Harry Potter : Chapter 8: Rising Star I

I ignored the frothing-at-the-mouth teenagers that I had swiftly incapacitated in order to study Tom Riddle: high cheekbones, dark eyes and flowy black hair.

I could understand how he would grow up to be charming, but for now, he still held the gangly, uncomfortable appearance of someone that had just got started on puberty.

Distractedly, I loosened my tie before resuming my walk towards the common room, the wands of my impromptu opponents held loosely in my hand.

"You could have helped, you know?"

"It didn't look like you needed it." came the smooth reply, "Aren't you going to..." he nodded towards the still screaming teens, suggesting that I took a measure of revenge for their attack.

I rolled my eyes, I wasn't going to punch around teenagers only because they were dumb. Even if I' going to kill this particular 13 years old. 

I grimaced as my resolve showcased my hypocrisy, choosing instead to answer Tom's enquiry.

"I was thinking about placing the wands on the mantel of the main fireplace, even if someone different than a professor manages to get them down, they'll still need to recover their wands in front of everyone."

"A power play." Tom's eyebrows rose on his forehead, "You're not like your everyday eleven years old wizard, are you?"

Fuck. I shrugged: "What did give it away? My height? My non-verbal charm?"

"The fact that their first Pietrificus Totalus didn't affect you at all. But yes, the non-verbal magic is quite advanced, I take it that you've received previous teachings? I've never heard of a spell to hang people by their ankles." the slithering Slytherin inquired.

"I've got a protective charm on me, such a low-level thing would hardly affect me." I shrugged off his first question, rapidly thinking about how to approach my clearly extraordinary skill.

On one hand, proving myself extraordinary could make Tome see me as a potential threat, but as 13 years old, I was temporarily safe. On the other hand, he may try to take me 'under his wing', and I would be more than capable of sliding a knife between his ribs.

He knew jack shit about my life, so I could sell away my skill by talking about a previous teacher. The problem was... I didn't want to.

I wanted my accomplishments to be mine, I couldn't care less about the opinion of the World about my actions, but my skill and power... I wanted to be respected for it. I wanted to make it clear that I wasn't just another wizard.

I was going to flip the world on its ear, and a part of me wanted confirmation.

That I deserved to be here.

That I was up to the challenge.

That I was here to stay. And fuck the rest.

"I sort of hammered together a variation of Impedimenta and Tripping Jinx." I bullshitted Tom, taking a deep breath before going ahead: "And I don't understand the difference between verbal and not-verbal.

To be truthful, I hardly understand the punny or blatantly wrong Latin for incantations, but I guess I'm here to learn."

By then we had reached the Common Room where Tom waited for a few seconds before following me, letting the common rabble of students quiet down and look me with wide eyes as I dropped the two wands of my attackers on the mantelpiece of the largest fireplace.

I then seated down at the table where a marble chessboard was waiting, casually setting up a new game before picking up my extremely advanced Transfiguration books.

I wasn't a genius at chess, to be truthful, it was a pretty linear game, which tended to be too slow to be enjoyable. Now, the Bullet games were much more interesting: a couple of minutes for performing your whole match.

Soon enough, Tom sat in front of me, eyeing my books with a quirked eyebrow before fingering his black king, showing a sharp smile that I couldn't know if it was real or not.

I wondered if Riddle was aware of the implication of him seating in front of me right after my defeat of an older couple of students. For now, it didn't look like he was the top dog in Slytherin, I guessed that it was more because of his age than because of his skill.

No matter how good, no adult wants to listen to a kid that can show you up.

"Do you play?" he asked, hopefully oblivious to my thoughts.

"I prefer timed matches." I retorted while I started skimmed my selection of books: "If you can set up a minute worth of hourglass for each of us, with sand flowing only when it is my or your turn, then we can have a match."

And just like Minerva had challenged me after I had already started to impress her, I found myself setting up a condition through which Tom could prove himself worthy.

I suppressed a grimace when I realized what my casual reply did. Questioning his worth is a sure way to have him do something, but it will also make him see me like someone that looks down on him.

Befriending psychos was hard, who could have guessed?

I started casually skimming the principles regarding the transfiguration of living beings, trying to reconcile it with the admittedly limited knowledge I had about Transfiguration.

Long-winded chess matches, not professionally at least, were generally won in virtue of the computational skills of a player coupled with the concept of 'wearing down' the opponent, piece after piece.

Bullet games were instead a balance of aggressivity and timing. Generally, the first 5 to ten moves were executed through rote memorization: getting the horses on the field, opening avenues for the bishops to strike, controlling the centre of the chessboard with your pawns, and more often than not castling in order to set up a defence.

So I watched with the corner of my eyes, with disguised amazement, as Tom frowned in concentration and pulled out his pale wand.

With a muttered 'accio', which I'm sure he pronounced more to my benefit than out of real necessity, a couple of pawns from a free chessboard were summoned to our location, squawking outraged by the sheer gall of the 13 years old Slytherin, before he muted them with a distracted 'silencio'.

For a few seconds, Riddle seemed to still as he looked them over. Then he quietly waved over them with his yew wand, and I stared openly as the pieces elongated themselves, the marble they were made of flowing like water on their sides in order to showcase an eight-like shape of glass.

After a couple of muttered incantations, with a tap over the head of the two small hourglasses, white and black sand fell in its respective hourglass, stilling in the upper side.

In the end, the two pawns, which had originally kept glaring daggers at Riddle, had gone from being a couple of crouched infantrymen behind kite shields, to two hand-spans tall hourglasses, one in white and one in black, with helmed heads that were still glaring outrageously at Riddle.

I stopped pretending to study in order to follow as closely as I could the next part. Transfiguring was easy enough, the fundamental principle was something that I had grasped successfully, and everything that followed was a mere consequence.

Making it so that the sand would run only at the opportune time was not so simple, and entered a field that I hadn't yet met: enchanting.

Sure, charming a feather to float was technically 'enchanting', for it added a property to the feather that it naturally didn't have. But it was a 'direct' approach, very much like a colour changing charm.

Making it so an object would retain a certain mechanism or magic was a whole different kettle of fish, at least in my admittedly uninformed opinion.

His eyes met mine then, and he openly smirked before simply touching the top of the black hourglass and the head of the black king with his wand, before repeating the process with the white pieces.

Little motherfucker. I cursed mentally at him: by doing everything silently and without movement of the wand that I could see, he had effectively stopped me from learning something new.

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