Harry Potter and the Time Fluke

Common Room Commotion

If the silence was stunned before, it was completely, irreversibly shocked now. Harry swore that if a pin had been dropped in the corner furthest away from where he was in the Hall that very moment, it would sound like a gigantic boom to him.

Why did his peaceful evening feel the need to be shattered so violently?

"Dead." The headmaster's eyes were wide and filled with the most astonishment of all. "That's impossible; where is she, how can you be sure?"

"She... she's not moving... b-but her eyes are open... and sh-she's on the floor... and..." Patterway let out another horrified sob. "Sh-sh-she's s-so cold." The girl buried her face in her hands and continued to cry hysterically, convulsing quite intensely, in Harry's opinion.

"Where is she?" Dippet asked again, in a much harder tone than before.

"F-fourth floor c-corridor. By-By the painting o-of the fairy tea-gathering."

Professor Dippet nodded, not that the girl could see, and looked up at the rest of the student body.

"Prefects are to escort their Houses back to the dormitories immediately. That goes for the Head Boy and Girl too. Teachers are to go to the staff room; Albus, you come with me, Colletta, well, Miss Patterway's in your House..." Dippet glared sternly out across the student body. "No one is to leave their common room until tomorrow morning. Of course, we will be sending your Head's of House's in to explain the situation to you once the situation is sorted." He paused and waited for people to move. "Well? What are you waiting for? Go!"

There was a mad scramble as everyone got up to leave the Hall as one great mass of black-robed students. Harry would have surely gotten separated from his friends if it weren't for Orion's strong grip on his shoulder, guiding him through the swarm. Soon enough, he and the rest of his House were back in their common room, though he had become separated from Orion's hand once he had reached the dungeons. With the excitement of what had just occurred, no one in his or her right mind was even thinking about sleep. The first and second years crowded in the stairwells, with the third and fourth years creating their own little cliques around the walls. Most of the fifth and sixth years were also clustered about with a few sprawled out on various couches. The seventh years had taken control of the furniture surrounding the fireplace and relinquished their sacred spots to no one.

Or, at least, that was how it was supposed to be. That was how Slytherin politics were supposed to work when everyone was crowded into the common room like they were now. It was how it had worked any other time they were all confined to the common room.

But things weren't working as they should. The most blaringly obvious change was the single leather armchair; unarguably the most comfortable spot in the room. The chair always held a seventh year, always. Ever since Harry had first arrived in Slytherin. It didn't matter what year you were in, if a seventh year was there, you moved your arse away from the seat. It belonged to the seventh years. The special spot they'd earned after spending so many years at Hogwarts, giving up the same chair to people older than them. So when Tom strode in and over to the plush seat, followed closely by Dmitry, Abraxas and Orion, the last thing Harry had expected was for the seventh year who had already laid claim to the chair, to look once at Tom's approaching figure and practically leap out of it, handing it over without a fight. It was even more interesting to observe the other three position themselves around the chair; cold, scrutinizing masks perfectly in place.

Harry hadn't spent four whole years in Slytherin and not learned how to detect when something so conspicuous was clearly just plain wrong. As a Gryffindor, he might have taken notice of the act for a moment, pondering it before shrugging it off and deeming it unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but not now. Not here. It could be potentially dangerous and harmful to ones health to be unable to recognize such a blatant power-shift. However, instead of going up to question his friends about it, he crossed his arms over his chest and allowed himself to slink backwards, into a shadowed corner of the room and simply observe. He was, after all, a Slytherin.