Harry opened his mouth to argue, remembered exactly what he had said, and closed it. "Yeah, I suppose I deserve that." The denizens of the Gryffindor table (minus Hermione) all jumped at the same time, having not noticed that Harry was back in his ordinary seat.

Half an hour later, Harry was lying on his dorm bed, staring at the ceiling, and wondering what it was that turned magic users into dribbling morons. Regardless of his magical oath and warning in the Great Hall, he'd been swarmed by students asking how he managed to enter himself. It'd been easy enough to get rid of the imbeciles, thankfully, and the look of terror when he let his aura loose was hilarious. More troubling was Ron's defection. The bloke had been right at Harry's side for years, he should know by now that Harry despised the limelight. The confrontation in the common room had been illuminating.

Harry clambered through the portrait hole, wondering for the dozenth time why the stupid thing wasn't flush with the ground. What if he was using crutches? His musing was forcibly interrupted by a vicious sneer. "Just can't get enough of the limelight, can you Potter?"

Startled, Harry looked around. When had Malfoy gotten into the common room, and why hadn't he been turfed out yet? The sight he saw was nearly comical. The other people in the common room had made space around the source of the sneer, and Ron was currently at the center of a rapidly widening empty ring. Harry, with his newfound 'I am so done with this shit'-itis, kept his cool with no difficulty. "So we're not on first name terms any more? Shame, that. I could have sworn we were best mates. Then again, if you're stupid enough to think that I enjoy this shite, then I'm probably better off."

Ron flushed angrily and drew his wand, pointing at Harry. "Fuck you, Potter! I spent years at your side keeping your stupid arse alive, and this is how you repay me? Stabbing me in the back? You could have told me how you entered but nah, Harry Bloody Potter is too good to share the limelight with me!"

The room got very quiet. Not quiet enough to mask the murmuring of the twins offering odds on what Harry was going to do to Ron, but quiet. Harry just shook his head. "You're pretty bloody stupid Weasley." He held up one finger. "I made a magical oath that I didn't know who put my name in the Goblet." Another finger. "I fucking despise the limelight." Another finger. "When have you ever saved my life?" He dropped his hand. "But you know what? I don't give a shite any more. I'm done giving second chances. Anyone who decides to get on my shite list from now on is going to be in a world of pain the likes of which has never before been seen. I'm going to do you a favor, Weasley. I'm silencing you as of now." Ron opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He got even redder. "It'll wear off by tomorrow morning, but tomorrow morning the gloves are coming off. Choose your words carefully."

Harry turned, and went up the stairs. It'd been a fucking long day.

Harry supposed he shouldn't be too surprised. The envy Ronald (just calling him "Weasley" wasn't sufficient. There were three others in the house that Harry quite liked, so that was off the table) had revealed had clearly been a long time coming to a head. Never mind that Harry would happily hack off a testicle and give up his fame to have a living family. Ronald simply had a fucked-up sense of priorities, and this was the result.

Harry rolled onto his side, and punched his pillow into fluffiness. He'd deal with this shite tomorrow.

Harry rose early, as was his habit. I suppose I should thank the Dursleys for my work ethic, he mused sleepily to himself, right before I flay them alive and cover them with salt. He paused, one foot in the shower. Nah, that's a little extreme. I'll just make them always tell the truth. He finished his ablutions and was out of the dorm and down to the Great Hall before any of his roommates had woken up.

Breakfast had barely begun when he walked in, so he only had to deal with a minimum of staring and whispering. It was mostly Ravenclaws up at this hour, and they showed the wisdom of their founder by not bothering him whilst he woke himself with copious amounts of tea, bacon, eggs, and fruit. Mostly tea.

As he finally polished off his last rasher of bacon and absentmindedly conjured a really big mug for his final cup of tea, he tried to remember what day of the week it was. Yesterday was Monday, right? Wait, no, there hadn't been any classes. And there aren't any classes today either. So if there's no classes two days in a row, that's the weekend, and the second day of the weekend is Sunday. So that means today is Sunday. He nodded decisively, proud of his logic.

Harry might have been an early riser by habit, but it was certainly not part of his nature.

He thoughtlessly levitated out of his seat, rotated one hundred eighty degrees, and placed his feet on the floor, fully intending to find a quiet corner to allow the caffeine to take effect in peace. Alas, it was not to be.

"You have got to tell me how you do that."

"Hunh?" Confusion reigned. Standing very close in front of him was a waif-like girl wearing Ravenclaw robes. She had long, messy, dirty-blonde hair, pale skin, and massive grey eyes that seemed to protrude from her skull. She was looking at him as if she couldn't decide whether he was a lab rat to dissect, or a slice of treacle tart to devour. Her hands were on her hips, and every inch of her posture was fixated on him. Harry tried to backpedal rapidly, sloshed his tea over the side of his mug, burned his hand, dropped his mug, and gazed sadly at the resulting waste of precious, precious caffeine. "Shit." He turned around to get another really big mug of tea from the nearest available source, when the girl spoke again.

"You know, you'll get another detention from McGonagall for foul language if you keep that up."

He turned back around, having garnered his second really big mug of tea in record time. Something about that voice… "Oh, that was you wasn't it? With the experimenting? Last night? What were you trying to figure out with your, uh, experiments?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, the dried up old bint didn't like my methodology. I was trying to ascertain whether the swear word was the most effective word to stress in a sentence when striving for an attitude of 'shock'. Of course, I didn't account for Minerva No-Fun-At-All wrecking my experiment."

The caffeine was trying to kick in. Really. But 'ascertain' was a little too much for Harry's brain this early in the morning. His train of thought derailed entirely, and he spent an awkward ten seconds or so with his eyes glazed over re-finding the tracks before realizing the train had fucked off entirely, so he decided to start over from the part that made sense.

"I've got to tell you how to do what?"

A half hour and one really big mug of tea later, Harry thought he may have made another friend. An odd one to be sure, but then again, two of his professors weren't entirely human, a third one was dead, and he was going to a school for magic. What he knew about "normal" could fit in a thimble.

Her name was Luna Lovegood, and she was just as intelligent as Hermione but in a radically different way. Hermione was brilliant, but she learned things from books and studying. Luna was of the opinion that "Everything in the world is a source of knowledge. The tricky part is figuring out how to get the knowledge out. Books are easy, and therefore boring. Anyone can get the knowledge out of a book. I want to get knowledge from stars, from goblins, from creatures and places yet to be discovered." Currently, she was trying to get the knowledge out of him, and having a deuced difficult time.

She'd dragged him to the library, on the grounds that "It's the weekend, nobody but Granger and the OWL and NEWT students spend their weekends in the library. We'll have some privacy there." Once they were seated, she began to interview him in a manner that suggested that she'd expected to have all his secrets on the page before lunch. Instead Luna was currently massaging her temples slowly, a biro and empty muggle notebook on the table in front of her.

"Alright Potter,"

"Call me Harry, please."

"Fine, Harry" she gritted out. "I'll ask this one more bloody time. How did you levitate yourself?"

He opened his mouth, "I just did!" on the tip of his tongue, and stalled after hearing the faint sound of grinding teeth. He chose his next words carefully, knowing that Luna was at the end of her rope. "Well, I didn't really levitate myself, I think." The grinding teeth stopped. Hurriedly, he continued. "You know how the air surrounds us all the time, and it's constantly pressing in on us right? I sort of grab the air and everything else around me that I want to move, like my clothes and my shoes, and I levitate that. And my body just gets taken along for the ride."

She was openly staring at him, biro and notebook forgotten. He was about to ask her if she was alright when she said "That's bloody brilliant" in a quiet voice. Harry was reminded of the first time Ron had seen the Invisibility Cloak, and the stunned, reverent tone he'd used. Luna was having the same experience right now, and Harry was envious that she was having it. What a charmed existence, some corner of his mind mused, that she feels the thrill of discovery over and over again.

Luna immediately rummaged through her bag for her wand. Once she had it, she focussed intently on something, eyes closed, before murmuring quietly, "Wingardium Leviosa."

Harry was sitting in the hospital wing, guiltily waiting for Luna to regain consciousness. He wasn't actually guilty of anything in this case, except in a roundabout way. After all, it was Luna who had made the decision to test her theory without any safety precautions. At least, that was what he told himself.

At that moment Hermione burst into the room, nearly bowling over Madam Pomfrey, who glared at her back and muttered something that would almost certainly violate the Hippocratic Oath if she actually did it. Hermione paid the irate Medi-Witch no mind, and accosted Harry with "Harry, what did you do? It's all over the school that you threw Lovegood through the library doors with magic!"

"It wasn't me!" He protested indignantly. "She did it to herself!" At Hermione's disbelieving stare, "No, really! I was explaining how I did the flying thing last night, and she tried to do it too! She did some part of it wrong though, because instead of flying she just sort of bounced around and threw herself through the doors."

Hermione sat for a moment and digested that statement, before asking "Can you teach me too?"

Harry raised an eyebrow. "That depends. Are you going to attempt the same thing without any safety precautions? Because I don't fancy explaining myself to an angry Madam Pomfrey twice in one day."

His best friend snorted at him, and said "Naturally, because I'm the impetuous one here."

Harry reflected that she had a rather good point, however sarcastically it may have been delivered. So, he shortly explained to her what he had explained to Luna. Hermione sat and considered it for a little while, during which the only sound in the infirmary was Luna's slow breathing and Harry's fingers twitching for something to do.

Finally Hermione's mind came up for air, and she said slowly, "I think I know what went wrong. If I'm right, then neither Luna nor I will be able to do it properly. Fly, that is." She looked up at him. "Were you paying attention to Flitwick in our first year, during his lectures on wands?" At his sheepish grin, she grimaced. "Honestly Harry, why not? It's not like wands are our most… important… tool…" She trailed off as he raised an eyebrow (the other one, this time) and ignited a small flame in his palm. "Right," she sighed. "You're stupidly powerful. Anyway, wands focus our magic. The most anyone can really do without one is sort of shoving or yanking objects around, because our magic is too dispersed to do anything else. I suppose if you have enough magic-" she cast a glance at the still-burning flame in his hand, which he had absentmindedly begun to play with like a Slinky "you don't really need to focus it, because you'll always have enough to get the job done regardless." She was gathering steam in a way that Harry recognised meant she was about to get to the point, so he let the flame disperse and he started paying attention again. "What I'm getting at is that wand magic is so focused that it can't properly levitate all the air and whatever around your body, so it only levitates bits at a time. So I could try doing it, and only levitate the bit under my feet, then the bit on my right side, then the bit under my chin, and so on. So you'd sort of lift off, and then ragdoll around in midair until you hit something rather hard."

Harry nodded. That sounded more or less exactly like what had happened to Luna. He then asked, "So you're saying that in order to fly, you'd have to be able to use wandless magic first?" At her nod, he grimaced. "That's bollocks. I was hoping to have the next quidditch match played without brooms."