Kathy looked up in mild shock at being drawn out of her little daydream of vengeance, but her face then quickly broke out into a grin.

"Hello! Hah, yeah- I should've known better than to give a greasy old tit an excuse." The sudden mental gearshift reminded her to get her textbook out, and she did so as she spoke. "My brother told me about him, you know? Hates everyone- but forget that. My name's Kathy. Kathy Kwan."

She stuck her hand out for a shake and raised a curious eyebrow. "You sound... American? Something else? I can't tell."

---

Alex spent most of the journey chatting with Hitomi, mostly about her interests, classes, and a bit about Hitoshi; having managed to make it to class without any casualties, he found a pair of seats next to each other and sat down, presuming she wouldn't take this moment to decide she wanted to go talk to someone else.

"So what's your aunt like?" he asked, crossing his arms on the table and leaning a bit.

"From the East side of Los Angeles, California." She grinned and shook the girl's hand. "Aurelia Valdez. My mama's family has been attending Hogwarts for generations, since there wasn't a school for magic in the Dominican Republic. My papa wanted to send me and my brothers and sisters to this new school in Sacramento, but my mama said we couldn't go anywhere but Hogwarts. It's probably for the best, though." Aurelia frowned and whispered, "They say the headmistress there is crazy."

She leaned back in her seat, looking over the girl. She was tall, though everyone looked tall compared to Aurelia, and kind of pretty, or at least she thought so. And anyone that could join with her in mutual hatred for Snape was a friend in her book.

"What about you?" she asked. "Where're you from?"

----------

Hitomi plopped down next to Alex and fished her Transfigurations book out of her back, flipping it open to the first chapter. She was determined to do well in this class, if only because her aunt was teaching it, and she had no intention of letting her aunt down.

She considered the question for a moment, glancing back at Alex over her shoulder. "My aunt is... Well, she's very nice, but she can be very strict with my cousins. Rudeth says she's even harsher on them sometimes because she expects them to do better. I'm not sure if that will apply to me as well, since I'm her niece. You'll like her, though. Everyone does."

"Aurelia, huh? Nice. Like... Aurora Borealis, or something." Kathy grinned. "I'm from Brighton," she answered, shaking the girl's hand firmly. "Though my dad's from Hong Kong. Been there once; 's gorgeous."

She stretched in her chair. Maybe this wasn't going to be such a terrible day after all.

---

"Oh. Hmm." She sounded like an interesting sort of person, at least; Alex wasn't sure how he'd like her as a teacher, whatever Hitomi had said. That was to be determined. "That's good, I guess- the nice thing."

He took out his book as well, not wanting to get behind. The professor would probably be in any minute, if his time was right.

Rivienne's first class of the day, on the first day of the year, had been second year Slytherin and Gryffindor. Rivienne quickly learned that this was destined to be a bad combination. Last year, she had fortunately gotten the Slytherins together with Ravenclaws, and Gryffindors with the Hufflepuffs, which seemed to limit the amount of damage the respective houses caused; this year, however, Slughorn had requested very politely to switch with her and, not imagining anything quite to this magnitude, had accepted it. (In retrospect, she should have been suspicious that even Severus was giving her pitying looks, but she had taken it as a remark on the quality of the food.)

To begin with, Crystal Clearwater was possibly the most exasperating tattle-tale that Rivienne had ever dealt with -- and Rivienne had two twin boys. This had not been a particularly noticeable problem the year before, since she seldom tattled on anyone from her own house and had little to report on the Ravenclaw students, but with an entire year worth of Gryffindors packed into one room, the only way to keep Crystal quiet was to begin taking away points for "irrelevant interruptions".

To make matters worse, Blaise Park seemed to have gotten more spoiled and insufferable over the summer, and Rivienne had half a mind to write home to the boy's parents and give them a few pointers. She made a point not to dislike the child himself -- after all, most children would act similarly in the same circumstances -- but she was growing rather tired of the boy's behavior. His parents seemed to emphasize a very hands-off style of discipline, in both the figurative and the literal sense, and chose to use money as a sort of behavior-modification tool.

When he was being relatively good, Blaise bragged very loudly about his summer break, from buying a new computer (apparently the cornerstone of the modern muggle world which Blaise insisted even the wizarding world could benefit from) to visiting Korea with his father, usually during an important part of the lecture. Rivienne supposed that she should have taken it as a sign that the wizard world was becoming more liberalized that even the normally purist Slytherins were hanging on Blaise's every word, but at the time Rivienne had been far more worried about making her students pay attention to their lessons.

To make matters worse, Blaise seemed to make himself a rather instantaneous enemy with one of the Gryffindor boys, and between those three students alone, Rivienne had taken away as many points in one period as she normally did in a full week. By the end of the class, she'd had to escort the two boys off to Professor McGonagall's office, and hoped very dearly that McGonagall would manage to fix the situation.

It was thanks to that particular endeavor that Rivienne swept into her own class several minutes late, looking quite worse for wear. She dropped her things on the floor near her chair and braced herself against the desk, turning to face that group of students. She was a young woman, at least in comparison to most of the other teachers. Her long golden hair was braided back out of her face, though several strands had slipped loose in the front to frame her face; her robes were scarlet and close-fitting, and trimmed in gold. She heaved a great sigh and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

"So, who can explain to me what Transfiguation is?" she asked, giving the class a weary but warm smile.

Huh. She was pretty; and this, she thought she remembered, was one of the nice ones. Kathy didn't stop grinning, and raised her hand.

"Turning things into other things? Ma'am." That sounded about right, at least.

Rivienne nodded. "Thank you, Miss...Kwan, isn't it?" She gave the girl a smile. "A simple answer, but an accurate one, nevertheless. Transfiguration is the art of shaping objects by your will alone. It requires dedication, concentration, and--something I'm sure my Gryffindors will have no trouble with at all--stubbornness." Her voice rang with fondness.

"Many people would say it is more difficult than Charms, but I am not so sure this is an accurate assessment. To put it into a perspective most of you will understand, think of magic as a Quidditch game." She tapped her wand against a small plaque on the edge of her desk, and it shifted smoothly into a golden ball. "A magician who is talented at Charms is like a Seeker -- quick and agile. Those who, like Professor Snape, choose to focus on the art of Defense, could be compared to the Keepers. Transfiguration, on the other hand..."

She paused for a minute, turning the golden ball this way and that in the light. She smiled softly. "It takes, above all else, power and skill, like being a Beater."

Rivienne tapped the makeshift snitch once more and returned it to the little silver plaque that shifted between the saying "WOLRDS BEST MOTHER" and what looked to be some form of to-do list that seemed to include a lot of things like "Make cookies for Rudeth and Thrall", "Buy Rudeth a dragon" and "Make Rudeth stop singing in the shower".

Quidditch? Alex thought as he listened. He sat up straight in his seat, keeping his eyes on Professor Gilespi. She did seem nice, and not at all like his own aunts- not that his aunts were all mean, but they ranged from the one who was, to the one who seemed to like her dogs more than her children, to the one who seemed to do nothing but garden.

He continued to listen.

Ah, so this is the part where I go back to feeling like I've moved to Mars. He glanced at Hitomi, looking utterly lost. The worst part is, I can tell that it's some sort of sport. Even if it's explained it'll just be about balls and... whatever you do with the ball. Or balls. Or maybe the Wizarding World uses little things covered in flittery-bits, it seems.

Hitomi seemed to notice Alex's confused expression and leaned in toward him. "Quidditch is the biggest sport here. It's a bit like football in the muggle world, in that respect. My cousins got to go to the Quidditch World Cup last year. The school games should start in a month or so."

Rivienne glanced at her in mild warning, and Hitomi clamped her mouth shut. She would tolerate no interruptions, it seemed, and she would make no exceptions for her niece. Hitomi supposed she would have to tell Alex more about Quidditch after class.

"Now, while some of your instructors may insist on giving long lectures for the first several classes," Rivienne continued, "I have always believed strongly in learning by doing." She grinned. "And on that note, please take out your wands."

Kathy listened to the description with interest; Transfiguration didn't sound hard, at least, if it was all about being stubborn. She thought she might like this class, if you could make enough interesting things in it.

She took out her wand- oak and dragon heartstring, black as pitch and smelling a little like it when it first came out of the box. After a bit of rumbling around and students digging their wands out of various pockets and containers, the professor conjured quill-feathers on the tables, long and white, and gave them a brief demonstration of how to turn them into needles.

Not quite interesting yet, but we'll see. She shoved her chair back a little to get some room- glancing at Aurelia to make sure she didn't jolt the smaller girl- and levelled her wand at the thing, glaring in concentration.

"You- be a needle. Do it."


---

Alex gave Hitomi an apologetic look, nodding at her explanation. Concentration and determination, huh? He could probably do that. Maybe. (Uncertainty was a bad sign, wasn't it.)

Still, he took out his wand when he was asked, feeling the strange, cool sensation of his magic actually focusing with this thing, becoming something he could recognize and, if only a little, understand. The feather should be smaller, more focused, metal...

Forcing her will onto an object didn't sound terribly hard, though Aurelia had a feeling she would be a little more capable of it could be accomplished by beating the feather up. That was typically how she managed with her younger brother, at least when her mother wasn't looking.

Aurelia pointed her wand at the feather in front of her, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. She thought of Professor Gilespi's Quidditch metaphor and wished that she actually could whack the feather like a Bludger until it did what she wanted.

-----

Hitomi took a deep breath, tracing little circles in the air above the feather with her wand. She had a feeling she would be much more suited for the theory of Transfiguration than the practice. Sure there was more to it than just pointing her wand and trying to make the feather change shapes?

"Alex, are you having any luck?" she whispered, glancing back at her Housemate.

Alex was focusing hard enough on the feather that it took him a moment to realize Hitomi had said something.

"Hmm?" He glanced, then looked back at his feather, realizing why she'd been whispering. It looked... possibly grayer, but it might have been that way before? It was hard to tell. "Dunno," he responded quietly.

---

Kathy glared at the feather like a tiger glaring at a small, tasty-looking rodent, willing it to become a needle. The picture of a perfect sewing needle rotated in her mind, little hook there, probably made in a mould-

She felt an itch on her leg and unconsciously moved her wand hand to scratch, and was rather surprised when the feather exploded into a puff of tiny, vaguely metallic-looking bits.

Hitomi tilted her head, peering over at Alex's feather, then back at her own. "Yours looks a bit more silver than mine, don't you think? Mine's still completely white. Maybe if I--"

On the other side of the room, something erupted with a loud POP, and a silvery-white spray rained down around them. Within a few seconds, Hitomi's aunt had bounded across the room and was attempting to rectify the situation. Thankfully, it didn't look like the feather had been successfully transfigured prior to exploding, or else someone might have been sent to the infirmary.

Hitomi smiled sheepishly back at Alex. "At least you haven't made anything explode yet."

----------

Aurelia grinned back at Kathy at the explosion, the feather forgotten for the moment. "That was brilliant," she breathed. "How did you do that?"

Kathy stood there with her mouth open for a moment before her brain realized she'd inhaled some bits of feather and sent her into a short hacking fit. The professor cast a quick Charm as she came over, looking very long-suffering, and suddenly Kathy's lungs weren't itchy anymore. She coughed once more and wiped her mouth, then grinned broadly at Aurelia with an expression somewhere between sheepish and proud.

"Thanks!" she answered. "Wish I knew, really. Do I get to try again now?"

"Here, let's see if I can make anything happen. Shouldn't be too hard, should it?" Aurelia grinned and swished her wand at the feather in front of her, concentrating for a long moment on making it into a needle, or making it explode, or whatever interesting thing she could get it to do. It quivered a bit on the table, but nothing else seemed to happen.

Aurelia sighed. "Ah, well, it was worth a shot, anyway."

The rest of the class passed fairly quickly, with varying amounts of success. By the end of class, only a handful of students had managed to convince their feathers to so much as change color. Only one student -- a Gryffindor boy -- had managed to successfully transfigure the feather into a needle, and Aurelia had threatened to turn him into a frog if he didn't stop bragging about it, even if he did get them five points. (She was fairly certain the boy didn't believe her, but at least he'd taken the hint.)

Professor Gilespi had assured them all that it would take time to learn, and not to be discouraged if they made no progress on the first day. Thankfully, she had assigned them no homework. Aurelia was going to need all the time she had just to finish the homework Professor Snape had assigned to them, the cranky old sod.

The end of Transfigurations meant the beginning of lunch, as well, and Aurelia was starving.

Once Alex had gotten an idea of how everyone else had done, he felt pretty good about his light gray feather, if a little lost as to why in the world the class had consisted mostly of staring at a feather and thinking until his head hurt. At least the teacher seemed nice, and he suspected there would be more to it later.

"So do you know anything about the Defense Against the Dark Arts class? I heard people grumbling about the Professor there earlier," he said by way of conversation. "I hope I'm not pestering you, by the way."

---

She had not, in fact, been given another feather, but Kathy kept grinning until the end of class.

"So, Aurelia Borealis from East LA," she said as they were packing up their things, "you sound fun. Want to sit together at lunch? I've got to go harass my brother up at the Hufflepuff table, but after that I'm fair and I'd kind of like to know what you're into."

Aurelia smiled, hoisting her bag over one shoulder. She liked Kathy, she decided. She had been worried that the other students would already know each other, and she would be left out, but it seemed that very few of them knew each other at all outside of Hogwarts.

"Sure," she replied. "You have a brother in Hufflepuff?"

-----

Hitomi smiled politely back at Alex. "Oh, you're not bothering me at all. It's nice to have someone to talk to, actually. As far as Professor Snape goes..." She hesitated. "Well, I haven't met him myself yet, but Rivienne--that is, Professor Gilespi--works with him, and she says that I should be respectful to him, since he was a hero in the war, except he doesn't like to talk about that and he'll take away house points if you pester him about it. He's not really bad, so to speak, just rather grouchy and not terribly fond of children. My mum even liked his classes, though she was good at potions -- that's what he used to teach, when she was in school. With as dreadful as I know I'll be at potions, I'm glad he's teaching a class that's mostly theory, and I'll have Hitoshi to help me there."

By the time Hitomi took a breath, they'd made it to the Great Hall. Desperate for a good seat -- namely, one that was close enough to her brother to pester him periodically throughout lunch, which wasn't too hard, since the Hufflepuff table was to one side of the Slytherin table -- Hitomi latched onto Alex's arm and dragged him bodily through a mass of Sixth Years, around a group of professors, and at one point nearly ran into a man that looked as tall as a house and about as wide. Eventually Hitomi managed to locate her brother, which was not a particularly easy feat. Hitoshi was easily the shortest student at the Slytherin table, and was half-obscured by a small group of Second Years standing around the table.

"Here we are!" Hitomi plopped down in the seat across the aisle from her brother, close enough that she could probably touch him if she reached. They'd managed to beat most of the other first year Hufflepuffs to the table, thanks to Hitomi's somewhat dizzying short-cuts.

"Wonderful," Kathy replied, heading out the door and through the hall, following the other students to the Great Hall. "Yeah, he's a fifth year- thought I'd make sure he's not lonely on the first day of school or anything." She laughed to herself.

"D'you have any siblings?"

---

"The war?" Alex blinked. "Wow, he must be old." And a warning to be respectful- yeah, he sounded like a real prize. Well, Alex knew how to deal with those- just keep your head down and deflect everything.

He was just beginning to feel that asking Hitomi if she minded someone hanging around her all the time was like asking a bird if it liked being able to fly when she grabbed his arm once again and dragged him off. He clenched his teeth and tried his best not to trip over anyone's feet; when they finally found their way to the seats, he saw at least why she'd been running, and was amused.

"Hello there." He turned and smiled at Hitoshi, then turned back around for the moment to look over the table setup. He'd presumed last night's feast was just for last night, with all the different and occasionally strange foods, several different fancy desserts, and a huge starry sky for a ceiling, but it seemed that wasn't too far off from the normal fare here. The sky-ceiling was a bright sunny day, and most the food prepared wasn't quite as festive- only one pie and some pudding, he noticed, and also no fireless sparklers stuck into hams or anything- but this definitely wasn't cafeteria food or bag lunch. He rather wondered how long the kitchen staff had to work to make this much stuff every day; but in the meantime, he grabbed what he thought was chicken salad and some mashed potatoes and enjoyed having gotten one of the first seats.

---

Thrall burst into the Great Hall not quite as fast as he'd like, partly due to the crowd of firsties in front of him and partly due to his mother's statement over the summer that if he and his brother ran in the hallways one more time she would hang them up by their ears over the doors and let them listen to the ghosts' stupid stories all through lunch.

He nudged his brother in the ribs and gave him a conspiratorial smirk. "Hey- if we've got with the firsts this year- d'you see 'Toshi and 'Tomi? Sure Slytherin won't mind us borrowing one of theirs, eh? Haven't seen them since Christmas and now he goes and does this."

"Tons of them." She rolled her eyes. "My sister Juliana is a Fifth Year, as well. She's a Gryffindor prefect. One of my brothers is a Third Year in Slytherin, and I've got another brother coming next year, plus a little sister who's barely out of diapers. It's not exactly a recipe for privacy. Juliana means well but she's always getting me in trouble, and I know if Mateo gets sorted into Gryffindor, I'll never get rid of him. He's like a tick."

Aurelia found a seat at the Gryffindor, a few seats down from the needle-boy. (She was going to continue calling him that until a more interesting nickname presented itself.) "Xavier hardly talks to any of us, though, not even Juliana. He kept himself shut up in his room practically all summer. I think it's the other Slytherin boys. He wasn't like this before."

-----

"Old?" Hitomi repeated, doling out a generous serving of cake onto her plate. She was sick of shepherd's pie. "Hm... Well, I suppose so. He must be almost fifty now. His first year of teaching was my aunt's first year at Hogwarts. My uncle says that he remembers Professor Snape being a prefect his first year of school. Mother says he was ruddy awful to Snape his first year of teaching. He wasn't happy that Snape was taking Slughorn's place, even if Slughorn did leave on his own."

She pushed her plate at Alex. "You really should try the cake, by the way. It's almost as good as my mother's."

Hitomi looked up at the head table, her eyes roaming over the teachers. The Heads mostly kept sitting near their respective Houses, with a tiny blond man sitting at the head of their table -- Professor Sapphire or something, as Hitomi recalled. Rivienne headed the Gryffindor table, and in front of the Slytherin table sat Professor Snape, looking at best mildly tolerant of whatever Slughorn was on about. Whatever it was involved a lot of swinging his glass around, and at one point he managed to completely soak the young professor on the other side of him. Snape made a comment, far too quiet for Hitomi to hear, and the poor professor turned beat red and slumped down in his seat.

"That," Hitomi said, pointing to the black-clad figure, "is Professor Snape, Head of Slytherin House."

-----

"'s not Hitoshi's fault if the stupid hat put him in Slytherin," Rudeth replied. It might have sounded reasonable if there were any evidence he were paying attention, but right now Rudeth's mind -- and eyes -- were elsewhere.

Rudeth had recently become rather acutely aware of the presence of females in the world around him -- a plight with which his brother was less than sympathetic -- and, having a remarkably low attention span, Rudeth found himself "falling in love" anew every few weeks lately. Of course, this time, she really was special. Really.

She was a Slytherin.

"Look, over there," he breathed, pointing to the girl who surely must have been his one true love. She sat between Hitoshi and a blond boy who felt the need to sit on the table itself rather than the stool. He saw her laugh at something, and though he couldn't hear it, he could imagine the beautiful, musical sound she must have made. "Sitting near Hitoshi. Isn't she beautiful?"

"Oh, wow. Big family." Kathy smiled. "Hmm."

She looked for her brother and saw him easily- he was probably the tallest boy at the Hufflepuff table, after all. She whistled at him, but it didn't quite carry through the Hall; ah well.

"Maybe someone should talk to your brother, ah? Or is that none of my business?" She sat her bag down in the seat beside Aurelia to claim it and grabbed a slice of cake on a small plate and a fork to take with her.

"Well- see you in a minute-" and she dashed off.



---

Alex smiled at Hitomi's cake; there wasn't even anyone here to make sure they ate properly, was there? He was tempted, but not enough; he took some dark bread that looked like rye or pumpernickel and made a sandwich with the chicken salad. "I'll try it in a bit."

Fifty? But his grandparents were young when- "Wait, are we talking about the same war? Fifty would be... nineteen fifty-eight, we can't be." Hitomi definitely seemed to be the best choice of friend for getting information out of, at least.

Alex raised an eyebrow at the tall, black-clad man. The man looked a little like a photo-negative of himself, he thought; tall where Alex was short even for his age, dark where he was light, greasy-looking straight hair where his was curly and puffy, and pointy where Alex was rounded.

Also, he looked like- well- like an utter cock. To the point that Alex found it hard to be worried about his next class anymore, if only because he seemed worthy of contempt, if his reading of the man was right.

Hitomi clearly wouldn't be enough to figure out what was going on in people's heads here. At least he had plenty of time.

---

"'Course it's not his fault." Thrall waved his hand dismissively. "But now he's in Slytherin, and he's... impressionable." Yes, that was the right word. "We've got to be good influences."

He looked where Rudeth was pointing, then snorted when it was something about a girl. Every girl at Hogwarts he seemed to think was some sort of glimmering goddess, and this was, once again, just some tiny blonde-

And then the boy on the table turned around, and Thrall's brain melted.

"Uh," he responded. There was a pause while he remembered what words were. "Uh, yeah- let's talk to the Slytherin table- uh, the Slytherins- at the table."

Hopefully Rudeth could pick that up. He wasn't sure he could.

"I guess it wouldn't have really touched you in the Muggle world, would it?" he heard his sister murmured, her voice distant. "I was about two when the war ended, so I don't remember much of it, but my Mum says it was terrifying. Most of it happened here, at Hogwarts." Hitomi gestured reverently at the school. "It started when Harry Potter came to Hogwarts, and--"

Hitoshi's eyebrows knit together. No, Hitomi was telling the story wrong.

"You have to start from the beginning, Hitomi." Hitoshi swiveled around in his seat to face them, his face impassive. He looked back at Alex. He knew the story well enough from his mother's tales. He could almost recite it by heart. "A long time ago, there was a dark wizard named Voldemort. He was powerful, and he was selfish. He wanted to take take over the world.

"Voldemort thought he was invincible. Then he heard a prophecy, that he would be killed by a child. He was incredulous." Hitoshi was rather proud of remember his mother's usage of that word. "He found the child, and though he killed the boy's parents, he couldn't kill the boy. His curse failed, and Voldemort was destroyed. The boy was Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived."

The surrounding students had all gone unusual silent. He could feel dozens of eyes on him, prickling like bugs crawling over his skin. Rather than acknowledging them, Hitoshi's eyes stayed only on Alex.

"Except Voldemort wasn't really dead. He couldn't be killed. He came back, and sought to finish what he started. He took control of the Ministry of Magic, and arrested all Muggle-born wizards and witches. He took control of Hogwarts. And then, when everything seemed to be going right, he meant to kill Harry Potter, the only obstacle left to his success.

"But whatever dark magic had kept Voldemort alive, Harry Potter had found it, and it was destroyed. He faced Voldemort, and true to the prophecy, he was destroyed, once and for all." He frowned softly. "They waged a bloody battle on Hogwarts soil. My sister and I were two that year, and all I can remember is hiding. Our curtains were always drawn, and the doors were always locked. The night Voldemort died was the night my mother opened the curtains."

Alex slowly turned around on the bench to face Hitoshi as he listened to the story, his eyes not leaving the other boy's face. He had a number of reactions to it, a few of which he didn't quite understand, and none of which he really had the desire to untangle right now, with what seemed like the whole Hall staring at Hitoshi, and by proxy, at him.

If he'd had any illusions at this point that he could pretend to be of wizarding blood and still even talk to people, they were gone now; and this little culture was far more complicated, and far more hidden, than he'd imagined, if some actual Dark Lord had been prancing about when he was tiny, trying to hurt people like himself, and he hadn't even heard of it. Unless someone was sending him on a snipe hunt, but... Hitoshi didn't seem the type.

Alex sat there for a moment, trying to think of what to say.

"You're very good at telling stories," he finally responded.

---

Thrall was distracted from staring at the impossibly pretty blond guy by Hitoshi's story- distracted enough to remember what he'd originally decided to come over to the Slytherin table for, at least. He narrowed his eyes; he'd been barely older than Hitoshi had been during the war, but it had been enough to affect him a bit. What had brought this up?

He headed over to the much shorter boy and mussed his hair a bit. "Afternoon, cousin; getting melancholy all over here without us?"

"It's better when my mother tells it," he said quietly, remembering the long evenings she sometimes spent with them telling them stories. He had only been reciting her lines, and it was less than perfect.

Crystal and Blaise, the two blond Second Years, were watching him as well. Crystal reached for his shoulder, opening her mouth as if to say something, when someone -- his cousin, he realized, far too late -- came up behind him and started messing up his hair.

He heard Blaise snicker, still lounging on the edge of table, and Crystal covered a smile with her hand. Hitoshi tensed and batted is cousin's hand away. "Stop that," he hissed, running his hands through his hair to fix it. Hitoshi found that he liked his family much more when they weren't actually around.

-----

Blaise only knew of the war through Crystal and his History of Magic class; his family was entirely Muggle, and at that age, he had lived in France, anyway. Most students in Slytherin preferred not to talk about the war, as they had been caught on the wrong side of it, and the few that did talk said very little. He knew that Snape was a war hero, and that it had something to do with a boy named Harry Potter, but he had never paid much attention to it. But hearing Hitoshi tell it like that... It made it seem almost real.

It was the oaf in Gryffindor robes that distracted him. The way messed with his cousin might have been cute, if it wasn't so hilarious. Blaise clapped his hand over his mouth to muffle his laughter, and very nearly stuck his hand in a mound of mashed potatoes. (The boy next of him made a rather indignant remark, but Blaise wasn't really listening.)

"Well, well, looks like our little First Year has more family," he mused, eyes raking over the twins.

"Oh! Well hello there." Thrall flashed his most dazzling grin at the blond Slytherin guy; it came off more like psychotic, but then, it usually did. "Has he made friends already?"

Thrall looked down to Hitoshi; his cousin wasn't really the type to make friends quickly, or at least hadn't been, but there wasn't really another way he knew of to say "if you're going to bully my cousin, I'll beat living hell out of you, but if not then by god I would like to snog you".

"And what's your name, then?" It was then he finally noticed Hitomi, and by extension, the white-haired kid 'Toshi'd been talking to. "Both of you, I suppose. Is this 'Tomi's little friend, hm?"

---

Alex gave Hitoshi a look of incredible sympathy, then gazed coolly up at his rather large apparently-relative.

"Alex Meriweather," he replied, holding out his hand. "Nice to meet you. I... think I'm friends with both of them."

---

Kathy was still watching the scene when she shoved a fourth-year Hufflepuff girl over a little and sat down beside her brother. She ate a bite of cake and watched, figuring he'd notice her at some point.

"Blaise Park," he replied, the barest trace of his French roots audible in his lilting voice. Blaise put one foot on Hitoshi's shoulder and nudged him out of the way, getting a better look at the Gryffindor. Gryffindors, he corrected, glancing over Rudeth, who seemed much too distracted by staring at Crystal to even recognize Blaise's existence.

Blaise smirked. "Another set of twins? Does your entire family come in matched sets?"

-----

Reed glanced up from his book, looking over his sister. "Hullo," he said mildly, piling a second helping of rice onto his plate. "Enjoying your classes? I heard you got Professors Snape and Gilespi first."

Reed added another portion of shepherd's pie to his plate.

Thrall looked at Hitoshi, and then back at Blaise, not sure what to do or whether this counted as 'bullying' or not.

"Blaise Park, eh?" That wasn't any Pureblood name he'd heard of, but then the boy looked Asian and sounded vaguely French, so that didn't mean much. "I'm Thrall- this is Rudeth-" he gestured, "and no, not really. Mind if we ah, continue being friendly and take a seat?"

---

Alex gave Thrall quite the annoyed look, but the older boy didn't seem to notice, so Alex turned to smile at Hitoshi.

"Sorry. Should we do something about this?" he said softly.

---

"It's sucked," Kathy said simply. "Exploded a feather in Transfigurations, though; that was brilliant. Might have made a friend."

"Haven't been lonely yet, have you, brother?" She grinned up at him.