The Talent Show

Chapter 10 - Jeremy Lays Down the Law

Hey y'all! I'm super excited for this chapter! Jeremy is my favourite character at this point, so I'm always excited to write from his perspective. This chapter contains a lot of background on Jeremy that I wasn't going to include at this point, but it just kind of happened, so I hope it turned out okay. Also, thanks for voting and commenting! It makes my day every time. I hope you keep it up! Anyway, here's Jeremy!

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Jeremy didn't really know what was going on as Draco dragged him out of the Room of Requirement. When he'd told Draco that he was magically bound to a talent show, he thought Draco would have tried to laugh it off and freaked out in private. In fact, he'd been so confident that he was safe from Draco's indubitable panic that he'd dropped the bomb in front of Luna.

It appeared, however, that Jeremy had been wrong.

Draco was wigging out right in the middle of the corridor outside the Room. He was in such a state that there was a high likelihood that he'd still be there when Luna left the room. In fact, he would most likely be there no matter who walked by. And as much as Jeremy wanted Draco's ego taken down peg, no one was allowed to laugh at Draco except Blaise, Pansy, Luna, and Jeremy himself. And that was final.

And so, Jeremy grabbed Draco's wrist and hauled him the heck out of there. They rounded a corner and Jeremy shoved Draco behind a tapestry and into a secret tunnel. Inside, there was a small stone bench against the wall with a candle on it. Jeremy let Draco wander over to the bench and sit down as he took the candle and lit it with a spell he'd heard Hermione Granger use recently. Then, setting the candle in a tiny niche in the wall, he settled down to wait out Draco's panic.

An hour later, Jeremy was mostly finished his Charms essay and he was starting to get hangry. Draco had been sitting catatonic the whole time and hadn't batted an eyelash when Jeremy had announced that he was having some trouble with the essay. Normally Draco would have been more than willing to help out, as it was an opportunity to show off his 'superior knowledge'. But in this case, Jeremy knew Professor Flitwick would notice the decreased level of quality in Jeremy's work. And then the professor would ask him yet again if his housemates were giving him a rough time about his parentage.

You see, Jeremy was most definitely not a pure blood. He was, in fact, Muggle born. There was some wizarding blood very far back on his mother's side, but it was at least five generations removed. It was so distant that his family only remembered his four times great-grandfather as 'Crazy Uncle Rupert who thought he could fly". It wasn't until Jeremy's significantly brother, Dominic, had shown signs of magic that anyone had thought any more of Uncle Rupert.

Dominic had also attended Hogwarts. He'd been a first year in 1985 and graduated the first year Harry Potter attended, 1991. He'd received more than his fair share of torment from his classmates. He'd been part of a class when people were still horrifically bigoted, but were also a little terrified to admit it out loud, lest they be single out at a follower of He Who Must Not be Named. So Dominic suffered a lot of missing personal items and many, many silent glares. He'd had no friends for the first two years of his Hogwarts life, except other terrified Muggle borns. He often said that seeing Harry Potter arrive at Hogwarts was easily within his top ten memories of school because it meant that maybe people would start to realize that He Who Must Not Be Named was really gone and it was no longer acceptable to ostracize people.

Dominic was the reason Jeremy's mother was so worried about Jeremy at school. In fact, she'd told him before he'd left that he should be proud of his Muggle roots, but he should keep the information under his hat at all costs. So Jeremy had tried, but a few people had siblings who remembered Dominic and let it be known that Jeremy came from Muggles.