Ravenclaw common room, around 4:30 am

Alvis hadn’t come into the common room planning to build Sasha into a blanket fort. He just couldn’t sleep.

It’d been a rough week, what with his year-mates avoiding him at every turn, afraid to linger near for too long lest he latch onto them as a stalker. Worrying over their whispers and the ever-evolving rumor interpretations kept him awake, staring into the darkness of his bed-curtains and wondering where he’d gone wrong. He was tired. He was stressed.

So, when he’d wandered down to the common room wrapped in a bed-sheet and found Sasha passed out in his usual place before the dying fire, Alvis felt he could be excused for indulging a bit of architectural whimsy.

It’d taken an hour, a Silencing Charm, five top-sheets retrieved from linen cupboards, two mops, a few dozen Sticking Charms, and a length of conjured rope. Sasha stirred a few times in the process, but never woke completely. Baldur came to halfway through, though. He stayed by his master’s side and watched Alvis bewilderedly, as though failing to understand the point.

The end result started at the mantelpiece, stretched to a rope strung over Sasha’s couch, and fell into neat walls on three sides. Alvis might have kept it up, but he was out of sheets. So instead, he settled in on the floor next to the couch, gave Baldur a friend scratch behind the ear, and practiced some chemistry equations in his notebook until the older boy woke. It didn't take long.

"Good morning. You really need to stop doing this, you know. You're going to ruin your back on that couch."

As usual, Sasha's descent into deep sleep had been slow and reluctant, like his mind knew exactly what lay ahead and was willing to try any diversion tactic it could to avoid sliding down the slippery slope.  But, sleep had finally claimed him shortly before Alvis had found his way into the common room. 

The fort was finished and the fourth year was sitting on the floor with the chemistry book when Sasha finally drifted into a deep sleep and the usual pantheon of nightmares started to drag him down.  But, they hadn't gotten very far before a cold, wet nose pressed firmly against Sasha's hand and a warm weight pressed against his chest. 

The dog's contact dragged him to wakefulness before the nightmare could pull him in any deeper and the obviously relaxed disposition of the dog - and the odd presence of a cloth over his head - settled the sixth year's bout of panic quickly.  Sasha blinked and scowled up at the linens until a familiar voice drew his attention towards the fourth year. 

"It's a fort," Captain Obvious stated before finally pushing himself upright.  "What time is it?" With a yawn, Sasha peered around the room for a stray timepiece before finally looking back down at the fourth year. 

Sasha couldn't deny the fourth year had a point when it came to the couch.  None of them were actually long enough to accommodate his height and sleeping curled up was only comfortable for so long. 

"Couldn't sleep?"

Alvis shook his head and adjusted his glasses self-consciously. "It's been a bad week," he sighed. "I hate people."

No he didn't. He didn't even hate Casey. He missed Casey terribly, even if the Slytherin was a bit of a paranoid prat. What he hated was stupid rumors and the awkward feelings that'd clouded the atmosphere of even his own dorm room. He knew they'd disperse eventually -- the rumor too vague to stay alive for long -- but it wasn't moving near fast enough for his taste.

He didn't know what time it was, either, and he didn't have his watch. He'd used a mantel clock to hold the sheet onto the fireplace, though. He peered up at the fort's roof and tried to read its face through the thin material. "It's either five twenty or four twenty-five. The former, I think. I'm sure it was four-thirty when I came down here. Pretty sure."

He shrugged, glancing down at his chemistry equations. Somewhere along the line, he'd slipped into his personal research for Ancient Runes, substituting alchemical symbols instead of the proper elemental letters. Mum'd take off for that. He picked the notebook off his lap and held it up to the faint light of the embers.

"Quill ink is really inconvenient, isn't it? It looks all fancy but you can't fix corrections without making a mess. Have you seen those music players the Americans have?[1]" He glanced up at Sasha with an unblinking, curious stare that saw nothing odd in his train of thought. "Why d'ya suppose they can't use that to make like, computers? You'd think it'd be easier than wasting all this parchment."

1.	http://www.absitomen.com/wiki/index.php?title=United_States#Traditions_and_Technology

Alvis was not acting like himself.  That much was pretty obvious.  Sasha scowled at the fourth year in concern and scooted off the couch, sitting on the floor next to the younger Ravenclaw.  He didn't know what had prompted the boy's dour mood and he wasn't sure if Alvis was wanting to talk about it or ignore it. 

He watched, remaining silent, as Alvis tilted the notebook towards the light and poured himself into one of the equations.  Sasha was far to personally familiar with the diversion and distraction tactic to not recognize it for what it was. 

When Alvis complained about the inefficiency of quills, Sasha wordlessly tugged his leather quill pouch from his bag and withdrew a mechanical pencil and held it out to the boy. 

"Ja" Sasha admitted, in response to the question about the American's music players.  Before elaborating on his answer, Sasha pointed towards the equation from the textbooks Alvis was modifying and offered some clarification.  "The potassium chromate has been acidified into potassium dichromate.  They explain that in the instructions but left the ion out of the equation as part of the problem."  Which, of course, were in German so it was an easy detail to not see. 

"Well, sound waves can be analog," Sasha pointed out, returning to Alvis' question.  "Magic doesn't effect monolog waves - or at least not to the same degree.  Otherwise phonographs wouldn't work either.  I assume the player really just amplifies the sound - they probably just substituted magic as the power and amplification source.  Until we can figure out how to keep magical pollution from interfering with the digital medium, I'm not sure computers could ever work at Hogwarts."  'Magical pollution' wasn't exactly official terminology - but it seemed a better term than 'magical fallout' for the ambient energy that surrounded high volumes of magical entities and was a much easier term to yield than 'all that extra magic that just makes things not work in Hogsmeade and Hogwarts'. 

He glanced at Alvis and offered an awkward half-grin.  "Am I supposed to ask why you hate people?" 

Alvis took the offered mechanical pencil and held it up to the slight light the tent allowed in. He'd seen a few of these, living the village, but his mum hated them, so she'd always given him old-fashioned wooden ones to work with. He continued to mess with it as Sasha explained the problem of computers and magic. It made sense. Annoying sense.

"You'd think there'd be a way," he muttered, half to himself as he selected a new parchment piece and began copying the formulas over in pencil, making note in the margin of the things Sasha translated from Geman. "It wouldn't have to be exactly the way Muggles do it. With everything magic's capable of becoming, there should be some way of mimicking electricity without actually becoming electricity. Americans like Muggles, maybe they've figured out something like that." Now he wanted to take apart one of those American music players, to see how they'd gotten it to tick.

When Sasha asked about his hating people, Alvis hesitate and his hand stopped writing. He shook his head. “I…I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” Not at Hogwarts, where there was no Mum to run to, no Gramps and Gran with a plate of cookies, no quiet field between villages where he could be alone. Three and a half years of school and he’d never felt like all he wanted to do was hide. Not until now.

He felt the frustration pooling on the edge of his eyes and rubbed it away before it could turn to tears. Crying wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t even make him feel better. “I don’t know what I did wrong. I thought we were friends, but he…I just don’t understand why he’d say something like that. And now everybody thinks I’m some sort of…”

He was babbling again, not making any sense. He tried to focus on the problem he’d been re-writing, but he was too distracted. The numbers might as well be German too, for all the sense that made.

“Some of them try to hide it. That’s the worse part. They act like nothing’s happened, but they’re always thinking about it when they look at me. What makes them think they can hide that? If they’re going to judge me they could at least be honest about it.” He scowled at the parchment, willing his eyes to stay dry. "...I've lost track of the problem now. What were you saying about  potassium chromate?"

The older Ravenclaw watched in muted amusement as the younger one contemplated the mechanical pencil.  It was a strange mixture of conversation topics - electricity and whatever this 'he' said or did.  But, Sasha understood it.  He understood the mixture and the purpose of the mixture.  Alvis was intrigued by muggle technology and chemistry but he wasn't sitting here in a makeshift blanket fort at just before five because of a pressing need to discuss electricity.  The science - or, rather, the logic and reason behind it was just as much the emotional security blanket as the fort itself. 

"I don't think the issue is electricity," Sasha commented.  "Of course, electricity can exist and work within Hogwarts.  Assuming magic doesn't change the way our brains and hearts work, we'd all be dying of strokes and heart attacks otherwise.  And, we still have electrical storms.  I don't know what it is - I assume magic makes electricity more unpredictable or ... it disrupts or fluctuates the current.  Or something."  Sasha pursed his lips and glanced over the stack of textbooks.  "Wonder if more rudimentary sources of electricity show different results.  Keys on kit strings or potatoes.  Be interesting to test." 

Maybe not so much the getting struck by lightning one. 

"Never done what?"  Sasha glanced towards Alvis.  It was unclear from context alone what 'this' was.  Even as the younger man offered more of an explanation, that he was upset was the only thing that was clear.  He wasn't sure who this 'he' was that had been a friend but had said something.  And, Sasha wasn't sure he knew what he was supposed to think Alvis was, despite the fact that everybody supposedly knew about it. 

It could have been like looking in a mirror, watching Alvis suddenly turn back to the chemical equation mid-rant.  "It has been acidified," Sasha repeated, calmly, as if the transition had been perfectly reasonable.  If this tactic of Alvis' was similar to his own, Sasha knew trying to distract him from it totally would only make things worse.

"Well, I don't know what everyone is thinking you are," he admitted.  Without knowing that, it was impossible to say how dire this current strain of gossip was.  "I'm usually the last one to be brought into any gossip circles.  But, most people don't have the courage to be upfront and honest.  It's just easier when you always take a position that everyone around you agrees with.  Half of them probably don't even believe it themselves, they just won't admit it."