An American at Hogwarts: Book Two

Chapter Twenty

Jackson had been calming down throughout my whole speech, and now he was standing up straight with his hands on his hips. He looked far more serious now.

"Stark, that's actually a good theory."

"You don't have to sound surprised about it, I'm actually right about a lot of things."

Jackson ignored my comment and started pacing, following his own train of thought. "So some things are easier to resist than others. That makes sense. I mean, if someone told me to go to the Great Hall and eat dinner, it would be harder to resist because I was going to do that anyway."

"Exactly. That's why I'm thinking we start with the easy stuff, the stuff we would never want to do, so that we get practice resisting when we have the best chance to shake off the curse. From there we can go to the harder stuff, once we've had some practice with an easier level."

"Yeah, good plan. So, you wanna keep going?"

"Ugh, no. I've made you break down into uncontrollable laughter twice, and I'm almost definitely going to have a mark on my cheek tomorrow from the last time. I think it's your turn now."

Jackson didn't look excited about switching places, but he hid his nerves well. He crossed his arms and looked at me defiantly as I pulled out my wand and said "Imperio".

Just like that, Jackson's posture relaxed. His arms dropped to his sides, and he got a dreamy look on his face. Now the only question was what I should make him do.

Several different thoughts flashed through my mind at once. Jackson didn't have an obvious weakness like my arc reactor, but he had a tough guy, too cool for everybody image that he worked hard to maintain. There were plenty of things that could ruin that image that he'd never want to do.

Finally, I decided on one. When we were in the pre-college program together the summer before last, I had a lot of fun singing songs from Disney and musicals with our other two teammates, Alana and Dale. Jackson had refused to participate, even going so far as to threaten destroying our phones and speakers if we kept trying to make him sing.

It was the perfect activity to try to make him do now. Either he'd resist, or I'd get to see the Jackson Rappaccini sing Let It Go from Frozen.

"Sing a Disney song," I said, leveling my wand at Jackson and speaking as firmly as possible. He didn't do it right away, and his face scrunched up a little. Exactly as predicted, he was trying to resist.

I gave it another second, and then I repeated my instructions, trying to sound as authoritative as possible. Still, Jackson didn't sing. His face twitched, his mouth kept opening and closing, and I could tell I almost had him.

"SING A DISNEY SONG," I commanded, trying to match his voice when he told me to activate my armor. Jackson's voice came out strangled and horrible, like he was choking on something at the same time he was trying to sing.

"HAKUAHHHHHHH" He got part way through a horrible, guttural yell of Hakuna Matata before he changed it mid-word to just yelling.

Suddenly I understood why Jackson couldn't seem to keep it together whenever I did weird stuff while trying to resist the curse.

I broke down laughing, dropping the spell and doubling over. I glanced up and saw Jackson had come back to himself, looking extremely cranky. Needless to say, that only made me laugh harder.

"What the hell was that?" I asked between laughs. I was starting to get tears in my eyes. "That was the worst thing I've ever seen!"

"Alright Stark, whatever. Low blow, trying to make me sing Disney songs. It's nice to know you haven't forgotten anything from the pre-college program."

I didn't respond, but I did start to calm down. I could stand again, and I wiped at my eyes while the massive smile never left my face.

"Okay, I know this is all very serious because, well, wizards being able to mind-control us is obviously not ideal, but this is such a massive perk that never even occurred to me," I said. Jackson just rolled his eyes.

"I think we need to make a pact that we never record these training sessions," he said.

"Oh, one-hundred percent agreed." We shook on it, then I sighed, having finally caught my breath. "Okay, so what do you think? You wanna go again?"

"Yeah, I should. We'll do it a few more times and then we'll head down to dinner."

"Sounds like a plan."

I came up with different things to make Jackson do, so he'd have to deal with the element of surprise too. After he half-managed to stop himself from dancing and dabbing, we decided to call it a day.

"We still have a lot of work to do," he said as we headed down to dinner together. That was the understatement of the year.

"I think our biggest problem right now is breaking the spell because we laugh. We need to be able to keep the spell going no matter how stupid the other person looks, or we're never going to get good, realistic practice breaking the curse all the way."

"I agree. We both have some seriously scary, superspy-type people in our families. We just have to channel them, and we'll be fine."

"Next time, for sure. You wanna try again tomorrow?"

"No, I can't tomorrow. Adrian's helping me with some Charms crap before dinner. I know I make it look easy, but it's a little hard to keep up with people who've been doing this for more than five years when you've only done it for a little over three months."

"Fair enough. We'll find a time in the next couple days that works." We reached the Great Hall, and moved to split off to our separate tables. "And hey, if you ever need help with anything else, let me know!"

Jackson snorted. "I think I'll stick with the more experienced teachers, not the one who only barely knows this world better than me." I rolled my eyes and he paused before continuing in a quieter voice, so nobody else could hear him. "Thanks for the offer though, Stark."

I gave him a small smile and a thumbs up before turning around and walking to sit at my own table with my Gryffindor friends. We ate and chatted all through dinner, and Jackson and I's little project didn't really come up. I could have told them, but part of me didn't want to, especially since it would involve a long conversation about my Uncle Clint and Uncle Loki. This world was a nice break from a lot of things in my normal life, and dwelling on bad memories would only ruin it.

We all went up to bed that night, and the rest of my poor, poor friends had Astronomy just a few hours later. I, on the other hand, dropped that subject along with History of Magic, so I got to sleep peacefully right through the night.

It was even better knowing the rest of my class was hiking around the castle half asleep, trying to do work and pay attention to Professor Sinistra, while I never had to leave the comfort of my nice, warm bed.

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A/N: So I know in the books Harry shakes off the Imperius Curse successfully in like, six tries or something, but that's always seemed a little unrealistic to me so we're going to chalk that up to jumping on a desk being one of the easier things to resist as well as Moody going a little easier with letting him break the spell since it's not Moody and is actually a Death Eater. And hey, maybe that whole thing he has going on with Voldemort made him better at resisting the curse too. Whatever the case, in these books the curse is going to be harder to break than that, like Moody talked it up to be.