If your name is Newton, and you grow up in Cambridge, you have two choices in life; you can be acutely temperamental or deeply imperturbable. Newton Carter’s basic disposition led him to the latter. He put up with apples dropped on his head, he put up with being called “Newt-breath,” and he put up with a coterie of snobby Slytherin housemates, because the other option was already taken by Severus Snape and seemed to be getting the boy nowhere. However, he preferred “ greatly and forcibly preferred “ to be addressed as ‘Carter.’ It had a dignity that ‘Newt-breath’ lacked. And secretly he dreamed of being twice as great as his famous namesake.
He kept his own secrets well enough, but not always those of others, so he was fairly certain that the reason the whole school had learned a nonverbal spell that should have been known only to Slytherins had something to do with him. That pretty Ravenclaw girl, Nathalie Willoughby, had kissed the spell right out of him after the third time he’d wanted a look at her legs, and the next thing he knew, everyone at Hogwarts was dangling everyone else by the ankle. Carter decided that the next girl he kissed would be someone a bit more discreet. He also referred a few people interested in charming their undergarments into Shrieking Scants and Roaring Bloomers to Snape in the hope of making the blunder up a bit “ being on the wrong side of Snape was never a comfortable place to be. Personally, he refused to wear the silly things.
Which left Carter in need of a strategy. As a Slytherin, he knew sooner or later his name would be on the pranking list of some or all of The Gryffindor Four. And sooner or later, he could count on being dangled upside-down by the ankle in a corridor, probably one where the whole school would be passing in a few minutes to critique his legs, his weight, and his choice of pants. A green pair that flashed “Potter Stinks” in silver across the bum had a certain appeal, but again they were not quite his style, and the charm would be complicated. Too, he would either have to perform the charm daily or enchant all his underthings permanently “ which would be awfully hard to explain to his mum come summertime.
Which led him to wonder: would the Roaring Bloomers develop laryngitis eventually, or would they roar when upside-down in perpetuity? He chalked up the question as another reason never to own a pair.
No, there was a better solution, he thought. Knowing the four pranksters as he did “ as all Slytherins did “ he had a rather better idea. Carter took to roaming the corridors alone on purpose, just to get the issue out of the way.
It actually took them a whole chilly week to get around to him. He was beginning to wonder if someone had told them his little secret when Potter and Pettigrew caught him not too awfully far from the Great Hall, not too awfully long before dinner. Nobody else was around, but that would last no more than a few minutes, and the twosome no doubt meant to leave him as a hanging ornament for others’ amusement. Very well. Carter stuck his hands over his head as the spell snagged his ankle, was swept upside-down, his robes bunching about his ears, heard a tandem gasp, caught himself neatly as they released him, completed a nice gymnastics walkover, and went on his way, serene as the moon.
Leaving a shocked silence behind him.
To play this well, he had to resist the temptation to smile, or even to look the least bit smug. Either would simply convince them he’d been prepared for them on purpose, and then he would never be shut of them. Carter kept his back straight, his head high, and continued to wear his usual expression of abstraction. It seemed he had guessed quite correctly. Potter and Pettigrew had been quite prepared to judge his taste in undergarments “ but they had not considered for an instant that he might not be wearing any. And, luckily, even they had no wish to redecorate Hogwarts in Naked Slytherin Contemporary.
He was now safe from further Marauder attacks, at least with that spell, and returned to Slytherin House unbothered to dress more thoroughly for dinner. Winter was coming, and he was glad to have gotten this little escapade over with. The dungeons, especially, grew far too cold for anyone to be happy without six layers of clothing beneath his school uniform.
Should he tell this tale to anyone else? If the idea caught on, it would lose its shock value rapidly, and he also had no wish to see the castle redone in Nude Deco. He would keep it as his little secret, quite certain that Potter and Pettigrew would do likewise, and add a layer to his vague little smile.