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Hogwarts: A Theme Park? | ||||||
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Category: Reconstruction Challenge (2007-5) Characters:None Genres: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama, Humor Warnings: None Story is Complete Rating: PG Reviews: 9 Summary: "Bucking Broncos" and block-expelling walls wasn't really what Harry had signed up for. But with a pillow-fighting, Doxy Powder sneaking Hermione standing over him, he has no choice but to get the job done. Hitcount: Story Total: 29061; Chapter Total: 4660 Author's Notes: Many thanks again to Mojomig for going through this chapter for me!! |
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Chapter 4: The next day arrived to find Harry still lying in bed, feeling utterly puzzled by the fact that it was nearly noon, and no Hermione had come barging in to wake him up. In fact, he found that so strange, he couldn’t lull himself back to sleep, even though he was still feeling rather exhausted and sore from yesterday’s work. “Ron?” he called out. “Ron!” But when his friend wouldn’t stir awake, Harry scrambled out of his bed and shuffled over to his best friend’s bed, and pulled the curtains apart. “Ron, wake...up?” he said, and his voice trailed off when he saw that the bed was empty. He felt a bit alarmed; Hermione wasn’t waking him up and Ron wasn’t in bed? “Ron!” He heard footsteps along the stair case and he started for the door, only to see Ginny coming up, still in her night dress. “Looking for Ron, are you?” she asked. “Hermione’s missing, too.” Harry was too busy looking at the long legs that were showing underneath the rather short dress, to focus on what the owner of these legs was actually saying. “Uh...really?” he said absently. She reached up to where he was standing and folded her arms against her chest. She frowned. “Do you reckon they’ve...gone off somewhere together?” she asked. “Hermione never said anything to me about it, though. She always told me she wasn’t ready yet.” Harry only just realised what his girlfriend was saying. “What?” he yelped. Ginny smiled mischievously. “Oh, you know,” she said, sidling up to him. “They’ve had feelings for each other for seven years now; it was bound to happen some time soon. This is probably the perfect opportunity for them...no parents, no restrictions...” She was standing really close to him now, he could count the freckles on her nose. His heart hammered against his chest, as he realised that this was probably the first time he had been this alone with Ginny before. She was right...there was nothing to stop them now. Just as they leaned forward towards each other, footsteps came thundering down the staircase next to them. “Good morning!!” Ron stood at the top of the staircase, looking slightly foreboding. Ginny groaned and stepped away from Harry, who felt a sense of disappointment mingled with relief. Ron approached them and they could see that his hair was tousled and his clothes were rather unkempt. Hermione followed him shortly afterwards, looking as dishevelled as he was. Harry noticed that there were feathers sticking out of their hair. Harry tried not to snicker. “Good morning, Ron, Hermione,” he said casually, and they both flushed. “I missed you this morning. You weren’t in bed, either of you.” Ron looked exceptionally flustered. “We woke up early, me and Hermione, and we went to find somewhere private to...talk, yes,” he murmured. Ginny rolled her eyes. “I’m not buying that,” she deadpanned. She nudged Hermione with her elbow. “What happened to all that crap about you not being ready yet?” Hermione turned beetroot-red. “I am not ready yet!” she said indignantly. “You didn’t think Ron and I...oh, for God’s sake! Be sensible! We did not do anything!” “I wouldn’t call it nothing,” Ron said, appearing hurt. Hermione smacked the back of his head. “Ron, you prat! You make me disgusted!” she snapped. She straightened her attire and started down the stairs that led to the common room. “Now go get dressed, the lot of you! We have to deal with Peeves! It’s already getting late!” Giggling, Ginny hurried after her, no doubt to gather all the juicy details, and Harry turned to Ron, who was still looking a bit hurt. “Mate, honestly, what happened?” he asked, still trying to control that snicker. “You’ll laugh.” “I promise not to.” Ron sighed, resigned. “Well, at first Hermione just wanted me to accompany her while she checked for damages in all the dormitories, and then we realised we were alone, and...” he murmured, and broke off, apparently trying to figure out how to rephrase his words. “...we’d just started to kiss and we sort of stumbled back on the bed, and...erm, it crashed down on us.” Harry stared at him, aghast. “It...crashed on you?” he said, perplexed. “Well, yes.” Harry couldn’t hold that snicker back any longer. “I knew you’d laugh! Bloody hell, Harry; I just wrestled my way out of drapery, be more sensitive, will you?!” - Breakfast wasn’t a successful event. Both Ron and Hermione looked rather disgruntled by the humiliation of what had happened to them, and seemed to take offense every time either Harry or Ginny smiled. They now led the way to the Slytherin Common Room, with Harry and Ginny trailing dutifully after them. Every once in a while they’d exchange a quick glance and let out a snort of laughter, which only subsided when Ron and Hermione cleared their throats significantly. Cuthbert wasn’t accompanying them this morning because he claimed that Peeves had threatened to hang him up by the ankles from the ceiling if he ever saw him again, and the proof was soon heard. “Cuthbert is a bloody fool He thinks I’m just a pretty tool And he huffed and puffed And became no more than the buffoon he...” The foursome made their way cautiously down the broken stone steps that led to the corridor were the Slytherin’s Common Room entrance was. “And he became no more than the buffoon he...he...” Peeves was floating inside the canvas that was hung on the wall on the furthest end of the corridor, looking out of place in the dreariness of the dungeons, with his bright colours and his loud voice. He seemed to be deep in thought, something which they never saw before; he was sitting cross-legged and had a look of utmost concentration on his face. Upon hearing them approaching, though, he looked up, and his eyes glinted with malice. “It’s Potty and the Weasel!” he said cheerfully. “And Miss Know-it-All, and Weasel Girl!” “Hello, Peeves,” Harry said warily. “What are you doing here?” The poltergeist gave them an impish grin. “Well, you see, I was trying to find a word that rhymed with puffed,” he told them. “But I’m afraid I wasn’t able to make any progress. Could you help?” “We’ll help you if you help us, Peeves,” Hermione ventured. “Ooh, bargains!” Peeves squealed in delight. “What can little ol’ me assist you with, Miss Know-it-All?” Hermione looked more than a little annoyed that she was being called a Know-it-all, but she didn’t say anything about it. “We need to get into the common rooms, Peeves, but we can’t do that since you’ve taken charge of all the portrait holes, and won’t let anyone past,” she explained. “As you well know, Hogwarts sustained a lot of damage during our battle against Voldemort, and we’re trying our very best to finish repairing the whole castle before the school year starts. We want everyone to have a clean and fresh start, see?” Peeves nodded, his eyes brimming with tears. “That is indeed very noble of you, young lady,” he said softly. “I’m touched.” Hermione blinked. “Really?” “No! Are you daft?” he screeched at her, and Hermione succumbed into silence, and Ron rolled his eyes at her in a gesture of ‘serves you right for being so stupid’. “So you aren’t going to help us?” Harry asked. “Nope.” “You leave me no choice.” Harry took out both his wands. Gripping one in each hand, he flapped his arms like a bird, the wands emitting gold and red sparks as they rose up and down. He then brought his arms before him and started juggling the wands from one hand to the other, sending up twirling into the air as he did. Peeves watched in fascination as Harry then moved both wands to one hand, and started turning his arm round and round, so that the sparks emitted down made a brilliant circle of red and gold. Harry did all this while muttering something under his breath. While Harry’s friends thought that he had probably gone bonkers, Peeves considered this whole act very intimidating. His eyes followed the wands as they went round and round, his eyes seeming to go out of focus. He then brought his hands to his eyes in an attempt to stop himself from looking. “Stop this evilness!” he pleaded, peering at Harry from between his fingers. “I’ll give you access to the common rooms, but stop the spinning and those awful sparks! You were planning to send me to another dimension, weren’t you? You’ve always wanted to do that. Everybody wants to. That circle of sparks...it’s a portal, isn’t it?” Harry grinned. “Sure it is,” he replied. “I knew it! I knew you were a rotten egg! You are no better than the others!” Peeves wailed. The portrait door swung open and he flew out of the canvas. “I’ll go and open the other doors, but you must promise not to tell anyone of this ritual!” “Okay.” Peeves gave them all one beady look, before disappearing with a noisy pop, and was heard chanting “Potty is a rotten egg” somewhere in a distance. The threesome didn’t say anything, and Harry grinned cheerfully at them. “Well, that was easy,” he remarked. “Did you learn some form of extraordinary magic and didn’t tell me about it?” “Where you really going to send Peeves to another dimension?” “What was that you did?” Harry smiled. “No, no and I don’t know,” he replied, nodding at each of them in turn. “I just improvised. It was Peeves who decided I was going to banish him. Now...shall we go common room discovering?” By the end of the day, Harry and the others had toured all three of the common rooms, and had marked places where repairs and enchantment-scrapping needed to be made. After reporting what they had done back to Cuthbert, the engineer clung on to Harry for a few moments, mopping tears of gratitude and joy that Harry was with them on the construction site, and only stopped when Ron whispered a strong imitation of Peeves’s “Cuthbert is a bloody fool”. As Harry lay in bed that night, he finally was able to find time to focus on his two special projects: the students' request, and his personal imprint on Hogwarts. |
| Reviews 9 |
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