Fifteen minutes was long enough to wait, thought Pepper. This better not become a routine. She tapped her wand against the side of her leg impatiently. She gave an exasperated sigh and made her way up the stairs to Tony's dorm. She knocked a few times, lightly. Nothing. "Tony?" Nothing. She knocked harder. "Tony! Are you awake in there?"

Bang! Bang! Bang! Tony jerked awake with a yelp, falling off of his bed and onto the floor. "Ow," he muttered. Bang! Bang! Bang! There was no going back to sleep now. He looked around for the source of the banging.

"Tony! Wake up! We're going to be late!"

Pepper! Tony scrambled to his feet and ran to the door, opening it mid-bang. Peppers fist swung past where the door had been, hitting him right on the forehead and nearly knocking him over. "Ow!"

"Oh my goodness I'm so sorry! Are you okay, Tony?" Pepper tried to get a look at where she'd smacked him, but he kept backing away.

"Hey, hey, stop, stop it, I'm fine!" Tony waved away Pepper's hands and looked up at her. "Why am I being abused this early in the morning?"

Pepper stopped trying to look at Tony's forehead and instead looked at his face. "Tony, we have class! We're in school! Magic school! We-" She stopped as she noticed Tony's bed. It was a mess. Pepper wasn't sure, but it looked like pieces of a computer. "Tony, what is all of this?"

Tony looked where Pepper was looking. "Oh. My laptop wasn't working. I was trying to fix it." He tried to think about when he'd stopped trying to work on it. Maybe he'd just fallen asleep?

"Tony, technology doesn't work in Hogwarts. I told you on the train, don't you remember?" Then Pepper remembered that they where supposed to be in class. "Tony! We have to go right now! Where's your wand?" He'd need more than that, probably, but just the wand would probably be okay just for the first class.

"Um..." Tony tried to remember where he'd put it. It was in his hand, wasn't it? And then he'd fallen off of the bed...

"Here! Let's go!" Pepper shoved Tony's wand into his hand. It had been under his bed.

Tony attempted to fix his hair as Pepper dragged him out of the room, leaving it empty and silent, except for the disassembled laptop scattered over Tony's bed.

Rhodey finished class and headed to the Great Hall for lunch. He looked for Tony and Pepper, which wasn't hard, as he could hear their argument halfway across the room.

"-and if I really want to I can take notes on my laptop-"

"-technology doesn't work in Hogwarts, Tony-"

"-it doesn't work yet, if I can just-"

"Hey, hey, hey! Calm down, everybody." Rhodey put his arms back down, as he'd had to wave them to get Tony and Pepper's attention. "What's this about technology in Hogwarts? I'd love it if I could use the internet, I've been dying without it."

Pepper gave both him and Tony a kind, but slightly impatient smile. "I'd like to use it too, but as I've said, many times, it just won't work. There's just too much magic in the air."

"Yes, but," Tony interjected, "I was thinking that since magic is all around us that I could somehow fix my laptop, and maybe other things, to run on magic instead of electricity. That way, we wouldn't even need to charge anything." A quiet voice spoke from a little ways down the table.

"You assume that magic works in the same way as electricity."

Tony turned to face the speaker. "Well I did, at first, that was the the problem that I was having- hang on, who are you?"

"Um. Hi. I'm Bruce. Bruce Banner. Electricity is basically particles moving from one place to the other, right? We don't even know if magic is made of particles, much less if they move the same way as regular ones do."

He was a smallish boy with very curly brown hair, and rather large, rectangle shaped glasses. He was hunched over his food and his parchments, but he looked very interested in their conversation. He held out a hand for Tony to shake. Tony took it. "Finally, someone who speaks English." Tony gestured for Bruce to join their group and Rhodey did the same.

"Hello, Bruce, it's nice to meet you. I'm Pepper, this is James." Tony and Bruce fell into a discussion on the possibility of running technology on magic, and by the end of lunch it seemed as though they had been friends for years.

Over the next few weeks, Bruce and Tony's friendship grew. Rhodey and Pepper were great, but Tony had never known someone who was as interested in science as he was.

"So have you made any progress yet?" Bruce asked as they spread out their homework in the Ravenclaw common room. This had become a routine, setting up their homework, then ignoring it completely in favor of their technology experiments. However, nothing had even made it out of the hypothesis phase so far. Just as well he'd have to leave early tonight, Bruce thought. Tonight he wasn't in the mood for more hopeless cases.

"No. I thought my laptop screen went on once, but it was just Rhodey using lumos and messing with me." Tony took out his laptop pieces and spread them out over the homework. "I know how it's supposed to work, but it's just not."

Bruce looked at the pieces, hoping for some sort of inspiration. How could they even begin to do this? Their one hope was that, at the start, they had researched to see if anyone had tried something similar and hadn't found anything. That meant that they were working with nothing, but it also meant that no one smarter than them had tried and failed yet. It was a faint hope, and he knew it. "Maybe we're starting too big. Maybe we should start with a watch or something and work our way up."

Tony poked the laptop pieces with his wand. "Maybe."

Bruce's attention wandered. People started to light their wands as the sun went down and the common room got darker, but not yet dark enough to light the fire. We'd be using phone lights, thought Bruce, if we were at home. Wait. "Or, we could start by just trying to get magic to work like technology." They didn't have to replicate anything. There were already similarities. Like lights. "Lumos is similar to a torch, right? If we can just get magic to act like technology, it's a start, right?"

Hearing this seemed to give Tony an idea. "Wait, start small, right?" Tony made a flipping motion with his hand, as if that would help him get the right words out. His mind was racing. "Maybe instead of phones, we could make, like magical walkie talkies or something."

"I mean, I don't know, is there a spell that lets you speak over a distance like that?"

"I don't know. We could check the library, though."

"We could. Like I said, it's a start."

"It's more than a start! I have an idea!"

Tony's eyes lit up with excitement and plans. Bruce could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes. Tony grabbed a random piece of parchment and started scribbling out designs. Bruce almost laughed at the sight, surprising himself. He hadn't laughed since... well. It had been a while. Bruce left quietly, not wanting to disturb Tony's thought process. Tonight there was somewhere he had to be.

Several hours later, Tony looked up from his sketches and realized that he was the only one left in the common room. The only lights were from his wand and the dim embers of the fire, and the only sound was a faint breeze coming through the window. I should go to bed, thought Tony. Usually he fell asleep before he was finished with whatever idea he had, but this time he still felt awake.

Bruce! He could show him the designs. He'd probably gone to bed, but he could wake up for this. Tony ran up to Bruce's dormitory, too eager to show him what he'd drawn to care about waking the other boys.

"Bruce! Banner! Look what-" However, upon reaching Bruce's bed, he discovered it to be empty. Tony looked to the other bleary-eyed boys in the dorm. "Where is he?"

One of the boys mumbled a reply, "Look, I don't know, he didn't come back. It's not my problem if he gets in trouble." The rest groaned a similar sentiment before rolling over and going back to sleep.

Tony tried to think of where he might go. He didn't seem the type to sneak out after they were supposed to. Maybe he was sick? Tony headed off to the hospital wing. Just to make sure he was okay.

He made it almost to the door when he heard noises and voices coming from the other side. He quickly hid around a corner, hoping they wouldn't come that way. He just managed to make out the end of the conversation.

"Last check, everyone had taken their potions, correct?"

"Yes, madame." Tony was confused. It sounded like a small group of children.

He quickly ducked back around the corner as the door to the hospital wing opened and the nurse and several children walked through. Luckily, Tony was unnoticed as the nurse ushered the children past and away. Tony recognized Bruce's curly hair at the back of the group, and followed them down the stairs all the way to the outside.

A light breeze blew, rustling the bushes, providing Tony with enough cover to follow the group at a distance across the grounds of Hogwarts. Tony heard a distant rumble of thunder from the east, where several dark clouds had gathered, making everything feel tense. Tony darted behind another bush as they continued forward, faster now. Where on earth where they going? It was so late, not even the older students were allowed out of bed now.

They turned a corner and Tony saw it.

The tree was huge, so big it would have been threatening even if its arms weren't moving all over the place. Tony hadn't had much time to explore the grounds, they'd only been there for a few weeks, but still, he'd heard of this. It was the Whomping Willow.

Why were they heading towards the Whomping Willow?

Tony could just barley make out the nurse's flick of her wand. Suddenly, the tree was still. Like magic, thought Tony, before he realized what he'd said and then mentally smacked himself in the face. The group of students headed for the tree, lead by the nurse, who was still holding up her wand, presumably holding the tree still. Tony leaned forward, trying to see where they could possibly be going. They reached the base of the tree. It was so dark, and Tony still couldn't see what was happening, so he leaned forward even more. There! Someone was heading down into the tree?-

CRASH! Tony fell out of his hiding place, somehow knocking over a large ornamental bust in the process and smashing it on the ground. Though they were several hundred meters away, the group by the tree turned to look.

"Tony?"

Tony had just enough time to look up and see Bruce's face, small, but lit up now by the moon coming over the clouds, before all of the children suddenly convulsed in pain. What was happening? Tony watched with disbelief as Bruce, his friend, changed before his eyes. In a matter of seconds, what had once been a group of children was now a small pack of wolves. Most of them ran immediately to the tree, except for the one who had been Bruce, who stared at Tony for a moment before following the others.

Tony lay on the ground for a moment in shock, then somehow remembered that he wasn't supposed to be outside right now and that the nurse had definitely seen him. He took off across the grounds as fast as he could run. He was halfway back to the Ravenclaw tower before he realized that no one was following him. The nurse must have decided that the wolves were the priority. Had she seen his face? He didn't know. Tony slowed down a little and made his was quietly back to his bed.

He threw himself onto his bed, his head full of questions. What had just happened? This where Bruce had been? Wolves? Wolves? It was the full moon. Werewolves? What? How? Why didn't he tell me? I guess he doesn't know me that well. I guess I don't know him that well. He's not going to hurt me?

Is he?

Tony's thoughts continued to swirl until the early morning, when he finally fell asleep. He would get to the bottom of it tomorrow.