Doodling (Matthew)

Obviously, because of his love of reading, one of the few places Derek spent most time at here at Hogwarts was the library. It was the best place ever! A whole huge room, stuffed with loads of books for him to read! What wasn't to LOVE? He would love to read every single book here before he graduated in seven years and he was well on the way. He was constantly running up here to swap a finished book for a new, exciting one. Today he had an essay to complete for Transfiguration and he needed to bring back the books he was reading anyway, so he chose the library over the common room to sit and do it. He was doing the homework as soon as he got it because that made him more organised and meant he wouldn't forget stuff and would never be in trouble for late homework! The powers of simple logical thinking!

It was fairly busy for a normal Thursday afternoon. There were lots of intelligent people at school who chose to work in a calm, quiet space like him. He went straight to the shelves and found a cool book to read, Dragon Species of Great Britain and Ireland. Dragons were cool. Maybe he could work with dragons one day. Then he made his way to find the librarian, who he had become good friends with all the time he spent in this territory. He gave in the book he had got out yesterday and got out the new one. As much as he wanted to read about dragons, he was here for his Transfiguration essay, so he took a seat at the end of a long table.

Before long, he had to put the book in his backpack because it was too distracting and stupidly tempting. Now he could focus. But he couldn't focus. Derek just wanted to read about dragons. Not compose a decent essay. It wasn't due for a while, but he really didn't want to get into the habit of leaving homework until the last minute. So he had to do it now. No he didn't. Yes he did. He must not procrastinate! But he was procrastinating. He was subconsciously drawing clouds and cauldrons all over the parchment he was meant to use for his essay. Oops.

Hogwarts was cool, but Matthew was quickly becoming more and skeptical about the place. At home, he and Ollie were an awesome amazing cool brilliant best friend brother team of epicness. And here - well, here they were just nothing. It was like Hogwarts had sucked all the fun out of Ollie and made him forget that his brother was the best most amazing person in the entire world. It was terrible - a tragedy! Matthew hadn't spent the past two years at home begging his parents to be able to go to Hogwarts early for this. Biggest disappointment of Matthew's life - hands down.

But then, Hogwarts seemed to be full of disappointments. Like the fact that their awesome, beret wearing candy giving charms professor hadn't even taught them how to make fire! Of course, he'd found the words for a fire spell in his textbook, but when he tried it, it didn't work! Apparently he was moving his wand wrong or something. It wasn't fair. No fire. No Ollie. Even if the castle was ten times cooler than it already was - which wasn't even possible - it wouldn't make Matthew feel any better.

With a sigh, he figured that since the whole world was pretty much ruined and boring now anyway, he might as well try and do some homework to pass the time. So he gathered his things and headed up to the library. When he got there, it was pretty full. When Matthew saw that Derek kid sitting at a table by himself, Matthew quickly approached him so that he could sit with a familiar face. "Hey Derek," he said dejectedly, slamming his books down onto the table in front of him and not even bothering to hide his misery. "Nice picture."

Then he drew a dragon. A pathetic, unrecognizable, deranged dragon, but a dragon all the same. It had wonky wings and big scary teeth and stripes. It was Derek the Deranged Pajama Dragon. HumanDerek was proud of him, even if you had to stare quite hard at him to work out exactly what he was supposed to be. This sucked. Procastination was the action of delaying or postponing something. He didn't want to delay this essay. It was just that procrastination was evil and he just didn't have the motivation not to procrastinate.

When Matthew came along and said hello, he was almost relieved. But he found himself vacillating - that was wavering between different options and actions - over whether he should subtly hint that the other boy go away so he could do homework or stay to talk to him and procrastinate more. He decided on the second option because even without an annoying chirpy voice in his ear, he wouldn't be able to concentrate on working.

Derek wasn't the most sensitive and thoughtful person all the time, but it wasn't hard to work out from Matthew's facial expression and depressing tone that he was sad. "Hey Matthew!" he said, enthusiastic anyway because his enthusiasm might rub off on the Slytherin, which would be good. "Thank you, it was an accident," he added, staring at his picture. He picked up the quill again and labelled Derek the Deranged Pajama Dragon. "Why are you sad?"

Despite his depressing mood, Matthew couldn't help but lean over the table and completely invade Derek's personal space to see his pictures more closely. "Derek the deranged pajama dragon..." he read slowly, and squinted down at the picture. "That's supposed to be a dragon?" he said doubtfully, scuffling back into his seat and allowing Derek to have his own space back. "Dragons are cool!" he said randomly. "They breathe fire!"

Matthew wondered momentarily if there was a spell that could make people breathe fire. If there was, Matthew had to learn it. When Derek asked him why he was sad, Matthew didn't even contemplate the idea of denying that he was unhappy. Instead, he launched instantly into the terrible, tragic story that was his life.

"Well first of all," he started dramatically, "I spent the past two years of my life doing nothing but waiting to come to Hogwarts so that I could hang out with my brother Ollie all the time. We're best friends," he explained. "He's the coolest person that you'll ever meet, and we're supposed to spend all of our free time together." Obviously. "But he's been so busy. And he doesn't have time for me! How unfair is that?"

And that wasn't even the worst thing! "And," he continued, "None of the teachers are teaching us the fire spell! I know the words to do it, but I can never get it right. And I want to make fire!" Because fire was awesome. Matthew would literally sit there and watch fire all day long if he could. His parents always told him it was dangerous and told him to stay away from fire, but they just didn't understand how cool it was.