G. Lippert - James Potter and the Hall of the Elders' Crossing

Several students, including Zane, ducked and called out as Ralph flicked his wand ahead of him. Ralph smiled sheepishly. "Get a grip, everybody. I wasn't gonna say it."

"Ralph, you're the real deal, mate," Zane said, recovering. "You went from floating a feather to a human body in one class, you know? My boy's got talent."

James stirred. "If you two are done congratulating yourselves, I'm gonna go find a hole and live in it for the rest of the year."

"Hey, I'll bet Grawp's girlfriend has room in her cave," Ralph said. Zane did a double take at Ralph, open-mouthed.

"What?" Ralph said. "It'll save him some time looking!"

"He's joking," Zane said, glancing at James. "I couldn't tell at first."

"Congratulations on making the team," James said quietly, standing and collecting his cloak from a hook by the fire.

"Hey, really," Zane said awkwardly. "I'm sorry about how things worked out. I didn't know it was that important to you. Really."

James stood still for several seconds, staring into the fire. Zane's expression of regret struck him deeply. His heart ached. His face heated and his eyes burned. He blinked and looked away.

"It wasn't that important to me, really," he said. "It was just really, really important."

As the door closed behind James, he heard Ralph say, "So who was it important to?"

James walked slowly, his head down. His clothes were still damp, and his body ached from the jolt of Ralph levitating him at the end of his long dive, but he barely noticed those things. He had failed. After the victory of becoming a Gryffindor, he'd been cautiously confident that Quidditch, too, would work out. Instead, he'd ended up looking like a complete fool in front of both the Gryffindors and Ravenclaws. Far from the spectacular aerobatic displays his dad had legendarily performed, James had to be rescued from killing himself. There was no surviving this kind of failure. He'd never live it down. Nobody was making fun of him now, at least to his face, but what would they say next year when he showed up for tryouts again? He couldn't even bear to think about it.

How would he tell his dad? His dad, who would be coming at the beginning of next week to see him and hear of his exploits. He'd understand, of course. He'd tell James Quidditch didn't matter, that the important thing was for him to be himself and have fun. And he'd even mean it. And still, knowing that didn't make James feel any better.

Zane had made the Ravenclaw team, though. James felt a stab of bitter jealousy at that. He felt immediately sorry for it, but that didn't make the jealousy go away. Zane was Muggle-born. And an American, to boot! Quidditch was supposed to be a baffling mystery to him, and James was supposed to be the instinctive flyer, the rescuing hero. Not the other way around. How could things have gone so totally wrong so fast?

When he reached the Gryffindor common room, James ducked around the edge of the room, avoiding the eyes of those gathered there, laughing with their friends, listening to music, discussing homework, snogging on the couch. He ducked up the stairs and into the sleeping chamber, which was dark and quiet. Back in his dad's day, the dorms had been separated by year. Now James was glad that he shared the room with some of the older years. They usually brought reassurance that all of this was survivable. He needed some of that reassurance now, or at least someone to notice his misery and validate it. He sighed deeply in the empty room.

James washed up in the little bathroom, changed, then sat on his bed, looking out into the night. Nobby watched him from his cage by the window, clicking his beak from time to time, wanting to get outside and find a mouse or two, but James didn't notice him. The rain had finally exhausted itself. The clouds were breaking up, revealing a great silvery moon. James watched it for a long time, not knowing what he was waiting for, not even really knowing he was waiting. In the end, what he was waiting for didn't happen. No one came upstairs. He heard their voices below. It was Friday night. Nobody else was going to bed early. He felt utterly lonely and bereft. He slid under the covers and stared out at the moon from there.

Eventually, he slept.

James spent most of his weekend moping about in the Gryffindor Common room. He knew that neither Ralph nor Zane could get into the common room without the password, and he was in no mood to see them or anyone else. He read his assigned homework chapters and practiced some wandwork. He was particularly annoyed to discover that he couldn't get his practice feather to do any more than scuttle pathetically around the table. After twenty minutes, he grew exasperated, growled a word his mother didn't know he knew, and slammed his wand onto the table. It shot a stream of purple sparks, as if surprised at James' outburst.

Saturday night's detention with Argus Filch came. James found himself following Filch around the corridors with a bucket and a giant, stiff-bristled scrubbing brush. Occasionally, Filch would stop and, without turning, point at a spot on the floor, the wall, or a detail of a statue. James would look and there would be a bit of graffiti or a patch of long trodden-upon gum. James would sigh, dip the brush, and begin to scrub with both hands. Filch treated James as if he was personally responsible for each bit of defacing he scrubbed. As James worked, Filch muttered and fumed, lamenting about the much better sorts of punishments he had been permitted to mete out in years past. By the time James was allowed to return to his rooms, his fingers were cold, red and sore, and smelled of Filch's ugly brown soap.

On Sunday afternoon, James went for a moody wander around the grounds and ran into Ted and Petra, who were lounging on a blanket, ostensibly working out star charts on sheets of parchment.

"Now that Trelawney's sharing Divination class with Madame Delacroix, we have actual homework," Ted complained. "Used to be we just had to look at some tea leaves and make up doom and gloom predictions. That was kind of fun, actually."

Petra was leaning against a tree, shuffling maps and charts on her lap, comparing them to a huge book of constellations that lay open on the blanket. "Unlike Trelawney, Delacroix seems to have the quaint notion that astrology is a hard science," she said, shaking her head in disgust. "How a bunch of rocks rolling around in space know anything about my future is beyond me."

Ted told James to stick around and keep them from getting too much done. Sensing that he wasn't interrupting anything personal, and that neither Ted nor Petra were going to bring up James' disastrous Quidditch tryouts, James flopped onto the blanket and peered at the book of star charts. Black and white drawings of planets, each emblazoned with names and illustrations of mythical creatures, circled and spun slowly on the pages, their orbits drawn as red ellipses.

"Which one of these planets is the Wocket from?" James asked drily.

Petra turned a page. "Hardy-har."

James turned the enormous pages of the constellation book slowly, examining the moving planets and other-worldly astrological symbols. "So how do Professor Trelawney and Madame Delacroix get along, then?" James asked after a minute. He remembered Damien implying there would be some friction between them.

"Oil and water," Ted replied. "Trelawney tries to make nice, but she obviously hates the voodoo queen. For Delacroix's part, she doesn't even pretend to like Trelawney. They're from two different schools of thought, in every sense of the word."

"I like Trelawney's school better," Petra muttered, scribbling a note on her parchment.