Part One: The Other Side

Chapter Two: “Squabbles, Saviors, and Stupid Mistakes”

October 3rd, 2021-

Kristina Potter watched sadly as her twin brother, Shane, paced the floor of the library.

“Where could they have possibly gone with out telling us?” He asked frantically, more to himself than to his sister. “I mean, it’s not like Kali said anything about this to me, heaven forbid,” he said in a surprisingly bitter tone that Kris had never heard him use before. He abruptly turned on his heel to look her directly in the eye. “Has Elita said anything to you? Or Kali for that matter? I’m sure she talks to you loads more than she talks to me-”

“No, Shane,” Kris said sadly, beginning to play uneasily with a strand of her long, black hair. “We’ve been through this before—several times—neither Elita nor Kali has told me anything. It’s the same with all the others.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry for snapping at you, Kris. It’s just… I’m really worried, is all.” He scratched his head and unknowingly rumpled his wavy, light-brown hair.

”I know, Shane,” Kris said soothingly. “We’re all worried about them.”

Shane noticed Madam Pince eyeing the two of them suspiciously, just waiting for a reason to kick them out. Shane often got the distinct impression that she didn’t like Kris very much. Well, she was very loud—a librarian’s worst nightmare. He smiled in spite of himself.

“I think I’m going to go back my dormitory to get some rest or something,” Shane sighed. He just needed to be alone. He had needed to be alone a lot lately. Kris nodded, tucking the strand of hair she had been playing with back behind her ear. Her almond-shaped emerald eyes followed Shane out of the library and out of sight…

Shane Potter was the kind of person who thought everything through. He was very intelligent, indeed. And responsible, certainly more so than his sister, Kris, with her constant prank-pulling. Everyone loved Kris, though. Sometimes he wished he could be as carefree as his twin, be as well-liked, or have as much fun. He found himself wishing that rather often actually, but Kris’s spontaneity was simply not in Shane’s nature. That’s probably why he was a prefect. And a Ravenclaw.

Now, he was proud of being a Ravenclaw, and so was everyone else, obviously. They had very good reputations with the teachers, not to mention an excellent Quidditch team, which he happened to be a beater for. That was a good thing; beater was definitely the best position for Shane.

He liked to consider himself a pretty classy person, and stoic too. He never let what people said get to him, outwardly, at least. But, considering how stoic he was, he had a lot of pent-up rage, which was great for taking out on bludgers. Voila, a great beater. He sighed to himself as he walked down the deserted corridor leading up to the Astronomy tower, where the Ravenclaw common room was. He was a good Quidditch player, but Kris was better. Kris was Seeker for Gryffindor, which made his father undoubtedly proud, considering it was his old position for his old house. He was proud of Shane too, of course, but it just wasn’t the same….

Sometimes Shane wished he could just say what he felt when he felt it… like Kris… but he couldn’t. He constantly worried about what people thought of him.

This wouldn’t be a problem if he were in Gryffindor, then they would have the best Quidditch team, hands down. But, since he was in Ravenclaw, that really wasn’t an issue. And that wasn’t the only thing he disliked about being in separate houses from his twin. He missed their closeness. They still talked of course, but it wasn’t the same as it was before they came to Hogwarts. They used to be inseparable, but now Kris spent most of her time with Ste and Connor, her best friends, and only talked with Shane when she had no one else to talk to. But on the other hand, he didn’t think him and Kris would get along if they spent all of their time together. They weren’t alike in the slightest. But Ste and Connor were both notorious for their trouble-making, like Kris, and Shane would just be a wet blanket if he were good friends with them, because he just had to be Mr. Caution all the time.

Considering all of this, Shane was the last person anyone, including himself, would expect to ever get in trouble with anything. Which was why what happened after he left the library that day came as such a blow. Literally.

The whole school had been in a frenzy since Kali and Elita had gone missing. It was well-known that the two young ladies were two very powerful witches. This did not help ease anyone’s fears about what could’ve possibly happened to them.

A curfew had been installed disallowing students to go roaming about the school or the grounds after dinner considering the current situation, but the students’ fears were so severe that most simply didn’t go out at all unless they absolutely had to. Too bad Clay Reagan and his gang of idiot flunkies were not some of those students, if they were, it might have saved Shane a lot of trouble.

Reagan was standing with his groupies, who happened to be in Shane’s way as he was headed toward the Ravenclaw common room. He was in a bad enough mood as it was, and he did not want that idiot Reagan making it any worse, so he tried to push past them unnoticed. It didn’t work.

“Potter! How lovely to see you again,” Reagan exclaimed in a saccharine-sweet voice. The boy was large and muscular, with short, spiky brown hair and beady eyes.

“Oh, likewise,” Shane replied in the same tone, looking as menacing as he could possibly manage.

“So I heard about your girlfriend and her sister,” Reagan attempted casually, looking haughtily down at Shane.

Shane’s deep brown eyes narrowed. He felt an uncontrollable anger beginning to bubble inside of him. Reagan hadn’t said anything particularly vicious yet, but it was the sound of his voice, his manner of speech that made Shane all the more angry. He could tell this wasn’t going to be pretty.

“I would say it’s a shame,” Reagan continued lazily. “But I’m afraid that’s a level of lying that even I simply cannot achieve.” Shane scowled. Reagan’s friends laughed loudly.

Shane clenched his fists at his sides.

“Maybe it’s time someone told you the truth, Potter. Your idiot girlfriend and her sister have probably gone and gotten themselves killed by now. I don’t really care, personally. I know that I, for one, am not going to miss those stupid mudblood bitches.”

That was it. Shane had taken crap gracefully from Reagan for five and a half years years, but this was where he drew the line. Shane abruptly felt that being a beater on the Quidditch team simply wasn’t enough. He needed to hit something. Right this second. He couldn’t take it anymore, the first thing he saw he simply had to hit. And the first thing he saw just happened to be Clay Reagan’s face.

He swung back so quickly that Reagan didn’t have enough time to react. He thrust his arm forward with as much force as he could muster and his fist collided with Reagan’s face in a sickening crack. But it hadn’t helped. Hitting him wasn’t enough. Shane’s anger was still there, anger he had bottled up for years. And not just anger towards Reagan, it was anger towards things he had never really acknowledged he was even angry about.

Reagan looked up at Shane it utmost loathing, blood spilling from both his nostrils, trickling down his face, but he didn’t seem to notice. He seemed every bit as angry as Shane. He reached for his wand--

--But Shane was quicker. “EXPELLIARMUS!” he shouted with so much force and anger that not only did Reagan’s wand soar out of his hand, but Reagan himself soared across the corridor and stopped abruptly when he collided with the wall, which met him with another sickening crack.

Two of the people Reagan had been talking with--boys by the names of Pryce and Young, Shane vaguely recalled--rushed over to their comrade’s side. But the other person remained firmly planted in her spot, hand reaching inside her cloak and pulling out a long, wooden wand. She waved it dangerously in front of Shane’s face, and his grip on his own wand tightened considerably.

“Why, Shane!” she sneered, “We’ve simply got to stop meeting like this.” He knew the girl all too well. Cassandra Erickson. She was pretty, with black hair and almost black eyes. Probably to match her heart, Shane thought wryly.

Cassandra seemed so intent on making him squirm, that she hadn’t even noticed the girl that had come up behind Shane until she bellowed “EXPELLIARMUS!”

Cassandra blanched as her wand flew out a window, shattering it to pieces of glass shard in the process, and it continued to fly through the courtyard and out of sight. Cassandra glared from Shane to the girl, then back to Shane before she huffily stormed out of the corridor.

Shane spun around to see his savior. He smiled. It was Kris. Her emerald eyes sparkled as she glanced over the crumpled heap on the other side of the corridor--Clay Reagan--and the two figures trying, and failing, to pull the heavy-set boy up. “You did that?” she queried breathlessly.

He nodded silently. “I—I didn’t think--” he stopped. His sister looked up at him. Shane knew what she was thinking. She knew was amazed by the fact that Shane might, in fact, have some irrational bone in his body. Shane was amazed by it too. They continued to stand in silence for what seemed like a very long time, neither of them sure what to say or do. They suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of approaching footsteps.

Panicked, their eyes darted to the end of the corridor, where a tall, blonde-haired, pale-eyed boy with a badge that read “Head Boy” now stood.

“Hey, Kris,” the boy said, grinning shyly. He acknowledged Shane with a curt nod. “Er-- you two might want to clear out. That Erickson girl and Filch are coming down this way--” he surveyed the scene before him, taking in the broken window, Reagan and his lackeys, and the blood splotches on the floor. “--and I’m guessing this is why. I’ll try to stall Filch as long as I can.” He grinned at Kris once again.

“Thanks, Blake,” she said, grinning back, “We really owe you one.” And with that Kris and Shane took off running in the opposite direction.

As they were running, Kris thought to herself that punching Reagan’s lights out might very well been the stupidest thing that Shane had ever done, but it was also the greatest. Kris had never been prouder to call him her brother. Her face broke into an unmistakable grin. Lucky Shane didn’t notice—he would’ve thought her to be crazier than she already was.

“Shane WHAT?” Shane and Kris’s concerned younger brother, Aiden, screeched, his chocolate-brown eyes wide.

Kris replied giddily, “He beat that bastard, Reagan to a bloody pulp! You should have seen it!” Kris jumped up out of her seat in the red armchair and pranced around the Gryffindor common room, acting out what the squabble must have looked like. “Reagan didn’t stand a chance!”

Stephen Weasley, Kris’s best friend, a red-haired boy with eerie gray eyes said dryly, “Shane. Ha. I never knew he was so much like you, Kris.”

“Well, Ste,” Kris said, still prancing around, “We are twins, you know. There had to be sometime we acted remotely alike. It was bound to happen sooner or later. This is so great!” she squealed. “Reagan getting the stuffing beaten out of him! Really brightens the current moody ambiance around here.”

“I don’t believe it,” Connor Lynch laughed as he ran his fingers through his brown hair. “Well, it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out for I suppose.”

“Y’know, he’s going to be in loads of trouble,” Skye Cooper said shakily. Although Skye was a Hufflepuff, she was often found in the Gryffindor common room, for she didn’t have many Hufflepuff companions. And, considering she was a friend of Kris’s, no Gryffindor dared object to this unorthodox visitation.

Kris stopped dancing merrily for a moment to look at Skye. “How do you figure?”

Skye started to nervously twirl a strand of long, white-blonde hair, as to avoid meeting Kris’s interrogating glare. “Well--I mean--he is a prefect. And they really hate it when prefects misbehave. I heard about this one girl who was caught snogging with this one boy--”

“—And they fell in love, got married, had a thousand kids, and lived happily ever after?” Kris supplied.

“No,” Skye objected angrily. Her blue eyes—always over-bright, so that it looked all the time as if she were on the verge of tears—narrowed. “I’m serious! She got stripped of her badge!”

Kris scoffed. “That would never happen to Shane. Flitwick’s head of Ravenclaw so he’ll be in charge of his punishment—and he loves him. He would never do that to Shane… I mean… would he?” She looked around to her friends for support.

Aiden shrugged and rumpled his long jet-black hair unconsciously as he said, “I dunno. But I expect they’ll be writing to Mum and Dad, because I expect someone will tell McGonagall or Dumbledore, this sort of thing doesn’t often go unnoticed. And so I believe at the very least Shane should be expecting a nasty Howler from Mum.” Aiden’s eyes glimmered mischievously.

Shane did all he could do. Cassandra had, of course, told Snape everything, who, in turn, told McGonagall. So the only probable solution was to tell McGonagall exactly what happened in his own words. And he did. He began with after he left the library and ended with himself and Kris running down the corridor. He was planning to leave Kris out of the story, but he was almost positive that Cassandra had included her, and Shane needed their stories to match up as much as possible to avoid as much trouble as possible.

There was a long silence on McGonagall’s part after Shane finished his tale. He began to occupy himself by nervously wringing his hands instead of looking into McGonagall’s eyes. He wished he could have met with Flitwick, seeing as he was the Ravenclaw head and he had a fondness towards Shane, and plus, he didn’t intimidate him nearly as much as McGonagall did, but Flitwick was in a very important meeting with Dumbledore and obviously couldn’t be disturbed.

He looked around the office. It was very nice, albeit not nearly as extravagant as Dumbledore’s, but it was still better than most other professors’ offices. He was seated in a comfy, crimson chair across from the Deputy Headmistress’s desk. He thought half-heartedly that the crimson chair in which he was seated chair was probably supposed to reflect the fact that McGonagall was also head of Gryffindor House. Maybe if he had been sorted into Gryffindor she wouldn’t be as hard on him….

McGonagall finally spoke, “I trust you are aware that Clay Reagan is in the hospital wing and will remain there indefinitely? You put quite a lot of feeling behind that Expelliarmus curse. He’s unconscious at the moment.”

“Yes, Professor, I know. Blake Malfoy told me, I passed him in the hallway on the ay here,” Shane said quietly, almost in a whisper.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Potter, but this has come as quite a shock. You were practically the only student none of the professors, including myself ever worried about, I suppose that’s where we went wrong, wouldn’t you say?” Shane said nothing. “As a prefect, younger students look up to you for guidance and support, and as a role model. Now, picking fights with other students and landing them in the hospital wing when you haven’t got so much as a scratch, especially at this time,” she made a reference to Kali and Elita. “Well, I don’t think that’s the best image for our younger students, or any of our students for that matter, to look up to, wouldn’t you say?”

Again, Shane said nothing.

“You will run into incidents like this again, Shane,” he was startled by the fact that she called him by his first name. “And you’ve shown you can’t handle those situations with the utmost dignity and responsibility. Therefore, I am suspending you from your prefect duties indefinitely.” Shane blanched. “Honestly, Potter. You’re a very intelligent young man; you can’t tell me you didn’t see that coming.”

Well, Shane sighed inwardly, what had he expected? To be let off? At least he wasn’t suspended or expelled.

It was clear the meeting was over and Shane stood as gracefully as possible from his seat across from McGonagall’s desk, and he headed towards the door.

“However, Potter--” he turned around, once again startled, but this time by the unmistakable sound of kindness in her voice. “Given the situation, I’m quite sure I would have done the same thing.”