by Z. E. Grockle
Summery: James gets bored in History of Magic.
Disclaimer: The plot and Eve Valentine (who actually has more to her than this story) are mine; everything else is JK's.
Rating: G stands for "good clean fun", a rarity for me!
Pairings: None
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Another incredibly boring History of Magic class, thought James. Professor Binns was lecturing, as usual. Half the class was asleep and the other half was daydreaming, as usual. The only difference was that today the ghostly professor was lecturing on a lot of rather odd foreign wizards, so he had helpfully bewitched a piece of chalk to write down the spellings of the names on the board behind him as he talked. And this gave James an idea of how to break the monotony.
Carefully not drawing attention to himself, he pulled his wand out of his inner pocket and held it under his desk. Beside him, Sirius awoke from his daydreaming and glanced over. He smirked, indicating that he knew James was up to something, and then pretended to go back to his reverie, but James saw that he was all ears.
He twitched the wand. The chalk-which had been in the middle of writing a long, complicated Greek name-paused, then began to write again, slightly faster, so that the result was 'Delphiblah'. The few people who were actually taking notes didn't yet realize what was happening, and so copied this down and looked up expectantly for more.
"Blah, blah," wrote the chalk. The note-takers frowned and glanced around to see if anybody else had noticed what was happening, but none of them spoke up, which was what James was counting on. "And more blah-de-blah…" the chalk continued. "I mean, really, who gives a crap? When are you going to use this in your life?"
One of the note-takers stifled laughter, and some of the daydreamers looked around, hopeful that something interesting might happen. They caught sight of the writing and nudged friends who were asleep, so very shortly everyone was waiting to see what the chalk would write next-except Professor Binns, of course. The chalk decided to comment on this:
"He just keeps going on and on… he must really live for this job!"-out of the corner of his eye, James saw Eve Valentine turn red as her hair and clamp a hand over her mouth to keep from giggling-"Meanwhile, my life is being wasted, as I float up here writing down stuff nobody cares about, and slowly wearing myself away to nothing. It's very depressing to be chalk, you know."
Lily Evans was glaring at him, but James was having too much fun to stop without a parting shot. "In fact," wrote the chalk, "my life is so depressing, I think I'll just commit suicide and put myself out of my misery." And with that, it dropped to the floor and broke in half with a sharp crack that got even Professor Binns' attention. He looked around with an air of ghostly surprise.
"Odd," , he muttered then caught sight of the board, so James walked out of class ten minutes later with detention and a smile.
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The joke about living for the job is not meant to offend. Both James and I have nothing but respect for dead people ;- )