It was no secret that Aubrey didn’t have an ounce of creative talent outside of potion making. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, broke every instrument she touched, and got more paint on herself than on a canvas. Why, then, was the Ravenclaw standing before a scribbled on parchment and some kind of free form sculpture of sorts in the art room? Well, that was an easy question to answer: Science!

She’d determined that somehow her calculations had to be off, and had concluded that she needed numbers to account for magic. What Aubrey didn’t know was if it was even possible to calculate numerical equivalents of magical abilities and influence on a flying broom. Thus the ‘diagram’ she’d scribbled out and the small-scale version of the situation she was attempting to create so as to properly study it.

The redhead bit her lip and fiddled with her creation, not satisfied with how it looked or how it was going to work… or probably not work if she was being honest. She’d have to use magic to make the pieces move, and that would introduce a new variable that she hadn’t counted on, especially considering magic was the very thing she had no idea about and was trying to figure out!

The snarky grey tee that proclaimed her to be “Beauty and Brains” was sticking to the small of her back due to sweat from moving the stuff around without magic. Aubrey had tried to keep the substance in question from tainting the experiment, and now she felt rather stupid. There wouldn’t be an experiment without magical interference! She grumbled and kicked a heavy piece of the ‘sculpture,’ whimpering and hopping around while she held her bruised food. If only she could similarly soothe her bruised ego…

Harry was on the way to the student study area, hoping to catch Ginny there, working on homework and avoiding her brother or something. He had no idea why she would be in there, really, but he had already checked the common room and the library for his redheaded confidant, and he really needed to talk to her and sort out the bungled mess he had accidentally made of her advice the other night.

Before he even got there, however, he got distracted. The door to the art room was open, and whatever was inside was weird enough to make him forget the mess of the other night long enough for his natural curiosity to carry him to the door. His crazy new Beater’s identical Ravenclaw sister was kneeling on the floor, sweating through a t shirt and pushing around some kind of weird sculpture.

Still, he hugged the plain green tee to himself, nervous to actually enter the room. Rumor had it that this girl was quite dangerous if you interrupted her work or dared to be a male in her presence, and Harry was strongly considering doing both of these things at the same time. Maybe he had a death wish or something after everything that had happened lately.

Still, curiosity was probably the dark haired boy’s most prominent trait, and eventually it won out. He slowly and carefully approached, coming close enough that she could hear him with no problem but staying far enough away that she couldn’t easily reach him to hurt him, and cleared his throat. “What exactly are you doing in here, Ravenclaw McGregor?”

A male voice interrupted her frustrations, and Aubrey was stuck trying to figure out how to deal with the familiar boy who now stood inside of the room with her. She barely stifled the laugh that came to her lips when he called her by her house rather than her first name. ”Well, I was trying to work through an experiment, but now I think I doomed myself to failure. So I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

Aubrey had a confused look on her face. She really didn’t know what else she could do to fix the stupid sculpture and she’d already hurt her stupid foot. Everything was just… stupid. She sighed and looked over at the Gryffindor. ”Say, you’re experienced with flying. Know any way I can get this thing to fly? Without magic?” That last part was key, especially since she wasn’t sure there was a way to pull it off. Maybe she should tell the boy why she needed to get the thing to fly in the first place…

”You see, I’m trying to figure out the numerical equivalent of the magical variable of flying a broom. My calculations were off based solely on physics, so it has to be something to do with magic. But I can’t really look at the effects of magic without seeing it without magic as well. So I need to figure out some way to get this stupid thing flying so I can do some calculations before I consider the effects of magic. You see?”

She looked at him expecting him to completely understand. After all, it was very clear to her. She had to figure out what was stopping her from success, and this was the way she could do it. ”I have a theory that the bond with the broom has a lot to do with it. Some magical connection of sorts. So I think I need to get a broom of my own if I’m actually going to get up in the air without another foolish mishap…” she’d started muttering mostly to herself at this point, seeming to forget that the Potter boy was even in the room. She was back to calculating things, even though she wasn’t coming up with anything new.

Harry really didn’t want to laugh. It was probably one of the worst things that he could do given the situation. He couldn’t help it, though. Everything about this situation was funny and the boy had to just give in to the laughter for a little bit.

He smiled and apologetic smile when he could finally control himself. “Sorry,” he said softly. “It’s just that your entire premise is flawed. You cannot do anything to do with flying without magic being at the very core of it. If you could, muggles would be accidentally taking flight every time they tried to sweep their kitchens.”

“The rest of it is just as flawed, though.” He really didn’t want to explain the rest of it. If this witch was as close to Hermione in the way she thought as Harry assumed she was, this was not going to go over well at all. “Brooms don’t work like wands, where they pick one person and don’t work the same for anyone else. They are more like cauldrons, a set of spells and features, some more useful than others in general.”

He thought of a way to soften this, and make it easier for the Ravenclaw. “The only thing I can think of is what I told Hermione when we were getting ready to do this before. Flying isn’t something you can learn out of a book, or in your case, I guess it isn’t something you can learn with a formula and a weird sculpture thing. You have to learn flying by doing it.”

He also really did not want to give the witch a flying lesson, especially if she was as bad as Hermione, who intentionally hadn’t been on a broom in years as far as Harry knew. Still, he couldn’t very well blow her whole work here to bits and not do anything to make it better. “I can try to help you get the hang of it, if you want.”

The boy was laughing at her! Aubrey couldn’t believe it! She was staring at him like he had three heads as he just stood there laughing. Didn’t he realize how serious this was? She had found something she couldn’t do! She had to fix it! How could he just stand there and laugh?! She glared coldly at him and barely resisted the urge to charge at the idiot like Aimee would do. She was so used to the ways that her sister dealt with people pissing her off that she knew exactly how to duplicate them. She just never gave into the urge. Oh, did she ever want to though. Self-control be damned, Aubrey was ready to tackle this pompous male to the ground and show him just how serious she took the situation.

Then the idiot was apologizing while still telling her how wrong she was and she just wanted to slap him. Gah. He was so full of himself! Like bloody Harry Potter knew everything in the whole world. It was so frustrating! She knew that magic was important in the process but if it was just a constant then she wouldn’t have to worry about it in her calculations. Now that she thought it wasn’t a constant, but something that changed with the witch (or wizard) that changed things.

Of course she didn’t expect some foolhardy Gryffindor to understand, though. She rolled her eyes at him as he kept tearing her theories to shreds. Apparently a broom was like a cauldron. Well, that wasn’t going to help her. That meant getting her own broom was going to do nothing to help her fly! Aubrey was so frustrated she was ready to scream. Then the boy kept talking and one word he said stayed with her and made her feel less like hurting someone.

”Hermione…”

She didn’t even pay attention to anything else he said after that. He’d said the intelligent girl’s name and it made Aubrey’s breath catch in her throat. Oh, how she wished she could spend just a little bit of time alone with the girl! She’d tried to be as smart as her, but it seemed like that was impossible. Hermione was… well, she was amazing! Aubrey swooned a bit, then came back to earth when Harry Potter offered to teach her how to fly.

”You’d do that? For me? I mean, you’d help me fly?” she asked, feeling all her anger toward the boy for laughing at her melt away as she thought about what becoming closer to him might mean for her future with the bushy-haired bookworm he called one of his best friends. ”Oh, I would love that!”

Without even realizing what she was doing, Aubrey threw her arms around the boy’s neck and clung to him. No one had ever been willing to actually teach her things before. Well, it might be due to her nature of biting people’s heads off when they told her she didn’t know how to do something. But still, it made her happy to have someone actually offer to teach her to fly. ”When can we get started?”

Harry had really been hoping for a different answer. On the one hand, at least she wasn’t as mad at him as she could be. Still, she seemed every bit as bad as Hermione about learning things, based on classes, and Hermione couldn’t fly to save her life. Plus, she got both angry and obsessive when she couldn’t master something.

Then again, the screeching and hugging him was kind of cute and not what he had been expecting from the Ravenclaw at all. Maybe she would be such a grateful and willing student that this would actually go better than he had expected. He patted her a couple of times before carefully extracting himself from the embrace and taking a few steps back. He didn’t want McGregor getting any ideas, after all.

He looked around the room and decided that it would be big enough, as long as everything was moved out of the way. “We can start now, if you want,” he said with a smile. “It might be better to fly somewhere indoors at first anyway, that way no one but me can see you and there is no reason to be embarrassed if it takes some time to figure it out.”

We had a couple of misgivings about flying indoors for the first time in years, but shrugged them away. No one would dare mess with his easily recognizable broom as it soared through the hallways towards him, and he trusted the Ravenclaw would be careful enough to not fly into a wall or anything. He kind of wanted to move to the Room of Requirement, just to be safe, but he didn’t want to give McGregor any more reason to worry than he had to. This room would have to do.

“Hey, do me a favor and clear all of this stuff to the sides of the room so that the middle of the room is open for you to take off from?” While she was doing that, Harry concentrated on his broom, currently put up in the locker room where it belonged, and carefully summoned it. He knew it would come, having done this before, but had no idea how long this would take, and he really hoped that McGregor realized what he was doing and had the good sense not to interrupt him. If he got distracted and dropped his broom in the lake or on some angry Slytherin’s head, the result would be disastrous.

Aubrey nearly fainted when he told her they would start right at that moment. She was in shock. Flying indoors? And on his broom? What if she wrecked it?! Oh, Me would kill her if she destroyed her quidditch captain’s broom! She nervously nodded her head, unable to answer him with words. Of course she would want to start as soon as he was willing to teach her. The fact that he spoke of her embarrassing herself as if it would definitely happen at some point and was no big deal had her respecting the well-known boy. Perhaps he would be a good teacher for her.

”Right, of course!” she said quickly, working to move the ‘sculpture’ out of the way. She seemed to remember half way through that she was, indeed, a witch, and so she could move the heavy thing with magic, which she did with a flick of her wand. A satisfied smirk crossed her lips once it was out of the way, and she walked over to the boy who would be her teacher.

It was obvious that he was focusing, so she simply remained quiet. While she silently stood beside him, Aubrey thought about what she was about to do. She was going to fly. She was really going to do it! Or, well, she was going to come as close as she could to actually doing it. She hoped this went better than the attempt with her sisters had. If it didn’t she was going to be seriously disappointed, since the quidditch star Potter seemed determined that the broom did not make the flyer.

When his Firebolt made it into the room, she gasped and grinned at him, reaching out to touch the fine specimen of a broom. ”Oh wow. There is no way I can ride this thing. I don’t want to break it. I… I wouldn’t be able to control it and it would get all messed up and I couldn’t fix it.” She glanced nervously at him then, hoping he wouldn’t insist on her destroying his precious broom, yet desperately wanting to earn her wings.

The broom finally came hurtling into the room, coming to rest obediently by its master as if it was alive, and Harry grinned at it, and then at the Ravenclaw. The grin only got wider as she actually reached out and touched the broom. This was either going to prove his worth as a teacher just as much as the DA did last year, prove to be completely hilarious, or both.

“The thing about the Firebolt,” he explained calmly, “is it’s probably the easiest broom in the world to learn on, because it responds to the lightest of touches.” It never occurred to Harry that this could also make the broom really hard to learn on, because the slightest touch that she didn’t intend, or too hard of a touch that she did would have the ability to lead to disaster. Still, he sensed that he needed to do something to make her feel better about this before they would be able to get going.

He grinned again as the idea hit him and he waved his wand, causing the floor and walls of the room to be covering in mattresses. “There, now if you lose control, it won’t hurt you or the broom. Plus, I’ll keep my wand on you the entire time, so that I can slow you down if you need it.”

He hoped that would be enough reassurance to get her into the lesson, because he wasn’t sure how much else he would be able to do for her in this room, and moving to the Room of Requirement for this would be a hassle. At least keys wouldn’t be attacking the Ravenclaw the whole time she tried to fly as they had been the only time he had tried to fly indoors. Bloody Flitwick and his crazy ideas for protection spells.

“Okay, the first thing you need to do is grab the broom firmly and move it to the proper height for you to mount, since it’s used to me,” he said calmly. “Mount it whenever you’re ready and then we’ll go from there.”

Perhaps the boy was trying to be reassuring as he told her about how his broom would respond to her lightest touch. It didn’t matter, though. Aubrey was scared out of her mind when he spoke so highly of his mighty mount, and she just got more nervous as he seemed to look at her expectantly. Did he expect her to just hop on just like that? She started to shake her head even as he grinned at her and looked like he had had some sort of epiphany or something.

She watched while the room became covered in mattresses and let out a little bit of her deep breath, feeling slightly less worried for her life. At least if she fell she would bounce instead of crashing with a painful thud. She still wasn’t too sure about hitting hard into the padded walls or floor, but at least it was an improvement to the pre-padded versions.

With the promise that he would keep his wand on her at all times, Aubrey nodded and moved the broom to the correct height for her to get on. Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself and held the handle steady, swinging a leg over it without allowing herself to worry any longer. Aubrey breathed deeply as she sat on the broom, feet safely on the ground. Oh Merlin. It was time to kick up and say goodbye to the ground again, and that made her panic a bit.

”A-are you sure about th-this?” she asked, lifting her feet for an instant and quickly slamming them back down, squeaking with fear. Oh, what if she did a face-splat like she’d done on the pitch when Ace and Aim had found her? She groaned and squeaked again, pushing gently with her toes and leaning forward a bit without meaning to and screaming as she started to plummet forward.

Aubrey automatically pulled and leaned back on the broom, overcorrecting so much that she slid right off the end of it and onto her bum on the mattress-lined floor. She groaned, glaring at the broom and then at the boy who was helping her. ”Yes, this is so very easy. I’m just overwhelmed by how great I’m flying.” Her sarcasm was so thick it was nearly suffocating as she rolled her eyes. This was seeming like such a bad idea.

It was great to watch Aubrey’s face get slowly more worried, only to almost completely clear when he padded the room. Still, the peaceful look didn’t last long, and by the time she was due to take flight she once again looked like she would rather be doing anything else. Clearly she had been losing her personal battle with gravity for a long time, and Harry wasn’t just going to fix it all in a few minutes.

For just a second it looked like she was going to kick off hard and shoot straight through the ceiling. Then her whole body tensed up and she slid straight off the front of the broom and into a heap on the floor instead.

He rushed forward, forcing himself not to laugh or smile at all as he helped her back to her feet. “Honestly, that could have gone a lot worse,” he said, giving her a reassuring smile. “Get back into position on that broom, and I guarantee I’ll get you into the air properly.” He meant it too. In one attempt he had seen several easily correctable things to set right. Either she had never flown for her quidditch playing sisters or they didn’t really want her in the air. Either way, she would be far easier to teach than Hermione.

When she was in position, the first thing he did was adjust her grip on the broom. “A book will tell you to do it your way,” he said with a shrug, “but this way will give you better balance and make it so you can pull up with your wrists if you feel like you’re going to slide off.” Next he put his hands high on her waist, moving her back into a straighter posture, so that her weight would carry her more into the broom instead of at the ground. “I know you’ve probably heard never to fly straight up like this, but trust me. It’ll be slow and jerky, but it will keep you in the air. Once you know you can do it, you’ll relax more, and then we can worry about technique.”

He took a step back, looking to make sure he hadn’t missed anything obvious. There was more he could do, but this would get her in the air right, which would hopefully relax her some. Then he could show her more. “Alright, Aubrey,” he said encouragingly, “give it a shot. Let’s see you actually fly a little! Remember, I’ve got you if anything goes wrong, not that it will. You’ve got this!”

Aubrey let the boy help her to feet, rubbing her bum with a sore look on her face. She was really irritated at this point, especially as the Gryffindor seemed to think it was all well and good. This was not what she would call good in any sense of the word! She’d already fallen, and last time she’d actually tried to fly she’d nearly managed to kill herself. So far her confidence was in the negatives and this boy was not helping.

Rolling her eyes, she got back on the broom only to have Potter adjusting her and talking about her books as if they were completely pointless. Oh, it was so… infuriating! She could see why Hermione always seemed irritated with the boy. If he mocked books like this all the time, she couldn’t imagine trying to teach him anything!

”Oh, you just know everything, don’t you? Put your hands here, sit like this, don’t do this… I mean, you clearly think so bloody highly of yourself…” She was so annoyed. Aubrey didn’t even know why she’d agreed to have Potter help her at this point. Oh. Right. She wanted the in with Hermione. But did he even have that to offer?

The Ravenclaw had been so thankful at first for this chance to learn to fly, but now that she’d fallen and he hadn’t seemed at all concerned about that fact, she was definitely questioning her resolve. Did she really need to fly? She could always talk to Hermione in the library on her own, without this boy’s help after all… And he wouldn’t have to touch her again, either. That would be a definite plus. But, she was already here and in position to kick off, so she gritted her teeth and pushed gently on the mattress-lined floor, feeling herself shakily rise a bit.

Oh, dear. She was shaking too much for this to work out very well. She could feel herself starting to veer off, and she didn’t know what the hell to do. ”Whoa! What do I do-AH!” She tried to ask for help, but before she even could finish, she tilted sideways and fell to the floor, the broom shaking until her entire body was off of it and it settled still in the air. That had gone well.

Aubrey lay on the ground, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the hell she was doing with her life. Who was she kidding, trying to fly? She wasn’t Ace or Aimee. She was supposed to stay on the bloody ground. Gravity just kept pointing that out, too. Maybe she should just stay lying there flat on the floor until the boy got bored with her and left.

Harry grinned as the redhead muttered at him. He was far too used to Hermione to take it personally or try to argue with her. If someone was used to having all the right answers, they took it really personally anytime they didn’t, and if someone was used to books always being right, they got completely angry when real world experience was a better choice. There was nothing him getting upset would change about that, and if he wasn’t careful, her McGregor temper might break through and do him some damage.

Unfortunately, all the proper positioning in the world couldn’t stop her from shaking with nerves, which made her barely get off the ground when she kicked off, and seemed to confuse the hell out of the broom. Before long it was actually vibrating, and she was tilting sideways. Then she was back on the mattress. That was still better than any of their other attempts, but not by much.

Also, maybe he had misjudged the mattress on the floor part. Or at least the not giving her any hard ground to kick off from part. That could have been part of it. He needed time to give this some more thought if he was going to make her into a flyer.

“Okay, you’re getting better, but I don’t want to stress you out too much at one time,” he said with a pleasant shrug. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll be in the Room of Requirement one week from today at around this time. I’ll have a broom for you and an even better setup if you want another lesson. If you don’t know where the room is, ask one of your sisters or Luna, I know she knows and you wouldn’t have to tell your sisters you’re learning to fly if you don’t want to.”

That would work out for Harry either way. The broom could provide Aubrey with a broom more suited to her, even if she probably wouldn’t be able to take it out or whatever the weird rules there were. And if she didn’t show up, well, Harry hadn’t practiced his own indoor flying in quite some time, and he seemed to need the skill far more often than he would have originally thought possible. It wouldn’t be a wasted night either way. He did hope that she showed up, though. He hated to think that there was a chance he would fail in his efforts to teach her to fly. Harry really didn’t like to fail at anything.