Hello, lovely readers! I hope you enjoy this next installment of Julian Larson et cetera, as I like to call it. CP Coulter and JK Rowling own everything, I own next to nothing.

The end of this chapter marks the end of PART 1, but don't fret, PART 2 will come really really really soon (I can't say HOW soon because I don't know when episode 26 will be updated and I'll have to wait until everyone, including myself, calms down after that to update).

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Enjoy!

Chapter 5

"Here." Derek threw a green and silver tie at Logan. "This is yours, I believe."

"No way!" Logan examined the tie. "This is Jules's." He threw it at Julian, who was carefully packing up his chess set.

"Hey!" Julian picked it up from where it had landed on the bed. "This is definitely yours, Lo." He tossed it to Logan.

"Take it." Logan threw it back at Derek. "Consider it a gift."

Derek rolled his eyes and put it into his trunk.

Julian continued wrapping his chess pieces into bubble wrap, humming a bit as he did so. Logan stopped sorting his socks (they'd all gotten mixed up and at least 5 single socks had gone missing) and watched Julian carefully place a castle piece into the box.

Logan cleared his throat and Julian looked up. "Uh, next year we can play more and I'll definitely beat you at least once," Logan said, smiling a little.

Julian nodded like it was obvious. "Yeah, of course we'll play more, but there's no way you're going to beat me even once."

Logan looked relieved (he had been worried that Julian might want to make new friends next year and ditch him). "Not a chance," he taunted, returning to the mystery of his socks. "Did either of you by any chance find an extra sock anywhere?"

"Did you check under the bed?" Derek was sitting on his trunk, trying to get it to close on top of all his clothes and belongings haphazardly thrown inside.

Logan dropped down onto the floor and peered first under his bed, then Julian's, and finally crawled over to Derek's. "Nothing." He stood up and brushed off his hands.

Julian was dangling a sock in front of his face. "Found it."

Logan snatched it. "Thanks for telling me before got my clothes all dirty!"

"It's just the floor," Derek said, taking out his wand and trying to figure out a spell to close his trunk.

"It's dirty. We've been walking on it all year and when do you think it gets cleaned?" Logan looked from Derek to Julian (who had returned to the chess set). "Never! It never gets cleaned. I'm bringing something to clean it with next year because-"

"Shut up," Derek said, and Logan came to a full stop, looking at his friend in surprise. "Just take your overly-girlyness somewhere else for the time being, please."

Logan's mouth fell open and Julian stopped packing his chess set. Even Zane, who hadn't spoken to any of them in about a month, stopped what he was doing to watch.

"What did you just say?" Logan asked, balling his fists.

"You were freaking out about the floor being dirty," Derek said defensively. "That's just kind of…" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Feminine."

Logan's eyes got huge and he turned his back on Derek, throwing things into his trunk now, fast as he could. He'd been taking his time before, but now he couldn't wait to get out of there. To leave school. Go home.

Not that spending the summer with his dad would be any better.

And especially not spending the summer with Cal, because he was fairly certain that Cal hated him.

But this time he would actually write to Julian. He wasn't scared anymore. He was confused, yes, and he had suspicions about himself that he didn't like, but he wasn't scared, not of Julian.

.

"Bye! See you next year! Write to me!" Julian waved at Derek and Logan standing next to each other on the platform. Then he remembered something and he looked up to his mum. "Wait, hold on a second." He let go of her hand (she'd been dragging him away from his friends) and ran back to them. "Your birthday," he pointed to Logan, is July 22nd. And yours is August 8th."

"Right," Logan and Derek said in unison, turning to glare at each other afterwards.

"Try not to kill each other!" Julian said perkily, and then turned and ran back toward his mother.

"I still can't believe you said that," Logan said to Derek, not looking at the brunette.

"I was just making an observation, I'm sorry," Derek said defensively.

Logan didn't say anything for a moment, during which time he thought a great deal. Then he said, "I'm really feminine?"

"Only sometimes," Derek said carefully.

"I'll still write you this summer," Logan said. "But maybe only for your birthday."

"I'm okay with that." Derek bumped his shoulder into Logan's. "And um, for the record… You know there's nothing wrong with being…feminine? A bit?"

"Of course," Logan said quickly.

.

Dear Julian,

I actually am writing you this letter on the last night of term. You think I'm studying for exams – HA! I already studied for 5 hours today, and my strategy is, study until you can't fill your brain anymore, and then you're done. I think I'm done. Anyway, I'm good at exams and tests and stuff. I'll do fine.

Anyway, I wanted to be the first to write to you instead of waiting for you to write to me because I was scared you'd go the first few days of holiday thinking that I wasn't going to write to you, but here I am, writing to you. With you right across the common room. Sometimes I look up at you and think about how I'm going to miss you over the summer.

-Logan

.

Dear Logan,

You actually wrote me! And you wrote me before we even left the castle? Whoa. Life just got so much cooler, you decided to grace me with your awesome presence in paper-form. SARCASM. But not totally.

So my holiday looks like it's going to be BORING. Absolutely nothing to do. My mum is always at work at the Ministry and she leaves me home all day with zero stuff to do. Guess I'll be playing chess against myself a lot this summer. The good news is I'll win every time, though that won't be much different from playing with you.

-Julian

.

Dear Derek,

You better be practicing Quidditch a lot because we lost the House Cup again this year to the stupid RAVENCLAWS. So you better be getting really good.

-Logan

.

Dear Logan,

You actually wrote to me and it isn't my birthday! I feel so honored!

And yeah, I'm practicing a lot, don't worry. It's not like I have anything better to do at this stupid house. (Although there is this really pretty girl who rides her bike around a lot… She's a Muggle. UGH. But she's very cute and Muggles can be hilarious sometimes.)

-Derek

.

Logan laughed as he read Derek's letter, and then he pulled out some parchment and a quill from the drawer in his desk.

"Logan?" There was a knock on the door and Logan looked up, surprised. It was none other than Cal Johnson.

"Hi," Logan said shyly, dropping the quill. An ink splatter appeared on the paper and Logan sighed. More parchment wasted.

"Do you want to play?" Cal looked hopeful.

"Sure." Logan stood up and smiled. "Are you sure you want to play with me?"

"Why wouldn't I?" Cal grinned and turned, running down the stairs. "Let's make a tree house!" he shouted.

Logan looked back at his parchment and promised himself that he'd finish the letter after he played with Cal.

.

Derek tossed the ball through the hoop. It was weird and it had taken him about ten shots to actually get one in. He wasn't using the right ball, for one thing (he thought he was supposed to use something called a 'basketball' but he wasn't entirely certain what that was), but the Quaffle he was using did actually fit through the basket. It didn't really bounce though…so that was making it kind of hard to get into the sport.

But he wanted to get the attention of that Muggle girl, and he couldn't do that in his backyard practicing Quidditch.

"Hello?" Someone tapped his shoulder and Derek whirled about. It was the girl.

"Oh, hey." He smiled at her. She had straight brown hair and it was kind of messed up because of her helmet but he didn't care. She was standing next to her ever-present bicycle.

"What is that?" she asked, pointing to the Quaffle.

"Oh. Um, it's…" He turned it over in his hand. "It's this ball my dad made for me."

"It got dented," she pointed out, reached out for it.

Derek handed it to her. "Do you want to play basketball with me?"

She examined the ball. "Weird." She gave it back to him. "Let me go get my basketball, and we can play with it. By the way, I'm Hilary."

"Derek." Derek grinned and once she'd turned away, he raised his fist in the air in a VICTORY! gesture.

.

Julian watched as the white knight and the black knight fought on the chess board. His eyes were glazed over, he was hardly paying attention. How many more days until he could go back to Hogwarts…?

Sighing, he pulled the two knights away from each other and packaged up the chess set carefully, putting it back on its place on his bedroom shelf. He walked aimlessly around the house for a few minutes, looking for something to do, but he found nothing. He considered reading 'Harry Potter: The Story of the Boy Who Lived' for the fifth time, but he already had it memorized and his mom might take it away if he read it too often, because she thought he should branch out a little more.

Right when he thought that he might actually die of boredom, an owl flew through the open kitchen door and landed on his head.

He smiled wide. A letter from Derek or Logan. He picked up the owl – it was Logan's. He untied the letter attached to its foot and sat down at the kitchen table, Logan's owl next to him. Julian would feed him some dead mice or something after he read the letter.

A smile crept across Julian's face as he read Logan's letter – about how he and his friend were building a tree house, about how his father was basically ignoring him (which was a good thing), about how he missed being able to do magic, and then at the end it said:

'I'm really looking forward to seeing you on September first, and maybe Diagon Alley before that. I'm going the last week of August, probably on the 27th. Maybe I'll see you there. I've really missed you a lot over the holidays.'

Julian would ask his mum when she got home if they could go to Diagon Alley sometime during the last week of August, preferably the 27th.