Harry Potter: Pandora's Box

Chapter 5: Classes and Quidditch

Summary: The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Chapter 5: Classes and Quidditch

Harry had to confess he was bored. It was something that he'd been afraid of. Harry had spent years before Hogwarts studying with Pandora. All the time they'd spent focusing on his control and intent for wandless magic, not to mention all the effort put into learning theory since they couldn't very well do much else without a wand, meant that Harry was well ahead of his peers. Well, most of his peers, anyway. There were a few students from old families that were like him, seemingly bored and able to perform any of the spells they'd tried so far on a first or second attempt.

Most annoyingly, the professors seemed to have expected it, and never gave points when those students got things right first. Instead, points were reserved for those that got things after an obvious effort, their struggle showing that they'd not known the spell beforehand. It made sense, of course. But it felt bitterly unfair to be held back to the average speed of students. A feeling that made Harry uncomfortably aware how the distain for muggleborn students could develop so easily in their wizarding-born counterparts.

All of it meant that he'd been forced to sit through extremely boring lectures. And that even the practical magic portions of any class were brutally mind-numbing. Harry had gone through the entire book of Grade 1 standard spells already, making sure he could perform them all, and was now spending most of his class time trying to get them to work wandlessly. Which, at least, was a proper challenge. He had caused a bit of a stir his first few days by refusing the use incantations. But even that had only gotten him a small amount of points and some odd looks. Now, people seemed to simply be taking it for granted that he was 'Harry Potter' and thus nothing he did was really all that normal. As if he hadn't put in literally years worth of hard work on the theory and on sharpening his intent and control.

Of all the classes, only Potions and Herbology had really been truly new to Harry. And one of those was taught by an overgrown bat with anger issues who had tried to single Harry out in their first ever class. It hadn't worked. Harry had known the answers to his first two questions all on his own, with Pandora easily providing the rest as Snape increasingly tried to trip him up. The actual brewing had, at least, been mildly interesting. With the enchantments on his glasses, he'd been able to see and understand the interactions of the steps to making potions in a way that fascinated him...and frustrated Snape, as Harry kept turning in nearly flawless work.

Astronomy, too, had been a bit of a standout. But that had more to do with the fact Harry had always been fascinated by the stars and the idea of space than it did the magic of them. Frustratingly, even his most basic questions to the professor had been met with confusion. He'd been dying to know if magic would work in space...for a number of reasons. While professor Sinestra had been quite interested in the answer herself, even promptly citing several theories...she'd also disappointingly informed him that no one actually knew the answer. No wizard had, to anyone's knowledge, made it up to space in order to find out. That had added aggravation to even the most enjoyable of his classes. Add in that Harry was not a particular fan of gardening, leaving Herbology as more an annoyance than anything, and the result was classes as a whole being very much a disappointment.

Almost worse than the classes, however, had been the fact that he'd completely failed to really connect with any of his fellow Gryffindors. He was friendly enough with the boys in his dorm, but only on the level of affable strangers. The less said about the girls, the better. At thirteen, they were all far enough into puberty to have gotten past the idea of the other gender being 'icky,' at least. Yet for all that they were pretty enough, the three Gryffindor witches in his year all rubbed him the wrong way. Lavender and Parvarti were flighty, more interested in gossip and Teen Witch Weekly than magic. And Hermoine was such a creature of order that she practically made his skin itch. Harry had never yet met a rule he really liked the look of...and Pandora was based on several witches whose idea of rules was to treat them as 'guidelines,' at best.