The Immeasurable Marauder

Flirting With The Dark Side

The morning lessons went by speedily. All the teachers stressed the importance of diligence this year as the O.W.L.s would be one step in the direction of deciding our future. As if I needed more stress in my damn life. All the while, people gawked at me and whispered, "that's the new girl." And, "did you hear what she did to Sirius Black?". 

Hogwarts wasn't that different from any other school- news, of any kind, travelled quicker than light. And boy, was I news. Maybe tangling with the most popular, high profile guy wasn't the most solid decicion I had made. And on the first day, what an idiot.

By the time I got to Potions, I was so irritated I nearly exploded when Slughorn started rubbing his fat little hands together.

"Lily, my dear, who is this?" He said with inquisitive eyes. Lily was his favourite student. It surely didn't help that she was clever, courteous and prefect.

"This is Yves Fleury Professor."

"Curious. Well, welcome Yves, welcome, welcome, welcome. Take a seat over here." He said gesturing to an empty table littered with ingredients while three cauldrons bubbled animatedly in the front of the classroom.

"Sorry I'm late Professor." Said a voice whose gravel timbre I was coming to recognize easily. And of course he was the other occupant of my work station. He threw his bag unceremoniously to the floor, picked up his stool and pulled it over so that he was directly across from me. I ignored this but it became increasingly difficult as he stared at the side of my face while Slughorn spoke.

 I looked around the class and noticed a few Slytherin's listening to Slughorn intently. Lily was seated next to a black haired Slytherin boy while James Potter who sat a few tables away, was shooting the boy daggers and clutching his wand. Even this peculiar scene wasn't enough to distract me from the insane boy in front of me. I thought, if I didn't stand up for myself, this Sirius was going to make my life a living hell. He was obviously trying to intimidate me and quite frankly, I had had enough of that from my own family. If I wasn't about to allow that from them, then I most certainly wasn't about to tolerate it from Sirius. I met his eyes and refused to look away and just as he looked at me, I looked back. Suddenly he smiled, the darkness lifted and he looked away. He was so strange.

"Off you go!" Slughorn said passing behind me. "You'll need every second Miss Flume." 

Sirius rolled his eyes at Slughorn getting my name wrong.

"Don't worry about that. He gets everyone's name wrong. Well, everyone except his favourites."  Sirius said moving a mortar and pestle closer to my side of the table.

"Thanks." I said a little bewildered again. 

He disappeared while I was reading the instructions and came back with armfuls of ingredients, settled them down and went back for more.

"Here." He said returning with yet more ingredients. "I got double."

"Thank you." I said again slowly eyeing the ingredients. What was he up to?

"About this morning..." he started, "I didn't mean to embarrass you. So, I, uh, I'm sorry."

I couldn't help but stare at him. I would have to keep an eye on this guy. I needed to find out a little bit more  about him and made a mental note to interrogate the girls about him after classes.

"You're forgiven." I said and he smiled his most dazzling smile at me before we both got to work.

We had a little bit of a late start but by midway through our double lesson, Sirius and I were working in relative harmony. It was almost as though he knew where I was in the recipe because he kept on handing me the knives, tools and instruments I needed without me asking. Were it not for his help, I would have spent more than half the lesson looking for everything. In return I showed him the easiest was to extract essence of Gillyweed and remove Scarab Beetle wings. At the end, Sirius's potion was a little too thick, and mine a little too grey but Slughorn was very impressed with our attempts.