Another excerpt from my book from the same night as the other, this time from Albus's point of view
The first thing that Albus Potter registered as he climbed into his bed and pulled the covers up was that it was sweltering hot inside the Hufflepuff dormitory rooms. It had been fine in the common room, but the minute they had followed the tunnels that led to the rooms that you could actually get some sleep in, the warmth of the earth began to surround them and it began to get hotter and hotter. He kicked the covers from his body and proceeded to roll his pajama legs up so that they wouldn't sweat in the night. He hated more than anything to wake up sticking to the sheets, dripping sweat and smelling as if he had been running laps with the entire Puddlemere United team before rolling around with them to make sure they all created one giant stink. Well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but still, it was a terrible thing to be hot in the middle of the night, and Albus would avoid it at all costs if it meant sleeping in his briefs. That would of course be unpleasant in a room of random boys who he didn’t know from Merlin, but he’d rather run naked than have to feel so dirty and sticky.
He felt a bit cooler with his pajama top unbuttoned halfway and his pajama pants legs rolled up to his knees, folded over all neatly and in line. It made him happy, the neat little angles of things, and any small bit of random joy he could siphon from the things around him was worth it. It had been a day of up and down emotions, along with the entire past summer in which he had often lay alone in bed at night (mostly naked, as it had been even hotter then, and his room was in the attic to keep from having to share with James) and wonder what he would do with himself when he was older. He hadn’t realized until a few days before the crucial train ride that he had been thinking much too far ahead. The face to palm reaction he’d had when it suddenly hit him that he was about to spend seven years in a school full of people who knew pretty much his father’s every move, due to the constant coverage in the newspapers, the stories that their parents told them, or the many biographies, histories and another other sort of bound and printed book that claimed to tell the “definitive outline of the life of Harry James Potter, the Chosen One.” It all made Albus a bit sick to his stomach, in all honesty, and he hadn’t been sure that he could take it.
The visit from Aeron Dash had proven to him that, no, he absolutely would not be able to put up with it. Aeron was a girl with an inexplicable boy’s name, but that wasn’t the issue at all. Aeron was about nine or ten years old, somewhere around Lily’s age but close enough to Albus’s that his parents had assumed that Albus did not need his own playmate over; he could just hang about with his bipolar little sister and her best friend. James had gotten his own friend over, a boy named Ben that turned out to be a Squib who lived several streets over. Albus had actually been impressed, for a few moments’ time, that James had a Squib friend, until he realized that the boy had been raised to basically hero worship James as the next Chosen One, or something of that sort. Albus wasn’t given the opportunity to invite anyone over, although he supposed it would have been pointless anyway; the only person he really wanted to see on a regular basis was Teddy or Rose. Teddy had been gone off to university in some country that Albus couldn’t even pronounce, studying to be some sort of professor. He had promised Albus to teach him a dozen new languages when he came home, and to tell him more about the stars than he’d ever imagined he could know. That had been comforting and even exciting until Teddy had actually been gone for a few weeks and had not even sent an owl or called by Floo once. Albus’s dad had only nodded and said that he’d always pegged Teddy for the type to leave and never look back.
Rose would’ve been an option, but she was off with her mother, Al’s Aunt Hermione, on a trip to some huge library in America. She had invited all of the Potter kids of course, but James had begged off, claiming he was too cool for wandering around in rooms full of books, and their mom had declared firmly that Lily was far too young to be wandering around the world. It was particularly amusing, since she was really not that much younger than Rose or Albus, but either way, she had gotten to throw her little fit about not being allowed to go before promptly deciding that she hadn’t wanted to anyway, since Rose was boring. Of course, she had changed her mind the next day when she needed someone to play with, but that was just Lily’s mercurial temperament. Albus had thought seriously about taking up the offer, but when Rose began to talk about the airplane they were taking, Albus kept a calm exterior and explained that he’d rather not go, thank you very much, but he’d appreciate a few pictures and perhaps something to mark his books with when he read. Albus hated being in the air, even on a broom, so he highly doubted he would have any fun flying around in a large metal winged thing. Of course, there was a lot more to a real Muggle jet than just metal and wings, but the concept still got under his skin and made him wary.
So he sat at home, alone in the kitchen, undecided on whether to go outside and chance finding his brother and Ben out in the yard, throwing around a Quaffle or boxing or something of the sort, or to go upstairs and risk being kidnapped and “made over” by his little sister and her friend. In the end, both sets of people he had been attempting to avoid ended up, inexplicably, sitting around him at the kitchen table. Between the questions about their parents (who were honestly just down the hall, why couldn’t they go and ask them themselves?) and the constant jabbering of the girls, Albus had learned his lesson very well that he didn’t deal well with people, especially those that were too interested in who his parents were and not at all caring about who he was and what he might be good at. He hadn’t made the decision for Hufflepuff that night, but it had not been long after, and now it was over and done with; he had actually had the courage to challenge the hat and he had outright won, despite the object’s attempt to turn his brain into a block of Swiss cheese with its disturbing little tentacles of the mind.
Yet, he wasn’t happy about his achievement in the slightest. The room around him was completely soundless except for a slight snore at the opposite end of the room. Al had chosen the bed closest to the wall, particularly so that he wouldn’t have to forever be in the middle of two people. This way, he could face the wall and feel alone, if he needed to, which he often did. He felt crowded even with just the few other boys who had made their way into Hufflepuff this night, most by accident instead of by design, as his mistake had been.
Yes, that’s what it was. A terrible mistake. He missed his Rose, who suddenly didn’t seem quite so pushy or bookish and who he wanted to simply pull into a hug and apologize to, taking back everything he had sat to the hat in his mind and worming his way into Gryffindor, where hiding would be harder. It would have been worth it, though, for a person that he could call friend. He had thought he might find a person like that in Scorpius Malfoy but that, too, had played out in an unexpectedly bitter manner as well. What a night.
The snub from Scorpius Malfoy shouldn’t have hurt. Honestly, Albus had recognized how silly he had been, acting as if he knew all about the boy who had said not much more than a dozen words to him and had clearly wished to be left alone that morning on the train. He wasn’t anti-social by any means; the boys and girls at the Slytherin table had immediately begun to speak with him and he’d spoken back, without any of the sort of hesitancy he had noticed when he tried to make the boy answer his questions. Why were they good enough and he wasn’t? It obviously wasn’t because he was a Hufflepuff, since he had been brushing him off the whole time they were waiting to be sorted. Besides, as a Slytherin, he didn’t have much room to judge a person by their house. So, Albus was left feeling inadequate and as if something had gone missing from his life without him even knowing he had possessed it for a while.
Even if he were not missing out on the friends he could have had elsewhere, Hufflepuff had apparently not been a very well thought out plan of action for staying away from the crowd. Sure, he would be left alone, for the most part, by the other students, but he wasn’t sure that he could deal with the quiet mutual dislike that all of the other students seemed to have for each other. Even the older students, who had been living here together for many years now, didn’t seem too enthusiastic about calling each other friends. The entire house just seemed like a junk yard of random parts, no two of which went to the same kind of machine. Sure, he had wanted to stay sort of anonymous, less Albus Potter and more just plain old Al, but in the land of Hufflepuff House, he might as well be a discarded bandage on the floor – no one was going to go over and pick it up to throw it away, but they weren’t going to pay much attention to it, either. He felt as if he didn’t exist, and that hadn’t been what he was going for at all.
It occurred to him that perhaps he had not been wrong about Scorpius Malfoy at all. He had thought, on the train, that the boy had wanted to keep away from the gossip that his family history could put after him. Maybe, just maybe, his seemingly instant comradery with the students of his looked down upon house wasn’t a sign that he was actually an outgoing boy. Maybe he was just much better at hiding than Albus could hope to be yet. The thought was comforting, and when he smiled and rolled over he realized that his legs were beginning to get a little chilly out in the open air. Happy that he wouldn’t be dripping sweat throughout the night, he rolled down his pajama legs, for the first time noticing that they were decorated in small red Quaffles. Albus rolled his eyes and chalked it up to hand me downs. His brother was more obsessed with Quidditch than any child had the right to be, and the fact that he was already a reserve chaser for his team didn’t help the matter at all. He didn’t understand why his parents had so much money for trips and books and all kinds of gifts, yet here he was, wearing James’s stupid Gryffindor-ish pajamas with their strange Quidditch theme.
Even the indignance at the discovery of the pajama bottoms could not keep Albus Potter’s eyes open at this point, and as they began to flutter closed, he wondered if he ought to be preparing himself for the day that was inching towards him as he drifted off. He had no clue what to expect, as James’s stories tended to revolve more around friends and Chasing than any of the classes and what they were like, how hard they were, or who taught them. If the Headmistress had said anything about the changing around of professors, he hadn’t heard it, so James could have already given him the run down on each and every teacher in the school, yet he had never opened his mouth once to help his brother out. Leave it to James. His last thoughts were of how unfair things seemed to be, and how much he had completely missed the boat by edging his way into the house of the badgers. The next seven years were not going to be much fun.
