Chapter 5: Halloween

It took an almost annoyingly long amount of time for me to be proven right.

"A broomstick!" Malfoy groused. He had been complaining about that for what felt like weeks now.

"I told you so..."

He shot me an angry look, "Are you incapable of saying anything else?!" I simply raised an eyebrow at him, and he huffed and rolled his eyes, "Fine, you were right. You happy now?"

Malfoy leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed, his lips pressed together in an angry pout, and I couldn't help the smirk on my face, "Was that so hard?"

There was a prolonged length of silence, and then Malfoy broke it again, "A broomstick! And Flitwick saw it, too! Bloody Goblins..."

"I think the word you're looking for is teachers, not Goblins. McGonagall got him the broom, remember?"

"It's unfair! Blatant favouritism!"

I snorted, "Tell that to Professor Snape in our next Potions lesson, then." Malfoy shot me a poisonous stare, "Life isn't fair, Malfoy. Stop trying to bring Potter down, and just focus on yourself, for once. I guarantee you'll be better off for it."

I stood from my seat, closing the book I had been reading as I did so, "Where are you going?"

"Charms. The lesson is in fifteen minutes, if I'm not mistaken."

Malfoy reluctantly rose to his feet, "Wait! I'll come with."

"Well hurry up, then."

Malfoy rushed to my side as I set off, muttering under his breath, "Bloody bookworms..."

I smiled, ignoring him as we walked through the bustling halls and to the Charms classroom. When we finally arrived, we were put into pairs, and apparently Flitwick had a sense of humour, as I wound up partnered with Hermione, practicing our wrist movements and incantations. When it was all over, feathers materialised on all our desks, and we set to it.

Ron waved his arms about like a windmill, repeatedly yelling the incantation, as if volume affected the power of his spell. Most of the rest seemed to have either the incantation or the wrist movements down, but struggled to combine the two, "Now, don't forget that nice wrist movement we've been practicing!" Flitwick said. "Swish and flick, remember, swish and flick. And saying the magic words properly is very important, too."

Of all my classmates, I had perhaps made the least effort of the bunch. Charms was an entirely different beast to Transfiguration, or so I had heard, and it took a special kind of intent to achieve much of anything with a charm. I spent a good long while figuring out what that meant, at least for my first few Charms lessons. You see, Transfiguration requires a strong ability to visualise, because it's all about changing the form of something. You have to be able to see the full transformation, and the more detail with which one can visualise, the better one will be.

This is why boys tend to do better in Transfiguration than girls. Spatial awareness and attention to detail are massive assets.

But if Transfiguration was detail-oriented, then Charms was the exact opposite. It requires an abstract form of understanding to perform a charm. An understanding of reality, so that one can manipulate it better. It is, in every sense of the word, a more holistic subject. More importantly, Charms are all, without exception, fuelled by some form of desire. One had to want the change to be able to bring it about.

It was for this reason that most of the Dark Arts are technically classified as Charms. You have to want to hurt someone to kill, torture or control them, after all. It's also the reason that most Dark Lords tend to descend into insanity as they delve deeper and deeper into the Dark Arts. The magic itself is not corrupting, but rather the rewarding of the negative emotions within their brains creates a negative feedback loop.

They get addicted to it, for lack of a better term, just as you or I might get addicted to videogames. The behaviour winds up becoming habitual, and after a while, I doubt many are even cognizant of what, exactly, it is that they're doing. It isn't physiological, at least as far as I can tell, but psychological.

Anyway, I'm going on a bit of a tangent. Back to my main point.

This was all well and good for the simpler charms. Hell, even a toddler could summon up enough coherent desire to cast a basic lighting charm, but levitation was another ball-game. There were, as far as I could tell, two separate ways to cast the charm. The first was to summon a little desire tempered with a lot of understanding. This often resulted in a finer, if weaker, control over the thing you were levitating, and demanded intense concentration from the caster. It was also a skill that could be acquired essentially in the same manner in which any other could be acquired - practice.

The other was to just be chock-full of so much emotion that you could overpower the laws of nature basically at a thought. This essentially works by brute-forcing the concentration required to cast. It's sloppy, and often unreliable, but when it works, boy is it powerful.

And so, when I finally levitated my feather, it was not with a pitch-perfect incantation or a smooth wand movement. It was with pain. Imagined pain, to be sure, but enough emotion to brute-force the problem. My feather hovered a few feet above me, and when I stopped pinching my thigh, the feather came fluttering back to my desk.

I was, as usual, the first to complete the spell in the class, but I sat through the obligatory awarding of points by Flitwick before setting to the task of testing the limits of my own magic. At first, I tested different intensities of pain. Then, I tested it without any at all. I still managed to levitate the feather, but it was weak, and the feather trembled in the air.

Hermione had, by this point, finally pulled off her spell, and was flawlessly hovering her feather, shooting rather smug looks in my direction from across the classroom. Both her incantation and her wand movements were pitch-perfect, of course. Ron was an entirely different story, though he kept shooting me dirty looks, likely for the way Malfoy had been getting all chummy with me in public.

"You're saying it wrong," she said, once she had completed her own spell. "It's Win-gar-dium Levi-o-sa, so make the gar nice and long."

Needless to say, Ron was in a foul mood by the end of the lesson, "It's no wonder nobody can stand her," he said, just a touch too loudly. "She's a nightmare, honestly."

"I think she heard you," Harry responded as Hermione rushed past them, sobbing.

"So?" Ron said, uncomfortably. "She must've noticed she's got no friends."

Nobody saw her for the entire afternoon, nor did she turn up when the Halloween feast began. I felt a little sick by that point, but not because of my typically atrocious eating habits, for once. It would be more accurate to say that I was nervous, and my gut was acting up as a result. Then, it happened.

Quirrell came barging in, reached Professor Dumbledore's table, slouched against it, and announced, rather breathlessly, "Troll - in the dungeons - thought you ought to know."

He then sank to the ground, unconscious, as the furor began. The uproar was only broken by several firecrackers erupting from the tip of Dumbledore's wand, who loudly announced, "Prefects, lead your houses back to the dormitories immediately!"

Malfoy rushed off, his goons following him, and I lingered and watched out of the corner of my eye as Harry and Ron slinked off. Looking around to ensure that nobody was around, I rushed off in pursuit, making sure to barge into Snape on my way out, "Stupid boy! Watch where you're going!"

"Sorry, Professor, but I need your help! There's a missing student, and I think that Troll's going to find it!"

Snape stiffened, "Where?"

"The girls toilets, Professor."

Snape looked back to Quirrell's slumped form, and then to the column of Slytherin students headed to their dormitories, and then back to me, scowling, "You best head off with your classmates. I will check the bathroom." I nodded and turned, and Snape offered one last parting shot, "And Crawley?"

"Yes, sir?"

Snape looked at me through narrowed eyes, "You best not be lying to me."

I nodded, and made it look as if I was part of the crowd before peeling off to the side, working my way around the hall before I could leave and head in the right direction. Professor Snape headed in entirely the wrong one, likely headed for the third floor to check on the Stone. I had memorised the route to the girls toilets beforehand, and I knew I was headed in the right direction as the sight of red robes slipping past a corner caught my eyes.

The stench helped, too. So much garlic.

I arrived to the rather comical sight of a little Harry with his arms wrapped around the Troll's neck, holding on for dear life, his wand jammed firmly into the Troll's oversized nostrils. "God!" I shouted. "Is he trying to strangle it?"

Ron shot me a look, and my shout roused Hermione into action, who scrambled to get to her feet and get out. Ron, in a bit of a panic, shouted out the first spell that came to his mind, "Wingardium Leviosa!"

The club rose into the air, and the Troll's hands groped upwards for it for a moment, and then grasped Harry's head, still over his shoulder. That wasn't supposed to happen. In a panic, I yelled, "Everybody close your eyes!"

Before me, I could see Harry's eyes - behind the Troll's thick, gnarled fingers - scrunch tightly shut. I raised my wand in the direction of the Troll, and chanted with as much emotion as I could gather, "Lumos!"

It was like lighting a miniature sun. Light bathed every corner of the room, and I could hear the Troll howl in pain, and hear the shattering of mirrors as it flailed about. Now no longer in it's grasp, Harry did not need any prompting to leap clear off the Troll's back just as Ron's control over the club failed, and it came crashing back down on it's owner's head with a sickening crunch.

"Is - is it dead?" Hermione asked after a moment of silence, as everyone blinked the spots from their vision.

"I don't think so," Harry replied. "I just think it's been knocked out." He bent down, and pulled his wand from the Troll's nose with a squelch, "Urgh - Troll bogies."

"You... you idiot!" I shouted, not realising that I was now shouting. "You faced off with a Troll and you decide to jump on it's bloody back?"

Before I could continue my tirade, there was a slamming sound, and Snape burst through the door, followed by several of the other professors. McGonagall gave Harry a hard stare, her tone rich with a cold rage, "I'm afraid I must agree with Mister Crawley, what on earth were you thinking of? You're lucky you weren't killed. Why aren't you in your dormitory?"

Snape gave me a swift, piercing look as Hermione began to explain. When she was done, Snape said, "And you, Crawley? Why did you not go to your dormitory after I told you to? Why even inform me?"

"I was going to, sir, but then I saw you head in the wrong direction. I panicked."

McGonagall issued her punishment, and sent the trio packing. Snape gave me my punishment, a much harsher one than expected, and then sent me on my way. At the end of the hallway, Harry and Ron were waiting for me, somewhat uncomfortably on account of the distance that had grown between us in recent weeks, "Thanks, mate."

"No problem."

"How many points did you get?" Ron asked. "McGonogall gave us ten, but if you ask me, we should have got more."

"Five, you mean," Harry said, "once she's taken off Hermione's."

"Good of her, that," Ron admitted. "Mind you, we did save her."

"She might not have needed saving," Harry said, "if we hadn't locked the thing in with her."

Ron turned back to me as we approached the point where our paths diverged, "Say, you never told me how many points you got."

I shook my head, "None. I got no points. Professor Snape gave me detention instead."

Ron sputtered, "Detention! For saving Harry's life?"

"For being stupid," I replied.

I stopped in front of the staircase that led to the dungeons, looked at Harry and Ron, and said as I left them, "Tell Hermione I said hello."

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