After All This Time? Always.

First Year, Part Two, Chapter Two

****The Next Week**** Okay, so I decided to skip a week to get the ball rolling, everything was pretty normal and it will make SANSe once you read it.
I wake up at about four in the morning, and go downstairs to find Padfoot, who woke me up by jumping off my head to the stair case. The first thing I see is my dog, sleeping on top of Violet! I just gape at the sound-asleep Vi, not believing she's here in my common room, at four in the morning. How did she get in? I go over and shake her, and she sits up and looks at me in tired bewilderment.
"Qu'est-ce que tu veux?" she says yawning. Oh yeah, did I mention she knows French? I don't know what she said, but I don't care.
"Why are you sleeping on a couch in my common room?" I ask, and she seems confused for a second, before her eyes light up with understanding.
"Oh yeah, is that a problem? I mean, I was going to ask you if it was okay but, by the time I found this place, it was midnight. I can easily leave if-" I cut off her rambling.
"No, it's alright, of course, but why did you decide to come sleep here at midnight?"
"Oh, um... I kind of got in a fight with the Ravenclaw door, and it won't let me in. Flitwick and McGonagall said I can sleep here if I want." She says, looking embarrassed.
"How did you- You know what, never mind, I don't want to know. You can sleep here, but you need your stuff."
"Oh, Flitwick already got all of it, it's right here." She nods at a pile of her few belongings, Athena still asleep. We sit and chat for about ten minutes before we fall asleep, her curled up under me. We are woken maybe a half-hour later by James, Sirius, and a disgruntled-looking Lupin, who was most likely woken by the other two.
"Well, what are you two doing out here? For that matter, what are you doing here Vi?" Lupin asks, and I look to Violet to explain before I realize she is still asleep. I could have sworn she woke up. I give them the quick explanation, and they nod in assent before turning their attention to Vi.
"Should we wake her up?" Lupin asks, addressing me with his eyes on Vi.
"Yeah, she's going to be sore if we don't. You should wake her up, she won't move if I do it." I respond, and get off her so he can. Phase one of evil plan completed. He walks over and bends down so they're face to face. He probably would question it under normal circumstances, but four-thirty in the morning isn't a good time for pretty much any human bean. He gently prods her.
"Violet, wake up."
"Aller, je dors!" She says. Damn it, not again. Some days, she will switch in and out of French like it's the easiest thing in the world. There's also usually some Italian and a heavy dose of Latin mixed in. That's right, she is such a nerd she knows Latin. Where is Google Translate when you need it? After a couple more attempts, we decide that we should all sit on her. Nothing could possibly go wrong. We gently jump onto her with all of our weight. Huh, is that called an oxymoron? She doesn't even shift, just relaxes and sighs, flipping her leg over Lupin and I. Her leg is barely long enough, but I'm used to this; if you go next to or on top of her while she's sleeping, she will sling her leg over you if you don't resist. Phase two of my evil plan complete. She pulls Lupin closer, holding him like a 5'9 teddy bear. I know, these boys are kind of huge, Lupin is the shortest by about an inch, then James, then Sirius; I barely come up to his shoulder. Vi is shorter than me by about two inches, so she comes up to around Lupin's sternum. They fall into a deep sleep right there, with Violet falling deeper, still holding Lupin. I look at James and Sirius and silently ask if we should get them up. The answer is exactly the same from all of us: No, we still have more than two hours until breakfast, and Vi needs the sleep. Lupin also looks like he needs more sleep, and that is most likely why he could fall asleep in such an intimate position with someone he met only a week ago. Was it really only a week? It feels like all five of us have been friends for years. Huh. I extracted myself from the tangle of limbs, and the other two boys do the same. I can't help but take a picture with my phone that Vi water/magic-proofed. I look at the pic, and it's so cute that I have to send it to Vi. James goes out to stalk- *cough, talk to a girl named Lily Evans. She's a nice girl, but kind of snappy. Sirius and I play checkers, and we alternate winning games. We don't even do it on purpose, we just win and lose alternatingly. By the time breakfast rolls around, we are tied at three wins each. We go to wake up Vi and Lupin, only to find that they have reversed. Now Lupin is cupping Vi's small body with a leg over hers. I take another pic and gently wake them up.
"Pourquoi est-ce si bon de dormir sur?" Violet asked, and we all looked at her questioningly, this time Lupin included.
"Je ne sais pas, peut-être parce que vous êtes sur moi?" He said, and we looked at him, Violet in confusion and the rest of us in shock. Apparently, none of us knew that he spoke fluent French.
"Cosa intendi?" She says, this time in Italian. She uses Italian when confused, Latin when she is being the smart one, and French whenever. She switches it up often, but that's the normal pattern.
"Can you two love-nerds stop talking? We have to go get dressed and get breakfast and I'm hungry, so hurry up you lazy Violet." I say I pull Vi towards the stairs of the dormitory.
"I was having a conversation! Anyway, my clothes are over there!" She says, but I don't care about simple things like logic when I'm hungry.
"Yeah, I know, come on, I have clothes for you to use; we have to get dressed before breakfast is over and not in the common room, we have a Casanova present!" I say, looking at Sirius who started laughing.
"Hey, I have to make a living somehow!" He says. Does he actually get paid for it? Well, I think the jokes and our reactions are payment enough for the arse. Changing the subject now- Vi and I get dressed, each of us having a spare change of clothes in the other's trunk just in case something like this happened. We go down to breakfast with Lupin and Vi still blushing madly and debating on whether they think that L.A Meyer accurately describes the way women were treated in Boston soon after the Revolutionary War. Lupin thinks that she was a bit on the harsh side until Vi runs to the library and comes back three minutes later with a book on the female criminal trials of Boston, 1780-'89. I don't know why Hogwarts even has that book, us being in England, but it brings Lupin over to Violet's side in the matter. Eventually, they subconsciously switch to Latin, and I stop trying to pay attention. We get to breakfast, Vi sitting down at Gryffindor and attracting some odd looks. While we're stuffing our faces with our favorites, she fills us in on how things are going to work now that she is sort of in two houses at once. She now goes to classes with us, sits with us even though she did that anyway, but any house points she earns or if she was on any sort of team would be for Ravenclaw. I don't know why all this sprung from a fight with the door, but I'm kind of glad it did, even though Vi is no longer with her own species, also known as Nerdius Bookest. She has Lupin to geek out with, and now we can actually get our homework done, we being James, Sirius, and I. I'm sure Vi's done with the entire week's homework already and Lupin has been working through it slowly but surely. I know I should have started it, considering that it's due Wednesday and it's already Saturday, but most of it no one in Gryffindor even can think about doing, considering that the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Malum, gave us homework for fourth-years that he expects us to have done by Wednesday. He's completely unreasonable and a total jerk, yelling and assigning detentions to random kids just because he hates Gryffindor. If Slughorn wasn't head of Slytherin, Professor Malum would be. The Slytherins listen to him more than Slughorn anyway. Vi hasn't been in his class yet, but when she comes with us on Monday, she will either wrangle him into calm like a boss or have a nervous breakdown. We go up to the common room, Vi explaining to the curious people there the situation. I can't believe how much better with people she is now after only a week; she just explained something not-academical to what must of been at least twenty people. I sit down and start the huge pile of homework, and after maybe five hours I can see the blond puff of Violet's hair sticking up from the identical stack of books and work next to me. The Ravenclaws seem to have tons more work than we do, maybe four times, so that they finish at a reasonable pace or something like that. If she's working hard, her slightly curly, chin-length hair sticks up from the bun she always has it in, like a startled cat's tail. It's blond, the shade that looks just barely natural enough not to make people think you dyed it, which of course she didn't. If she wasn't so shy and sensible, she would have made the perfect slut. I, on the other hand, have dark brown, almost black hair that barely come down to my shoulders. If I wear my hair down carelessly, I look like John from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, minus the facial hair. If I'm careful with how I have my hair when it's down, I'm told it's stunning, but I'm way too lazy to do that. But I rarely put on my glasses, so that what contacts are for! We continue to work until Vi's somehow done, and I am about halfway through. I can't even see the boys, just their homework, though Lupin's stack is dramatically small compared to the other two. I get up and stretch, Vi bent on the floor in a classic cat-stretch. She takes an essay from my completed pile and looks it over, frowning.
"Rin, the assignment was to go over three medium curses and their counter-curses." She says, still frowning.
"Didn't I do that?" I ask, pretty sure I did.
"Rin, you copied word-for-word from the textbook, and you copied the chapter on defending yourself against werewolves." She said, and I think I saw Lupin twitch, but it could have just been my imagination.
"Also, Rin, your handwriting is almost illegible and the letters are so big that you barely wrote half a reasonably-sized paragraph on two feet of scroll. This is completely useless. Is all your homework like this?" She said, and I cursed loudly.
"Uh, it might all be like that. Possibly." I say, and she sighs and sit down in my chair.
"You go read the chapter again while I fix this." She said, and started wiping my work off the scrolls with her wand. I do as told, and by the time I'm done, Vi has re-written all of my homework.
"Here, everything is done. I got a few questions wrong and made the writing a bit bigger and messier on purpose to make it seem like you're not a lazy bludger that somehow always manages to convince her hapless friend to do her homework." She says, winking. I know she's joking, and we laugh before catching sight of the boys staring at us.
"What?" We ask, and Lupin pulls himself together enough to answer.
"Y-You just finished what I've spent hours on in the space of twenty minutes! You know what, I don't think you're completely human!" He says, looking at the paper in my hand and on Violet's desk.
"Shh, you'll blow my cover!" Vi mock-whispers, and he gapes before realizing it was a joke. We all laugh at that, and Vi checks over everyone else's work. She starts in on re-doing it for James, and is done and handing it to him before we notice. She explains pretty much the same thing she told me, and starts in on Sirius's work. She's done and handing it to him, apparently he did the exact same thing I did and she tells him the exact same thing she told me. She also explains that Lupin actually got all of it right and she just made his handwriting neater and did the rest of his work. She then crashes onto the couch and falls asleep instantly, with us staring at her, incredulous that she just did four people's homework in less that one-sixth of the time it took us. I'm suprised her eyes didn't roll back in her head. We put our completed homework away and split off. James starts to play chess with Arthur Weasley while Lupin and I read by the fire. He seems to be completely engrossed in the Hunger Games book Vi lent to him, and I've seen her read Bloody Jack for hours on end. By the time dinner rolls around, Arthur is beating James five to one, and Lupin and I are halfway through our books, and Sirius flirting with a second year while Vi knits behind him, having woken up about half an hour ago. We get up and head down the stairs to dinner, chatting happily. We sit down at Gryffindor, and for a second I just think about how nice it is to have Vi join us, to be eating with us, her practical family. Then I notice what she's eating. She has a small serving of mashed potatoes, some sad, limp string beans, a bit of vegetable soup that looks fairly awful, and a few pieces of bread with cheese. Oh, and a good handful of what I think are called "peppermint humbugs". She always did love peppermint. She eats all of it up hungrily, and I notice that she has almost no protein on her plate. The spread before us is delicious, but almost all of it contains meat, and what doesn't has almost no nutritional value. I would just try to find somewhere with tofu for her or something like that when we go home, but the swimming championships are coming up during winter break. She swims like an arrow shooting through water, and has been winning international competitions since we were ten years old. I also win international gigs, but in kickboxing instead of swimming. We have a training regimen that goes into effect one month before we return home for the holidays. We alternate days of swimming, kickboxing, and general exercise, with two days off a week. It starts in about three weeks, and she needs protein to help build the necessary muscle. Also, just to keep her alert, she has almost no energy now that I think about it, and she has been sleeping way too much. I resolve to get something healthy to her as soon as possible, and plot on ways to do that. I decide to go looking for the kitchens and see what I can do. I ask the boys if they know where to find it, and Violet nods in assent along with the three.
"Violet! I didn't think you were the rule-breaking type. Shame, we needed an incorruptible force in this group." James says, and Vi blushes scarlet.
"I didn't know it was against the rules, I just make a point of finding the kitchen wherever I am, and I decided to stay for awhile, cooking. The house-elves down there seem to be just bursting with joy that they get to work there, and when I asked them if I should stay out of the kitchen, they were practically begging me to stay until I may have offended them. I only asked if I should get Dumbledore to pay them, they all but threw out of the kitchen! I had to tempt them with my cheese-potato bake to let me stay, and they ended up eating the entire thing. They are awesome little guys, and I promised to come down again soon." She said, and I had to smile. Vi has always loved to cook, and I was always more than willing to be a guinea-pig.
"Vi, I always knew you'd end up friends with someone that cooks! That is like reverse irony." I say teasingly. She scowls playfully, and makes me nervous with the next sentence.
"Well, there may be some surprises in the common room tomorrow, tell me what you guys think!" Oh no, this is trouble. Vi is a great cook, but when she says "surprises", it usually is painful or glittery. Don't even think about asking. We go back to the dormitory and get ready for bed. Vi conks out on the couch again. She was worried that it would annoy someone, but all the Gryffindors seem to be cool with it. I trudge up to my bed, and fall asleep almost instantly.