Chapter Summary: In which I decide certain third year stuff can't wait and they get to go to potions with Pitch - yay!
A/N: Just BARELY got it in! Woo-hoo! Let's go sleep deprivation!
To Drago1404: Those are all very good points, and some of them I hadn't taken into consideration. I do stil see Hiccup more as a Slytherin than the other houses, but I would like to make it clear that I'm also going by book canon for HtTYD, in hich for instance, Hiccup never even considers leaving and I think shows more ambition than he does in the movie.
As for the loyalty thing, I've looked into it and it seems to me that loyalty is both a Hufflepuff trait and a Gryffindor trait, though it is more major for Hufflepuff than it is for Gryffindor.
(Also, your English is fine. I wouldn't have thought it's your second language, so your good. (: )
"Specialis revelio." A wand was tapped against a painting of a never-ending hallway. Three people waited with bated breath for the results of the charm.
Nothing happened.
There was a moment of silence. Then Hiccup said, "Well, it's not like every painting is hiding some special tunnel."
Jack sighed, "Yeah, but I was so sure this one would, I mean, look at it. The whole picture just screams 'secret passage here'!"
"Yeah, well," Merlin fingered his wand, looking around for anything else that might be hiding a secret. "Hiccup's right; I've only managed to actually find one with this spell twice. It's meant for finding enchanted things, not specifically secret passages. This'd probably be easier with a spell that's actually tailored for finding tunnels and the like. We can't even be sure there are secret passages at school, or if there are, they might not be enchanted."
Jack leaned against the wall, "Maybe there's one on this floor, though; five's my lucky number."
"I doubt that," Hiccup muttered.
Jack just grinned, then pointed at an odd spot on the wall, "That might look like a key if you squint. Try it there."
Merlin performed the charm again, doubt written all over his face. Nothing happened.
The three of them had decided they were going to explore every last inch of the castle and find every hidden corridor there ever was. Well, Jack and Merlin had decided that and Hiccup hadn't had anything else to occupy himself, having finished his homework already. Actually, he could have organized his quills, but that was hardly the way Hiccup wanted to spend this particular Thursday evening.
And so they'd had to find a spell to help them find them. Luckily, Merlin knew a spell that might work, apparently having learnt it from his Uncle Oswald for this very purpose. Just a half hour before, they had scarfed down their dinner, and since curfew wasn't for several more hours, they had taken a corridor at random and started their search.
"Maybe..." Jack looked around and pointed at a slightly misshapen torch bracket. "Look, you could convince yourself that's a doorknob. If you tried really hard, maybe..."
Merlin tried it on the torch bracket. It stayed as a torch bracket. He tried it on a window that was missing a brick. It didn't react. He tried it on a good number of other things, too, but naming them all would probably take up a whole other book.
Jack sighed and flopped onto the floor. Then he winced and rubbed his head at the pain of stone meeting skull. "Are we ever going to find one? Maybe there aren't actually any hidden passageways here after all."
Hiccup frowned. "There must be. My dad said he used them to hide from Filch..." This was one hundred percent true, but Stoick had never said exactly where they could be found or how one could enter them.
Jack suddenly sat up and pointed at a small chandelier that looked a bit out of place. "There! There's no reason they need a chandelier there, it's got to be hiding something!"
Hiccup looked up, thinking Jack sounded a bit desperate. The chandelier swayed slightly as people moved upstairs. Hiccup looked back at Jack incredulously. "In the ceiling?"
Jack pointedly ignored him, turning to Merlin. "Here, I'll use that one levitation spell we're learning in Charms, Wingardium Leviofa I think it's called."
"Ah, no." Merlin displayed his deep bond of trust with Jack by backing away and managing to look just a teeny bit scared.
Coming to Merlin's rescue, Hiccup pointed out a statue of a paunchy bald man who looked a bit grumpy. "Why don't you try it on him? He looks like he's absolutely sick and tired of standing there anyway."
Merlin gladly took the exit and Jack pouted. As Merlin tapped the statue and said the incantation, Jack grumbled. "I'll just bet there actually is a secret about that chandelier."
"I seriously doubt that, unless the candles come alive and start singing or something," Hiccup replied.
"Well, come on, it's completely random! There's no reason fo a chandelier to be there!"
"This entire castle is random! There's no reasoning behind it! I mean, really, the staircases move and there's random trick steps and some doors are actually walls and the suits of armor can walk, and you think one random chandelier has got to be hiding something?"
"Well when you put it that way..." They were suddenly interrupted by the grating sound of stone scraping stone, and they whipped around to see the statue of the old man slowly moving to one side to reveal a dark tunnel. Merlin stood in front of it, looking a bit shocked.
After a moment of silence, Jack burst into a fit of laughter. "Of course it would be the one you chose, Hiccup! Your logic is really odd, so of course it would! Sick of standing there, right." He took a breath to calm himself down, then strode over to the newly revealed passage. He gestured to it, inviting Hiccup in. "Ladies first."
"Oh, by all means," Hiccup bowed sarcastically, then waited for Jack to go.
It took Jack a moment to get it, but then he snorted. Apparently, though, he was out of witty comebacks, because he whirled around and walked down the shadowy hallway. Hiccup followed soon after, and Merlin brought up the rear.
The statue slid back into place behind them, but luckily the darkness was lit every few yards by a torch with a flickering blue flame. They walked along the stone corridor in anticipating silence, Hiccup thinking what might be at the end. A dragon? A treasure room? A Roman fortress?
The tunnel sloped subtly downward, turning every so often and giving off a slightly damp smell. The air felt kind of stale to Hiccup, but he ignored it. Finally, they reached a spiraling staircase, and Jack stopped.
"What's up?" Hiccup whispered.
"I'm not sure... listen, I think I can hear voices. Can't you?"
Hiccup and Merlin stopped to listen. Hiccup could just barely make out the distant chatter of a group of people. There were too many and they were too far away to make any specific phrase out, but now that he heard them, they were definitely there.
"Where do you suppose this is?" Hiccup wondered. "Do you think we're still in the castle?"
"Who knows..." Jack replied. "Guess we'll just have to find out."
The trio began their trek up the stairs, the voices gradually increasing in volume. Finally, the stairs leveled out into a straight hallway, whose ceiling lowered into a relatively spacious crawling size. The tunnel finally ended at a glass pane, and Jack tried to make room for Hiccup and Merlin, who craned their necks to see.
Evidently, the pane was a one-way mirror, because every so often, someone would stop to fix their hair or their make up, staring at the glass and waving their wands around their heads. Beyond those people, there was a small crowd wandering around, looking at shelves and shelves of things such as sneakoscopes, non-explodable luminous balloons, crystal balls and lunascopes, among other things.
There was a silent minute or two in which they all stared at the shop and it's customers. Then it slowly dawned on Hiccup where exactly they were.
"Sweet mother of Thor," he breathed. "We're in Hogsmeade!"
Friday morning found Merida delaying her first class as much as possible without actually being late and losing her house some more points.
"Do you want to skip with me?" Merida suggested dismally, addressing the golden-haired princess next to her and pressing her forehead against the dungeon wall.
Rapunzel folded her arms across her chest. "No. And you're not either, I'll have you know."
"But," Merida turned to face her, desperate to get her to understand. "But it's double Potions!"
Rapunzel was unimpressed. "Yes...?"
Merida widened her eyes and spread her hands. "With Slytherin!"
Rapunzel shook her head. Then she abruptly grabbed Merida's wrist and pulled her away from the wall, dragging her toward the Potions classroom. Merida yelled and complained the whole way there, trying to pry Rapunzel's fingers off her wrist, but the other girl was surprisingly strong.
They entered the classroom with thirty seconds to spare and Merida scanned the room for the three boys who had helped her with the trick stair the first day. It wasn't hard to spot Frost's white hair, sitting towards the back with Whitelaw on his right side and Haddock on his left.
Haddock. What a ridiculous name.
Merida sat exactly opposite the three of them at the front of the room, pulling Rapunzel down next to her and determinedly not looking at those stupid Slytherins at the back of the room.
No sooner had the bell rang than a tall man with dark hair and grayish-looking skin swept into the room. He stopped at the front of the class and regarded them all as if they were an exceptionally dim group of creatures that had just been found under a rock and he wanted to put it back and never look at them again.
"Good morning," the man said, sounding as if it were anything but. "My name is Professor Black. I will be your instructor for this course from now until you either graduate or find yourself, for some reason or another, removed from this particular class. There are a good many reasons why 'Potions' might disappear from your schedules, and among them are insolence, rule-breaking and an utter lack of skill."
Black's eyes moved slowly from one side of the room to the other, as if he were taking note of anyone who looked like they would be even remotely successful in his class. He didn't seem pleased with what he saw. "I doubt many of you will manage to scratch your way to the final year-" Congratulations, thought Merida sourly, You're a terrible professor. "-but know that if you do not make it to your second year, you will be the first student I've had to have done so. Are there any questions." He made it sound like if anyone actually dared to ask a question, they would be pinned with a month's worth of detentions. Apparently, this didn't make it through to a Gryffindor named Timothy Marchbanks, because he raised his hand tentatively.
Professor Black's lip curled slightly. "Yes," He glanced down at a piece of parchment. "Mr. Marchbanks?"
Timothy chewed his lip, probably reconsidering his decision. "Are you, by any chance, related to Sirius Black?"
Black's lip peeled back in a sneer. "I highly doubt it. If I am, it is extremely distantly. 'Black' is not as uncommon a name as an imbecile like yourself might think."
Nobody else dared to ask any questions or make any comments, so the remainder of the lesson was spent mixing a simple potion for curing boils. By the end, Merida and Rapunzel's looked at least a little bit like the book said it should, but Merida, who knew absolutely nothing about either potions itself or even cooking like many of the other muggleborns, so she suspected she had been more of a hindrance than a help.
Her only comfort was that Frost and Whitelaw, who had been working together, had a potion that looked like thick tar and was bubbling unpleasantly. Merida noticed Haddock behind them shaking his head in utter disbelief. Not that she was actually looking at them. No, of course not, she had just been glancing around the room and their three semi-familiar faces caught her eye.
Stupid Slytherin snakes.
Jack sprinted for the fifth floor first thing after lunch, Hiccup and Merlin not far behind. After about fifteen minutes of retracing their steps, they were in front of the statue of Gregory the Smarmy, as they had recently learned.
After they Hiccup had come to the realization of where they were the previous night, they had agreed to come back the next afternoon, when they only had classes before lunch. Hiccup and Merlin had both brought wizard money to spend, and both had promised to share it with Jack, who didn't have any.
Now, Jack tapped the statue with his wand and murmured the incantation, Merlin having spent most of last night teaching it the other two. The statue scraped aside, and Jack was down the passage even before it had settled into place.
The three of them sped down the passageway, faster than before now that they knew their destination. Jack felt a grin slowly spreading over his face as he imagined all the wizard sweets, tricks and broomsticks. The only all-wizard community in the world.
When they reached the staircase, Jack slowed to a walk. They climbed up, spiraling around until it made them dizzy, until they finally got to the mirror. They removed their robes, so that they wore only muggle clothes. These would probably stand out from the rest of the town's wizard robes, but some wizards did wear muggle clothes, and it was better than getting caught outside of school, because they were definitely not supposed to be here.
"Hold on a minute, make sure no one's there," Hiccup said from behind. Jack rolled his eyes. Despite the fact that he was an idiot, he wasn't stupid. Honestly.
When Jack thought the coast was clear, he cracked the mirror open like a door and slid out, pushing it shut behind him and searching quickly for any witnesses. Finding no one, he turned back to the mirror. It didn't look suspicious in the slightest, just a simple mirror in a semi-hidden hallway that lead to the bathrooms. Who would think that it actually hid a secret tunnel that lead all the way up to the school? No one, that's who.
Glancing on each side and seeing a relative absence of people, Jack beckoned to the mirror. It swung open and Hiccup tumbled out. He stood almost immediately, grinning as much as Jack, and Merlin climbed out behind him, shutting the mirror door so that it looked just as utterly inconspicuous as before.
"What store is this?" Jack wondered aloud.
"Probably the one we're at." Hiccup shrugged.
"Oh, ha ha," Jack rolled his eyes. He went went toward the main room of the shop, heart thumping in anticipation and the other two trailing behind. He entered the room and got the first good look at all the things they had on the shelves. There were all sorts of things on display, from collapsible cauldrons to singing clocks to what looked like lava lamps with radio antennae. It was utterly chaotic and wild and magical, and Jack loved it.
They left Dervish and Banges with several odd things, such as a sneakoscope and an odd compass-like contraption that was used for telling when something invisible was in the area. They walked up the street to Honeydukes, the sun beaming merrily overhead. They spent a considerable amount of money at the sweet shop, buying things like ice mice, sugar quills, licorice wands and fudge flies, and they left with bags full of the stuff.
After Honeyduke's, they went to Zonko's, which had been restored after Voldemort was defeated. There, they bought stink pellets, hiccough sweets and screaming yo-yo's, among other things that Jack couldn't wait to put to good use.
Their entire afternoon was spent roaming the town, visiting the Shrieking Shack and drinking several pints of butterbeer from the Three Broomstick's, and when they finally went back to the mirror in Dervish and Banges in the evening, they were laughing and thoroughly worn out. All in all, it was arguably the best day of Jack's life.
A/N: If anyone knows an actual spell to reveal secret passages, could you let me know? 'Specialis revelio' is a spell for revealing enchantments or other spells placed on inanimate objects, so I thought it could work, but I've looked everywhere and can't find an official secret-passage-revealing spell, and I didn't want to just make one up...