Untitled Ravenclaw Story

(c)2005 by Josh Cohen. May not be reprinted except for personal use. JK Rowling owns the Potterverse; I\'m just here for a visit.

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YEAR THREE, PART TWO

(Note: This chapter contains Lime.)

“Hey, Goldman!”

I turned my face upward to the second level, against the common room wall with the windows, to see Robert Towns waving at me.

“Come up. I need a word with you.”

I shrugged at Terry, with whom I’d entered Ravenclaw, and as he headed back to the dorm room to get his Transfiguration book, I climbed to the loft.

Robert wasn’t the only person present. There were several other seventh-years and sixth-years, all of them boys except for a small, mousy girl that I think may have been named Fiona.

“Come in, come in. Have a seat.” Robert waved me to an empty chair – wooden and hard-backed, but not terribly uncomfortable – and collapsed back onto one of the couches. This was a large loft, known throughout Ravenclaw as the place where the Prefects spent their time. I had never been here before.

“Um. Can I… help you?” I was understandably a little touchy; some of the Ravenclaws up here were known for the pranks they played on younger students.

But Robert shook his head. “No, my friend, I believe we can help you.”

All right, now I was confused. “In what way?”

He held out his hand. In it was what appeared to be a pocketwatch – the inexpensive variety; I could tell from the sheen that it was made of brass. I took it. “Open it,” he urged, and so I did.

The interior did have a clock in it, and – I checked my watch – it appeared to be keeping proper time. The inside of the cover was a mirror. “Thank you, I suppose. But why are you giving me this?”

Probably-Fiona reached over – she was seated beside me – and twisted the cover of the watch around clockwise. When she finished, I had a fairly good view of one of the dorm rooms. Judging from the colors of the drapes hanging from the beds, it appeared that it was one of the girls’ dorms.

The person seated on Robert’s right was Roger Davies, the Quidditch captain for Ravenclaw. “I think you’ll understand a little better now.”

“But…”

“No buts,” Robert said simply. “Just accept the gift. Say thank-you.”

“Thank you.” I wasn’t sure if anything else was expected, so I asked.

“No,” said one of the others, who was leaning against the railing that overlooked the ground floor. “Just don’t ever tell anyone about it.”

“It’s sort of a test.” This from a sixth-year Prefect named Joseph Tormolen. “If you pass, you’ll find out. Probably in fifth year.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s an awful long time to wait.”

“Trust me, Goldman,” said Roger Davies, “you won’t need to know until then.”

“That’s it,” Robert said. “You can go.”

So I went.

Terry had asked me, as we worked on Transfiguration homework, what it was that Robert had wanted, and I concocted a quick lie about how he’d found one of my books on the floor of the common room and wanted to return it. I don’t think Terry believed me.

As I passed Fiona in the common room on the way back to bed, she whispered to me, “three things. First, only look at night. Second, if you cast the Bubble-Head Charm on it you can hear, too. Third, the hour hand controls the location.”

I nodded. “What am I doing with it?”

“Just trust us.”

She swept away, and I returned to the dorms.

That night, I closed the curtains around my bed. We all had the option of doing so, but no one did it often, unless we were sick and didn’t want to bother the others with coughing or sneezing. Oh, and when Kev would snore, one of us would wake up and close his curtains. But that was about it.

Around ten o’clock, I turned onto my side and opened the watch. The mirrored section was blank, but as I ran my fingers over the face of the clock section, I could feel the hour hand. I started turning it, keeping track by the glimmer of light coming in through a crack in the curtains.

Nothing happened as I trailed the hour hand all the way through to four o’clock, but as it got closer to five, the mirror started to resolve an image.

I bit back a gasp as I saw Sally-Anne Perks’s older sister, Julie-Anne – not very imaginative; their youngest sister, in first-year, was Mary-Anne – walk toward a bed wearing a white flannel nightgown. On a whim, I started turning the minute hand and I watched the picture zoom out.

I could see all of the fifth-year girls!

“Holy crap,” I whispered. The second hand did nothing, so I dialed the minute hand in far enough to see one of the other fifth-years, whose name I didn’t know, as she bent over to get something out of her trunk.

Very carefully, my finger trembling, I turned the hour hand to six. Nothing exciting happening there; a couple of girls sitting on one of the beds, studying what, on further examination, turned out to be a Divination text. But when the hour hand went to seven, I very nearly cried out in shock.

And as I sat in bed that night in my pajamas, I learned quite a few things about the seventh-year girls. I learned that Penelope, while she didn’t sleep in that dorm, still visited it. I learned that they were all very friendly with each other. I learned that Karen DeMarco and Lauren Maxwell-Thorne enjoyed kissing each other. Very much. And I learned that one of the other girls – I didn’t recall her name – didn’t wear a bra under her clothes.

I dialed back to six, wondering if I would see Fiona, but as I zoomed out with the minute hand, I realized that only four beds were visible. The fifth must have been Fiona’s, and suddenly I figured out why she had been in the loft with the boys.

Back at the fifth-year setting, I found the girls wearing nothing but their underwear – Julie-Anne and one of the other girls had removed their bras as well, and in Julie-Anne’s case, there was much more than an eyeful – and hitting each other with pillows. I could see them laughing, but since I didn’t know the Bubble-Head Charm just yet, I couldn’t hear them.

Back up to seven. I was thoroughly shocked to see one of the seventh-year girls over Penelope’s lap, her bottom naked and slightly pink as the girl who was very nearly my older sister spanked her lightly. I watched Penelope’s breasts bob behind a plain white cotton bra, a pale pink flush between them; I watched Karen remove Lauren’s underpants; I watched Julie-Anne’s ample chest bounce around as she play-fought with her yearmates.

For about ten more minutes, I dialed between five, six, and seven, the images growing more and more exciting until I felt a familiar clenching sensation in my lower stomach.

I twisted the cover back around and hid the watch under my pillow, and then made for the loo.

I wasn’t a fool about these things. Over the summer, Da had had what he called “the talk” with me. So I knew that I was aroused; I knew that I had an erection from what I had seen. And from furtive discussions with the other boys in my year, mostly in fits and starts, I knew what to do to relieve the situation.

At least I made less noise about it than Terry did.

And the next day, I asked Professor Flitwick when we would begin doing the Bubble-Head Charm.

The watch didn’t show me the most exciting things every night. One evening, I witnessed Penelope comforting one of the fifth-year girls about something, and there was nothing titillating about that. Another evening, Professor Flitwick and Madam Pomfrey were making inspections of the dormitories – Flitwick as Head-of-House and Pomfrey as a chaperone – so very little occurred.

But I noticed the little things. I noticed the way Karen and Lauren would touch each other casually at meals or in the common room. I noticed more than a few Ravenclaw sixth- and seventh-years sitting gingerly, no doubt having had their turn across Penelope’s lap. And I also noticed how, on the mornings after nights when I saw very few of the girls in their dorms, many of them were behaving very differently toward the sixth- and seventh-year boys.

I think I had a pretty good idea of what I was being tested for. And I had an even better idea of why Leonard Scott had sent me on that little mission last year.

Of course, I kept all of this to myself. I didn’t try to hide the watch; I just kept it in the top drawer of my nightstand. After all, if anyone found it, they’d just think I’d forgotten to set the time. I never took the watch anywhere but into bed with me, and I started sleeping with the curtains closed more of the time, even when I was too tired to be a spectator. And in a move that surprised even myself, I approached Roger Davies and asked him to procure for me some sort of adult magazine – it turned out to be an older issue of a muggle magazine called Playboy – which I kept tucked between the mattress and box-spring of my bed. Not that I ever looked at it. The witches in Ravenclaw provided a much better audience – and they moved.

One thing, though, that Robert and his friends had failed to mention was how much more difficult it would be to see the girls I knew, knowing what I knew about them. With Julie-Anne, it was easy; every boy talked to her chest when she wasn’t wearing her robes, so on the very few occasions I had to speak to her, I simply acted like I hadn’t seen her breasts bouncing around as her yearmates held her down and tickled her.

With Pen, though, it was a bit tougher. She was like a sister to me, and she was a friend. I almost felt bad knowing what I’d seen, but my sarcastic nature peeked its way out on a few occasions.

On the first Hogsmeade weekend of the year, my mouth got the better of me. Pen had asked me if I could pick up some quills for her, as she would be staying back to spend time with Percy, and I said, “of course. I’ll make sure they’re spanking new.”

It was about the fourth time I’d made a crack like that. She grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me into one of the nooks and crannies to be found all over Hogwarts. “Listen to me, David. I did that once, when I was babysitting you, and you were five years old!” Her face was very flushed. “You never brought it up until now. Why?”

I just stammered at her. I couldn’t tell her the truth, although I knew that the comment had definitely needled her more than a bit.

But she let me go. “Forget it. You’re probably just being a pain in the ass.” She ruffled my hair – which she knew I hated. “You’d better make sure the quills are spanking-new,” Pen said jokingly, “or else you’ll have a pain in the ass. Now get out of here.”

I swear that my blush didn’t fade away until we were almost at Hogsmeade itself.

“So, what are we doing in here again?” Terry asked. He and Padma were with me as we wandered through Hogsmeade. Right now, we were at the bookshop.

“Pen asked me to pick up some quills for her. It couldn’t hurt.”

“She was quite steamed at you this morning, though,” Padma said as I picked out a few interesting-looking quills. “What did you say?”

I did my best to control my blush, but I couldn’t control what my body was doing about a foot and a half lower down. Fortunately, I was wearing my robes over a pair of jeans, so it was less noticeable. “I had been teasing her about something that happened a long time ago. I guess it just got on her nerves.”

Terry grinned. “She was your babysitter once, wasn’t she?” I nodded.

“What does that mean?” Padma asked.

“Well, your family isn’t from Britain, right?”

“No, we’re originally from India, but Parvati and I were born here.”

Terry’s grin grew. “David, I doubt she’d have any idea.”

“What?” Padma was now fully interested.

“Terry, you tell her. Evidently you know all about it. I have to go find a book.”

I wandered off toward the back of the shop, looking for Underwater Explorations. According to Hermione, it had a whole chapter on the Bubble-Head Charm – we’d discussed it after Arithmancy a few days prior.

Just as I found the book and paged through it to make sure Hermione was right – like she was ever wrong when it came to books – I heard a loud, startled “what!” from Padma.

Evidently, Padma had never heard about British discipline, because she pestered the both of us about it all through Honeydukes until Terry ducked his head and whispered, fiercely, “fine, if you must know! Yes, I got swatted! Yes, it hurt! No, it wasn’t abuse! No, Mum and Dad didn’t cane me or whip me! Yes, it taught me a lesson! Are you happy?”

Padma drew back. “I’m sorry, Terry,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean…”

But he just laughed. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago. After about seven or eight, parents stop doing it anyway. I can’t tell you how many times I had privileges revoked in primary school. I swear, I’d rather have a detention than be stuck in my room for hours, staring at the walls.”

“What about you, David?” she asked, all innocence. “Same story?”

“You know, Padma,” I deflected, “you’re awfully interested in this.”

She blushed, but persevered. “That wasn’t an answer.”

“No, it wasn’t.” I inspected the wall of Every-Flavor Beans – Honeydukes had assortment bags as well as do-it-yourself – while I made her stew a little longer.

It wasn’t until I got to my third Bean selection – Sour Cherry – that she finally broke. “So, did you?”

“Did I what?”

I could see Terry fighting the chuckles.

“Did you…” she lowered her voice. “Did you get, you know…?”

“No, I don’t.” I moved onto the Roasted Pumpkin flavor and drew out about ten. “Did I get what?”

Her face was darker than I’d ever seen it before, and her whisper was nearly inaudible. “Did you get your bottom smacked when you were younger?”

I raised my voice back to its normal volume. “My parents never did it. Didn’t believe in it.”

Padma let out a long sigh, and then smacked my shoulder. I almost lost the grip on my bag of Beans. “You prat!”

Now Terry and I weren’t even bothering to conceal our laughter. “I take it where I can get it, Padma,” I said as I filled up the rest of the bag with various flavors I liked – and a dozen of the High-Powered Jalapeno Beans, their color almost indistinguishable from watermelon. No one ever asked me for a Bean twice, and since I detested watermelon, I would never make the mistake of eating one.

We paid for our goods and left the shop, passing by Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, both of whom greeted us pleasantly. “Oh, David,” Hermione asked me, “did you finish the Arithmancy homework?” I nodded. “Can I check mine against yours?”

“Sure, Hermione, but you’ve probably got more of the questions right than I do.”

“Yes, but you know the theory better than I do.”

“Hermione!” Ron said sharply. “If you start talking about school now, we’ll never get into the shop.” He spied the sack of Beans in my hand. “Goldman, may I?”

I picked out one of the dark-green Beans. “Watermelon all right?”

“Fine, thanks.” He took it out of my hand. “See you all at the Feast.”

“Bye,” Padma said as we walked away.

As the shop door closed behind Ron and Hermione, I started counting.

“One.”

“What?”

I waved Terry down. “Two.”

Their faces pointed expectantly at mine.

“Three.”

“BUGGER!”

Ron came running out of the shop, his hands at his throat, face crimson. I pointed him toward an ordinary muggle-style vending machine across the street and tossed him three Knuts. He ran to the machine and fed the coins in, then hit as many buttons at random as he could. A can of some kind of cola appeared in the opening at the bottom, and Ron opened it and downed it in one go. Then he stormed back across the street. “Goldman,” he said, his voice only slightly hoarse, “if you ever do that to me again, I will sic Fred and George on you.”

“You have to admit,” Terry said, “it was a good one.”

Ron colored. “Yeah. Right. See you at the Feast.”

The three of us laughed about that the rest of the way back to Hogwarts.


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First and foremost, the whole thing with the mirror and the timepiece was generously borrowed from Jackalman\'s tale \"Harry Potter and the Secret Nurse\" (link: http://adultfan.nexcess.net/aff/story.php?no=30550), and has been used with his permission. The \"test\" is all mine, though; we\'ll learn more about that as time goes on. But it\'s going to tie in.

Joe Tormolen was the weapons officer killed in the ST:TOS Episode \"Balance of Terror\".

I can\'t stand watermelon at all. Or really any kind of melon except pineapple. But I do like Sour Cherry. As for the vending machine, I figure three Knuts is enough, and David only felt it fair to help Ron out after he punked him like that. But I doubt Ron will ask David for a Bean again.

I am going to get back to Natalie, and explain later in this Year why Pince doesn\'t use that device anymore. But that\'s all I\'ve got for tonight.

Year Three Will Continue... Just consider yourselves lucky that I\'m not going to force you to leave me reviews just so I\'ll continue writing. I couldn\'t stop if I tried. (That doesn\'t mean you shouldn\'t leave reviews, though. I know people are reading this -- they\'re just not talking.)