Reverse Falls: A Hogwarts Story

The Adjustment of Gideon Pines

Being at Hogwarts was like being on a very long and magical rollercoaster. Sometimes it was terrifying, other times it was awesome. There were even times he wanted to throw up or scream with excitement. There was no in-between.

Thankfully he had Pacifica and Kathy to keep him grounded. They could help him get through the bad times and celebrate the good times. He told them multiple times before, that without them he would have gone crazy. Pacifica smiled and insisted that he could survive without them. Kathy, however, told him that he was right and he was lucky to have them. Then Pacifica would scold her and Gideon would laugh.

As he got to know Kathy better Gideon began to realize how special she was. Sarcasm seemed to be her native language and she was brutally honest about almost everything. Once she even asked how in the world Pacifica's chicken-owl, Hannah, could even exist without being a crime against nature. Or how Hannah could even be conceived in general considering that owls were chicken predators. This led to a long silence as Gideon and Pacifica absorbed this new information and started wondering the same thing. The only completely logical explanation that anyone could come up with was that magic was involved.

Kathy made Gideon contemplate a lot of things. She made Gideon wonder if Professor Snape ever washed his hair. It was so greasy that he was surprised that none of it had dripped into any of the potions he leaned over in class. His hair looked like if you squeezed it, you could milk all the grease out of it. This became one of the reasons they mocked Snape so much. The main reason however was because they simply didn't like him.

In their first lesson of Potions, Snape pretty much praised everything the Slytherins did and criticized everything the Hufflepuffs did. After class, but not before making sure no one else could hear it, Kathy whispered to Gideon that she thought Snape was angry at the world because some girl rejected him and he spent the rest of his life taking out his anger on all the wrong people. Gideon agreed as he had seen firsthand how fragile the male ego was.

When he was eight years old he saw an older boy named Nick, approach a pretty girl whose name was Wendy. He boldly asked her out, calling her love, and touching her which obviously made her uncomfortable. One of Wendy's friends pushed Nick and told her to stop touching her as if he knew her. Then she proceeded to tell him that Wendy didn't like him and probably never would because his ego was bigger than a T-Rex and he had a brain the size of a walnut. She told him that he should just stop before he made an even bigger fool of himself and move along.

Later that day Gideon got beaten up by Nick for seemingly no reason whatsoever.

So Gideon could see why Kathy thought that Professor Snape's ego was shattered. Getting rejected turned people into jerks, especially if they were boys.

Although all his other teachers were very kind. Professor Flitwick who taught charms had taught them various beginner charms and did his best to help them succeed. He wasn't like Snape, who would sneer every time someone not in Slytherin would do something wrong. Flitwick warmly congratulated every student who got it right and kindly helped those who didn't.

Gideon found out early on that he had quite an aptitude for charms and was constantly praised by Flitwick. He had earned Hufflepuff house a lot of points in charms that people started calling him Prince Charming.

Actually, Pacifica called him that one time and Kathy started feeding the flames until everyone in Hufflepuff was calling him Prince Charming.

Transfiguration, however, was a different story. It wasn't that he was terrible at the subject, but he certainly wasn't as good at it as he was at charms. Gideon blamed it on his inability to work under pressure. He found that Professor McGonagall was very strict and every time she passed him in class he tensed up. As a result, he ended up messing up more than one transfiguration spell.