Transition

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Transition By Firesword
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~ Chapter One: Hidden Message ~

Saturday, September 6^th, 1997.

Harry suppressed the surge of irritation and annoyance as he walked past the Slytherin tables. He could not think for the life of him why his archenemy still bothered to trade insults silently, by the way of origami. He swore extensively in his mind and pretended that Draco Malfoy was not there for dinner. A week had scarcely passed since school term began and already he felt rather stressed.

Bloody hell … doesn’t he care a bit about trees? the raven-haired Gryffindor thought crossly. He reached the bench where his friends had been waiting for him. It did not take an expert to know that his friends were quite apprehensive as he approached. I guess I must really look like a storm waiting to explode.

He smiled faintly to set his friends at ease and Ron heaved a loud sigh of relief. For the first time in a very long time, Harry Potter turned his back to Draco Malfoy. Once he sat in between Dean and Seamus, he started plying his plate with the delicacies available. He quietly ate his dinner and listened absently to Ron’s voice.

“Hermione,” the redhead sounded exasperated, “can you please stop reading and eat your dinner before it gets cold? Are you on a dieting program or something?”

“Fine, fine!” the bushy-haired girl almost shouted, looking at her partner crossly. She closed her thick novel with a loud slam, jolting Ginny, who had been woolgathering, back to the present. “Sorry,” Hermione muttered.

Harry hid a smile. He glanced covertly at the arguing couple and watched in wonder, thinking about just how grown up the two looked. He couldn't stop himself from noticing that Hermione had turned out very, very pretty despite her unmanageable hair. He snorted and Dean looked at him askance. Harry blushed slightly at his own actions. Getting older wasn’t such a bad thing to him. He was much taller and was slightly muscular. His golden complexion had certainly made him popular with the girls, even the ones in Slytherin.

Ginny had once told him it might be the combination of his sable-black hair and eyes of the color of high quality jade. The barber he had visited in Diagon Alley just before school started had certainly altered his look, and people talked more about his new hairstyle rather than the non-existent scar on his forehead. And it also helped - or maybe not - that Bill and the Weasley twins had drilled some fashion sense into him, finally.

“Harry, don’t explode, but Malfoy’s sending you another flying griffin,” Neville said in a hushed tone, leaning forward slightly to tell the teenager sitting across him.

He-Who-Triumphed-Over-the-Dark Lord took out his wand, looking quite bored. Harry was just as ready to mutter “Incendio” under his breath when something about the folded paper made him pause. It looked as though Malfoy had not just scribbled something; it looked as though the Slytherin had written an essay.

He set aside both wand and fork, but did not touch the griffin. Instead, he scrutinized it. Then he shrugged and took it. Nothing happened to him as soon as his fingertips touched the wings; he wondered if it had ever occurred to the silver-haired prefect to lay a jinx upon his works. He knew that the Weasley twins or their sister certainly had pulled enough pranks involving hexed parchment - all to celebrate the triumph of Light over Evil.

Then again, Harry smiled sardonically, one wouldn’t have expected Remus to impart a bit of knowledge of how the Marauders created the Marauders’ Map. As the werewolf had told him with a certain pride, the main contributors of the complex spells had been James and Sirius. Nudging his glasses up his nose, he peered at the ‘griffin’. His pair of bushy and black eyebrows lifted in puzzlement and a little in amusement.

IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou….

He withheld the sarcastic laughter that threatened to burst out and shook his head in disbelief. Without speaking, Ginny gave him a scrap of paper and a magical quill, a more expensive quill with a never-ending supply of ink.

“Here we go again,” Dean said in a singsong manner.

The entire Gryffindor table - well, at least the one where Harry was seated - burst into cacophonous laughter and they heard Professor McGonagall clearing her throat loudly in disapproval of their rowdiness. After all, most of them were among the oldest students in the school and it seemed important to their Head that they should be good examples to the younger students.

With a wide grin, Harry began to draw a very simple sketch of himself, with glasses and spiky hair, with a deadpanned expression. Then he chanted a spell and that very layer of drawing vanished. Well, not entirely. He could still see the faint outline of the original drawing. He used that as a template and started drawing another figure of himself, this time giving a florid little bow.

Seamus, who was following his every movement, snickered. “Good one,” he applauded.

Harry shrugged; the drawing looked good enough, although it still looked amateurish, even to him. He chanted the same spell and the layer vanished. Then, on an entirely new space, he created a speech bubble and made that one disappear before writing his response:

I believe that statement is mutual, Slytherin.

He uttered the invocation it took to animate the drawings and smiled crookedly as he folded the parchment into an airplane. He hoped that Snape would ignore their play, but after stealing a glance at the teachers’ table, the professor looked as though he was ready to jump and stop the nonsense between him and Malfoy immediately. Harry merely kept his expression bland as he let loose the plane.

He resumed eating his dinner and promptly forgot about Malfoy’s griffin. He was just about finished eating his mashed potatoes when something sharp hit the back of his neck. He started and turned his head quickly. The first thing he saw were the evil grins from the Slytherins, with the exception of Malfoy, who was glaring at him. He looked down and realized that his paper plane had glided to rest in between his feet. He picked that up and saw bright green letters scrawled all over.

Unfold the griffin, you four-eyed punk!!!

Punk? Harry bristled and he was stunned for a short moment. How on earth did Malfoy, a pureblood, even know what that meant? Still, he angrily opened Malfoy’s origami, nearly tearing it in half in his aggravated state. His emerald eyes scanned through the parchment briefly, and he saw that the Slytherin had actually written a letter. But what about? he asked himself, and shifted in his seat as he prepared to read whatever the cunning dragon had to say.

A less-than-fond greetings to you, Potty.

By the stern orders of that smug-looking, beak-nosed rogue of a Potions Master, I am to tutor you in Potions starting today. And don’t think that I like this arrangement, Halfblood. In Merlin’s name, that frizzy-haired Mudblood is more than welcome to teach you. But of course, I wasn’t given a damned choice in this matter, and you don’t have one, either.

You can ask the bloody Headmaster about this, but in general interest, it would be absolutely a waste of time. I’ve tried, and all he does is smile at me. Perhaps you people should have done him a service and let him die when he was supposed to, after You-Know-Whose defeat.

The point of this accursed letter is to arrange a meeting with you, so that we can plan your lessons without clashing into my other plans. So I will see you by the statues of the Three Knights, at the Ravenclaw Tower - Snape has booked an empty classroom somewhere up there for discussion - after dinner tonight.

Given the suddenness of this arrangement, we will just do revision for the first tutoring session - of whatever we have learned from the first year to NEWT level topics. Since there aren’t any curfews, be prepared to stay up well after midnight.

Harry stared at the letter in stunned silence and a hundred thoughts whirled in his mind chaotically. How can - How can anyone assume that I’d agree to this plan? he fumed. And Malfoy? Slowly, murderous thoughts began to surface, most of which had to do with chaining Snape and attaching the implacable man to the giant squid underwater.

He also had the entertaining thought of locking Malfoy up with Remus on one of the werewolf’s bad nights. Like what Sirius and James had done during their childhood, Harry had learned to become an Animagus, but, unlike his father and godfather, he was one legally. After his godfather’s death, he thought it was a good idea to be the companion the werewolf had lost. Harry learned to become a wolf, thanks to all those Animagus books he had found after spending some time at Sirius’s place.

The reason he had imagined the Slytherin with the werewolf was that Remus had admitted he had mauled a couple of ferrets during his earlier years, before the Wolfsbane Potion was invented. Harry had also heard news that Draco Malfoy was capable of turning into a silver-white fox, but there wasn’t any evidence that the Slytherin was an Animagus too.

A few minutes later, those thoughts dissipated and Harry felt the first wave of what was going to be a terrible headache. Bloody hell … How do I know that this is not a joke? He risked a furtive glance at the Potions Master and was disappointed by seeing the evil smirk on his face. Not given a goddamned choice. He snorted. Nobody even told me I’m included in a peer-tutoring program!

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