A Means of Survival – Chapter 09 – Fully Turning The World Upside Down

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Chapter 9 – Fully Turning the World Upside Down

By the time Monday came around again, the Misplaced Trio, as they had been firmly renamed in the minds of their classmates, was back together again.

From the outside it appeared as though nothing had changed, but for anyone who actually bothered to spend any time with the three, it quickly became obvious that reality truly was defined in the eye of the beholder.

By Tuesday, their situation seemed to be settling down somewhat, but perhaps that was only because everyone in Gryffindor was pointedly ignoring the topic. Reality, after all, is only so strong as the belief that is put into its understanding.

To Neville Longbottom, Reality was a capitalized word that existed only to constantly remind him of what he wasn’t. To him, all steps were covered in marbles and every shirt he wore had a sign woven into its back reading, “Kick me” in bright neon green letters.

For him, Tuesday mornings were the only days—well, parts of a day—where he felt somewhere near normal. The Gryffindors had double Herbology with the Hufflepuffs on Tuesday mornings, and it was here that Neville suddenly found that the world had righted itself from the topsy-turvy mess that followed him around on a typical basis.

That Tuesday morning was no different. Plants just seemed to react well to him and his methods. Unfortunately, the brief respite from insanity always resulted in a harder fall back down to the “normal” plane, and that’s where the day took on a particularly demented twist, if anyone were willing to listen to him.

It wasn’t until during their afternoon Defense against the Dark Arts lesson with that twisted macadamia nut called “Lockhart” that the bottom suddenly dropped out for him and everyone around him. Unlike most days of wackiness, the craziness did not seem to build gradually, but rather it erupted abruptly into a massive waterspout of hysteria.

From Neville’s point of view, and everyone else’s as well, Defense was easily the worst class of the week, other than Potions of course. Lockhart blathered on about some adventure he had probably just pulled out of his butt, while everyone fought to stay awake—and away from him. He was known for making the class act out scenes from his books, particularly Harry, who always looked simultaneously mortified and disgruntled at being picked. It was a look that Neville had been secretly trying to emulate, but as of yet had not had much success.

If he had bothered to look in a mirror later during that day’s class, he might have seen himself make a similar sort of expression, but it was likely that by that point he no longer really cared that much about such trivialities.

Unfortunately for everyone present, Lockhart chose to “volunteer” both Harry and Ron for that afternoon’s “lesson.” Even more bothersome was the fact that given the events of the previous two weeks, his choice in picking Harry might have even gone unnoticed by the boy, considering his general lack of awareness for the world around him. His head was filled to the brim with everything that had happened lately, especially late that night with Snape. He was more confused than a niffler in a junkyard.

No, the problem lay in Lockhart’s hasty decision in having Ron act out the part of a particularly disgruntled hag named “Pludge.” True to the hag’s inherent disposition, when Lockhart tried to demonstrate his truly twinkling tickling methods, Ron howled and attacked him.

He attacked out of an adrenaline spurred fear response, somewhat similar to the elbow he had inadvertently thrown into McGonagall’s mid-section the other day at dinner. This however, was a bit more . . . animalistic.

Personally, Neville thought he could see hints of the mandrakes in Ron’s fighting style; particularly as they had fought their way through the terrible twos. Absentmindedly, he found himself wondering where his earmuffs were as Lockhart shrieked and tried to get away from the furious second year who was still trying to pummel him down to the bloody ground with just his fists.

By the time someone thought to intervene on his behalf, Lockhart was curled in a fetal position on the ground, desperately trying to shield his balls with his hands. His lips moved in time with his breathy shrieks while he prayed to the witch doctor from book 3–a man?—whom Lockhart had made famous after teaching him about herpes clearing potions.

The class was clearly hesitant to involve itself in the fight. Instead, they seemed caught somewhere between horror at Ron’s gall to attack a professor, and uncontrollable mirth as they watched the man who was supposed to be teaching them about defense be taken down by a boy half his size.

Amusingly enough, Harry was the one to intervene, and by that point it was only about trying to keep Ron’s shoes clean.

“Mate!” He had called out desperately to get his friend’s fiery attention away from the creep who lay twitching at his feet.

“You don’t want to keep this up Ron!” He bellowed directly at him, his hands forming a makeshift funnel around his mouth.

“You’ll get blood on your shoes!” He yelled, desperate for something to get through to his friend.

At hearing Harry’s words, the class teetered over the edge and fell into bottomless mirth; some reacting so strongly that they laughed themselves straight out of their chairs and onto the floor.

Regardless, it got Ron’s attention, and he stopped kicking wildly at the whimpering cretin below him.

“Mum wouldn’t like that much, would she,” he bellowed back, oblivious to the mayhem breaking out around him as he looked his best mate directly in the face.

“No, I don’t think so,” Harry said, shaking his head furiously in an effort to keep himself from laughing. Why on earth was Hermione not stepping in? He found himself wondering offhand.

They soon got their answer to why Hermione was still on the sidelines as they stepped away from the seemingly harmless professor behind them.

“Duck!” She yelled as a strangled curse came from behind them.

They rolled to the ground and the curse hit the wall instead, shattering several of his signed photographs and upending others so that all one could see within the frames was a pair of ugly, half-shaven legs kicking wildly in the air.

Hermione had been watching their backs, Harry suddenly found himself realizing. He felt as though someone had switched out his shorts with a pair that had been kept previously in a deep freeze locker at the bottom of the lake.

He shivered inadvertently, as he remembered that nothing was ever to be the same as it was before.

From the floor, he saw Hermione pull out Ron’s battered wand from inside her robes. She had insisted on continuing to use it, even if all spell work still required a back-up person handy with a fire extinguisher.

And like that, he recognized the look in her eyes and saw very clearly what it was that she was planning on doing.

“NO!” He yelled, reaching out blindly and hopelessly towards her as she cast the spell that had taken Draco down the week before.

Neville watched all of this in fascination, aware that the class had fallen completely silent only moments before the shrieks from the lump on the floor began in earnest. It was a horrendous sound to just stand idly by and listen to without trying to do anything to help. Lavender and Parvati obviously felt the same way, and Neville was somewhat surprised to see them leave the classroom without being stopped. Everyone else just stared on dumbly, with the exception of Ron.

Unbeknownst to the majority of the room, Ron had scuttled on his hands and knees to the back corner of the room following the failed attack by Lockhart. He was currently rocking back and forth; pressing his hands desperately against his ears, in a useless effort to shut out the offending sound of Lockhart’s reaction to his dying organ. The longer the sound of Lockhart shrieking went unchecked, the more forceful Ron’s body rocked against its sound.

Neville noted with unease as the air began crackling with, what was likely soon to be, uncontrollable wild magic, followed shortly by the sound of the glass in all of the picture frames breaking, up and down the walls. To both muggle borns and those from traditional wizarding families, it sounded like a cross between drunken popcorn cooking and outdoor firecrackers mistakenly being set off indoors.

Neville didn’t need to be told to get out of there. His survival abilities might have been lousy, but his instincts worked just fine. He tripped over his bag when he stood up, but had it in his hands in the next heartbeat and was out the door second, just behind Dean Thomas.

By the time Professors Flitwick and Snape got to the room, the only ones left in there were the “Misplaced Three” and a bloody, beaten and still keening Lockhart.

The wild magic was building in the room and was beginning to cause the—now broken frames—to pitch off the walls at an ever increasing, and alarming, rate of speed.

Professor Snape looked and saw Hermione standing in the midst of all the destruction with an unreadable stony expression frozen on her face.

He reached her first and grabbed her arm, yelling “GO!” and pointing at the door. She snapped out of her trance-like look and ran for the door, not even bothering to grab her backpack—another first, if ever there was one.

Next he picked his way carefully over to where Potter lay on the ground, only a couple of desks away from Ron, whom he’d obviously been trying to get to when he’d gotten brained in the head by a flying picture frame. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Filius using mobilicorpus on Lockhart’s nearly inert form. He saw his look of disgust at the creature he was removing from the classroom and decided that he would definitely have to kid him about that later on at the dinner table.

He frowned down at Potter’s unmoving body as the beginnings of an earthquake began rumbling through the floor of the room. He looked up at the still rocking boy in the corner and decided to try something.

He took out his wand, pointed it towards the Weasley boy and yelled “Stupefy!”

He was forced to dive onto the glass littered ground beside Potter’s still unmoving body as the spell shot angrily back at him. He threw himself over Potter and covered his head instinctually as the desk from the other side of the room abruptly exploded, sending a thousand wooden shards violently outwards throughout the entirety of the room. He threw up a shield charm as soon as he could, but still felt more than a few shards cut fiercely into his back painfully. He gritted his teeth and let out a low grunt of pain as he began feeling blood dripping down the sides of his trunk and arms.

He kept his head down, just like he always did, as the mayhem began raining down around them. The boy underneath him moaned piteously and he silently added his agreement as the desks began exploding wildly in the developing maelstrom that was beginning to surround them.

Taking great care, he put an arm more fully around the boy’s huddled figure underneath him and began edging backwards, feet first, through the whipping debris. He took great care to keep the boy underneath him at all times, regardless of the shield charm he was hanging onto forcefully just above their slow moving bodies.

He was halfway across the body when he heard the first pain-wracked howl. Instinctively he looked down at the much smaller boy who was still beneath him, but was actually much comforted to see him still unconscious.

Making a leap in logic, he looked up carefully, as he sought to see past the whirlwind howling angrily all around them now. The desperate faced red haired boy had curled in on himself and was holding his stomach, crying wretchedly. It was obvious to Severus that with Lockhart out of the room, the original reason for that afternoon’s upset was now gone, and the boy at the far wall was beginning to lose the thread of his anger and dismay. Unfortunately for Ron, it also meant that he no longer had much control over the storm of flying objects that were still thrashing their way madly through the room around him.

The storm did seem to be losing steam, but short of accioing the boy through the instable mayhem into Severus’s likely unwanted arms, and possibly reigniting the stormy outpouring of wild magic, he truly had no way of protecting the boy from the physical environment around them.

So he sighed and then groaned at the feeling the sigh had elicited in his hurt ribs, before gathering his wits about him and inching backwards towards the door once more.

As he went, he felt the pain from his numerous wounds trying to lull him into unconsciousness. In order to combat that calm feeling as he inched through the still moving broken shards around him, he went through a list of the people whom he most despised.

Sitting at the top of that list most prominently was currently Lockhart and his damned need for seeing smiling, glassed in photos of himself all over his classroom. It was the broken glass that was being ground under his joints and limbs that he particularly found himself despising there in that moment.

He swore to himself that if Lockhart survived this experience and he somehow did not, he would come back and haunt the man until he either apologized or died, whichever came first.

Or both, he thought morbidly.

He was met at the doorway by a white faced and tight lipped Poppy, just as the storm settled completely around them.

Faint with blood loss and in a great deal of pain by this point, he turned and looked up at her with a very annoyed grimace clearly evident on his face.

“I hate Lockhart,” he said plaintively before slumping into unconsciousness over the still protected form of the boy whom he had now saved twice in less than two weeks.

When Poppy Pomfrey rolled him over, she was quite shocked to see Potter’s relatively unscathed body under his still bleeding and mangled one.

“Oops yourself,” she clucked under her breath at the young man who had continued to surprise her, even now in his surly excuse for adulthood.

A Means of Survival – Chapter 10 – Dumbledore Gets Annoyed