9 Chapter Eight

We had flying in the morning. It meant flying on a broomstick. I actually felt excited about it. It was a broomstick, a bonafide flying tool of sorts, and it was supposed to bring us up in the sky where the only limit was how courageous we were and how foolhardy we could be. We also had to keep our feet on the ground until we got our broomsticks in hand, and were capable of moving back and forth upon them.

As things went by, the first lesson with Professor Hooch came in the morning, and had us all stand by the side of our school-loaned brooms trying to get them to come up into our hands.

"Up!" was the only word needed, and just like that, the brooms ended up in our hands. The difference between Muggleborns, Half-Blood and Pureblood became known right there and then. The first didn't know what to do with the broom, like me. The second and the third instead knew already what they had to do not to fall, and in some case could easily move on them without lifting themselves too far up.

"Good, good, feet on the ground!" Madam Hooch would say, sometimes whistling to keep a student from going too far up, or grounding someone with her wand. I managed to get the broomstick in my hand, and to climb aboard with relative ease. Depending on where I bent the top of the broom, it would go up or down. There wasn't much in the way of controls past that. If one bent to the left, and pulled the stick to the left, it would move left.

Perhaps it was like using a helicopter's cloche, whereas there was no way of stopping the engine without at first getting your feet on the ground. At the same time, we weren't actually allowed to fly any higher than a foot, or perhaps two, until the very end of the lesson. We finished quickly, since Transfiguration would be next.

All in all, the days at Hogwarts were starting to blend into one another. There were lessons, there was theory and practice, there was breakfast, lunch and dinner, and rarely there was something deviating from the norms. It was interesting, but at the same time boring. The initial hurdles gone by, I reckoned destiny would continue along its intended path without much of an intervention.

Thus, I was surprised when something out of the ordinary happened.

"Are you working on Snape's latest essay, Shade?" the voice that asked me was a polite one, admittedly. It belonged to my potions' partner, whom I practically did not meet unless we were both at potions. I glanced up from my parchment, stared into the eyes of a hopeful eleven year old, and then gave a quiet nod in reply.

Emma Vane took a seat at my library table, soon followed by another girl I knew nothing of. "This is my friend, Fay," she said as ways of making presentations. "She's in Gryffindor with Harry Potter!" she added excitedly, in a low whisper.

"Nice to meet you," I said politely, scribbling down some more words on my essay. The man could be an ass when it came to lessons, but he apparently approved of the way I wrote my essays. Perhaps because I wrote them trying my best to keep them clearly readable, or perhaps because my annotations were actually on point, but he never valued them negatively. I'd actually have high chances of getting into the NEWT-level classes in potions if I kept this up.

"Can we have a look at your homework when you're done?" Emma asked, and I merely shrugged.

"Sure," I said. "Don't copy it straight, or Snape's going to catch on."

"Hey, we weren't going to copy it," Emma took offense to that, but I merely shrugged once more. "Really," she added.

"It doesn't bother me whether you do or not," I said, scribbling one more line on the usage of the Bezoar. "At the end of the day, there's no reason to sweat for the knowledge you don't need to learn." I flipped open the book by my side, taking the citation and adding it to the bottom of the parchment. "Though the knowledge you don't know you need...that's tougher to decide whether you need it or not."

Fay blinked. "Bookworm," she said in the end.

"Guilty," I answered with a nod and a smile. "So?" I pushed my finished homework ahead of me. "Your choice, brave Gryffindor. Do the easy thing, or do the right thing." I pulled out a free parchment. "I'll work on Transfiguration in the meantime."

As I began to flip to the assigned chapter that McGonagall wanted read, and from which she wanted us to write an essay on the difference between transfiguring a needle into a matchstick rather than the opposite, I briefly watched Fay's expression flicker with doubt, but then she shrugged it off and began to earnestly read and copy my essay. Her cousin hesitated a bit more, but in the end she copied from it too.

I didn't care. I didn't expect to have company while scribbling down, and I had gotten used to being left pretty much alone. I was the eye of the tempest; an area of quiet and silent acceptance. Everyone knew whom I was, and what I did, and nobody really cared. Then again, we were all eleven year old. I highly doubted any of them thought about me for more than two seconds, and for the professors I probably ranked as a quiet boy, maybe shy, who gave them no troubles.

Thus, September began to bleed into October.

"You're Shade, right?" someone asked, and I blinked at the figure who asked it. Frizzy dark hair, brown eyes and a Gryffindor tie belonged to the strangely stern-looking eleven year old that stopped me while I was heading towards the library to do my homework. She had zeroed on me after lunch, and was pretty clearly looking ready for a fight of some kind.

Well, I still didn't have the Protego charm, and my Flipendo could use some more practice, but I was willing and ready to get the party started if she wanted a scuffle.

"Yes?" I hazarded.

"You're letting Fay copy from you, and if you don't stop, I'm going to the professors with this," the figure said, firmly looking ready to defend the honesty and sanctity of homework from all evil individuals. I stared a bit more at her, furrowing my eyebrows and half-losing myself in thought. I stared at her for a bit longer than the norm, so much so that she began to fidget.

"I will if you don't stop," she pressed on.

"I'm sorry but...Fay who?" I asked, nonchalantly feigning ignorance.

The girl's stern appearance slipped. "But I overheard her say she copied her Potion essay from you-" she began in a mutter, only for me to shrug once more at her words.

"I'm headed to the library to get started on my Defense Against the Dark Arts homework," I said as politely as I could. "If you want, after I'm done with it I can let you have a look and see if there's anything in it you can use in your own essay?"

The girl's eyes widened ever so slightly. "So that's it!" she blurted out. "You-Don't you even bother checking!? She just copied it all, don't you know the professors are going to punish you if..." I shrugged once more at her words. "And stop shrugging! It's rude."

"Amen," I said. "Well, I'm going to the library. If you want, you can come along."

"The professors..." the girl said, hesitantly.

"The fool knows not the dangerous precipice he heads to when he takes knowledge without having learned it," I looked straight back at her with a small smile. "When the exams come around, I suppose they will cry?" I mused, and then shrugged. "The greatest punishment of those who cheat comes when they are put to the test."

"I don't like that at all," the girl said. "I'm telling the professors."

I raised an eyebrow. "Sure. I'll say I just let them look at my homework to get the general idea on how the work was to be done. They're the ones who copied, so they're the ones who'll get in trouble. I won't hold it against you, and if you want, I'll keep you a seat in the library, but think what they're going to do to you. Do you think they'll appreciate you sticking your nose in their affairs?" I sighed, and glanced in the general direction of the library. "I'm going, or I'll never be done with my homework. Feel free to come whenever you want."

And with that said, I walked away much to the annoyed spluttering of the fizzy-haired first year.

She had to be a filler-type character of some kind, maybe Hermione Granger had taken her place in the trio and she had ended up in the background of the movies.

It happened. There was a first year in Hufflepuff whose name was Lily Moon, and she looked every bit like Luna Lovegood in character alone. Pale blond hair, half-asleep gaze, and generally looking like she had lost a bet with sleep, or common sense. Not to the drastic levels of the original character, but somehow she did fit the bill.

Fizzy-hair was perhaps the pale copy of Hermione Granger.

Fight on, pale copy of a protagonist.

One day, maybe, you'll make your one-liner.