
they had to deliver stuff and leave. Some would land at the wrong table
to steal food before delivering their parcels or letters.
It was
two days until Halloween, and over the past few days the weather had
become progressively colder. Some students refused to accept the sudden
coolness to the air and had just given up their habit of wearing
nothing over the thing Hogwarts robes, shivering under heavy winter
cloaks in Care of Magical Creatures classes.
Next to him, Crabbe
took a seat, stifling an enormous yawn while scooping several eggs onto
her plate, followed by several pieces of bacon. Harry watched this with
both amusement, remembering how Ron used to always pile his food, and
amazement. It wasn't every day you saw someone other than Ron take that
much food at once.
A barn owl had landed on the opposite end of
the table, and was moseying along towards the other end, shaking its
soaked wings and tail over people's breakfasts and occasionally
sneaking on with small bits of toast. Harry was somewhat surprised when
the thing stuck its leg out at him while simultaneously stealing a
slice of Crabbe's bacon.
"'Nnoying li' bugg'r, in't 'e?" Crabbe
said through a mouth full of toast as said owl continued its stroll
down the table. Harry used his finger to slit open the blank envelope
groggily, squinting at the words on the parchment he pulled out. They
certainly took their time before forming coherent words and sentences.
Apparently Ron, enjoying his safety in Gryffindor, wanted to meet him.
Harry bitterly regarded the short note, as whenever Ron was involved,
Draco was sure to linger.
That only ever meant sadistic chaos, anyway.
His
first class was Care of Magical Creatures with Gryffindor, and while
Harry was reluctant to miss instruction–as the teacher was one of the
few left who assigned homework–Ron and Draco firmly led him away from
the rest of the group as they entered a marked section of the Forbidden
Forest for a lesson. The rain had died down a bit to a sprinkle.
"Have they met yet?"
Faced with an important question so early in the morning, Harry simply
waited for a further explanation, raising an eyebrow.
"Stop that, Potter, it doesn't suit you," Draco told him as Ron said, in disbelief, "the Death Eaters, dimwit."
"Ah." Harry stretched, taking his time, wishing that Hagrid's hut's
roof extended a bit more. "Not that I've heard, but you know, Pansy
isn't exactly talking with me. Crabbe'll tell me when they do."
"What'd you do now, Potter?" Draco asked conversationally, polishing his wand with a handkerchief. Ron was smirking.
"She–he–bugger it, Snape found out who I was."
"So you told him?"
"I didn't say that–"
"How else would he find out?"
"I am not
telling you how, Malfoy, go bother someone else." Harry began to turn
around and was mere centimeters from Pansy, then took a step back,
tripping over Ron's foot, prompting him to say, "Blast it, Potter, make
up your damn mind!"
Harry grumbled as he got up out of the mud
he'd landed in. All three of the Slytherins or, for the time being,
ex-Slytherins looked faintly amused.
"What?" he asked impatiently,
casting cleaning spells on himself while trying not to get some on the
wand, because, after all, you can't point a wand at itself.
"Professor Hagrid told me to come and get you three," she said boredly.
"Said you all have detention tonight with Filch unless you get back to
class this instant."
They followed her to rejoin their classmates,
who watched them silently, even after Hagrid had asked for their
attention again. After they'd turned away, Pansy elbowed him.
"What were you telling them?" she hissed. "Why should you trust them? One of them could be a Death Eater–"
"One of them was
a Death Eater," Harry shot back, and opened his mouth to continue, but
was then made unable to by Pansy's automatic reaction.
"WHAT?" she
screamed, and the class shrieked with her as some surprised people in
the front knocked people over like dominos by slipping in the mud. "How
could you–" She punched him in the stomach, knocking the wind
out of him. As he doubled over, she hooked a leg around his and knocked
him into the mud, jumping on top of him. Hagrid's voice boomed
uselessly over the chaos and the patter of rain.
By eleven in the
evening, Pansy and Harry were well into their fourth hour of detention
and had not spoken a word to one another. Trelawney supervised with a
tired eye, saying just as much as they had, and often turning to stare
out the window at the sky for minutes at a time.
They were cleaning
all of Trelawney's dusty objects. Of course, there was no point in
it–it was just to give them manual labor. Trelawney's class was a free
period. Harry quickly wiped at the dust on a crystal ball and roughly
passed it to Pansy, who already had several waiting for her, as she was
finding the spots Harry had missed and drying them. He rolled his eyes.
There was a clatter and a shriek from the floor below and Trelawney
twitched, shaking her head and tripping over the edge of a rug as she
left the room to see what the ruckus was.
They continued working in silence, each too stubborn to say anything.
CRASH.
Trelawney hadn't been gone an entire minute before Harry showed a
brilliant streak of clumsiness, dropping one of the things. They both
stared down at it in horror as things in the room began to come to life
with a sudden surge of wind; the countless lamps with shawls draped
over them flickered on and off as the shawls blew out the open window.
A sort of dark glittery shadow seemed to be leaving the crystal ball at
the present moment, and as it made its steady but slow course to the
window, Pansy had the sense to shout the repairing spell.
Lights
went out, as well as the candle Trelawney had been using to grade,
which had amazingly not been snubbed by the winds. These winds stopped
as well. The glittery thing moved in slow motion backwards as well,
slowly disappearing into the creamy crystal ball.
That done, they glanced at each other and Harry burst out laughing.
"What?" Pansy asked impatiently, wiping a nonexistent speck of dirt on the newly-fixed and entirely clean crystal ball.
"Your hair... it's all in a pile on your head...."
She blinked, patted her hair, and grumbled about the disadvantages of long, curly hair.
"Hey, you already had long hair before being changed. At least you
didn't go from looking scrawny to looking utterly pathetic."
"You
speak the truth," she answered with a small grin, which was replaced
with a wince as she tried to tug a conjured comb through her hair.
Harry yawned. "What time you reckon it is?"
She looked around in the dark for a clock and then shrugged. "Almost midnight."
They dried off the last of the crystal balls to discover that they'd
finally cleaned everything on the shelf, and in a matter of minutes
everything was back on it, sparkling clean.
"Let's go," Harry said, starting to the door.
"Idiot, no, we need to wait to be dismissed."
He stopped in his tracks and turned around to face her, incredulous. "Never had to before."
She gave him a disgusted look and shook her head, but he slumped next to her on the sofa again anyway.
"So,
er, I was wondering," Harry said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "When
we're, y'know, normal again, will we be civil to each other or will it
just go back to you hating me?"
He tripped over his rush of words, and Pansy raised an eyebrow.
"What do you think?"
"Well it would be nice–"
"You think so." She froze the next words in his mouth with an icy
glare. "It would be nice. Well, look around you, Potter. Open your
eyes. Since when have I ever been nice?"
"Well–"
"No, Potter. As Snape. When have I ever been nice company, an understanding friend, a–"
"Stop." Harry said, turning away. "Never mind. I just thought that since you aren't a Death Eater anymore–"
"–That I should give them more reason to hate me? 'Oh look, m'lord, old
Severus fell for our target.' That would go over nicely, Potter, I'm
sure. Besides, you seem to be caring a bit too much for me. I can take
care of myself. Worry about yourself, you've got more of a problem
there."
Harry lied back against her, sighing.
"No, Potter," she said, words dying out. "This is exactly why you're–get up, I hear Trelawney coming–"
The door opened as Harry sat up, and Trelawney stopped for a moment,
eyes going over them with a raised eyebrow, then shaking her head. "I
don't want to know. Dismissed."
They left the tower quickly, and
Pansy seemed to be varying her step so Harry couldn't fall into the
same pattern next to her. Harry sighed and almost turned in the
direction of Gryffindor tower before Pansy took his wrist to make him
go the right way.
"You're not in Gryffindor anymore, Potter."
"How'd you know I was going to Gryffindor?"
"You can be thick at times. I'm a house head, it's logical this late at
night, and I've been in your common room once or twice as a teenager."
"Really?" Harry asked, yawning. "Why?"
"To get back at your father."
"Oh. What'd he do?" It wasn't an accusing, indignant question, just an innocent and admittedly sleepy one.
"We're here, Potter," Pansy said softly, only remembering to let go of
his wrist after they were up the steps and needed to head in different
directions.
