Nobody knew precisely what thoughts were churning through Draco's mind as he sat there covered in feather debris, white fluff clinging to his robes and hair like snow.
But up on his book-stack podium, Professor Flitwick had definitely noticed the commotion including the small explosion, the startled yelp, the cloud of down now drifting lazily through the classroom air.
He hadn't witnessed Tom's initial technique, his attention had been elsewhere when the blue cat performed his first successful levitation. But Draco's attempt? That sequence of events Flitwick had observed in crystal-clear, horrifying detail.
The tiny professor's expression cycled through surprise, concern, and finally settled on stern disapproval. His voice, normally so cheerful and encouraging, carried an edge sharp enough to cut through the ambient classroom chatter:
"Mr. Malfoy." The formal address was a warning sign. "I believe I specifically emphasized that the Levitation Charm requires a 'swish and flick' motion—gentle, controlled, like conducting music. Not..." He gestured at the feather carnage. "...aggressive downward strikes as though you're attempting to bludgeon the object into submission."
He descended from his perch, approaching Draco's desk.
"Your reckless behavior and awful study habits demonstrate a fundamental lack of attention to instruction. Three points from Slytherin!"
"But Professor!" Draco's voice emerged higher than intended. He gestured toward Tom with a hand still dusted in feather fragments. "That cat just did exactly the same thing! I was just copying what he—"
Professor Flitwick's expression hardened further, his patience was clearly reaching its limits. His voice rose several degrees in both volume and severity,
"Mr. Malfoy, did your family only teach you to deflect blame onto others when confronted with your own failures?" The rebuke was sharp enough to make several nearby students wince sympathetically.
"You claim Tom used the same technique then why did his spell succeed while yours produced..." he waved at the feather debris, "...this catastrophic mess?"
His squeaky voice somehow managed to convey profound disappointment despite or perhaps because of its naturally high pitch.
"If today's practice had involved something harder than a feather—a rock, a piece of metal, anything with actual mass, you would have just demonstrated exactly how the unfortunate wizard Baruffio met his end! Do you understand how serious that could have been?"
Draco's face paled slightly at the reference to the famous cautionary tale of magical mishap.
"And for your dishonesty in attempting to excuse your carelessness, Slytherin loses an additional two points!"
[Um, Professor Flitwick...]
Tom guiltily held up the whiteboard, drawing Flitwick's attention:
All eyes in the classroom turned toward him.
[Draco was telling the truth, actually. I really did use that exact method to levitate my feather.]
Professor Flitwick's expression looked like he thought Tom was being kind to a struggling classmate giving a helpful lie to save Draco embarrassment.
Before the professor could respond with what was clearly building into a lecture about the difference between kindness and enabling poor study habits, Tom made his decision.
He needed to prove it as no amount of explanation would convince Flitwick without practical demonstration.
So, with the entire class watching, Tom gripped his wand, raised it high, and brought it down in a sharp, aggressive swatting motion.
The kind of motion you'd use to smack a particularly annoying fly.
The feather on his desk trembled. Rose smoothly into the air. Wobbled slightly as it gained altitude, then stabilized into a gentle floating ascent toward the ceiling, as perfect an example of Wingardium Leviosa as any textbook could illustrate.
"Oh, Merlin's beard," Professor Flitwick whispered, the color was draining from his already pale face. "This isn't magical at all. This is... this is..."
His voice failed him. He swayed slightly on his feet.
The classroom had gone absolutely silent like witnessing something that violated their understanding of reality.
Professor Flitwick took several deep, steadying breaths. His hand pressed briefly against his chest as though checking his heart was still functioning properly.
When he'd recovered enough motor control to move, he walked to Tom's desk with the slow, careful steps of someone navigating an unstable surface. His expression mixed professional concern with what might generously be called existential dread.
He examined Tom's wand closely, checking for hidden enchantments, unusual materials, any conceivable explanation for what he'd just witnessed.
Then the feather itself, testing its weight and composition. Then the desk surface, as though perhaps some property of the wood might account for the impossible.
Finally, reluctantly, Professor Flitwick was forced to accept an uncomfortable truth:
He had no idea how Tom had just performed that spell. But the feather was undeniably hovering due to a proper Levitation Charm. The magical signature was unmistakable, the effect was textbook-perfect.
If Tom had used wandless magic or non verbal casting, both advanced techniques that Flitwick himself had mastered, the professor could have rationalized the success.
But this? This was neither wandless nor non verbal. Tom had very clearly used his wand. And the motion had been the complete opposite of proper spell-casting technique.
He'd simply... whacked the wand down like swatting a mosquito. And the magic had responded perfectly.
It shattered everything Flitwick understood about charm work. About the relationship between gesture and magical manifestation. About the fundamental principles that had governed his entire career as both practitioner and professor.
The silence stretched for nearly thirty full seconds while Professor Flitwick stared at the floating feather with the expression of someone watching their worldview crumble in real-time.
When he finally spoke, his voice carried complex layers of emotion: confusion, fascination, concern, and the slightly desperate quality of a teacher confronting a phenomenon they absolutely could not explain to their students because they didn't understand it themselves.
"That's... well... a very... particular casting technique you have there." The words came slowly, carefully, as though he were testing each one for stability before committing to it. "However, I think we need to discuss this matter privately. So please—" his tone shifted into something more formally professional, "—come to my office after class."
He delivered this request while ignoring Tom's expression of absolute dismay.
Then Flitwick turned to Draco, who remained frozen at his desk in a state somewhere between vindication and continued confusion, feather fragments still decorating his person.
The professor's voice softened slightly in not quite apologetic, but acknowledging error: "As for you, Mr. Malfoy... it appears I misjudged the situation. You were, in fact, accurately reporting what you observed."
Then his expression hardened again.
"However!" The word cracked through the air with emphasis. "That absolutely does not mean you should attempt to replicate such... unconventional... highly irregular techniques without proper understanding of the underlying principles!"
He gestured at Draco's destroyed feather as evidence.
"I trust this experience has taught you that magical education proceeds step by step for very good reasons. Attempting shortcuts or copying methods you don't understand leads to exactly this kind of disaster. Before you experiment with non-standard approaches, you need to master the fundamentals thoroughly. Is that clear?"
Draco nodded quickly, still looking somewhat shell-shocked.
"Your previous point deductions are rescinded," Flitwick continued, his tone becoming almost gentle. "But given your recklessness in attempting an unknown technique without proper precautions, Slytherin will still lose one point as a reminder that caution is a virtue. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Professor. I understand." Draco's voice was passive, much of his earlier arrogance was deflated along with his feather.
He opened his mouth as though to say something else then apparently thought better of it and closed his mouth again. But his gaze toward Tom had shifted noticeably.
Gone was the simple contempt and dismissal. Now his expression held confusion, hurt pride, and something that might have been genuine curiosity lurking beneath the other emotions.
Why had Tom stood up for him? They weren't friends. Draco had been planning to expose and humiliate him. The logical response would have been to let Draco take his punishment, enjoy the schadenfreude, move on.
But Tom had intervened anyway.
Draco didn't understand it. And not understanding bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
Professor Flitwick returned to his podium with visible distraction, his normally cheerful demeanor was replaced by something distant and preoccupied.
His mind was clearly elsewhere probably replaying that impossible spell-casting sequence, trying to reconcile what he'd witnessed with everything he knew about magical theory.
Fortunately, Hufflepuff and Slytherin students tended toward better self-regulation than the Gryffindor cubs. Without constant supervision, Gryffindors might have devolved into experimental chaos testing whether other spells could be cast through aggressive swatting, perhaps, or seeing what happened if you performed the wand movement while standing on your head.
But these students simply returned to their assigned practice, though their attention wandered frequently. Glances kept drifting toward Tom, who sat at his desk radiating an aura of innocence that was thoroughly unconvincing given recent events.
As for Tom himself, his internal monologue had reached new heights of distress.
'I've been at Hogwarts for exactly TWO DAYS. How have I already been summoned to professors' offices TWICE for "discussions"?! This frequency cannot be normal! This is not the peaceful academic experience I was promised!'
And the situations weren't even comparable. During Potions class, his unconventional methods had at least produced the correct result without collateral damage.
This time there was a victim. Draco Malfoy sat right there covered in feather debris, living proof that Tom's technique was not collectively applicable. And Professor Flitwick had experienced what looked like an imminent existential crisis, his entire framework for understanding charm-work called into question.
Tom did not think this upcoming conversation would be pleasant or easily resolved.
'(‧_‧;) I need a plan. Some way to get through this without— wait.'
His thoughts stuttered to a halt as an idea crystallized.
Tom's paws began moving together in a slow rubbing motion in the universal gesture of scheming villains preparing their master plans. His eyes narrowed to slits. His mouth stretched into a grin that spread literally from whisker to whisker, showing far too many teeth to be anything but sinister.
A low hehehehe sound emerged from his throat.
'I think I know how to cast spells "normally" now!'
He didn't fully understand the theoretical basis of spell-casting—what incantations actually did on a fundamental level, why wizards needed to speak them aloud, how the relationship between word and effect actually functioned in magical physics.
But he didn't need to understand the theory. He just needed the practical formula:
Specific gesture + Correct incantation = Magic
Gestures? Those were easy. Tom could reproduce wand movements with the precision of a trained conductor. That had never been his problem.
The bottleneck had always been vocalization—his cat mouth literally could not form human speech sounds properly. The syllables came out mangled, unrecognizable, magically inactive.
His "want-it-make-it-happen" ability worked as a bypass, certainly. But that was instinct, not skill. If Tom was going to actually learn magic in the formal sense, live in the magical world properly rather than just stumbling through it on cartoon physics...
He needed a solution.
And now, finally, brilliantly, he'd identified one.
The revelation was almost embarrassingly simple once he'd thought of it:
What was the purpose of saying an incantation? Communication. Expressing intent in a specific, recognized form that magic could interpret and respond to.
And how did Tom communicate? Not through speech. Through writing. His whiteboard was his voice, his method of bridging the gap between his thoughts and others' understanding.
So why wouldn't that work for spell-casting?
If other wizards needed to speak incantations aloud because speech was their primary communication method, then Tom should be able to write incantations out because writing was his primary communication method!
The logic felt sound or at least, sound enough that he wanted to test it immediately.
Tom grabbed his whiteboard and wrote with precision:
[wing-GAR-dium levi-OH-sa]
He even included pronunciation guides, breaking the words into syllables with emphasis markers. Making absolutely certain the magical intent was clear and specific.
Then he held up the board in his left paw, gripped his wand properly in his right, and executed the standard textbook gesture for Wingardium Leviosa, the swish and flick exactly as Professor Flitwick had demonstrated it.
The feather rose smoothly into the air.
Tom's tail swished with satisfaction and vindication. Finally!
A method that actually made sense, that he could replicate consistently, that didn't rely on unpredictable instinct or—
His tail swished again.
Behind him, another student's feather suddenly lifted off their desk, wobbling upward in a surprised arc.
Tom's tail continued its pleased swishing, completely unconscious of the movement.
Two more feathers from nearby desks rose into the air, joining what was rapidly becoming an unintentional fleet of levitating practice materials.
The student behind Tom stared at his floating feather with absolute confusion. His wand was still on his desk. He hadn't said the incantation. He hadn't done anything except sit there trying to gather courage to attempt the spell.
"Did I... ?" the student whispered to himself, bewildered. "But I didn't even... Is delayed activation a thing? Can spells work on a timer?"
Tom, focused entirely on his successful written-incantation method, noticed none of this. His attention was fixed on his own feather.
But Professor Flitwick noticed.
Oh, Merlin, did Professor Flitwick notice.
The tiny professor had been watching Tom with the fixed intensity of someone observing a potentially dangerous magical anomaly which, given recent events, seemed like a reasonable precaution. He'd witnessed the entire sequence: Tom writing on his board, Tom performing the proper wand movement, Tom's feather rising in response.
And then, in what appeared to be completely unrelated action, Tom's tail had swished.
And three other feathers had immediately levitated.
The connection was undeniable.
Tom had just cast the same spell through four different methods without realizing it: his written incantation (successful), his proper wand gesture (successful), and apparently his tail movements (accidentally successful on multiple targets).
Professor Filius Flitwick, Charms Master, dueling champion, educator for over four decades, expert in magical theory and practical application, felt his understanding of spell-work crack like thin ice under excessive weight.
His eyes rolled back in his head.
His knees buckled.
And with a small, defeated sound that might have been "impossible" or might have been just a sigh of surrender, Professor Flitwick fainted dead away.