An American At Hogwarts: Book Three

Chapter Forty-Eight

A/N: Happy Friday the 13th!!

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The next class I had after lunch, conveniently enough, was Care of Magical Creatures. I stayed behind after the end of class to talk to Hagrid, since I figured he was probably a good place to start if I wanted to learn about mermaids and centaurs. Apparently I'd been wrong, because Hagrid had been perfectly nice, but had also all but chased me off to my next class. He'd seemed incredibly distracted the whole time I'd been talking to him, and he kept looking behind him towards the Forbidden Forest. He'd given me a few basic answers, then referred me to the Hogwarts library.

Part of me wanted to stay and push him, and another wanted to change tactics entirely to try to figure out what he was doing that had him so distracted. But the part of me that knew I needed to go to Herbology and handle all the other things I'd already put on my plate won out.

I'd just have to make a beeline for the library once our double period of Herbology ended.

We had Herbology with the Ravenclaws, and to my surprise when I started speed-walking from the greenhouse back to the castle and the library, I found David moving at the same pace right beside me.

"Hey," I said, nudging him and giving him a smile without slowing down. His eyebrows raised like he hadn't realized I'd been walking right next to him, but he gave me a small smile back. "Where are you going in such a hurry?"

"The library," he huffed in response. "Why? Did you need something?"

"Nope! I'm headed the same way, actually."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I've got some research to do, and technically I don't need to be in the library to do it since I digitized everything a couple years ago, but the library environment helps me focus. How about you?"

He sighed, and I could see the dark circles under his eyes hadn't gotten any better over the break. I frowned as we made it back to the castle and started heading up the stairs.

"It's my research project with St. Mungo's," he said. "I need to put together a load of research and information on existing wizarding diseases to make recommendations about the best one to start using muggle immunization technology on. And then maybe they'll let me start doing actual work on creating what I want to create. It's slow going at the best of times, since it requires living test subjects, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you about the Ministry's recent wave of anti-muggle sentiment..."

I snorted and rolled my eyes. "No, you don't."

"Now, I'm stuck wading through a bunch of poorly recorded cases of magical maladies from decades and centuries ago to try to write this report in a way that might stand a chance at getting it past the people in charge."

I sighed. "This has really been a hell of a year, huh?"

David scoffed as we at last reached the library together. We walked towards a table in the back of some stacks, out of the way of Madam Pomfrey and most other people who might come to the library for anything other than an intense studying focus.

"If you want, you can use Ana and her digitized database," I offered as we sat together. "We can both comb through it at the same time, and it has the 'control f' function to find things which might be a little less painful than flipping through all the books. Even if they did all have reliable indexes."

David at last gave me a little smile.

"Yes, please."

I smiled back, then set up Ana and her interface between us. David got to work on his project, and I got to work on mine.