The Many Musings of Albus Potter

vii. phoenixes

vii. phoenixes

The worst thing about exams is the heat.

Heat seems to find a way to pour through every crevice and crack, every obscure little corner and hole of Hogwarts, it seems. It's inescapable.

And what's worse is, Albus is involuntarily leaking random bouts of magic everywhere. Which is just bloody perfect timing, he thinks. Absolutely, utterly convenient that magic should be spilling out of him right when he's supposed to be graded on how well he controls his magic. It's like his own fate has set out to make every possible aspect of life as difficult as possible for him.

It's as though it's not enough that his friendship with Scorpius is non-existent, or that his relationship with his father is continually deteriorating, or that Lily's cannot seem to suppress the temptation to scream out 'Hey Al!' every time he walks into the Great Hall for dinner in front of practically the entire school. Oh no. This has to be the proverbial icing on the cake. Or perhaps he's got it all wrong and there's more to come. Maybe Gran will knit him a particularly camp jumper this year for Christmas, which'll reinforce James' very particular thoughts on Albus' sexuality.

He realized that things were going south for him sometime in May, just a few weeks short of his first OWL examination. It had started out a perfectly normal day. Albus and Scorpius had gotten into another row (their fifth one of the week) at the end of which Scorpius stormed off in quite a bit of a temper and Albus retreated to the dark confines of the school library. He had been so angry. Angrier than usual, if he remembers correctly. Perhaps it was because it'd been so bloody hot that day -- so hot, in fact, Albus had half a mind to strip off there and then and transfigure every library book into huge blocks of ice he could lay on top of -- or perhaps it was the fact that Scorpius had most likely gone off to the bloody Black Lake, where Rose Granger-Fucking-Weasley would be, and they'd spend the rest of their afternoon there talking to that damn merfreak or revising for their OWLs together or worse -- canoodling.

And that was it. The very fleeting thought of it had acted as some sort of a trigger. Like a match catching on fire. That was what it'd felt like. His whole body was on fire. No. His body was the fire. And that's when he had also noticed the smoke in front of him. Correction -- his study desk was now on fire.

It was nothing a quick aguamenti couldn't have solved under normal circumstances. Except, of course, one cannot exactly place spontaneous combustion under the 'normal circumstances' category, which Albus quickly realized was the case when he tried every spell he knew that could dispel fire, and none of them worked. In the end, he was forced to run for help and the result of it all was a very pissed off librarian, fifty points from Slytherin, and three weeks worth of detentions, of which he spent two trying to get paint over the charred surface of the table and the walls surrounding it. (Albus couldn't even remember at what point the fire had reached the walls).

Naturally, Albus wasn't about to go around confessing he could conjure wandless magic at the tender age of fifteen and so had to allow his professors to come to a conclusion that he had simply been trying out some sort of banned Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes product. His father, obviously, was not at all pleased to receive an owl informing him of his son's dangerous misdemeanor.

"I don't know if you're trying to replicate what your uncles did back in my fifth year," Harry wrote back to him in one of his usually strongly-worded letters, "or if you're just trying to antagonize me with another one of your nasty little tricks. Frankly, I'm just not too bothered about what goes through your mind anymore. Anyway, mum, me, Lily, James and his girlfriend are going off to Hawaii over the summer. If you decide you'd like to grace us with your presence this year, owl me."