Plots, Plans, and Potions

Chapter 25: Plots, Plans, and Potions

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Whatever wisdom Lupin might have had to offer about the situation, they never heard it, because after almost an hour of all but ransacking the castle, Draco and Hermione were informed by an unamused Professor McGonagall that Lupin was not there.

“What do you mean, he’s not here?” Draco demanded. “It’s a Sunday afternoon. Where else would he be?”

“What Professor Lupin does with his weekend is quite his affair,” replied McGonagall, “and I fail to see how it should concern either of you. If you require something to occupy yourselves with, the silver in the armory needs polishing, though it may not for long, if you continue to take that tone.”

Draco apologized, and steered them quickly back to the common room; the clipped tones of McGonagall’s disapproval made Hermione look so wretched he worried she might try to kill herself.

Harry and Ron were stationed at a table under a wide hemisphere of unfinished homework.

“Look who it is,” Ron said sulkily, as soon as her head cleared the portrait-hole. “Quick, Harry, check on Hedwig. She might ‘run away’ any minute now.”

“Any other time, Ron, but we’ve much more important things to do,” said Hermione breathlessly. “Both of you, put that away and come with us.”

The boys gaped at her with twin expressions of pure horror. Harry took off his glasses, looked at them, and then put them back on. Only a catastrophe of life-altering proportions could impel Hermione, of all people, to admit of an activity more important than homework.

Hermione windmilled her arm towards the portrait hole. “Well? Come on!” she exclaimed. “Up! Up! We haven’t a country age!”

With a shriek of jostling chairs, the boys scrambled to their feet and hurried out. Draco, who was enjoying their panic far more than Hermione could ever be allowed to know, said, “Hup, hup,” and swung the portrait-door closed behind them.

Hermione sped through the labyrinthine corridors of the castle at a breakneck pace, almost bowling over an unfortunate gaggle of fifth years who paused to stare as she careened by, heedless of Draco’s trail of hapless apologies, neglectful of fellow student and staircase alike. She cruised right under the leering visage of Peeves, who launched into a rude limerick as she passed, and without turning around, she aimed her wand over her shoulder and said: “Langlock!” with such crisp efficiency that she might have been locking a door; with a gulp, Peeves’ jaw snapped shut, and he fumbled at his throat with panic that was slightly comical.

“Ruthless, Granger,” said Draco admiringly.

“Percy taught me that one,” she panted, without pausing for breath. She hiked up her robes and dashed down a flight of stairs, hair bouncing wildly in her wake. He hopped on the banister and slid down on his hips, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.

They rounded the second-floor landing, and she breezed into the second door on the right without knocking. Draco was about to follow when he finally got an eyeful of the door itself, and jumped back with such scandalized vigor that Ron plowed straight into his shoulder blades.

“Granger!” he hissed.

She hauled the door open. “What?”

“This is the girls’!”

“Oh, please. Like it would be your first time.”

Harry snickered. Draco used his eyes and fingers to communicate what he thought of this manly betrayal.

“That was two years ago,” he whispered, shooting a furtive glance down the hallway, and finding it thankfully free of any potential witnesses in need of Obliviating. “And do you remember what happened when I did? It rhymes with fountain roll. ”

“It’s a loo, not a dungeon, you baby,” she said. “You’re just skittish because you don’t want to get caught in the girls’! But you needn’t worry. This is Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom; it’s the first place I could think of where nobody will be able to overhear us.” She paused. “Well, except Myrtle. But she doesn’t really count.”

“Who’s Myrtle?” said Ron.

Hermione grimaced. “You’ll see,” she said. She held the door ajar and pointed her chin meaningfully inside. Sending another pained glance up and down the hallway, Draco ducked in.

“A whole magical castle at your fingertips, and your first thought was a privy?” he hissed at her as he passed. She made a face at him, and he stuck his tongue out at her, which made him feel much better, all things considered.

In a moment, the door shut, and enclosed them in a disarmingly clean marble bathroom, octagonal in shape, with high deep windows that strained afternoon sunshine through whorls of dust. Their footsteps echoed on the pale stone, and when he scraped his heel on the tile, the sound went skittering into the high vault over their heads. It smelled of rock and damp and other old-castle things, which was none too pleasant a thing to smell, but as one of Merlin’s few small mercies, it did not smell particularly like a bathroom that was often used.

“Who’s there?” cried a queer, watery voice from above. Draco’s wand was out and pointed warily at the ceiling before he had time to look, and saw a dark-haired specter in the rafters. The ghost was a girl, and a young one, with long black pigtails that triggered an unpleasant flare of familiarity in the back of his mind. That was where the resemblance to Pansy ended, though: the ghost girl had a long nose and a small, woeful mouth, with thick glasses which had been inflicted, rather unfairly, he thought, on a face of very little beauty to begin with.

“Hello, Myrtle,” Hermione said tentatively, locking the door behind them. “It’s me. You remember me, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Myrtle, sinking closer. The sunlight through the windows passed through her body and bleached it out, rendering her almost wholly transparent. “You’re the one who was always crying.”

Draco frowned at Hermione. She rolled her eyes and said, with a touch of color in her cheeks, “Yes, but that was years ago. I’m quite recovered now, thank you.”

“That’s nice,” said Myrtle sadly. “Must be really nice, to be able to get over things… to go out there and make a lot of nice friends… it’s much harder for me, of course, I never get to go anywhere…”

“Yes, that’s very sad, Myrtle,” Hermione said briskly, setting down her bookbag. “I’m sure that’s terribly rough for you. Maybe you should have thought of that, before you became a ghost, though.” She caught Draco’s astonished eye, and whispered: “You can’t give her any sympathy, or she’ll really work herself into a fit. She likes feeling sorry for herself, and she especially likes when other people feel sorry for her. If she gets going, we’ll be here for hours.” Raising her voice again, she called: “Now, do you mind giving us some privacy? We’ve something important to discuss.”

“Some-thing im-por-tant!” Myrtle mimicked her. “Oh, very important, yes, I’m sure. Much more important than anything I have to say. After all, who cares about Myrtle? It’s just stupid old Myrtle — dumb old Myrtle — I’m not someone im-por-tant, like little Miss Hermione Granger!”

“Yes, that’s the long and short of it. Could you go in your toilet, please? We only need a few minutes.”

“Oh!” At this indignity, Myrtle was too overwhelmed to speak. She gave a howl of misery, and swept through the doors to one of the stalls. The toilet inside gave a riotous, rageful flush, and water began to lap out from under the stall door, trickling into the drains in the floor.

Ron balked and gave the water a wide berth, twitching back his robes. “She’s not really inside the toilet, is she?”

“In fact she is,” said Hermione. She sat down on the floor near the window, settling herself in a nice pool of sunlight, and drew her wand. “Muffliato. There, she shouldn’t be able to hear us now.”

“But why?”

“Why what? Oh, that’s annoying, isn’t it. Silencio,” she said, aiming her wand severely at the still-gurgling stall. It fell silent with a pitiful squelch.

“Why a toilet?” said Ron, a question Draco had dearly wanted to ask, but considered it beneath himself to give voice to. Ron often did this for Draco.

Hermione shrugged, as if she couldn’t possibly be bothered to entertain the logic of a creature so deeply beneath her own powers of reason. “Ask her, I suppose. Ghosts are bound to the place they died, or places that were particularly significant to them while they were alive. Either way, it’s rather depressing, isn’t it? Really not worth thinking about.”

“Poor thing,” said Harry, staring at the stall.

Hermione said, “You’d feel a lot less sorry for her if she started bellowing every time you were trying to relieve yourself. Now sit down, please, Draco and I have just heard something terribly important and I don’t know how long that Muffliato will hold.”

They gathered in a circle on the bathroom floor. Draco, for whom this was easily the worst thing to happen to him all week, and possibly all month, cast a Cushioning Charm, and sent a rueful mutter about choosing better meeting locations in Hermione’s direction.

Quickly, in brisk, unornamented language, Hermione related to Harry and Ron what had been revealed at Hagrid’s hut.

“So we have to save him,” said Harry immediately. His tone was edged with panic. “We can’t let them take him. They can’t take Sirius back to Azkaban. He won’t do it. And Lupin! What will he do? Sirius won’t go, he’ll go down fighting, they both will, they’ll die.”

Ron was nodding glumly, as if he, too, saw this as a foregone conclusion. Draco, overall nonplussed at the dour mood of the congregation, decided to give them both a dose of medicine.

“Potter. Weasley. Shape up. Nobody wants to see my cousin dead,” he began. Then he considered. “Except, of course, the Ministry of Magic. And the dementors, though they don’t count. They want everything dead, it seems, so Black isn’t so much an exception as the rule. And most of the Wizarding World, of course, they’re against you. But of the people you’re talking to, zero of three.”

In return for this endorsement, he received a trio of bleak stares. He cleared his throat and added, “A very good start, one thinks.”

“Thanks for that,” said Ron incredulously.

Harry drove the heels of his palms into his rumpled hairline, clearly saddling up for a nervous breakdown. Draco was privately impressed that he had held out this long.

“Harry, calm down. Draco, stop trying to calm Harry down,” Hermione pleaded. “There’s still time. The man from the Ministry said they were extending the search for a month, and they’ll most likely start at the castle and move out, so they won’t reach the Shack for a few weeks, at least. The Forest will give them plenty to deal with in the meantime. All we’ve got to do is figure out how to move Sirius out of the Shack before then.”

“Trivial, really,” drawled Draco. “That’s all? Move a wanted criminal across a grounds packed to the gunwhales with dementors, smuggle him across the border — which we can’t cross, mind you — and move him to an as-yet undiscovered safehouse? While the top dogs in the Ministry sniff around?”

She glowered. “If you don’t want to help,” she began, heatedly, but he scowled and batted the suggestion away with his hand.

“Come off it, of course I’m going to help. He’s my cousin, not yours.” He pretended to inspect the soles of his shoes for bathroom-floor-grime.

This was not the reason he cared in the slightest what happened to Sirius Black. The reason he cared was five foot two and currently polishing his glasses like he could somehow scrub his abandonment issues out with a ratty sleeve. But Draco would rather end up haunting a toilet than bequeath that piece of information to anyone living.

And so Hermione could give him as many knowing smirks as she wanted. She could simper and wink and pretend to understand as much as she liked. Didn’t mean she knew anything. Didn’t mean it made him feel better, her looking at him like he’d just handed her a signed first edition of Bathilda Bagshot or lassoed the moon or something. Didn’t mean he liked feeling like he’d bested a basilisk with his bare hands.

Really, she might at least give him the dignity of feigning self-interest.

“Right. Er— anyway.” Hermione turned away from him, and her hair fell to cover her face, but her voice betrayed that she was still smiling. “There are three problems to solve, I think. One: we need to get Sirius out of the Shack and down into Hogsmeade, at least, where he can Apparate or use the Floo. Two: we need to make sure the dementors don’t get him — or us, frankly. Three: we need to make sure no one from the Ministry, or anyone else for that matter, sees us moving him.”

Ron rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, last one’s easiest, isn’t it,” he said. “We’ve got to do it at night.”

“Night makes it harder because of curfew,” Hermione reminded him.

“Yeah, but c’mon. Filch? Mrs. Norris? We’ve been sneaking past them since first year. Nothing compared to the number of eyeballs about during the day.” He grimaced. “Believe me, I’m not too keen about skulking around the Forbidden Forest at night, either, but I don’t see how any of this works, otherwise.”

“We can use the Cloak,” Harry suggested.

Ron pursed his lips. “Sure,” he said, “but even if we use the Cloak, there’s no way we can fit five, especially if one’s a full-grown bloke. We can fit two of us, maybe three.”

“No. Just Sirius,” said Harry. He looked like he was gearing up to take a kick from a hippogriff, with all the grim seriousness of someone for whom this would not be the first hippogriff-kicking. “He uses the Cloak. The rest of us just risk it.”

Draco raised a finger. “Objection,” he said. “Can we come up with something better than ‘just risk it’? For preference? It’s just that I get so much more pleasure from having my soul here, inside me, rather than having it sucked out through my mouth like a fine soup.”

“Maybe we could try a Disillusionment Charm,” mused Hermione. “Flitwick says Professor Dumbledore can produce a Disillusionment Charm so powerful he’s almost invisible.”

“Great, maybe he’ll do one for us,” said Draco. “Because surely none of us will. It’s sixth-year spellwork.”

“I know, but we could learn!”

“In three weeks? Enough to fool a dementor? Even you and I have limits, Granger.”

“What about a disguise?” suggested Ron. “There’s lots of magical ways to disguise yourself, aren’t there? Charlie said most of seventh year with McGonagall is just human transfiguration.”

Draco blanched. “It’s N.E.W.T.-level for a reason,” he replied, stricken. “With respect, I’m not letting any of you numpties point a wand at my face unless you have a maxillofacial Healer’s license and a cert from St. Mungo’s. Not even Granger there, and she’s the second coming of Merlin, if you believe McGonagall.”

“Oh, stop it,” said Hermione, who quite obviously did not want him to stop in the slightest, and she hid a beam behind her hair. “But Draco’s right, we haven’t a chance at managing human transfiguration, not at our level… I wonder if there’s something we could brew…?”

She gasped. She turned to Draco, who abruptly sat up straight, cursing himself for not beating her to it.

They said at the same time: “Polyjuice Potion.”

She smacked her forehead. “I’m an idiot!” she said. “Of course! A bit of Polyjuice—”

“Nick some hairs off of a Ministry official—”

“See if we can’t get our hands on a uniform—”

“No one would stop us, all we’d have to do is grab him and walk him out. It’d be trivial.”

“Anyone who saw us would assume—”

“—it was just Ministry business,” he said. She nodded fervently.

The thrill of finding the answer was so all-consuming that it took him a whole three seconds to remember there was a world outside of their conversation.

“We’d be breaking about fifty school rules,” she added.

“If they catch us.”

“And we’d have to actually make the potion. Which would be difficult.”

He snorted.

“No, it would be, even for us. Even for you! For one thing, we’d need to find the ingredients somehow. And it takes almost a month.”

“Lucky us, then, we’ve got almost a month to figure it out.”

“And it’d be a lot of work.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, because I’m certain it isn’t the only person in this castle who’s ever beat you in Potions.”

“Because Snape likes you better, not because you actually do—”

“Oi,” said Ron loudly.

Draco and Hermione turned in unison.

“Whenever you two feel so inclined,” he said, aggrieved, “there are, not to shock you or anything, two other people here. Get back to us before we graduate, would you?”

“But you know what Polyjuice Potion is,” said Hermione instantly. “Snape mentioned it last year.”

“D’you think I’ve got nothing better to do in Potions than listen to Snape?”

“Truthfully?” said Draco. Hermione pinched him.

“It transforms you into somebody else,” she said.

“What — forever?” Ron was alarmed.

“It wears off after a while,” she muttered, digging through her book bag. “But getting hold of the recipe will be very difficult. They don’t teach it in Potions, we’ll need the recipe from a really old book… The Darkest Arte, maybe? Or we could try Most Potente Potions, it’d definitely be in there…”

“Is this Dark magic?” said Harry, frowning.

She scoffed. “Hardly!” she said. “It’s forbidden because it can be abused easily, that’s all. But it’s not hardly as dangerous as lots of the magic they teach here at Hogwarts, and that’s all perfectly legal.”

Draco caught Harry’s eye and rocked his hand to-and-fro: equivocating. Harry’s frown deepened and grew its own miniature set of frowns. His face was a frown breeding pit.

Hermione blazed on, heedless. “But Most Potente Potions is bound to be in the Restricted Section of the library. We’d just need a note from a teacher, which would be impossible to get without explaining what we wanted it for… I suppose we could say we were interested in the theory, but I don’t think McGonagall will fall for it, knowing us… we might ask Lupin…”

“Come to think of it, why haven’t we asked Lupin?” suggested Ron. “He’s sure to have some say in all this, hasn’t he?”

“And would do, if we could find the bugger,” Draco replied. “He’s gone off the map. Whatever he’s doing, he isn’t making himself available for consultation.” Harry gave a sharp intake of breath, and Draco felt badly. But there was no sugarcoating the matter.

“Perhaps he’ll be back tomorrow,” said Hermione doubtfully. “If not, we could try McGonagall, I suppose… or, Draco, you could always ask Snape.”

Draco tipped his head back and let the idea roll around in it. Unlike McGonagall, Snape wouldn’t dismiss the request out of hand, and he might even indulge him; but the problem was, he could read Draco like a book, and he didn’t have a good reason for wanting it that didn’t involve breaking school rules. He wasn’t sure how much he was willing to bet on being able to fool his godfather. “Alright. Fair enough. And what do I say when he asks me what I want it for?”

“Tell him the truth: you’re interested in potion-making, and you want to study it outside of a classroom context. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“It’s true, but that book—” He cut himself off. “Did you say Most Potente Potions?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m sure it’s in other books, but that’s the first one off the top of my head.”

“We don’t need to use the library,” he said excitedly. “I have that book. Snape gave it to me for Christmas last year.”

“But that’s perfect!”

“I know! All I have to do is write home to Mother asking for it — she’ll wrap it up and ship it for me, we’ll have it by the week’s end!”

“Marvelous!” breathed Hermione, radiating the warmth of a solved problem. “Marvelous. In the meantime, we can work on our Patronus Charms.”

The air went out of Draco like a skewered zeppelin. “Our what?”

“Patronuses,” she said, scrawling something in her notebook. “We’ll be outside after dark, with no chaperone, and the dementors will be about. Sirius can cast one, but that’s only one, and it’ll be better if we all can… Harry, you said Lupin taught you to cast a Patronus, didn’t he? You did a solid-looking one at the Ravenclaw game.”

“I can do it alright, I guess,” said Harry sheepishly. “It’s not as good as his.”

“Well, it’ll have to be good enough,” said Hermione. “We can ask Lupin to help us, once he comes back, but there’s no sense in waiting. You can teach the rest of us, and we’ll practice that while the potion is brewing. I’ll make a list of all the things we have to do. Draco, you’ll write to your mother for the book this afternoon… we should start stealing the things we’ll need, it’ll look more suspicious if we try to smuggle it all in at once… we’ll have to get a spare kit from the Potions classroom, and a burner, don’t know how we’ll set that up in here…”

“What do you mean, in here?” demanded Draco. “We’re not doing it in the bathroom, are we?”

She blinked at him owlishly. “Where else?” she said. “There’s nowhere I can think of that’s as private, or as sterile. We certainly can’t do it in the Tower, someone would knock it over or try to drink it before the day was out.”

“But it’s a bathroom!”

“Yes, so?”

“For starters, it’s unhygienic, it’s humid, and it’s haunted, for Merlin’s sake.”

“You,” she said knowingly, “just don’t want to be seen coming and going from the girls’ bathroom.”

“Frankly not!”

“Tosh,” she said. “You’ll be fine. Use the Cloak. Harry, Ron, you’ll have to help us get the ingredients. The base for the brew is a standard Cosmetic Potion, so there’s some things I know we’ll need right off the bat. Lacewing flies, leeches, fluxweed, and knotgrass… I’ll make copies of the list.”

Harry said, “I don’t think I’ve been sold on the ‘not using Dark magic’ bit of all this, really,” but Hermione ignored him. She was writing with a haste fit to leave skid marks behind her the quill-tip, and her hair had started to drift out of its elastic in a static halo, a quirk of her excitement that was probably unconscious magic.

“It’s not Dark magic,” Draco told Harry. “If anything, it’s… gray magic. Silver magic, if you will.”

“But—”

“And,” he added, “if I’m lying, Potter, do you really want to know?”

“No,” said Harry frankly. “But the fact that the book’s coming from Snape doesn’t make me feel a lot better, either.”

“Yeah, but look at it this way. At least we’re doing it for a good cause,” said Ron easily, brushing off his knees as he stood up. “If it’s between this and a bloke getting the Dementor’s Kiss, I’m not bothered. Anyway, don’t worry, Harry. When the aurors come, we can always say these two told us it was a Pepper-Up Potion.”

---

They decided to wait until dinner to stage their first theft, hoping that anybody lingering in the classrooms would have been driven out by hunger or boredom. Harry and Hermione went to nick a Potions kit from the student cupboard in the Potions classroom — “Stuff it under your cloak, like you’re preggers,” suggested Ron — while Draco went to the owlery to write his mother, and Ron took up a watch outside Lupin’s door, in the hope of making contact with the professor who (they reasoned) might well have just been out for an afternoon stroll. Agreeing to rendezvous at dinner, the four of them went their separate ways, and with all the enthusiasm Sisyphus felt for his rock, Draco hauled himself up the long, dismal stairs to the owlery.

Since the Ministry was screening his mail, he didn’t fancy using Ulysses to carry the letter, but he didn’t see any other choice. He couldn’t explain to Snape the urgency of getting a missive to his mother on such short notice. So he scrawled out a letter that was as simple as possible: Jasmines are having a good season this year. May I have my copy of Most Potente Potions? Extra credit project. Don’t tell Uncle S, I want to surprise him. He strapped it to Ulysses’ leg and cast him out into the gloomy February fog.

His stomach noisily asserted its rights, and he made his way back down the stairs to the Great Hall. Near the foot of the great spiral staircase, the doors hung open, and a cluster of students had swept in from the cold, dusted with snow and whisking little snowdrifts into the hall around their ankles. Draco drew his cloak tighter around himself and curled his lip at the unwelcome intrusion of chill.

One of the students was Neville. He was trapped between Marcus Flint and Terrence Higgs, a pair of sixth-year Slytherins, who were amusing themselves with a game of murtlap-in-the-middle. Their toy was something small and mottled brown. Each time one of them tossed it, Neville gave a shrill squeal and went running after it, unaware or perhaps unwilling to admit that there was no possibility of him stealing it back. Despite the chill, his round face was splotched red and glossed with sweat. The Slytherins found this endlessly entertaining.

Draco had as much appreciation for a mean-spirited game of mockery as the next man, but watching them, he discovered that he had a significantly higher threshold for novelty. In first year, bullying Neville had been something of a school sport. By third year, he was astonished that none of the older students had found anything more important to do.

Fed up with waiting, and hungry besides, he drew his wand.

He threw a lazy slash of his wrist at Higgs, and the Body-Bind Jinx nailed him in the sternum. The boy’s joints snapped into rigid formation, his expression locked in a comical gasp of surprise, and with a muted groan he tipped forward like a felled oak tree.

“Oi!” Flint fumbled out his wand and aimed it up the stairs. “What’d you do to Terrence?”

Draco gave him the sort of look that begged to know whether it was a sincere question.

Without warning, Flint threw a Stinging Charm up the stairs. Draco sidestepped it — it was really laughably easy, he didn’t even think about a Shield Charm, it went so wide — and thought about trying the Banishing Charm Flitwick had introduced last week, but he recalled that Flitwick had been quite somber about the potential consequences of Banishing a living creature. He countered with a neat partial Body-Bind to Flint’s ankles, and the boy, whose shot had already drawn him off his balance, tumbled onto his rear in a puddle of melted snow.

“Draco?” said Neville, a bit wondrously.

Draco sheathed his wand and stalked down the last stairs to the entrance hall. “Longbottom.”

Neville had darted over and pried whatever it was they had been tossing from Higgs’ rigid fist: coming closer, Draco saw that it was a toad. The poor creature was shivering violently in Neville’s cupped hands. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “I c-c-can’t tell you how g-g-glad I am you s-stepped in. I didn’t think Trevor could handle much m-m-more of that.”

“Don’t bleat. I wanted dinner, and you were in my way. You ought to do a better job of holding onto your pets.”

“I t-t-try, honest.” He followed Draco into the Great Hall, cradling Trevor happily to his chest. “I was c-c-coming back from the greenhouses when they found me. They t-tried to take my Herbology notebook, but I t-t-told them they w-w-wouldn’t make any sense of it, and then Trevor got sc-c-ared by the shouting, and he jumped out of my b-b-bag.”

“And why the devil did you have your toad in your book bag?”

“He likes the humidity in the g-g-greenhouses.”

“He said so, did he?”

“Hagrid says it’s g-g-good for his skin.”

The mention of Hagrid did nothing for Draco’s mood. He snapped, “Then put him in a jar or something. I don’t know. After three years, you should have figured out—” He stopped. “Longbottom.”

“Yes?”

“You have access to the greenhouses?”

“All the teachers assistants’ do,” said Neville, blinking. “So we can check on the mandrakes. Why?”

Ten minutes later, he was whinging bitterly about the cold while Draco tapped his foot, waiting for him to unlock Greenhouse Three. The sun sank so early in February that it was already dark as midnight, and the snow fell in light flurries, crowning their dark robes with mantles of white.

“We’re really not sup-p-posed to be here after dark!”

“Don’t be such a ninny.”

A creak of glass-and-metal hinges announced Neville’s success. They hurried into the warm box of the greenhouse, whisking the door hastily closed behind them. Inside it was just as profoundly dark as the outside, merely mustier, and full of the sticky-sweet smell of earth and chlorophyll and pollen. During the winter the greenhouses pumped heat magically through the flagstones, so the soles of Draco’s feet marinated in warmth wherever he set them on the tile.

Within seconds, the snow on their shoulders had melted and soaked through their cloaks, dampening their hair. It made Neville’s bowl cut, which Draco already considered the nadir of men’s grooming, somehow even worse.

There was a snap, and a row of lightbulbs blazed along the line of the planters, filling the room with a red glow. Neville shucked his robe and tossed it over a chair near the doorway. He looped a weathered brown apron around his neck and fastened it behind the thick swell of his waist. “What are you l-l-looking for, again?” he said.

Draco fished the list out of his pocket and held it out between two fingers. Neville took it and drew a pair of reading spectacles out of his breast pocket, holding them at a distance from his face, like an opera spectator. It was a very pureblood gesture, in a way Draco couldn’t quite explain; it was the same invisible print of class that shone through how one folded a pocket square, or carried their wand-holster. Draco remembered, with a bit of surprise, that the Longbottoms were one of the finest wizarding families around. Neville simply didn’t make a production of it, because it wasn’t his way.

“Lacewing flies, leeches,” read Neville, squinting, “well we don’t have those, they’re not p-p-plants… fluxweed, knotgrass… oh, that’s easy. I know where those are.” He dropped the glasses to hang by a chain on his neck and bumbled cheerfully down the aisle, strapping on a thin blue glove of some strange rubbery material.

“So it’s common, then?”

“Ooh, yes. Descurainia pinnata — though only potioneers call it ‘fluxweed,’ most people just say tansy mustard — grows like w-w-weeds. It’s stubborn as an erumpet, practically won’t die unless you rip it up by the r-r-roots! And knotgrass is a perennial, so it’s around all the t-t-time. How much do you need?”

“How much can you spare?”

“Not all of it,” said Neville doubtfully, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Sprout will nn-notice if there’s some missing.”

“Well, just say that you were trying to—”

He clapped his hands excitedly. “Never mind, I know! I’ll say I used the fluxweed to make khakshir. It’s this drink Romilda made for us the other d-d-day.” He bent and examined the fluxweed plant, twisting one branch this way and that. “She gave us her d-d-dad’s recipe, she says they make it all the time d-d-during the summer, it’s actually quite refreshing. Did you know Romilda is great at Herbology? I hope she joins the TA group next year, Sprout likes her, too. I’m going to put in a good word… she’s really clever, Rom-m-milda, b-but she doesn’t think the other girls like her v-very much…”

Neville was talking more to himself now than to Draco, in the tone of someone used to muttering to themselves. While he talked, he carefully clipped a few sprigs of fluxweed from the small feathery plant. He tweezed them into a bit of cheesecloth in his other hand, and then stroked the plant he’d cut from, as if comforting it. In all this had the precision of a surgeon and the tenderness of someone changing a nappy.

Meanwhile, Draco was locked in a standoff with a wandering tendril of Venomous Tentacula. It was getting far too amorous with his ankles. He put a hand on his wand and glared it down, fully prepared to reassert his evolutionary prerogative.

“Longbottom.”

“…fair to her, because Parvati really does try to include everyb-b-body — hm?”

“How on earth do you remember all that?”

“Remember what?” said Neville, folding up the clippings in cheesecloth.

“Which plant is which. And what it does, and what it’s called, and where it grows, and everything.”

“How do you remember all that stuff about p-p-potions?” said Neville philosophically. “I dunno. I’m not very smart, but I can take care of things. And I’m g-g-good at it, which means it must be pretty easy.” He patted the knotgrass plant and smiled.

Draco could not dwell on Neville’s wistful tone; he was locked in combat. He stamped hard on the flagstone, and the Tentacula whipped its tendril away just in time to avoid amputation by bootheel. “It’s not easy,” he said hotly. “It’s wretchedly hard. How should I know if a plant wants watering? Or fertilizing? Am I to ask it? It’s worse than Care of Magical Creatures, if you ask me.”

“B-b-but it tells you,” Neville said. “See, here? This droopy bit? That’s it telling you it needs some water. And when it gets these little spots on its leaves, it’s telling you it needs medicine. It’s d-d-dreadfully easy, once you know what you’re l-l-looking for.” He tied the cheesecloth with a bit of twine, handed it to Draco, and drifted further down the aisle of planters, speaking absent-mindedly over his shoulder. “Easier than p-people, anyway. With people you can never tell how to make them happy,” he said. “There are all these little rules that nobody tells you what they are, and if you don’t follow the rules then they don’t like you. A-and it doesn’t matter how n-n-nice you are or how hard you try to follow them… but plants are easy.”

The Venomous Tentacula flopped a tendril around Neville’s neck as he passed, apparently to attempt an affectionate strangulation, and he brushed it off with a fond pat.

“One supposes,” Draco said nervously. He had not come prepared for emotional disclosure, and now found there was no way of extricating himself without coming across as uncouth or driving, alas, still deeper into the morass of Neville’s feelings.

Neville, seeming to understand Draco’s dilemma, shot a wry glance over his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said. “We d-don’t have to talk about it.”

“Good,” said Draco, relieved. “Decent of you.”

“But I am glad that I g-g-get to help you, now,” he added, plunging Draco back into discomfort. Gratitude was even worse than self-pity. He wished Neville would go back to moping. “After all the t-tutoring you’ve done for me. I don’t really understand why you d-d-do that, when I’m s-such a t-t-t-terrible student.”

Gruffly, Draco said: “Come off it, you’re not terrible,” but this was a bald lie. Neville giggled.

“It’s okay. You’ve s-said so often enough, and I do listen, even if you think I d-d-don’t. All I want is to get by an Acceptable on my O.W.L., and then I can drop it… My Gran s-s-says I shouldn’t even bother to sit the O.W.L. in Potions. But they won’t l-let you become an herbologist without at least an A.”

“Why?” said Draco, intrigued.

“B-b-because herbologists and potioneers work together all the t-t-time,” Neville said slowly, as though Draco were testing him. “Half the work herbologists d-d-do is for potion-making. It’s even harder for potioneers, though; they have to take the Herbology O.W.L. and the N.E.W.T.”

“They do?”

“Yes, of course,” said Neville warily, as if he still thought he were being quizzed. “That’s why it surprised me when you said you didn’t like Herbology. I assumed you wanted to be a p-p-potioneer, since you’re so good at Potions.”

“I… I’ve certainly considered it.” He briefly imagined taking four more years of Herbology, and shuddered. “But what a stupid requirement. What’s the point of having herbologists, if you’re going to force your potioneers to do all their work for them? Utter waste of time.”

“I don’t know. I’m sure you’ll be good at it, though,” Neville said reassuringly. “Everybody knows you and Herm-m-ione will get top ranks in everything.” He folded up another sack of cheesecloth and gave it to Draco. “Besides, if you r-really hate it, maybe I can t-t-tutor you. As p-p-payback.” He grinned.

There was a long beat of silence. Neville, his smile fading, said timidly: “Only joking, Malfoy. Sorry.”

“That,” said Draco, “is — no. It’s fine, Longbottom.” He looked down at the bundles of cheesecloth. “I suppose I ought to thank you.”

Neville shrugged. “S’nothing,” he said. He began to polish his spectacles on his apron. “Really, I’m just g-glad to be helpful.”

“I,” said Draco, and paused. A heavy bolt of something sour was curdling in the bottom of his stomach. He tried again: “I think I may owe you… a concession.”

“A concession?”

“I’m not apologizing.”

“Okay,” said Neville, wide-eyed with alarm.

“But I think… that is, I believe it is possible, at times, over the past few years… before I had access to all the available information… I may have indeliberately — and, of course, non-maliciously — said things that implied you were unintelligent.”

“You called me a thick-skulled moron with pudding for brains.”

“You know, it’s perfectly tactless of you to see a man trying and throw it right back in his face—”

“But you were right. I am stupid,” said Neville, staring.

“No,” said Draco resignedly. “In fact not. What you are is uniquely and fatefully dreadful at Potions.”

There was a pause.

“Okay, I knew that, thanks.”

“But you are not,” he added, “utterly, all the time, a moron. No more than anyone else at this school, anyway. Which is not saying much.”

Neville’s face screwed up like he’d tried a staring contest with the sun.

“Well, thanks,” he said, sort of pleased, but mostly confused. “That’s awfully nice of you to say. Er — you’re not a moron, either.”

“Of course I’m not! Do you think I didn’t know that? Did someone say I was? Don’t answer that. And don’t look so cheerful. All this means is you haven’t got an excuse for switching the burner to the wrong setting, and before you say anything, yes, you very well did, and if you hadn’t then you wouldn’t have ended up with a cauldron full of muck, and Longbottom I swear to Merlin if you don’t wipe that smug look off your face I’m going to turn that toad into ribbons.”

---

By Tuesday morning, most people had noticed the Ministry officials lingering on the grounds long after the Minister had taken his leave.

“I thought they were supposed to leave days ago,” said Ginny impatiently. “What are they lurking around for?” She had been apprehended by an auror on her way to the Great Lake and ordered to explain her business outside the castle so close to curfew; she had thereafter received a harsh reprimand from Professor McGonagall for giving the answer of ‘streaking with Sirius Black.’

“They’re here for our safety,” said Percy severely. He flipped open his newspaper and gave it a significant-sounding rustle. “You ought to be grateful they’ve stayed as long as they have. Black has been on the lam for almost six months now; I shudder to think how Fudge would have handled the situation.”

Draco narrowed his eyes at Percy. The elder Weasley was spending an awful lot of spare time hanging around the Ministry workers, with whom he could occasionally be seen escorting around the grounds, or leading down various passageways in the castle. He always seemed to be in the middle of a long, pontificating speech about the castle history, interspersed with exclamations of: “And of course, as Head Boy, I could also show you…” and in general showed a humiliating level of ignorance as to his own obsequiousness. Whatever his game was, it appeared to be working, however: last week, Draco had spotted him sharing butterbeers with some of the aurors in Hogsmeade. He didn’t know if Percy knew he’d been seen, or if he cared.

“Isn’t Fudge in your party?” he said.

Percy rolled his eyes. He lathered his scone with blackberry jam in thick, brisk strokes. “Really, Draco. You of all people should know it’s perfectly reasonable to want to criticize members of your own party.”

“‘Of all people’?”

“Dad says it’s illegal,” fumed Ginny, massaging her wrist. She had spent three hours last night writing ‘I WILL RESPECT MY ELDERS’ for McGonagall, and a hand cramp had done nothing to improve her mood. “He says you can’t search a magical domicile without a warrant, and Hogwarts qualifies as a domicile for everyone in residence.”

“Yes, but you see, Ginevra, it’s also government property,” said Percy, in a tone so snide and simpering it made even Draco want to see him smacked. From Ginny’s glower, she was clearly willing and able. “The Ministry funds Hogwarts. Do you know people like you and me wouldn’t be able to attend Hogwarts at all, unless the Ministry stepped in? It’d only be people like—” And he nodded, less than subtly, at Draco. Draco saluted, ironically, and sipped his tea.

“That doesn’t mean they get to barge in and ruin it!”

“Don’t be so hysterical. They’re not ruining it, merely keeping it safe. And besides, the Magical Security Act changed all of that rot about warrants last year, anyway. Or don’t you remember? What am I saying, of course you don’t. The Magical Security Act gives the Department of Magical Law Enforcement the ability to search, scour, or Trace any suspects charged with a crime. Now that Hagrid’s been caught out in one — and really, what a shameful day for the school, to have a teacher hoarding contraband, in all my years at Hogwarts I’ve never been so embarrassed—”

“Quirrell had the Dark Lord in his head,” said Draco, but Percy ignored him.

“—naturally, the Ministry’s entitled to be concerned. I mean, who knows what else he could be hiding in those woods?” Percy said, rhetorically, though Draco in fact knew the answer. He hoped Nott would stumble into a spider or two on his way in. “As the Minister says, if someone is willing to break one law, he’ll break another…”

Dean Thomas lifted his head from his book. “Come off it, now,” he said to Percy, in tones of gentle chastisement. “You don’t really think Hagrid’s done anything dangerous.”

Draco, who was of the mind that ‘something dangerous’ happened every Care of Magical Creatures lesson, could list half a dozen things for Percy to mention. But Percy flushed and said, “I beg to differ. He’s absolutely done something dangerous. He’s threatened the rule of law.”

“Yeah, and it was bloody cool,” said Seamus sulkily. A box of his firecrackers had been confiscated the previous day. “They should go on and leave him alone. He’s my favorite teacher.” Dean patted his leg in comfort.

“That’s your own folly,” said Percy peevishly. He had spent too much time scrubbing firework residue off the Gryffindor walls to have much sympathy for Seamus. “Frankly, I think Dumbledore should seriously consider replacing him. Let him stay as gamekeeper, if you must, but he’s got no business being a professor. Did you know that Hagrid didn’t even graduate from Hogwarts? He hasn’t a N.E.W.T to his name. Everyone at the Ministry thinks he’s a joke.”

Ginny — who, between a sore hand, a sore pride, and a sore spot for condescension, had very obviously spent her last reserves of patience on Percy long ago — jumped to her feet. “Why do you care what they think? Everyone here thinks you’re a joke,” she snapped. “You’re making a fool of yourself.” She stood up, tossed her fiery hair over her shoulder, and stormed off to sit with Lavender instead.

Percy blinked. Briefly, he looked very hurt.

Then he glanced at Draco. “Children,” he sighed.

Draco said merely “Hmm,” and stirred his tea. He had no stake in Weasley family politics, and did not want one. He remained silent when Percy, after several minutes of no one talking to him, threw down his newspaper and stalked over to the Ravenclaw table to sit with Penelope.

News of the Ministry’s snooping had evidently taken its toll on the teachers, too, for the following day they had their first lesson with Lupin since the Minister’s visit. It was the first of Lupin’s lessons to disappoint them. Instead of a field trip or a live demonstration, they filed into the classroom to find their desks arranged neatly in rows, with a small booklet atop each desk. Lupin leaned heavily on his desk, sallow-faced and almost blanketed by his traveling cloak, as tired as Draco had ever seen him.

Everyone understood at once what was happening, and several gave cries of disappointment or betrayal, for it had come to feel as though Lupin were not a teacher but a peer and friend.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Lupin good-naturedly, through the groaning. His voice was quiet and gravelly, and Draco mentally checked the calendar: the full moon had been several nights ago. “I’m afraid I let time get away with me, this weekend, and I haven’t got anything good planned. We’ll have a quiz today, and I’ll make up for it with something rather more interesting next time, I hope.”

Hermione, who ordinarily would have greeted this with cries of jubilation, did not even have the heart to celebrate. She finished her quiz in breakneck time, scribbling so quickly that the nib twice snapped off her quill, and then hurried to the front of the room. Draco, sensing that she had secondary motivations, scrawled out the last few answers and hastened to meet her.

“…didn’t know where you were, this weekend,” she whispered to Lupin in a low voice. “We tried to find you — to tell you — they’re searching the grounds, we think they’re going to find S—”

“Padfoot,” interrupted Draco, sotto voce. Hermione paled at her near-mistake, and flashed him a grateful look. “The Ministry’s going to find Padfoot. In a month, if not less. We’ve got to move him.”

“I understand.”

“…What do you mean, you understand?”

“Children,” said Lupin tiredly, “I appreciate your efforts and your worry. However, we are both aware of the problem.”

“You are?” said Draco. He paused. Then, more loudly: “Why didn’t you tell us, then?”

“Shh!”

He turned and saw Lavender Brown mashing her finger to her lips. He threw her a rude gesture behind his back, and she gasped.

Lupin murmured, “Find your seats. We will discuss this after class.”

“But Professor—”

“Professor Lupin?” Hannah Abbott approached his desk timidly, cradling her paper to her chest. “Can I ask you something about Question Three?”

“Certainly,” said Lupin warmly, turning to Hannah. “What’s the problem? …Ah, I see… With these kinds of questions, Hannah, there’s no one right answer; personally, I would take the vampire first, but as long as you demonstrate you’re thinking strategically…”

When the class was over, Hermione and Harry were the first out of their chairs. Unfortunately, they had to wait for the rest of the students to shuffle out entirely before they could speak to Lupin, who sagged visibly as soon as the last student went out the door.

“Professor Lupin, are you alright?” demanded Harry. He had spent the last half-hour of class tapping his foot frantically to vent all the anxious energy about him. “Where have you been? And when’s the last you heard from Sirius? He’s safe, isn’t he?”

In response, Lupin pointed his wand at the door, which closed, locked, and bolted itself. “Please keep your voice down,” he added, and Harry shrunk into himself, chastened. “I’m sorry to worry you. Sirius is quite well, or as well as he can be, under the circumstances; I visited him just last night.”

“So the Ministry hasn’t found him yet,” Hermione said, relieved.

“No.”

“Why haven’t you been around the castle?” Harry said pointedly.

Lupin rolled his wand between his fingers, an absent gesture. “I have made myself scarce,” he admitted. “I thought it was… a prudent move, given the circumstances. Dumbledore agreed.”

“Prudent how?” said Ron.

“Prudent insofar as I have no desire to subject myself to Ministry inspection.”

“Inspection?” said Hermione quickly. “What do you mean, inspection? You haven’t got anything illegal, have you?”

Lupin paused. “Hermione,” he said gently. “My existence is a crime.”

“No, it’s not!” she said hotly. “Nobody is a criminal for existing, that’s silly! And they haven’t got anything on you; you can’t tell when someone has lycan—”

“Lice,” Draco hissed. “You can’t tell when someone has lice by looking at them.”

Hermione grimaced, nodding. Lupin chuckled to himself softly.

“You can’t tell when someone has lice,” she continued, “no matter how much you search them. You’d need a blood test. Which they can’t take without a warrant.”

“Unless I’m charged with a crime,” he said calmly. “Like harboring a Death Eater, for instance.”

“Padfoot isn’t a Death Eater,” Harry gasped.

“Certainly not,” he agreed. “But the aurors will charge him as such, if they find him. Or if they find evidence of association.”

“Which they don’t have,” Hermione argued.

Lupin said, “Yet.” He rolled his wand out on his fingers, spun it, and caught it, all absent-mindedly. “The kind of secret that one cannot keep from four thirteen-year-olds — albeit rather perspicacious thirteen-year-olds — does not strike me as particularly secure information.”

“But that was only because we had the map,” exclaimed Hermione. “Draco never would have seen you with Sirius, otherwise. If you just hide the map—”

“A good idea. However, I have found the map rather useful in my efforts to avoid crossing paths with the Ministry,” said Lupin. “Particularly at certain times of the month… regardless, it doesn’t matter. I appreciate your concern, you four, but really this is none of your business.”

“None of our business?” Harry said incredulously. “None of our business? Sirius is my godfather!”

“Yeah, and my cousin,” snapped Draco, who thought Lupin made a good point, but he wasn’t about to leave Harry out to dry.

“And a thirty-four year old man,” said Lupin calmly. “Who is more than capable of looking out for himself. Harry, your concern is noted and appreciated. Draco, so is yours. But it is not your lookout to fear for the fates of two men who have had more than enough experience taking care of ourselves.”

“Yeah, right,” said Ron sarcastically. “Mate’s been in prison for thirteen years, I’m not sure ‘looking out for himself’ is his shout.”

Lupin said stiffly, “We’ll manage.”

“But we have a plan!” said Hermione. “A good one! We figured out how to sneak Padfoot out of the Shack—”

“No,” said Lupin sharply. “Absolutely not. You will finish out the year and attend to your studies. Padfoot and I have drawn more than enough of your attention away from what matters.”

Her jaw dropped. “But—”

“What matters is you,” Harry said. His voice was strangled. “You and Sirius. I don’t give a damn about school. What do I care if I get an E or an A in stupid Divination, if you two aren’t — if you don’t—”

“Harry, we’ll be fine,” said Lupin. He rose to his feet, and in kinder tones, he said: “Padfoot and I will make arrangements as we must. Do us the favor of not underestimating us. In any case, if I allowed you to put your life at risk for mine, I do believe that the ghost of James Potter would rise up and trample me to death.”

They retreated, in various stages of resignation; Harry was not disappointed so much as angry, stomping and muttering down the long stairs to lunch. Meanwhile, Hermione had vaulted right over any emotional reaction whatsoever and into the planning phase, which was one of the things Draco cherished about her.

“We’ll just have to do it without him,” she said grimly. “If he’s not willing to help… damn. I wanted him to let us use the map. It would’ve made things so much easier.”

“That’s ironic, seeing as you wanted it confiscated,” said Ron pleasantly.

“That was ages ago! And this is much more important, can’t you see that?” She sniffed. “I don’t like breaking the rules,” she said. “And I’m not inclined to break them for no reason. But if there’s no way around it… and if there’s something more important at stake… well, just imagine what would’ve happened last year, if you hadn’t gone into the Forbidden Forest, for example! I might still be in the hospital wing. Or worse!”

Draco shivered. “Don’t go saying that, ‘or worse,’” he said irritably. “You make it sound like you might have died.”

“Paralysis often has complications,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was lucky to escape without nerve damage. Anyway, Harry, did you get the boomslang skin? You did? That’s excellent. We’ll set up in Myrtle’s bathroom later today during free period, but before that, I want to have a word with you about Patronus Charms…”

As they rounded the great staircase, they intercepted Theodore and Pansy, who were coming up from the dungeons. Theo greeted them with a broad wave.

“Afternoon, lions,” he called. “Potter, Weasley, Granger… Draco. Lovely seeing you at the reception. Shame you couldn’t stay for the discussion.”

“I didn’t know there was one,” Draco lied. “I had a bad stomach. Had to run.”

He and Pansy exchanged a glance. She lifted her eyebrow at him and looked away. He felt a pang of gratitude to her.

“Shame,” repeated Theo blandly. If he could spot the lie, he didn’t show it. “There’s another one happening this Friday, you know. In the Slytherin lounge. Same invitation stands.”

Draco’s stomach flipped, hard. “Sorry, chap,” he said coolly. “I’ve a prior obligation.”

“Oh?” Theo yawned. Dark circles bracketed his eyes. “Ah, well. I’ll give the Minister your regrets.”

Ron snorted. “As if you’re friends with the Minister.”

“Closer to it than you are, Weasley. Or has your father made inroads in the Department of Whatsits and Doodads?”

“No,” said Hermione suddenly. She turned to Draco and gripped his arm. Her fingernails left divots in his sleeve. “You don’t. Remember? I had to cancel that study group, because of Lavender’s birthday party.”

Draco blinked at her. His mind pinwheeled like a cliff-diver in freefall. It was: (1) nowhere near Lavender’s birthday, they (2) did not have a study group on Friday nights, and (3) if they did, Hermione certainly would not have canceled it for a birthday party, let alone (4) Lavender’s.

“So you should go,” she whispered.

“…You want me to—”

“You were just saying,” she said loudly, “how much you liked the first one. It was the best party all year, you said.”

Theo tilted his head, obviously pleased. “Did he really?” he said. “You old scrooge, you might have said so.”

“So you really shouldn’t let me stop you from going again.” She squeezed his arm so tightly he gave a small hiss. “Don’t. Let. Me. Stop you.”

In her great brown eyes there was an appeal, as naked and earnest as he had ever seen, for him to trust her. He resisted it for several harrowing seconds.

“Alright. Fine. If you’re… sure… you don’t want to study.”

“No. It’s really alright.”

He turned to Theo. “It appears my mind’s been changed for me,” he drawled. “I’ll see you on Friday. Ta, Nott.”

“Ta, Malfoy,” Theo said cheerfully, and escorting Pansy by the arm, he went into the Great Hall. As they passed, Pansy twisted her head over her shoulder and sent Draco a querulous stare, as if to say: And what was that about? To which he could only shrug, for he honestly didn’t know.

“Alright,” he said, as soon as they were out of earshot. “That’s my Friday evening shot, then. Granger, you’d better have an exceptional reason—”

“But don’t you see it’s a perfect opportunity?” she said eagerly. “The Polyjuice Potion needs hairs from the people you mean to turn into, and students almost never get near Ministry officials unless they’re being searched. I’ve been wracking my brains for how to get them. And here comes Theodore Nott, handing you the perfect opportunity to get elbow-to-elbow a bunch of drunk Ministry men with their guard down!”

Reluctantly, he admitted she was right. Nevertheless, he sorely resented having his time volunteered so freely, as if he hadn’t anything better to do than whatever Hermione Granger told him to.

He didn’t, but she couldn’t be allowed to know that.

“Grand idea. I’ll just sidle up to Sibelius Nott and give his wig a good yanking— you know, most of them are wearing toupees anyway?”

“Hair gets everywhere,” she scoffed. “You can pick it off their robes.”

“Speak for yourself.”

She excavated her notebook from within her book bag and frantically scribbled in it. “You’ll want to take someone to help,” she said. “As backup, of course. Normally I’d go, but I’m right out, they won’t let me through the door. Harry would work, I suppose — Harry, you’re pureblood, aren’t you?”

Draco and Ron both made the same sort of pained equivocating noise.

“I’d go, but I don’t think most of them would be too happy to see me,” said Harry. “What with me being the Chosen One, and all.”

“Allegedly,” muttered Draco.

Hermione rounded on Ron. “Oh, but I’m so stupid! I’d forgotten! You’re a pureblood,” she exclaimed. “You could go!”

Draco and Ron exchanged a look of mutual understanding and disease.

“Hermione,” Ron began, “you’re not wrong, but… just because my mum and dad are both wizards doesn’t make me the sort that gets invited to these parties. I’m not a pureblood like Draco is.”

“Of course you are. You haven’t any muggles in your family, have you?”

“Not really, it’s — well, plenty of them, if you go back far enough, but that’s not really the problem.”

The twist of her mouth belied a deep skepticism. “So, to be clear,” she said, “these people aren’t just bigoted against muggle-borns, and half-bloods, and half-humans, and non-human sentient creatures, but even among purebloods, some of you just aren’t up to snuff?”

“You have to understand the way these things work,” said Ron, surprising Draco, who had assumed he would have to do the explaining. “It’s not about blood, right? I mean, you can’t get in unless you have the right blood, but once you’re there, it’s all about maintaining appearances. Using the right spoon, and the right titles, and bowing and arse-licking and all that rubbish. My family’s not like that, never has been. We like muggles, and muggle-borns, and it’s not as though we make any secret about it. Mum says she’d rather live in a hovel on ten galleons a month than have to put on airs and sneer at good people who never did nothing wrong.” He added, “Plus, we don’t have money.”

Draco said, without any particular pleasure, “That’s why they’re called blood traitors.” He paused, and in the ugly silence that followed, he felt pushed to add: “Obviously it’s not a pleasant thing to say, but it’s — it’s how they see them. People like the Weasleys, the Abbotts, the Lovegoods — the idea, which I don’t necessarily endorse, mind you, is that they’ve committed treason against their own kind.”

“That ‘kind’ being purebloods,” said Hermione shrewdly.

“Yes.”

Hermione chewed on her quilltip for a moment, thinking.

“Ron,” she said, “didn’t your mother say that you came from a pedigree? At one point, a long time ago?”

He scratched his head. “Er, kind of,” he said. “My mum’s descended from a Sacred Twenty-Eight family, but that’s my mum. The Weasleys haven’t been in good graces with the pureblood set for generations.”

“Sacred Twenty-Eight?”

“Wizarding aristocracy,” said Draco. “The top of the top of the pureblood set. The youngest bloodline in the Twenty-Eight is about two hundred years old.”

“The Malfoys are a classic Twenty-Eight family, for example,” said Ron, sticking his thumb at Draco. “And probably the oldest, too, right? Because the oldest family for a long time was the Blacks, but er, well…”

“I suppose we’re probably somewhere near there,” said Draco, trying not to preen.

Hermione drove a brutal line through something in her notebook and snapped it shut. “Well, that has to settle it,” she said, in businesslike tones. “Ron, you’ll go with Draco. You seem to understand all this much better than Harry or I, and you’ve got the best chance of not raising suspicions.”

“No,” said Draco patiently. “That was the whole point, he isn’t a proper pureblood. He’ll stick out like a big red thumb.”

“Thanks, mate,” said Ron peevishly.

“What? It’s true. I stick out,” he said, thrusting his finger at his own chest, “and that’s only because my tie’s the wrong color. The name ‘Weasley’ won’t get him past the bouncer.”

In fact, it probably would, since the bouncer was a three-foot house-elf that adored Draco with the passion of a hundred suns. Still, it wouldn’t get much farther.

“So you can’t use the name Weasley, of course,” said Hermione, as if it were obvious. “You’ll go under your mum’s name. The Twenty-Eight one. Prewett, wasn’t it?”

This took both Draco and Ron off-guard. “Um,” said Ron, “yeah, but the Prewetts are gone. Caputo. Extinct in the male line, just like the Blacks. Plus, these guys know my dad, they’ll see—” He waved his hand in front of his face, indicating his general Weasleyishness. “And they’ll clock me from a mile.”

“So we’ll dye your hair, and borrow concealer from Lavender,” she said impatiently. “Unless you want Draco to go it alone—”

“Which I could,” added Draco, mostly to defend his honor as a man. It would be hard to get hair from four different Ministry officials without raising suspicions. Having more hands would make the job easier, and besides that, he didn’t like the thought of going back to the League of Promising Youth by himself.

“—you’ll have to make it work. You can say you’re a new cousin they dug up somewhere,” Hermione said. “I’m sure these things happen all the time. And if any of them press you about it, you can say you’re illegitimate. That ought to shake them off your tail.”

Ron turned several shades warmer at the suggestion that he pretend to be a bastard.

“And I can come, under the Cloak,” added Harry. “As extra backup.”

Hermione beamed. “There you go,” she said. “See? It’s all coming together.”

“I want it said, for the record, that I was against this plan,” announced Draco. “And though nobody has asked for my opinion—”

“As if that’s ever stopped you,” said Harry, and was still giggling even after he caught a none-too-gentle chaser’s elbow in the ribs.

“—I will disclose, for posterity, that the chief fault of this plan is its reliance on Weasley pulling off a degree of subterfuge. We are wagering a large share of my dignity and my reputation on his being able to convince the snobbiest set of wizards Merlin ever made that he, Ronald Weasley, is the scion of a Sacred Twenty-Eight family. Are we holding our breath? I, for one, am not.”

“Nah, this’ll be easy,” said Ron, grinning. “I’ve been hanging out with you for three years. S’not hard. All I have to do is groan and whinge a lot, and I’m halfway there. ‘Eugh, Mummy, I said I wanted three castles for Christmas, not two! Now where will I put my swimming pool full of galleons?’ Throw on a cane and a monocle, I’ll be properly invisible.”

Harry and Hermione were now both snickering, though one made more of an effort to hide it than her counterpart. “Go on then, and try it, we’ll see how long it takes you to end up jinxed,” said Draco. Then he brightened. “On second thought, never mind. This is an excellent plan.”

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-at this point I should just give up and admit that short chapters are not in my nature. i will give you ten thousand words or give you nothing we die like men

-from around book 2 all through book 7 hermione granger’s personality becomes the world’s most brilliant teenage tryhard fused with this specific clip. artemis fowl ass

-which is great because “or WORSE, EXPELLED” hermione is my number one babygirl forever but hermione “brews a Dark Arts potion in the third floor bathroom, cross me and it’ll end up branded on your face, I’ll steal a hippogriff and STILL make prefect, eat my ass” granger is my wife

-ron’s idea of a “proper” pureblood wizard is scrooge mcduck

-sidebar: thank you for a really lovely reception to the last chapter, and recently in general! it’s been very motivating! next chapter will go up next week. its title: “Operation Prewett.”

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