Chapter 10
"You reckon it won't do anything?"
"Can't guarantee it," said Lee. "But at least it's not poisonous."
"Supposedly."
"Yeah... pretty sure it isn't. My uncle wouldn't risk getting cursed by my mum for giving me something truly dangerous. At most it might bite, I think."
Fred and George exchanged a look, and didn't have to say anything to know they were in agreement: they would try this even if it were deadly poisonous, so of course they wouldn't back off for such a mild thing as a spider's bite. No matter how big the spider.
They probably were also both thinking how hilarious Ron's reaction would be if he found Lee's tarantula in his bed one night, but they knew that risk wasn't worth taking it. Dad had called them aside last night to give them a stern lecture about being responsible older brothers, and Percy would not hesitate to write Mum if they did something 'reprehensible' instead of looking after little Ronnie.
"Let's do this, then," said George as he drew his wand and bent over the box. "I'll take the right legs, if that's all left with you."
"Right you are," agreed Fred. Not that it was necessary to agree on that out loud either, of course; George always took the things or positions to the right, and Fred those to the left, just as George always moved or spoke first, and Fred followed. It was their arrangement by default when they weren't deliberately trying to drive people crazy. He drew his own wand. "At the count of three?"
"Three it is. You keep it still, Lee, and if it jumps-"
The door of the compartment suddenly slid open, and all their heads turned to watch as a small red-headed boy slipped in and closed the door behind him in a hurry, looking agitated and nervous as if he were running from something. Fred's first thought was that it was Ron, and he had an embarrassing and inadmissible moment of worry over his little brother, but his impression was corrected when a moment later the intruder swirled around and stared at them with bright green eyes framed by a freckleless face. This kid was shorter than Ron, too, and was wearing nicer clothes, and his red hair was so wild that he looked as if his head were on fire.
No one moved for several seconds, until George, realizing that the boy had frozen at the sight of their raised wands, his posture defensive and his eyes wary as if he expected to be attacked, slowly lowered his. Fred mirrored his gesture, which seemed to relax the boy a little even though he was still looking at them with mistrust and, for some reason, building anger.
Or perhaps loathing would have been a better word for the expression in those green eyes that glinted like sharp emeralds.
George had opened his mouth to ask who the kid was and what was his problem when he was distracted by the unwelcomed sight of McLaggen's stupid face peering into their compartment. The idiot scowled at them and rushed away like the coward he actually was, but he lingered long enough for George to notice both the way he was cradling his hand against his chest, and the way their unexpected guest tensed and averted his face when McLaggen looked in.
Fred wondered if the kid had chosen their compartment to hide precisely because they were red-heads like him and he might pass as their little brother, and whether he had had something to do with McLaggen's apparently injured hand. If so, the boy deserved their sincere acknowledgement and profound gratefulness, since a broken hand might mean McLaggen would not be able to catch anything during tryouts. The entitled little prick had spent the entire last year whining and bragging about how he would have made the team if only first years were allowed to have their own brooms, and Fred feared Oliver might welcome him in if he proved to be as good as he claimed to be at whatever position he played.
"Ran into some trouble with that berk, lad?" asked George in his friendliest tone.
The kid didn't answer. Now that McLaggen had moved on he had gone back to regard them with inexplicable contempt, his expression so hostile that George closed his fingers more tightly around his wand just in case. It was absurd to feel wary around a boy that seemed younger than Ron and wouldn't know what to do with a wand if he were holding one —which he wasn't—, but he couldn't help the shiver that ran down his spine when those hard eyes looked straight at him.
"Whom did you take that from?" demanded the kid suddenly, a threatening edge on his voice.
They all followed the direction of his gaze in confusion, and Fred realized that he was referring to Lee's tarantula. Did he think they had stolen it?
"It's mine," said Lee defiantly, although he also sounded wary. "My uncle gave it to me for my birthday."
The boy's hard expression wavered, and for a moment he looked like just a kid, small and insecure, but his eyes hardened again almost immediately.
"You were doing something to it," he accused. "With magic. I saw you pointing you wands at it."
"We weren't going to hurt it," said George defensively. "Just turn it a different colour."
"And you think that's fun?"
They exchanged puzzled glances.
"Well, yeah," said Fred in bewilderment. "You don't think a half-yellow, half-red tarantula is funny?"
"For you, maybe," spat the boy, again looking at them with contempt. "I don't think the tarantula would enjoy being laughed at." He turned his admonishing gaze on Lee. "If it's yours, you should take care of it, not humiliate it."
Lee looked as if McGonagall had just scolded him for mistreating a conjured mice: baffled and guilty at the same time. George didn't know what to think, and Fred was staring at the kid with mouth open, also at a lost. Before anyone could recover enough to say something, however, the silence was broken by a muffled 'croak' that seemed to come from the boy's bag.
"What's that?" blurted Fred. "What do you have in there?"
"That's none of your business," said the kid curtly, although he seemed suddenly nervous and glanced back at the door as if he had just remembered that someone was chasing him. Seeming now in a rush to be on his way, he glanced one last time at the tarantula, scored them all with a severely disapproving look, and slipped out of the compartment without saying another word, scurrying in the opposite direction McLaggen had gone.
"Is that kid a cousin of yours or something?" whispered Lee when once they were alone again. "He reminded me of your mum that time when you stuck Errol to his perch."
"More like Percy," snorted George. "With a bit of Charlie and Ginny added to the mix."
"We don't have any cousin of Hogwarts' age," said Fred thoughtfully. "That shade of red is practically a Weasley trademark, though, so we might be distantly related. What do you think he had in his bag?"
"It sounded like a frog... or a toad," said George, narrowing his eyes. A tearful round-faced boy had stopped by their compartment twice already asking for a missing toad, and it was exactly the kind of pet people would make fun of.
"You don't think..." started Lee with a frown.
"I don't know what to think," said George. "But there was definitely something shifty about that kid. Fancy going for a stroll, Gred?"
Fred sprang to his feet at once. He found hard to believe that that boy could have stolen someone else's pet and then accuse them of doing the same with a straight face, but it had sounded as if he had something alive —something that croaked— inside his bag, and he had been running and hiding from someone. Fred had thought whatever he had done had something to do with McLaggen's injured hand, but maybe the jerk passing by at that exact moment had been just a coincidence.
"Lead the way, Forge!" he said with a rush of excitement, already feeling the thrill of a new adventure.
The kid moved fast. He had already disappeared from sight when they exited Lee's compartment, and they barely reached the next carriage in time to see him furtively duck into a bathroom at the other end in what looked suspiciously like an evasive tactic. No one could throw off the Weasley twins that easily, though, so they simply chose a nearby compartment as lookout post and waited, Fred taking care of distracting the compartment's inhabitants with some jokes and tricks while George kept an eye all the time on the bathroom's door.
He almost missed the boy when he came out a few minutes later, however, because he wasn't the same boy. Or rather, he was —George was pretty sure that the clothes and the rucksack he was carrying were the same–, but he had changed.
"Are you sure it's the same kid?" murmured Fred dubiously when they resumed their stalking a minute later, now carefully following a boy with long, honey-brown hair.
"Yes," whispered George excitedly. "I saw his face when he came out, I'm certain it's the same person. He's a Metamorphmagus."
"Blimey, I hope he's sorted into Gryffindor," muttered Fred wistfully. "Maybe if he makes friends with Ron we can get close to him."
"He's got to be a Gryffindor," said George as they ducked into another compartment to evade the kid's watchful gaze. "It took guts to confront us, being a first year without even his wand at hand."
"I don't know," muttered Fred, cautiously angling their transfigured mirror to check if it was safe to come out again, "he's rather sneaky."
"We are sneaky."
"Yeah, but we chose Gryffindor," reminded him Fred, snatching the mirror away fast when the kid glanced over his shoulder. "Not everyone gets to choose. Besides, the trait is more likely to run in old pureblood families with a lot of inbreeding."
George frowned. He wasn't so sure about that. It was true that the Metamorphmagus gift was infinitely more likely to manifest in a pureblood than in a muggle-born, but evidence suggested that inbreeding made wizards less powerful rather than more. And more stupid, if some of their Slytherin classmates were any indication.
"That Metamorphmagus in Charlie's year was a Hufflepuff, not a Slytherin," he recalled. "Maybe they're related. He did lecture us about the feelings of a tarantula, that's as Hufflepuff as you can get."
"True," agreed Fred, still incredulous that anyone could make such a fuss over turning a spider a different colour. Maybe magical creatures like hippogriffs or dragons would be offended, but regular animals couldn't even understand a change of colour, let alone feel humiliated by it. "Hufflepuffs would be too afraid to stand up against three older students, though."
"And Slytherins wouldn't care enough to stand up to anyone," pointed out George. "I say Gryffindor. Wanna bet?"
Fred wasn't convinced either way, but he agreed to a conditional wagger (he bet the kid would go to Slytherin if he wasn't related to Charlie's schoolmate, while George bet he would go to Gryffindor despite most likely having Hufflepuff blood). They placed a few more bets about the toad and McLaggen as they resumed their stalking, their quiet chat naturally drifting to Quidditch and to more waggers about the chances they'd get a decent Seeker this year. They really hoped McLaggen sucked, because they believed Wood perfectly capable of giving the position to whoever might help them win the Cup no matter how insufferable, and training with that berk would be too distracting (they'd be unable to resist the temptation of sending Bludgers his way all the time).
They had subsided into silence again when their target seemed to reach his destination four carriages later, where they saw him slip into another compartment after throwing paranoid glances right and left. Fred and George waited until he had disappeared from sight and then got moving again, hoping to catch a glimpse of the toad as they walked past the boy's compartment, but to their frustration and surprize they couldn't see absolutely anything through the door. They assumed at first that it was steam blurring the glass, but a quick look around confirmed that no other windows in the carriage were fogged, and closer examination convinced them that the glass itself was opaque. To their further surprize and frustration, when they tried to slid the door a tiny bit open to peep in or hear what might be going on inside, they found it firmly closed. Locked.
All right. Plainly the kid wasn't alone in the train. He must be sharing the compartment with some older student, perhaps a sibling, and they were private. George didn't think it was allowed to magically lock the train doors (if everyone did that some people might be left stranded without a place to sit), but he felt more inclined to congratulate whoever had dared to do it than to report it to Percy or some other Prefect. Fred, on his part, was interested to know what spell they had used on the glass, whether it was a transfiguration or a charm, and was considering possible prank applications for it.
Neither one thought a good idea to knock on the door and directly confront the Metamorphmagus and his associates, though. For one, the kid's attitude earlier suggested that they would not be well received nor trusted with any secrets. For another, it seemed safer to watch and find out what they could from a distance, just in case they were dealing with be a bunch of nasty Slytherins. So after conferring in whispers for a few moments they invited themselves into yet another compartment, glad that it happened to be one occupied by easy-going Hufflepuffs, and resigned themselves to wait.
They hadn't expected the boy to re-emerge anytime soon, but to their deep relief —Hufflepuffs were nice, but their sense of humour was too innocent— only five minutes later Fred, who was on mirror watch, saw him exit the compartment and scurry away in the direction he had come. Not wanting to lose sight of the shapeshifting kid for anything in the world —and wishing the Marauders had somehow included the Hogwarts Express in the map—, they hurriedly said their farewells to the Hufflepuffs and scrambled after their target, only to come to a halt again when they saw that the door glass of the boy's compartment had returned to normal and there was no one inside.
"No one else came out, I swear," said Fred in perplexity. "Only the kid."
"It can't be," whispered George. "Someone had to cast and finite the spells, and-"
"What?" asked Fred urgently. The boy had already disappeared into another carriage, if they didn't move quickly he might perform another evasive manoeuvre and lose them.
"It's McLaggen's compartment," hissed George in astonishment.
"What?"
"Yeah, look! That trunk over there has his initials engraved, and that's the McLaggens' family crest, I think."
Fred looked at the trunk George was pointing at, and saw that indeed those were McLaggen's initials, and that crest...
"No way," he gasped, noticing that the initials engraved in the other trunks matched McLaggen's roommates. And that owl over there also looked familiar. "You think the kid was stealing something from that jerk?"
"Maybe. Or maybe he was setting up a trap or a prank. He must have lured him away on purpose, and his idiot friends too."
"Maybe he planted the toad amongst McLaggen's things," suggested Fred dreamily, pushing away his slight concern over the comfort or even survival of a toad inside an hermetic trunk.
"We have to know who that kid is," said George with determination.
They set off again, but as they had feared the boy had performed another evasive manoeuvre while he was out of their sight and they lost him for a while. By the time they caught up with him three carriages away he was wearing Hogwarts robes instead of muggle clothes and had tied back his otherwise unchanged hair, so he looked really different from behind and they only recognized him because of the backpack —no one else went around the train carrying their belongings. Eagerly anticipating what might happen when the kid crossed his path with McLaggen again, and wondering what or whom he was looking for as he checked one compartment after another, Fred and George resumed their careful stalking, watching closely for any tricks magical or otherwise their sneaky chameleon might pull off as he went.
They almost missed it when he did something, though, despite their close watch, since it happened so fast and they didn't expect something like that —although perhaps they should have, at this point. Fred was holding the mirror this time, looking backwards through an inter-carriage's door, when the kid walked past a small hurdle of first or second years standing outside a compartment. They were distracted by what seemed to be an argument over who would go first through the door or whatever, so none of them paid any attention to the passing Metamorphmagus, and the blond one definitely didn't notice when someone stealthily slipped a hand into his robe pocket and made away with his wand.
Now, Fred and George Weasley might approve of many unscrupulous things, but stealing another wizard's wand... that was pretty much the limit. Even if you disarmed someone during a duel, unless it was an enemy trying to kill you you gave the wand back at the end, you didn't break it nor keep it. It was more a matter of common courtesy than an obligation, although there probably was some law or at least a school rule about it. Of course they weren't going to report it to a Prefect or teacher, but they couldn't let it slide either, no matter how much they might admire the smooth technique of their mysterious thief.
So they set off again after a quiet deliberation, now determined to confront the boy and make him surrender all his secrets and stolen goods, but they didn't get too far before they were pulled from their chase by what later seemed to them like a carefully planned and executed distraction tactic. It certainly seemed like too much of a coincidence that immediately after losing possession of his wand the blond boy and his gorilla-like friends happened to burst into Ron's compartment and stir up a fight over a toad that apparently had been taken from them by an unidentified red-haired boy. It took Fred and George some time to break the fight and clarify the situation —which appeared to be a misunderstanding, since clearly Ron didn't know anything about a toad—, and by the end of it their younger brother was sporting a broken lip, another boy was trying to contain a nosebleed, Scabbers had bitten one of the gorilla kids, and they no longer felt in the least inclined to negotiate the restitution of the stolen wand —the blond prat had turned out to be a Malfoy, with plenty of scornful things to say about Weasleys and Gryffindors, and besides it sounded like he was angry because someone had dared to take from him something he had taken from someone else, which as far as they were concerned made the loss of his wand deserved.
Meanwhile, the Metamorphmagus had disappeared, and while Fred and George were rather pissed at the sneaky brat for impersonating a Weasley and setting a bunch of bullies on their little brother, they couldn't help admiring him for all the trouble he had managed to cause without any of the offended parties suspecting his involvement. They no longer believed he had stolen the toad, all the evidence suggesting that he must have rescued it instead, and they were thoroughly amused by the thought of both McLaggen and that Malfoy prick furiously looking for different versions of the Metamorphmagus while the boy went around stealing things from their compartments or from their very pockets.
The kid was definitely interesting.
