Chapter 40: Read All About It
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
[img: https://i.postimg.cc/QtF6JWVF/Skeeter-R-From-Chosen-One-to-Champion.png]
[img: https://i.postimg.cc/yYPnZzTg/Skeeter-2.png]
There really was no spell quite like Levicorpus.
“Are you awake, Potter? Indicate. Else I shall advance to intermediate methods.”
Harry floundered in an upside-down pirouette from his suspended ankle. The wanker made a sound that did not signify consciousness so much as a lot of breath being discharged at once from an inverted windpipe and blundering into the vocal cords on accident. Most people would have accepted it as proof of consciousness.
It was a defining feature of Draco’s character that he was not, nor ever would be, ‘most people.’
“I didn’t hear that.”
Assembled in the Gryffindor dorm, at what Ron judged the “arsecrack of morning,” stood Draco and his proud legionnaires: Ron, in tattered paisley pajamas; Neville, in purple silk jimjams; Dean and Seamus, in faded muggle tee shirts; and Hermione, in a pink bathrobe. It was a worthy squadron, armed to the teeth with wits and wiles and whatever the hell Hermione’s bathrobe was made of, and also about five copies of the Daily Prophet between them, which, by Draco’s estimation, were more than enough to beat someone to death, if you put your back into it.
“Well, I gave you a chance. Anyway, no one can say I didn’t, and that’s what matters.”
“What?” said Harry blearily, and he enjoyed a few moments of reacquaintance with the surface of his mattress before the pair of them were joined by a deluge of cold water.
“Initiating intermediate methods.”
“OI! FINE! I’M AWAKE!”
“Do you think he’s up?” said Draco, yawning, to Ron. “I’m a bit deaf. Need a second opinion.”
“Nah, mate, I can’t hear him,” said Ron sadly. “Think he’s in a coma.”
“Drat. You know, if you can take over the Aguamenti, we might be able to engineer some sort of spit-roasting situation—”
“Piss off, both of you,” gasped Harry, thrashing to the edge of the bed. “Is the castle on fire? What’s happening?”
Two copies of the Daily Prophet hit him in the face, more or less concurrently. Draco exchanged a firm handshake with Seamus to congratulate his timing.
Hermione gave him his glasses and a sympathetic look.
“Mrph,” said Harry, reading. Then: “Ugh.” And, moreover: “Oh, God.”
Then, at last, with mortal fear: “Hermione, I swear—”
“Oh, Harry, I actually thought it was rather sweet,” she said, covering a yawn. “I’m sending a copy to my mum. She’ll be really excited that my name’s been in the paper.”
She was useless. Draco gave her a look that conveyed his disappointment in her lack of vitriol.
“Don’t look at me like that! I made it very clear I was here under protest. You know perfectly well that Harry didn’t say any of this.”
“I’ll hear that from him, first.”
“Er — I did say some of it,” Harry admitted, “but it — hang on! No! Listen! Skeeter took it all out of context, and she left loads out. She brought up Hermione, not me.”
“Did she,” said Draco. He twirled his wand through his fingers.
“Since when were you a top student?” hooted Ron. “You been pulling O’s when my back was turned?”
“I never said that! She made that up!”
“She did quite a bit of that, it seems,” said Draco.
“Yeah! She did! Like here — I never winked at Fleur! She’s three years older than me and barely knows I exist, and anyway, I wouldn’t — I can’t even wink! And I did not give her a ‘flirtatious grin’!”
Ron lifted his paper up to the ceiling light as if to christen it. “Lads. Advice. I’m thinking of getting ‘watch out ladies, he’s trouble’ tattooed on my back.”
“Can’t, I’m already doing it with Seamus,” said Dean.
“Bastards. Then can I have ‘the longing touch of a thousand teenage girls’?”
“No, I’m doing ‘the longing touch of a thousand teenage girls.’”
“Damn you, Longbottom. Fine, I’ll take ‘an aggressively deliberate raggedness,’ but nothing less.”
Harry stood up and found himself far closer to the point of Draco’s wand than he had been previously. He sat down, to reestablish distance with it.
“‘Stunningly pretty’?”
“I don’t know where she got that,” he said immediately. “Not that it’s wrong — or just, not that no one would say it, I just wouldn’t — I mean, but not like that, Hermione, you’re pretty, really, I guess—”
On many different levels, this was the wrong move. It was the wrong move to Hermione, who stiffened and gave an awkward, crooked little smile at the backhanded compliment; it was the wrong move to the assembled boys, who groaned like they were watching a bad quidditch play; and it was very much the wrong move to Draco, who was struck by a wave of meanness so acute it was painful, a prickling impulse to do something petty and vicious. He fingered the grip of his wand instead of saying what came to mind, which was a jinx he’d only ever read once in the margins of a book with three different warnings under it.
“I give up,” said Harry loudly, climbing back into bed. “I’m going back to sleep, and maybe when I wake up, this will be over. I don’t even know why you’re mad at me! It makes me look like a ponce.”
Hermione was slowly mummifying herself in fabric, descending into a chrysalis of pink-and-brown fuzz. She really was half hair, when you got down to it — hair and eyes; big mean doe-eyes full of wonder and cunning, like nature’s Stunning Spell, so intense they ought to have been classified as a weapon. If you were going to call her pretty, it would be because of the eyes. The rest of her face, while not unpleasant, simply got lost in the comparison. A liberal smear of freckles trailed lazily from ear to ear, like whoever made her face had elected for a garnish. A nice chin, a wide nose. A mouth, if you paid attention to that sort of thing.
Stunningly pretty might not have been the first phrase a reporter would choose, if they’d seen her, but that wasn’t for lack of pretty. It just wasn’t how a stranger would realistically describe Hermione’s face. Stunning was closer. Or other strong attributive verbs: Staggering. Startling. Imposing. Words conveying force, basically. She spoke with an unconscious gravity that hauled everyone’s attention kicking and screaming into the ambit of her voice, where she held them until she was finished.
It was hard to describe, but he couldn’t imagine walking into a room and not knowing she was there. Her presence clicked a light on in the back of his brain.
“I don’t care what she says about me, you know,” Hermione said waspishly, mistaking his attention for pity. This was a classic Granger mistake, and it hauled him straight back to earth, which was a relief, since he’d been somewhere strange and woozy; possibly he’d been hexed. “It’s a tabloid puff piece. The muggle world’s full of them. It doesn’t mean anything, I know that.”
“I never said it did.”
“You’re acting like it did.”
He shrugged. “Good for a laugh,” he said carelessly, and jinxed his copy of the Prophet on fire.
Gryffindor Tower, being a highly mature and even-tempered collection of wizards, found the article hilarious. The next few days saw it papered over every unlikely combination of doors, walls, ceilings, toilet stalls, shower curtains, and so forth. Lavender and Parvati made name tags that said ‘HARRY POTTER’S WINSOME WITCHES’ and distributed them, giggling, among the girls of Gryffindor Tower — with the exception of Ginny, who, in a fit of pique, pitched the whole lot in a bin after Romilda Vane cracked a joke about harems. Lee Jordan charmed a plaque that read ‘HOME OF THE CROWN PRINCE OF HOGWARTS’ beneath the Pink Lady, and Fred and George staged nightly dramatic readings of the article around the common room fire.
This was funny until it wasn’t. Outside Gryffindor, people gave Harry the kind of dirty stares you might well be inviting, if you honestly claimed to be the ‘crown prince’ of anything, or sent ‘sly looks’ at your interviewer in print. There were whispers when he stepped into a room, and more whispers when he stepped out of it. Someone accused him of misogyny for winking at Fleur Delacour; someone accused him of bigotry for not winking at anyone else. The politics of it all were inscrutable and bad.
Perhaps worst of all, some of the backlash splattered Hermione. Having any part of your appearance described by a major news organization was taken by most people as an invitation to loudly and publicly pass judgment on it, which was good news if you happened to be a supermodel and/or deity, and terrible news if you were anyone else. Someone approached her after Transfiguration and demanded to know if she was “the pretty Hermione Granger,” which gave Draco a chance to try out the Ear-Shriveling Curse they’d learned that morning, and gave Hermione a chance to shout a lecture on the importance of critical media consumption into their rapidly desiccating ears. Undeterred, or perhaps uninformed, another person appeared after Potions the next day, inquiring if she “had ever heard of Sleekeazy Serum,” and proceeded, without waiting for an answer, to explain what it was: this individual was rescued by Hermione herself, who deflected what Draco thought was a rather apt Hair Loss Curse with her Shield Charm, and then hauled him out of the dungeons before he could think of any other thematically appropriate punishments.
He had received three detentions, all from an increasingly exasperated Professor McGonagall; the fourth one, he earned after he made eye contact with her while dangling Ernie “Well, For A Muggle-Born” Macmillan by his ankle over the third-floor banister.
“Morning, professor.”
“Good morning, M— Mister Malfoy! What are you doing? Release Mr. Macmillan at once!”
Following this instruction to the letter would have sent poor Ernie on an expeditious visit to the bottom of the staircase. Draco was generous, however. He left him dangling from a sconce.
“Same time tonight, professor?”
“Spare me your attempts to be amusing,” she said plaintively, and hurried to get him down.
As November drew on, the less Harry seemed to care about his reputation, and for good reason: if he didn’t come up with a way to best a dragon, he would have very little time to worry about his reputation at all. Hermione carted a N.E.W.T.’s worth of reading back from the library, and doling out assignments, the four of them assembled for marathon reading groups in the common room, trawling for information through the eyewatering depths of Dragon Breeding For Pleasure and Profit, and From Egg to Inferno: a Dragon-Keeper’s Guide.
“To wit,” said Draco, “most of these are books on dragonkeeping, the main thrust of which seems to be keeping the animal alive.”
“Yes, but the only other books were in the Restricted Section.”
“That’s where the ones on killing them will be,” he said, stretching his back with a catlike twist of his spine. They had been reading so long that the light from the window was pointing in a different direction than when they’d started. “They won’t give books on dragonslaying to first years.”
“Charlie said you weren’t supposed to kill them,” objected Harry. “Norberta’s endangered, and Hagrid hatched her. He’d never forgive me.”
“Fine. Subduing them, then. Although, between you and me, if you get the chance, one less dragon in the world—”
“I’m not killing them.”
“I assure you, they don’t share your reservations.”
“‘Dragons are extremely difficult to slay, owing to the ancient magic that imbues their thick hides…’ very helpful, thanks,” muttered Hermione, and tossed aside Dancing With Dragons. “Doesn’t anyone know how to slow them down? A Stunning Spell is one thing, but it takes about four to knock them out, and it would take a miracle for Harry to land one in the eye from the ground.”
“Feeling great, team,” said Harry. “Keep that positivity rolling.”
Ron planted his elbows on the table and ruffled his hair, as if he could shake a good idea out of it. “Maybe there’s a trick to it, innit? Think of it like a game… What’s the most dangerous part of the dragon?”
“Fangs,” said Hermione.
“Fire,” said Draco.
“Claws.”
“Tail.”
“Size.”
“Bloodlust.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Like hell.”
“It doesn’t!”
“Does.”
“You can’t kill something with bloodlust alone—”
“Can, and I’ve seen you try.”
“Oi,” said Ron loudly, banging his Standard Book of Spells like a gavel. “Not the time! Can we get the Swot Squad on something useful, thank you? What can Harry use to get close to the eye?”
Hermione screwed up her nose in thought. “We could try Transfiguration,” she suggested. “A Shrinking Charm—”
“Spell resistant,” said Draco, balling up a bit of parchment for a shot on the bin.
“Or Harry could make himself bigger? An Engorgio?”
“He’d need to do quite a bit of engorging before he was anywhere near their size, and that spell is patently horrifying when it goes wrong. You remember what happened to Finnigan’s toes.”
She cringed.
“I suppose,” she said, hesitatingly, “we’re doing Containment Circles in Runes; if you could slap down a ring before it got to you… but I don’t know where you’d get the blood…”
“The blood?” said Harry, alert at once. “What blood? Whose blood?”
“Goat’s,” said Draco, waving lazily, “usually. Calm down. Though, to the point, Potter could always use intravenous.”
“Wrong, Dark, and illegal,” said Hermione, scribbling something in a margin, “not to mention unhygienic.”
“So’s dying.”
“But I haven’t taken Runes,” said Harry flatly. “Whatever a runic circle is, I’m not going to be able to pick it up over the weekend. And I don’t want to do anything with blood. Mine or goat’s.”
“Close-minded of you.”
“We’re going at this wrong,” decided Ron, shutting his book. “We’re all thinking about how Hermione would do it. Including you, Hermione, no offense. But we should play to his strengths, yeah? Nothing fancy, just plain, simple stuff Harry can do.”
Draco had the opportunity to say something rude, then, but he refrained. For this not even one person applauded him, and it was perturbing. “We might start with practical magic,” he suggested. “Flying, magical artifacts, et cetera. And you’ve got reflexes. If one of the tasks were to catch a Snitch, for instance, or to duel one of your competitors, one on one — I mean, you would have a better chance. But they’re not going to make it that easy. This will be about cunning. Strategy. Precision.”
“Are you campaigning? Because I can’t actually let you and Hermione do the Task for me, like tag-team boxing.”
“I don’t know what that is. No, don’t tell me, I don’t care. And of course you can’t, I already looked into it.”
“That was a joke.”
“What about his broomstick?” said Ron, epiphanous.
Draco lifted his head from a restorative sojourn on the table and squinted. “…It exists. It flies. What about it?”
“Think, egghead. How can we get it to him?”
“Shrinking Charm, in the pocket?” Harry offered.
“Can’t take anything with you but your wand,” muttered Hermione, paging through the rulebook.
“Er… transfigure something?”
“And who will be executing this transfiguration?” said Draco, mildly intrigued. “Yesterday, he struggled with the Beetle-Button Charm.”
“Hey, I did it, didn’t I?”
“Depends how many legs you like on your buttons.”
“Summoning Charm,” said Hermione absently, turning a page. “That’s how he could get it into the arena. Summon it.”
The three of them stared at her.
“That’s a bloody great idea,” said Ron, after a moment. “Why couldn’t you come up with that earlier?”
She looked up, nose wrinkling. “Because it wouldn’t work,” she said. “He’d have to Summon it through at least one wall, which would probably break it. Or hit someone, though I’m sure that’s not as much concern to anyone here as breaking a blessed broomstick—”
“Obviously not. Potter’s broom is a collector’s-edition vintage Nimbus, we’re not risking it on some mangy first year’s skull,” said Draco incredulously.
“Okay, but — but! We could plant it somewhere near the arena! Or one of us could sneak it in through the stands!” Ron was eager.
“Logistically unfeasible. Also, spectators can’t interfere.”
“It’s not interfering if he Summons it off us, is it?” Ron’s tone waxed sly. “We haven’t done anything.”
“It’s a good thought,” agreed Draco, who more than anyone could admire a slimy technicality, “and your loophole is, admittedly, robust, but we won’t have the chance.”
“Why not?”
“Because if any of the administrators have a fraction of a brain, there’ll be Anti-Enchantment Shields on the audience, so stray spells won’t hit spectators,” said Hermione, slamming the book shut. She scribbled something in her journal, frowned at it, and threw down her quill as if it had offended her. “Nothing Harry casts will touch us. Or anything outside the arena.”
“Okay, so, not to be ungrateful or anything — and thank you guys, again, for your help, really — but just taking stock,” said Harry patiently, “as of right now, we have: about half a dozen things I can’t do; one that I can, but won’t be able to; and nothing — again, just checking in — nothing, yet, that might actually, feasibly, work. To defeat the dragon.”
He spread his hands inquiringly.
“That’s about it, yeah,” said Ron.
“Right. Cool. Which leaves us… where, exactly?”
“Precisely nowhere,” sighed Hermione, shoving back her chair. “Which means it’s time to go to the Restricted Section.”
The hour-bell interrupted them with the unwelcome reminder that they did, in fact, go to school, and while Harry was fully ready to sacrifice Divination to keep preparing, they agreed that removing the joy of Arithmancy from Hermione’s day would be like kicking a niffler. Draco lived to regret this. An hour of work with Professor Vector, who was dragging them through a grueling unit on number ciphers, would ordinarily have been a pleasant intellectual exercise, but his brain was already wrung-out from the effort of preparations, and so he missed a frameshift that made he and Hermione do the whole thing twice over.
“It’s still better than Divination,” muttered Hermione, as they packed up their papers and abaci. “Ron says Trelawney’s in rare form. ‘Oooh… When the trine of Mars meets the sextant of Venus, and the tropic of Capricorn is waxing gibbous, a Leo with meteorological scarring will suffer a violent end…’”
“Why, Granger, you never told me you had the Sight.”
“Those with great powers must use them sparingly,” she said loftily, and they snickered their way to dinner. It was a good night: he managed several spoonfuls of a truly delectable lobster bisque before Hermione lost patience and dragged him to the library.
Give him some sort of disorder, she would. Madwoman.
The library was nearly empty at this hour, its towering aisles shadowed and vacant. Dancing spots of torchlight that skittered here and there like mice on the Turkish carpets. Abandoned desks lay strewn with scratch and books, chairs askew, evidence of their users’ hasty desertion at the dinner bell. Their footsteps creaked on weathered floorboards. At this time of night, the windows were a dull, dark blue, sinking swiftly into nightfall, a reminder of curfew’s approach.
“Where’s Madam Pince?”
“At dinner, with everyone else,” she said. “We should be able to get into the Restricted Section with Alohamora, we’ll just have to be quick. I should’ve taken the Cloak… I can forge McGonagall’s signature, in a pinch, but I’d prefer not to.”
“Lovely,” he said. “Unrelated, but do you remember when you yelled at me and Potter for getting detention, back in first year?”
“I was eleven. And terrified of getting expelled. Are you still sore?”
“I’ve found it in myself to move on,” he said nobly, swirling a Muffliato over their shoulders. “Thinking of how times change. That’s all.”
The Restricted Section was a small chamber of polished cherry wood, fragrant with wood lacquer and the dry earthy scent of old books. The sight of it elicited from Hermione a soft happy sound, like a bird returning to its nest, and Draco bit down on his cheek to keep his face from doing anything in particular about it.
Ten minutes later, there were no such sounds to be heard. The section on dragons was empty, its shelves gaping with missed volumes like a string of lost teeth. There was nothing to read but imprints in the dust.
“You’re joking,” said Hermione, dumbfounded. “What kind of person—?”
“Warrington.”
“The Head Boy? No.” She sounded far from certain. “He wouldn’t.”
“Yeah? Who else?”
“I — maybe one of the Tournament officials came through, and removed them—”
“Just because he’s a ponce doesn’t mean he’s entirely brainless. I’ll bet you a hundred galleons that the minute he knew it was dragons, he came straight here and cleaned them out. It serves him, and it keeps the other champions from learning.”
She rolled her fingers together with a frustrated thoughtfulness. Turning on her heel, she remarked, “It really should have been Cedric.”
He snorted.
“What?”
“Do you think Diggory wouldn’t have done the same?”
“Cedric wouldn’t have done anything this underhanded. He’s a good sport.”
“And you’d know, would you?”
“Surely you can see that you’re being irrational,” she sighed, sweeping out of the Restricted Section.
“And you’re refusing to see reason.”
“Oh, but I expect you’ll instruct me.”
“Diggory is just as competitive as anyone else.”
“I don’t know why you’re so prejudiced against him—”
“Prejudiced? Prejudiced!”
“Yes, prejudiced, because he’s handsome, I suppose—”
Her remark sent a firestorm of bad prickles up and down his arms. He stopped. Hermione, lost in thought, marched on for several feet before she noticed. She pivoted, her hands lodged firmly in preemptive judgment on her waist.
“All right. What is it?”
He spoke slowly and coolly, polishing his signet ring on his robe. “Even if he were, supposedly, ‘handsome’ — which I don’t see, frankly, he’s got a mouth like a dead fish and wears enough pomade to grease an axle — you’re the one who’s always bringing it up. Maybe it’s you who can’t see past his looks.”
“Oh, come off it,” she said in amazement. “I never said anything—”
“Liar.”
“What — that? It was a joke! Ginny was being embarrassingly obvious. You can’t be that delusional.”
“Says the witch who thinks his hair’s perfect,” he said, clipped, and stalked past her.
Her jaw dropped. Danger grazed its fingers down the back of his neck, like the premonitory jitter of a thunderstorm, and a little eagerness. She took a deep, noisy breath, fueling up for a proper go at him. They hadn’t rowed properly in a while.
He was mounting up for a daring Granger Distraction Ploy by way of academic inquiry, possibly followed with a patented Malfoy Routing Maneuver via theoretically dubious suggestion, when some irrelevant wanker cleared his throat and stepped into the aisle.
“Zdraveĭ,” said Viktor Krum.
They froze.
“I am sorry to surprise,” said Krum stiffly. “I did not mean to sneak.”
“It’s not your fault in the slightest,” Hermione assured him. “We apologize for disturbing you. You’ve caught us in the middle of something.”
“Something private,” said Draco.
“Ah,” said Krum.
“Not that private,” said Hermione.
“I see,” said Krum.
“Reasonably private,” said Draco, through gritted teeth.
Krum tilted his head at an angle communicating maximum confusion. He gave a surly, unimpressed grunt, and then pointed at them with a finger and pinky.
“You,” he said, “are Potter’s friends. I have seen you with him, when he comes to the ship.” He pointed at Hermione. “I have read papers. His girl.”
“His what?”
“His girl. Potter’s girl.” He cocked his head even further. It was becoming apparent that his surly look, which Draco had mistaken for misery, was in fact a mask of deep confusion at many bizarre conspiracies of the world, one of which, assuredly, was the idea that Hermione Granger would ever allow herself to become romantically affiliated with Harry ‘T for Tried’ Potter. “Top marks?”
“No. I mean, yes, that’s me, but we’re not — I’m his friend. There’s nothing — it’s really not, I mean — he’s nice — but friends! Only! Do you understand? Just friends!”
She leapt up an octave apiece on the last three words. Draco, who was enjoying the conversation about as much as he would a haircut with a rusty trowel, looked at Hermione in frank wonder at this verbal explosion. She glowered at him.
“Not his girl,” Krum said, frowning. “But you are — Herm-ee-own?”
Draco laughed. Loudly. They both stared at him for a moment.
“Right, so, no,” she said bravely. “It’s Her-my-onee, actually. Like my-own.”
“Her-my-own.”
“Her -mio-nee. Oh-nee. Nee, nee.”
“Nee. Nee. Hermione.”
“Yes, good.”
Krum’s scowl cracked and flickered into a dull little smile. “Yes? That is good?”
“To be clear, the grading curve is obscene,” said Draco. “It’s flat as a carpark. We’re wrestling on the knife-edge of ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ here.”
“A good name,” said Krum. “Her- mione. Strong name. Hearty.”
“Well, thank you,” said Hermione, perplexed and pleased in equal measure. She gave a sly, awkward smile, and Draco had a premonition that he was about to hear something terrible. “I suppose anything’s heartier than, er — a Crumb.”
Draco touched his throat in appalment. He did consider walking out of the library, but it would leave the two of them alone, a conspiracy that might well conclude in the heat-death of the English language.
Krum peered at her for several seconds, which crawled by as eons.
He threw his head back and bellowed a laugh that shook the dust from the rafters.
“Funny! That is funny! Very good!”
“No, it wasn’t, you idiot,” Draco hissed, “and pipe down, or Madam Pince will hear, and if I get detention because you’ve never heard a bloody joke before—”
Heedless, Krum hunkered down over his knees and continued to laugh for a full minute. When he straightened, he carefully shuttered his expression back into a glower, but his eyes were bright, and his cheeks were red.
“You,” he said, “are funny. But I must go.”
“Thanks,” said Hermione, so smug she might have broken into a purr. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you.”
“Yes. It has. Goodnight, Pale Man and Hermown.”
He pivoted on his heel and marched out.
“Oh,” called Hermione, “Oh, actually, it’s not — well, never mind.”
With a flourish of a fur cloak, he was gone.
“Granger.”
“He liked it,” Hermione said loftily. “He thought it was good.”
“He’s a quidditch player,” said Draco. “He’s been regularly concussed for years.”
“Or maybe I’m funny.”
“Maybe brain damage is infectious.”
“In fact, I’m hilarious.”
“You’re in want of a good pinching, is what you are.”
The green banker’s lamp still glowed at the desk Krum had abandoned, and a few books sprawled lasciviously over the desk. Lazy sod hadn’t even cleaned up his misses. Draco drifted close enough to inspect them, hoping for some indecorous reading, and found instead a headachy box of Cyrillic script. It had to be Krum’s, then.
A nosy witch pressed up against his shoulder. “What was he reading?”
He passed the book to her, and she cradled it like a baby in the crook of her arm. “No idea, it’s foreign. He must have forgotten to take it with him.”
“But it’s got the Hogwarts stamp,” said Hermione curiously, tapping the inside cover. She flipped to the title page. “That’s interesting, though, I wonder if he can read English… ‘The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles’? By Padraic Colum? What’s his interest in that?”
“Hello.” His eyebrow lifted. “Since when can you read Russian?”
“It’s not, it’s Bulgarian,” she said. She expertly slipped her thumb along the pages and found one that was dog-eared. “I read that dictionary you bought me. I’m not very good, but ‘Achilles’ is translated phonetically, and the rest is literal… you can sort of… infer… aha.”
She dumped the book on the table and stabbed her finger at a urchin-shaped black splotch in the margins. When she swiped it, a trace of ink clung to her index. “It’s fresh,” she said, with deep satisfaction. “He must have spilled it.”
“Well done, Constable Granger. We ride at dawn to draw and quarter him.”
“Don’t you see? That means he was reading it,” she said eagerly, wiping her finger on his shirt. He squawked and slapped her hand away, tempted to remind her of the number of organs she would have to sell to afford a replacement. “And taking notes. So he thought it was important. Come on, keep up, Malfoy.”
She flashed him a lightning grin, altogether too evocative of Harry, as was Malfoy; he didn’t like the sound of it in her mouth at all.
This was why no one ought to laugh at her jokes. It gave her ideas.
“Fine.” It was surly. “Can you translate?”
“Some. I’d need more time to do it all.” She fumbled out her English-Bulgarian dictionary, which, he was gratified to see, made a home in the same poor prolapsed bookbag that had carried all her other textbooks for three years. Since it could scarcely fit another teaspoon without ripping at every seam, this was great flattery.
“Loan me a quill and parchment. I’ll help.”
“You don’t read Cyrillic.”
He sniffed. “Then I’ll figure it out, won’t I? I broke Vector’s Playfair cipher, and this can’t possibly be worse.”
In fact, it could. They bracketed the Colum book with pages of script, sharing the dictionary between them, and putting their heads together engaged in their second daily dose of codebreaking. It had all the hallmarks of a study session — the squabbling for use of the book, muttered consultations on dangling participles, nitpicking the other’s choice of notation — with none of the academic pressure. They were racing each other, naturally, because whoever finished first — well, they finished first. It was like competitive extracurricular homework.
One would have to be a deeply diseased individual to take pleasure in any part of it.
Draco threw his quill down first, snapped: “Ha!” and leered at her.
“You did not!” She snapped up her head, caught sight of his finished page, and tossed her quill away. “Damn it!”
“Don’t take it personally, Granger, I’m something of a savant.”
“No, you kept hogging the dictionary!”
He sat back, lacing his fingers behind his head in adulation. “Mmmno. I think I’m just really that good. Greek, Latin, French, Bulgarian… what can’t I do?”
“Fit your head through a doorframe,” she said flatly, hoisting the paper towards her. “Let’s see if any of this is actually legible, shall we?”
For all their efforts, the translated passage was rather short.
Then Jason saw something that was like a cloud filled with the light of the rising sun. It hung from a great oak tree. In awe he stood and looked upon it, knowing that at last he looked upon THE GOLDEN FLEECE.
His hand let slip Medea’s hand and he went to seize the Fleece. As he did he heard a dreadful hiss. And then he saw the guardian of the Golden Fleece. Coiled all around the tree, with outstretched neck and keen and sleepless eyes, was a deadly serpent. Its hiss ran all through the grove and the birds that were wakening up squawked in terror.
Like rings of smoke that rise one above the other, the coils of the serpent went around the tree — coils covered by hard and gleaming scales. It uncoiled, stretched itself, and lifted its head to strike. Then Medea dropped on her knees before it, and began to chant her Magic Song.
As she sang, the coils around the tree grew slack. Like a dark, noiseless wave the serpent sank down on the ground. But still its jaws were open, and those dreadful jaws threatened Jason. Medea, with a newly cut spray of juniper dipped in mystic brew, touched its deadly eyes. And still she chanted her Magic Song. The serpent’s jaw closed; its eyes became deadened; far through the grove its length was stretched out.
Then Jason took the Golden Fleece.
“Always thought he was a bit of a pig, Jason.”
“Hm? Why?”
He reached over her arm and tapped the name Medea. “That’s his lover,” he said. “A witch. She helps him steal that glittery bit of couture, and then he forsakes her to marry a king’s daughter.”
“Oh.” Hermione sounded quite sad for her.
“Buck up, she hardly took it lying down. She gave his bride a cursed wedding dress that burned her to death, and the king died trying to save her. And Medea killed her two sons with Jason for fear of retribution.”
Hermione pressed a knuckle to her mouth.
“Overkill,” she decided, though she sounded like it was a hard call.
“Not to the Greeks.”
“You know, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to gather from that story.”
“That’s fine, it’s less important than what Krum’s gathering. Why do you think he’s been reading up on the Colchian Dragon?”
“For the First Task, naturally,” she said, impatiently, “but I don’t see why. This is a myth. It’s not practical advice on taming dragons, it’s just a story.”
“And you’ve never picked up some good advice from a story, have you?”
“What do you mean?”
It was a rare triumph when he thought of something before she did; he celebrated, in fine spirits, by dangling the page in front of her face. “Come on, Granger. Keep up. What’s she doing?”
She snatched it out of the air. “Singing, obviously,” she snapped. “Singing a magic song to put it to sleep, which, having heard Harry in the shower, is a long shot at best—”
“Not just singing. What does she do to it? Cite your sources.”
“Someday I’m going to skin you, really, truly, I will,” she muttered. “Let’s see… ‘with a newly cut spray of juniper dipped in mystic brew, she touched its deadly eyes.’ Oh, good.” She slapped it down on the table. “She touched it with a stick! How enlightening.”
He pulled out his wand and rolled it through his fingers. He was still trying to learn Mad-Eye’s trick with the knuckles.
“Indeed. If only we had a special stick of some kind,” he said, spinning it around his thumb. “Capable of producing supernatural effects. Or perhaps even a mystic brew.”
“Oh my God.”
“Ah, here she comes.”
“It’s a wand.”
“Ten points to Gryffindor,” he said, flipping his wand in the air and pocketing it. “And five more, if you noticed where she casts the spell.”
“I’ll snap my wand if it isn’t in the eyes.”
“Merlin, but it’s good to be brilliant. What would you even do without me, I wonder? Die, I suppose.”
“Are you done? I mean really, are you quite finished?”
“Oh, never. Now, tell me your idea. If you let me continue I might accidentally revolutionize wand technology or solve Linear A or something. And I don’t need you plotting to slit my throat from jealousy, or to jinx my bride’s wedding gown, or some such Grangerly vengeance.”
“Why would I bother with the gown? She’s marrying you. I can’t do worse to her than that.”
“Zing. Talk.” He kicked the leg of her chair. “You’ve had a full fifteen seconds to come up with something, I have high expectations.”
“It depends on how quickly you can brew a Sleeping Draught,” she said, already reaching for her notebook.
He cocked his head. “Under what conditions?”
“Non-ideal. Assume you don’t have a vent, a stovetop, or a stasis chamber.”
“So this is a bathroom operation?”
“Hypothetically,” she said, a touch defensive.
“Dreadful. Forty-seven minutes. Plus time to cool.”
She paused. Her expression was redolent with eyebrow.
He disgorged a piece of lint from his sleeve with extreme prejudice. “What?”
“Professor Snape gave us two hours of class time.”
“That’s his business. Forty-seven minutes, unless the valerian’s dry, in which case, an hour.”
“How strong can you make it?”
“In standard ‘strength of potion’ units? What kind of question is that? It’ll work.”
“How well?”
“Very!”
“On a scale from one to dead?”
“Catatonia.”
She blinked. “Really?”
He rolled his hand dismissively. “I didn’t spend all my summer perfecting the Wronski Feint.”
She smiled. In her face glowed his own prickling eagerness, a whetted appetite for unsolved puzzles, an unfinished challenge. “Good,” she said, tearing open a blank page in her notebook. “In that case, we’re about to take a lovely stroll down memory lane—”
“Absolutely not.”
“To Myrtle’s bathroom,” she said cheerfully.
Her excitement phased rapidly from inspiring to horrifying. “Pardon me, I want a clarification. Even presuming Potter has the most mind-numbing Sleeping Draught imaginable, which, of course, he will, he’d still have to administer the potion. To a dragon. Trying to kill him.”
“Oh, he won’t,” she said, annotating furiously. “We will.”
“…Will what?”
“Give it to the dragon,” she said. She speared the inkwell like she was staking a vampire and whisked back to the page. “Before the task. It’ll be slow and sleepy, much easier for him to hit with a spell. Then all he has to do is hurry and finish the challenge before it wears off.”
He stared at her.
“What?” she said.
“Oh, it’s very good and everything. Potter stands a very low chance of being eaten. I do, however, wonder who will stop the dragon from eating us.”
“But it’ll be easier for us,” she said patiently, “because we haven’t got to follow the rules. We can bring the Invisibility Cloak. Dragon eyesight is terrible, you know. I read it in—”
“From Egg to Inferno, yes, I remember. You might also remember their eyesight is compensated by a rather exceptional sense of smell.”
“It’s only for a few minutes. We’ll be in and out.”
“You’re serious.”
“Perfectly,” she said, and stabbed a full stop into the paper with great relish.
“Granger. Look at me. You want me to fight a dragon.”
She lifted her head, blinking away the fog of inspiration. “I don’t want anyone to fight it,” she said. “They’re endangered, and anyway, that’s Harry’s job. We’ve only got to make it a little easier.”
“And you still don’t think this is somehow an inappropriate thing to ask? Of me? Draco Malfoy, a supremely talented, but nevertheless regrettably mortal man?”
Hermione looked at him with the blank stare of someone who had never heard of such a thing as dying before.
“I can ask Ron,” she suggested, hesitantly. “If you don’t want to.”
Of course he didn’t want to. On the order of things he didn’t want to do, this was skyrocketing past setting fire to his Nimbus and sharing a bed with Neville. It was establishing new hemispheres of Things He Didn’t Want To Do.
But on the other hand. On the other hand, however.
Hermione had a certain way that she looked at someone when they’d done something that made her really, exceptionally happy, like she wanted to blow trumpets and hang posters of their face on every wall in the known world. And the less often she looked at anyone like that, the better it would be for his mental wellbeing.
“You might as well kill him yourself,” he said, massaging his eyes. “He’d mistake it for butterbeer and drink it.”
“I could try—”
“Don’t bother. We both know you couldn’t last ten seconds on a broomstick with a knife at your throat.”
She rubbed a writer’s callus on her third finger. “Well,” she said, “I still won’t make you, if you’d rather not.”
“My recommendation is that you stop talking before my good sense returns from its smoke break and flips over all the furniture in my brain in a rage-induced frenzy,” he said wearily. “In the meantime, you get the cauldron, I’ve got to go nag Longbottom for some valerian. But we’re brewing in the empty Charms classroom, this time. I am sick to death of bathroom smell, and I am not going to spend my last week alive listening to Myrtle complaining about blockages in the pipes.”
-This chapter was brought to you by PhotoPea. PhotoPea: “When you’re too cheap for PhotoShop.”
-Interesting fun fact about formatting images and special media on AO3: it is bad! And it makes me suffer.
-Note on the illustrations! Many headcanon Harry’s appearance differently from the movies, and I am in fact one of those people, but the stills were just a convenient resource for the article. I don’t necessarily imagine Harry looking like Daniel, so if you’re like me, and it bugs you, please consider the newspaper clippings a piece of extracanonical fanart (just one made by the author).
-Someone in the comments for last chapter mentioned reawakening a latent crush on Charlie Weasley, and I want you to know that that is exactly what I intended. One of the core tenets of writing fic is that everyone’s favorite character must be hot. It doesn’t matter who they are. They could have all of three lines, one appearance on page 492 of Book 5, a name-drop in a non-canonical appendix, it doesn’t matter. You deserve to have your favorite character look hot in print, and goddamnit, I’m showing up to deliver.
-This chapter’s a bit shorter than usual — apologetic shoutout to that one person who told me to not cut anything, you are an enabler and I love you — because it’s sandwiched between two hefty neighbors: “Norberta” (10k) and the upcoming chapter (11k). This three-chapter sequence was originally two, but when I went back to chop them up, I realized that it needed another cut for pacing, and 40 ended up getting squished. I don’t have any reservation about posting long chapters (the Yule Ball chapter is currently around 16,000 words, so, you know) but in a serial piece of fiction, throwing in chapter breaks allows the material to settle, and hopefully draws attention to smaller elements that would otherwise get overshadowed by set pieces, or just washed out in all the dialogue.
-That being said: the next chapter will be called “Trial By Fire.”
-As usual, thank you to everyone who commented! Seriously, I read them all, and if I haven’t replied, there’s a non-negligible chance I’m hoarding it jealously in my unreads as a treat. I hope that sometime today, you hear your favorite song playing somewhere you didn’t expect it.
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