Chapter 15
"Hm. This really isn't that bad… I can understand why my movie counterpart was so thrilled," I laughed to myself with a kind of frightened euphoria in my head as I moved easily and naturally on a battered-looking school broom. Flying on this plain, unimpressive stick was insanely exciting and ridiculously fun.
Adrenaline hammered through my blood. My heart pounded like mad, and the urge to squeeze maximum speed out of this ancient piece of equipment pressed on my mind. But for now I kept myself in check. I wasn't going to cost my House points or take stupid risks. Later—next year… in just one year I'd buy my own broom and cut through the air around Hogwarts every free moment I had.
"The main thing is not getting onto the Quidditch team. I don't want to waste my time on that too," I cooled my own enthusiasm a little, having already learned about the school's favorite game and how seriously many older students treated House competitions.
And yes, I liked Quidditch as a concept, despite its silly and blatantly unbalanced rules. Draco, a passionate fan of this "sport," had shared magical records with me—newspaper clippings, basically, which partly replaced television for wizards—of several professional and semi-professional matches, loudly commenting on the most spectacular moments… and there were plenty of those.
In that sense, Quidditch was more like team wrestling than football or any honest competition. Spectacle, speed, and serious risk to the health and life of every participant were the main priorities. Though that last part was somewhat conditional.
Magical medicine, at least in anything involving ordinary injuries, was leagues above even the most advanced Muggle technology… With diseases—especially chronic and hereditary ones like diabetes—wizards had it a bit worse, but still manageable. The real question was cost and how long treatment took…
I'd specifically asked Daphne about that. Unlike our blond friend, she was a bit more immersed in the topic. Her aunt—or maybe a great-aunt, I never quite understood—ran some department at St. Mungo's, so the Greengrass heiress knew a thing or two about magical healing. Not enough to tell me offhand how wizarding medicine handled nearsightedness, though.
But that problem could be solved with a couple of letters to Daphne's dear relative and a full consultation in reply, the essence of which boiled down to: vision can be fixed, but it will be expensive. And if an examination finds a magical cause, it will take longer, with a possible need to travel to Austria. Austrian wizards, apparently, were best at undoing curses tied to eyesight.
"So basically it's the same as my old life—there are treatments, but not everyone can afford them… and even if you can, you might not want the hassle, since there are still risks," I summed up our little investigation with Daphne. Mostly as a way to keep myself from doing something stupid on a broom that was absolutely not meant for it.
"Mr. Potter! Down! Down, I said!" Professor Hooch's irritated shout reached me.
"Sorry, Professor Hooch. I was thinking," I apologized to the woman with a rather striking appearance… basically an older female version of a witcher—gray hair, yellow eyes with a slightly warped pupil, sharp, mildly predatory movements…
A former professional athlete who clearly didn't shy away from magical doping. And as far as I knew, it was allowed in Quidditch, though not very accessible to ordinary wizards. As always, it came down to money and the right connections—potion-brewers, healers, and even alchemists.
"Be more attentive next time, Mr. Potter! You have good flying ability, but that is no excuse to ignore my instructions and commands!" the woman barked. Still, she didn't drag it into a full conflict. She didn't even take points, just dismissed us along with everyone else. She had a Slytherin team practice soon…
"What a nasty old witch. She'll take any excuse to yell at someone," one of my classmates muttered bitterly under her breath. Padma Patil, I think… a hereditary witch from India, whose family had recently moved to the islands. She also had a twin sister in Gryffindor, if I remembered right. Hooch had yelled at her too today.
"She's too used to training House teams. We only have her lessons in first year," I said calmly, understanding the girl wanted some kind of reaction from me.
"So what? That's an excuse to scream at everyone?" the Indian girl kept complaining, not pleased with my calmness.
"Well, something tells me it's the only way she can make our athletes listen. Quidditch players, from what I've heard, can only be stopped by a bat to the back of the head, a Bludger to the face, or Madam Hooch screaming like a banshee," I tried to turn it into a joke—and it worked.
One of the brightest girls in our year laughed, accepted the argument, and stopped trying to spit venom at everything around her. Instead, Patil tried to get me talking about Quidditch and whether I wanted to join the school team, since I was so good at staying on a broom.
In short, another conversation about nothing—something that regularly happened between me and most of my own Housemates. Ravenclaw might be known as a House of fierce individualists, but none of us could go without social contact completely. That would require either deliberately avoiding everyone, or having serious problems in the head.
And neither applied to me. So conversations like this weren't new. The only difference today was that over time, other Ravenclaws joined in, turning the talk into a full Quidditch discussion and persistently trying to push me toward joining the House team.
They didn't care that first-years weren't taken. The point was that it was cool, and you should announce your intentions as early as possible… maybe an older student would notice your passion, and next year it would be easier to pass tryouts. Ahem. I fought them off as best I could—these fans, burning with enthusiasm as the season approached.
This year, of course, Gryffindor and Slytherin opened the schedule, so the first match would be theirs. That didn't stop the excited Ravenclaws from bubbling over anyway. Though before the match, we still had the celebration of October thirty-first—Halloween.
It wasn't that this foreign holiday mattered to me, even if it coincided with the anniversary of Harry Potter's parents' deaths… A date so meaningful to many was an empty sound to me, notable only because we'd have shortened classes that day and…
"I'll have a chance to test how closely this world follows the events I remember from the films," I thought coldly, having already found many similarities and differences between reality and what those movies showed under my current name.
On one hand, Snape's first lesson really did resemble what I remembered… despite the fact that I had read the textbook and prepared for Potions. I'd also spent that entire introductory class carefully monitoring my mind, trying to notice any foreign intrusion—without success. I'd only wound myself tighter and gained no real benefit.
That wasn't a reason to stop. Despite the warnings about mental magic for wizards under fourteen, I'd learned some theory already and wasn't going to delay practice forever.
I might look like a boy, and the environment had made me a bit younger mentally as well, but I wasn't truly a child. I had reasons to believe the risk of "staying a child forever" was exaggerated—at least for me. From what I'd learned in books, the main problem with studying mental magic too early was the brightness and instability of a child's emotions.
Trying to control all that could affect the formation of mind and personality in a bad way. And foreign mental interference in a child's mind could do the same—while also risking the intruder. A traumatized child's mind could lash back painfully. That was somewhat comforting and, in theory, gave me a reason not to rush… but for me it still wasn't acceptable.
At fourteen or fifteen, someone would try to scan me with mental magic anyway. And if I wasn't ready in advance… I could face problems far worse than "childhood mind trauma." Not to mention, my mind wasn't a child's at all, which meant the usual dangers of studying Occlumency shouldn't apply to me.
Still, Daphne's warnings carried weight, so I wasn't going to rush into practice. First I'd absorb all the theory available, and only then move carefully toward something more. I wasn't about to pretend I was the smartest person in the world after only a couple months in the magical world. If it weren't for the overall difficulty of my situation and my frankly wild fear of mental magic, I wouldn't even consider learning Occlumency earlier than the usual timeline.
But that's not the point… The main point was that Severus Snape didn't differ much from the film version. Aside from looking younger than the actor who played him—nothing really stood out.
Much more interesting was the other wizard I was watching: our Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Quirinus Quirrell… According to what I knew, his body was supposed to house either the Dark Lord himself or a fragment of him, which should have caused health and magical issues, but…
Nothing. Just a stuttering man, a bit timid, and strangely obsessed with vampires. My sensitivity read him as not especially talented, but he could teach us the basics of his subject well enough—and my scar didn't react to him at all. In short, accusing him of possession didn't really work.
Which left me with a dilemma—how much to trust my old-life knowledge, and whether to trust it at all. It was a genuinely difficult question, and only on October thirty-first could I draw any real conclusion. Right now, every contradiction I'd noticed was too easily explained away by my Ravenclaw placement, my own shortsightedness, and the blunt inaccuracy of my memories.
I wasn't a die-hard fan of the Harry Potter franchise. I'd watched the films back in school and university and never really rewatched them… something I'd been regretting for the last couple of years. But I couldn't fix that now. All I could do was cling to fragments of old memory and rely first and foremost on the conclusions I was drawing right now.
Because the film knowledge I had so far looked painfully contradictory and… naïve. Like a fairy-tale show for young viewers, not something even remotely close to reality.