Chapter 17

(A/N: And this is the last chapter before things improve! Hopefully you stayed till now)

"Uh.....Hello?" I said in a timid voice, and this time I didn't need occlumency to fake my emotions. The crowd of angry people did that for me.

Before I knew what was happening, I found myself grabbed by someone and marched off to the Headmaster's office.

"Mr. Arrington, do you have something to say for yourself?"

The old man didn't have his usual kindly face, as I expected. Scolding people isn't done with a kind face, unless you are some sort of psychopath...which I am pretty sure Dumbeldore wasn't.

To be honest, I didn't want to be back here so soon but apparently, running at high speeds in a castle full of students ends up hurting a lot of them, and even though paintings cannot be murdered, they have some sort of "emotions" too.. so somehow I did deserve to be here.. huh, now that I think about it, it probably wasn't a good idea to dash through Hogwarts like that..

"I was worried about my owl, sir," I replied, as sincerely as possible, "In the excitement of discovering this new world and the wonders of magic I somehow managed to forget about the existence of a living being, a being that I was supposed to look after. So in my haste I was single-mindedly focused about the well-being of my owl."

The Headmaster gave a long sigh, and then said in a weary tone,"You're free to go, Mr. Arrington. Just take care to...refrain from doing anything like.. this in the future."

I mumbled a quick thanks and speedwalked out the door. So far, my days had been... exciting, too exciting in fact. While walking back to my dorm, I started to think about the events thus far and I thought I could, almost, feel a slight, a very minuscule amount of.. discrepancy in my thought process. I was about to investigate this when my thoughts were interrupted by a loud, piercing voice.

"GET OUT OF HERE, MURDERER!!"

The Fat Lady sure could scream.

I ignored her and proceeded to walk towards the Common Room, which promptly shut her up and she swung open even without the password.

I acted oblivious to the inquisitive students loitering around the room and proceeded to go to my dorm. Thankfully, none of my dormmates were here and thus I had a moment of peace.

I was about to continue my earlier ruminations but somehow didn't manage to get myself in the right mindset. Shrugging, I took to retiring to my trunk apartment and proceeded to read a few books the old fashioned way. Soon I started to feel drowsy and thus I let nature take it's course and let my exhausted self drift off to the realm of Morpheus.

The next morning, I woke up even earlier, too excited with the prospect of actual classes to sleep. Thankfully, none of my dormmates were awake to witness my nerdy side and thus were spared from being obliviated or worse, executed.

Anyways, after a light workout session that I decided to prolong a bit to go to breakfast on a somewhat 'normal' time, I found myself annoyed by the students who were shooting me glances or straight out talking to me about my stunts.

Deciding to think of this whole situation as a training regimen for my Occlumency, I promptly acted the part of a cold, aloof, apathetic boy, which resulted in increased number of glances but a drastic decrease in the talking part, so it waa a lot more manageable now.

All my excitement regarding classes evaporated when I found out just how..easy it all was. But nevertheless, I still decided to at least try to act a little more interested rather than complain mentally about how boring it was. Beating Hermione, though, alleviated some of that boredom and the pleasure that I felt on doing that was genuine.

After racking up a few House Points by breezing through Transfiguration and Charms, it was time for the dreaded Potions class.

Snape still tortured Harry and Neville and Gryffindor in general, but thankfully he didn't specifically do anything to me. I didn't earn any points but I didn't lose any either, so that counted as a win for me, personally.

After lunch, and a bit of a break, it was time for listening to Binns drone on and try to not sleep in that utterly boring History of Magic class. There was no Herbology or DADA class today but I did have an Astronomy class, which would take place in the evening, because apparently wizards don't have a method of stargazing whenever they want.

At night, when I was returning to the dorms, somewhat exhausted, (dinner was a very.. noisy affair) I felt a...jolt of sorts. Before I could investigate, everything went back to normal.

To say I was alarmed would be an understatement. I tried to not show my fear or dread on my face and ignored my housemates and dormmates as well as I could without straight out shouting at them.

I couldn't sleep peacefully that night. I kept trying to puzzle out what exactly had I experienced, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't. By the time I was thinking it was just a trick of my mind, I was too exhausted to care and dozed off.