Gryffindor vs. Slytherin — Lionheart

Chapter 66: Gryffindor vs. Slytherin

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

November ended with a dry rustle of black leaves on frost-blue lawns, and through swirling drifts of fog, they went down to the quidditch pitch for the first match against Slytherin.

The Prophet had run another spate of articles about conditions at Hogwarts, and Harry had been identified as a “lasting problem” in the student body.

The news did not so much change student attitudes towards Harry as redirect attention to festering ideas already planted. Not many people said hello to him when he came into breakfast, except for a few members of the Defense Club, a friend or two, and the Weasley twins, who tried to make up for the lack of enthusiasm by toppling over themselves with elaborate bows and hello’s; but then Umbridge came in for breakfast, cast her beady-eyed gaze over the hallway, and they quickly made themselves scarce. (They had set off dungbombs in the staff lounge earlier that week, and though Filch had twice tried to accuse them, there was an undeniable elegance in the difficulty of tracing a literal piece of dung.)

Cho came over and sat with him during breakfast, and she held Harry’s hand so tightly that he had to fumble through eating his eggs left-handed; when she left, wearing his Gryffindor jumper, she smiled bravely at him and ignored the sweep of whispering that followed her.

Daphne had painted her lips in rouge the color of the Gryffindor kit. She held an umbrella and hopped along cheerfully through the mud, though she leaned now and then on the nearest arm, and her steps wobbled slightly. She passed a group of Slytherins who broke into whispers, and she produced a rigid smile that could light up a stadium.

Ron grunted and marched on, trailing his borrowed Cleansweep behind him in the mud.

“In any case, I envy the both of you for your Occlumency lessons,” Hermione announced. “I don’t fancy anyone rummaging around in my head.”

“Who has the time?” muttered Harry.

There was a cool lull while the wind rattled sadly through the stands.

“Fine,” said Hermione. “Good luck. Be safe. Don’t fall off your brooms.”

She glanced at each of them, lingering last on Draco; and as she brushed past to the stairs, her arm pressed briefly against his.

She whisked it away with the haste of an accident, and hurried up the stairs.

“Thanks,” Ron called after her hopefully. Draco suppressed a twinge of irritation at quite literally nothing in particular.

The stands shuddered under a groan of wind. The locker rooms were warm and candlelit, and it had never been harder to leave them than when standing on the takeoff spot, brooms braced against the gale, as one by one they lifted into the winnowing snap of fog. Angelina led the group in a tight V- formation around the stands, cleaving through curtains of stinging mist. Harry zipped up to hover in the highest quadrant of the field, cutting a lazy loop.

Red scarves fluttered in between green stalks of wool and foam. The stray exhortation of sparks erupted when the players came onto the field, and there were cheers. The quidditch pitch looked like a kind of war arena in this weather, crowned in coronets of fog, the silver gusts peeled back by the windspeed of the play.

Roars met each player that erupted from the locker room. Applause swelled in long loops around the stadium. In the faculty box, McGonagall perched between Professor Umbridge and Professor Dumbledore, and when the Gryffindor team came out, she tapped out spirited applause on her palm. Umbridge, who was bundled in a puffball hat and a mink coat, glowered like a wet cat.

Theo sat next to Pansy and Astoria, wearing a thick double-breasted overcoat and a green scarf. Astoria had been given a front-row slot for her chair, and she was terribly excited about it.

“Good morning,” said someone who was not Lee Jordan.

It was the sixth year Slytherin prefect, Maude Rosier, who had her chin braced in her palm. “And a dreadful one it is. Can’t hope we’ll see anything impressive in this weather. Johnson has the quaffle… now Montague has it. Whoops, not anymore… there he goes up the pitch, and that’s a bludger from Weasley, don’t ask me which, Gryffindor’s got about twelve of them…”

Draco arced around to Angelina’s right, twisting a corkscrew over the stands, and drew a wave of screams from those who lost their hats in his slipstream. He changed his course when Angelina broke off, drifting into a wider formation that set him whirling under a bludger, only to duck again when Fred cracked it back over his head. There was Goyle’s habit of canting left, his way of always grunting before he hit the ball, giving a faint forewarning when a missile was en route. He caught a pass and volleyed it back to Angelina, slipped under Katie to change guards, and dodged another bludger.

The Slytherins were chanting. This wasn’t odd; the Gryffindor stands had been chanting errantly for Harry and Angelina, on and off, but it was unusual for how many of them were chanting the same thing.

“The crowd’s very spirited,” murmured Rosier. “Lots of energy. That’s Malfoy to Johnson, I mean Bell, sorry. Hard to tell them apart.”

The wind and the crowd battled to deafen him. The reedy strains of a chorus rose through the din.

What shall we do with a pureblood traitor?

“—and it’s Johnson back to Bell, Bell to shoot — whoops, missed,” said Rosier mildly, as if she couldn’t hear it. McGonagall half rose from her seat, her face a stone rictus, but Umbridge put her hand on her arm.

At the other end of the field, Ron was pale, clutching the front of his broomstick as if it might soon snap off.

Snap his wand and send him walking;

Snap his wand and send him walking—

Harry stopped moving. Draco willed him to discover some untapped reserves of self-restraint — perhaps ones rich from five years of neglect.

Wishful thinking. On the third repetition, Harry shot back down towards Ron, cutting back toward the goalhoops.

“POTTER!” Angelina shouted. She caught a pass and punted it hastily back to Katie, who fumbled it in haste, as Angelina shot off to try and recollect her seeker. “FOCUS!”

“Mm, Bell’s not in a very good position for it,” said Rosier, toying with her necklace. “She’s gotta beat Bletchely. Good luck. Shoots… oh, no…”

Umbridge and McGonagall had raised their voices. Umbridge lifted from her seat, her face dimming with displeasure. A flush colored in the sagging folds of her cheeks. Madam Hooch soared over to the Slytherin stands and began shouting at them, wholly without effect.

What shall we do with a halfblood bastard?

The Gryffindor stands started to object. Hermione was standing up and shouting, pink in the face; Daphne was tugging fretfully at her robes, trying to get her back down; Ginny was hanging out of the box, her wand out, snarling something that it was a mercy the wind had hidden from teachers’ ears. Boos and hisses broke out. The attention was shifting away from the game.

There was a surge of movement: people had come out of their seats, and they were moving toward the Slytherin stands, led by a furious Seamus and Ginny.

Put ’em in his place with a horsewhip, won’t we;

Put ’em in his place with a horsewhip, won’t we—

“Quaffle’s in Slytherin possession.”

As if anyone cared. Hermione had grown distracted by trying to keep the others in their seats, and she had two first years by the back of the robes, shouting at them fruitlessly. Daphne was tugging their friends away from the entrance to the box. A flutter of flashbulbs testified to the presence of Colin and Dennis Creevey, who were snapping pictures in between shouts. In the Hufflepuff box, Cedric was trying to maintain decorum, but there was a cacophony breaking out, and he hadn’t a chance. The Ravenclaws were stirring in disease, commingled boos and whistles and a bevy, above all else, of uncomfortable looks.

Then Daphne drew up short, staring at the Slytherin stands. Astoria was chanting the words between claps, as if she hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant; or, worse, didn’t care. Pansy was mouthing the words, but somewhat listlessly, her eyes wandering; Theo’s mouth was sealed shut, and he was massaging his eyes.

The quaffle sailed past him, forgotten. Angelina swore and caught it, but he was cutting away, crossing the field, because the Slytherins were warming up for another verse.

What shall we do with a thieving mudblood?

McGonagall broke away from Umbridge and snatched the microphone from Rosier.

“ENOUGH! ENOUGH — DESIST PLAY —”

He looked for Hermione, found her easily — in the middle of a field of red and gold, her hair thrashing darkly in the wind. She had stopped shouting, and she was watching the Slytherin stands, her mouth parted, rigid not with fear but fury.

Abruptly, Daphne surged away from the stands, wrestling her way through the crowd. She cut effortlessly into a pack of squirming, shouting Gryffindors, hustled along the front row of seats, and vaulted the railing between boxes, at one point lifting Dennis Creevey bodily out of her way by the scruff of his neck. People yelped at her careless show of strength, but single-minded and furious, she ignored them.

She was shouting something; he couldn’t hear her over the wind and the singing, but he knew the shape her lips were making. It was Tori.

Strap him to an anchor and then drop it,

Strap him to an anchor and then drop it—

“SILENCIO!”

It was Professor McGonagall.

The crowd cut out, and in the ringing peal of silence that ensued, the other shouts swelled to fill its new absence. Gryffindors surged over the barrier, and Slytherins leapt from their seats, shouting, almost chest to chest, red robes and green ones clashing and knitting in the thrashing currents of the mist, like waves of color meeting each other on a field of battle.

Daphne reached Astoria and seized her by the front of her shirt. She gave her a hard rattle, shouting something, and Astoria let out a shrill cry. The two broke into tussling. Ginny and Seamus were locked in a shouting match with Vincent Crabbe, and it wasn’t clear who touched who first, but one of them surged at the other, and Ginny stumbled onto her back foot; tripped — fell — and there was a flicker of shadow, and Harry shot over from the goalhoops, followed closely by Ron, who was bellowing at Crabbe long before he could hear him.

The Gryffindor team was constellating around the Slytherin box, and so was the Slytherin team. Faculty members were wrestling their way through the thick crowd of Hufflepuffs, but it was slow going.

Daphne gave Astoria another rattle and Astoria burst into tears, shoving her away. They were shouting at each other so fiercely that the nearest seats all peeled back, and stray magic rattled the seats beneath them, lifting the banners in gusts of cross-current wind. Theo stood up and tried to say something to Daphne, and she shoved him. He stumbled away; Pansy sprang up, snapping something at her, and Daphne snapped right back; they were arguing as he had never seen them argue, claws out, with a brute earnesty in their faces that seemed almost ill-fitting on features so acclimated to a sneer.

Astoria shoved Daphne’s chest and spat something. Daphne staggered back, stricken.

Then she slapped Astoria across the face.

The girl screamed. Crabbe rose from behind Astoria’s seat like six feet of towering marble.

He grabbed a fistful of Daphne’s hair and wrenched her back, and her shriek of pain pierced through the din.

At which point Ron leapt from his broomstick, hurtled into the crowd, and tackled him.

It erupted. The crowd, as one organism, had a seizure. Colors bled into each other. There were screams; spells glittered like stray veins of electricity over the crowd. Draco fumbled for his wand and cut a long arc around the fight, but there were spells flying, and he couldn’t see well enough to land anything, and his heart was in his stomach. Harry plummeted into the crowd with no such reservation, and the fight swelled to enfold the Gryffindor stands, which surged at Harry’s intervention like a cavalry charge.

Hermione was hurrying along the stairs, trying to get to the Slytherin box, and he set his jaw, following her carefully with his eyes. As if it would kill her to stay still. As if it would actually kill her, for once, not to run away from the danger instead of into it.

A spell veered wide from the crowd and nearly struck him. He slid into a dive into the stands, almost skimming a seat, and clipped the end of his broomstick on a railing. It tore out of his hands and he tumbled down, landing hard on his back, the breath driven from his lungs in one brute punch.

Steps thundered. He rolled aside to avoid being crushed underfoot. Then he shoved himself upright, gripping his wand, and cast a Shield Charm in time to block some careening Knockback Jinx — Colin Creevey bobbed under his arm, shouted “Expelliarmus!” and with an unfortunately flawless form, ended up ripping a wand from some Slytherin seventh year’s hand; Draco was mildly impressed with the quarter of his brain that wasn’t furious — Hermione was nowhere to be found, nor Harry nor Ron, buried as they were in the fighting.

“Enough!”

A roll of petrification swept over the crowd. Bodies stilled like they had been cast in stone; limbs knit together in abortive wrestling matches were laid still, like the casts of ancient Pompeii, a whole landscape of childish brutality turned to a kind of grotesque oil painting.

Umbridge lowered her wand while it was still glowing. She lowered her mouth to the microphone.

“The match is canceled. Both teams are suspended until further notice. The Gryffindor team will report to my office this evening for detention. The Slytherin team will report tomorrow. You may all leave.”

The spell broke. The crowd dropped, and students went tumbling to the ground as their momentum resumed itself. An outcry went up to complain of the decision — but now patrolmen came hurrying down from the doors, and students dissipated in haste, squawking here and there where a patrolman’s arm wrenched them apart.

“You may all leave!” cried Umbridge. “Some of you will be retained for discipline at the discretion of the patrolmen. The rest of you will be escorted back to your dorms, where you will remain for the rest of the day! Thank you for your cooperation! Good day!”

They filed out, marched in quick-moving streams up the aisles. The patrolmen stood watch by the doors, their wands out and glowing.

He was full of a nauseous, oily outrage, one made unendurable by the mere fact that he hadn’t deserved it. He had kept his distance. And yet his back still ached with a depth that he knew would bring black bruises up his shoulders tomorrow, no less bruised for his restraint, and its ache suffused him with a directionless anger — because if he was going to be punished anyway, he at least should have gotten a few curses in for it. He could have jinxed Crabbe on his back, or treated him to a second version of the Boiling Curse he’d given Warrington; if it didn’t make any bloody difference, then he might as well indulge the pit of white anger at the bottom of his stomach, because it was going to eat him one way or another.

The Gryffindor team was hurried off the pitch by patrolmen. Efforts at conversation received sharp censure, so they walked in silence. In the Entrance Hall, the castle was dim and silent, marked only by the echo of their footsteps. Fred came over and silently slung his arm around Ron’s shoulders. George slapped his back. Katie leaned her head on Angelina’s shoulder.

They climbed the stairs to the Pink Lady with a somber dignity, like returning soldiers, only the war had been fruitless, and they hadn’t even won.

“Boys? Draco? Harry?”

Footsteps echoed on the stairs. Hermione came flying around the banister. When she saw them, she buckled in relief. “Oh,” she cried, “Harry — Ron, thank God— I couldn’t, I thought — where’s — Draco!”

Alarmed at the urgency of his name on her lips, he turned, and just in time: she raced up the last flight of stairs and leapt on him.

He caught her, and let out a strangled noise as she wrapped herself tightly around his chest. He had to hold her up to prevent both of them falling down a flight of stairs.

She put her head between his collarbones and breathed, deeply, as if she was filling her lungs for the first time in years. He took the chance to give her a once-over: she seemed unscathed, save the mud on her cheeks and the wind in her hair.

“Hello, there,” he said, and his voice was low. “Did something happen to me that I should know about?”

“I saw you fall into the stands—”

“‘Fall,’ nothing. It was a calibrated midair dismount. Look it up.”

She gave a strangled laugh. “Don’t even try. I didn’t know what happened — you could’ve broken your neck and been trampled, or shattered your ribs and punctured a lung, or something else, I don’t know, everything was a mess. I just couldn’t see you. Sorry. It all sounds silly now.”

“Not to discourage you from the fawning, and the affection, and the whatnot,” he said, “because it’s obviously quite appropriate, and I deserve it; but it’s been my personal experience that I’m extremely hard to kill.”

She gave a huffy laugh, and her breath was hot and shivery on his neck.

“You deserve something,” she muttered, and before he had time to wrestle his thoughts back from the gutter they’d gleefully vaulted into, she had unlatched from him, and was wrestling Harry and Ron into a squirming three-way affair. “Don’t get me started on you two. Ron, what were you thinking, jumping off your broomstick, it’s good luck you didn’t break your back. Daphne screamed herself hoarse, and I expect when she sees you she’s going to do it again, look forward to that — Snape took her to his office — I saw Umbridge talking to him on the way in — and you, Harry, you’re lucky McGonagall covered for you; she said she saw you get hit before you jumped into the stands, which is, I’m pretty sure, a lie— oh, my God. All of you are mad. I hate quidditch.”

She breathed raggedly.

Draco touched her back to steady her. When she didn’t pull away, he kept his hand there, lingering.

“Alright, there.”

Her hair brushed the tips of his fingers. The contact was a tether to the world of the safe and the real. It drew down his pulse to a comfortable rhythm. Calm sank through his body like it flowed from his fingertips.

He spread his fingers along the small of her back. She gave a little twitch, something less than a shudder, more than a sigh. Her shoulders sank.

“It’s alright,” she said, and her voice was oddly calm. “It’ll be alright. It will. You’ll see.”

“Yeah?” said Harry tiredly. “Hope you’re right, then.”

She held out her hand, and he took it. Ron put his arm around Harry’s shoulder and ruffled his hair, almost violently. There was a moment — a not terrible moment — where it was the four of them in an unbroken chain on the staircase, and if they could have ten good minutes of it, then the rest of the day would be very nearly endurable.

Then there were voices in the hallway, and more students came around the banister. One of them was Pansy.

“What are you doing here?” Angelina called guardedly. “Students were sent back to their dorms.”

“Is the Tower so crowded you’re down to sleeping on the stairs? Don’t bother retorting, I don’t care. I’m meant to cart you all to Umbridge’s office.”

“They already know they have detention,” snapped Hermione. “Give them a minute to change out of their uniforms, at least.”

Pansy smiled with teeth, a thorny expression. “If she wanted you to have a minute, I think she would’ve said so,” she said sweetly. “And I don’t remember you being on the team, Granger.”

“I’m—”

“Astonishingly, I still don’t care. Johnson, gather your people. Umbridge made it clear that she’ll hold captains personally responsible for tardiness.”

“Understood,” gritted out Angelina.

A hand appeared on Pansy’s shoulder, and another student emerged from the stairwell. It was Theo.

“She’d like to see us,” he murmured to Pansy, with a brief, cold glance at Draco. “Five minutes.”

“What? Now? It can’t wait?”

“It could, but it shouldn’t.”

“Lost me at could, Teddy.”

“It’s about the thing.”

“The thing? Or the Thing?”

“The other thing.”

They shared a brief flurry of gestures and frowns.

“God!” Pansy burst out. “Have it your way. Five minutes, but tell her I need to piss first.”

“That’s a funny joke.”

“So is the bladder infection I’m going to name after you.”

Theo’s lip twitched. He squeezed Pansy’s shoulder — darted a wholly uncharacteristic kiss on the back of her head — and slipped away without a word to anyone else.

“Rat-faced bastard,” muttered Fred. “Should’ve let him fall and snap his neck in fifth year.”

“Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” said Angelina darkly. “C’mon.”

As they moved down the stairs, Hermione’s hand darted out and caught Draco’s sleeve. He turned, and found her face drawn, her knuckles tight on his cuff.

“Be careful,” she said, too quietly for anyone else to hear, and spoke quickly. “If she gives you lines, write with your offhand, so it doesn’t hurt your right; and don’t press hard, it draws more blood; and if Harry gets angry then do something to shut him up, you know how he gets; same with Ron; and say as little as possible, if she asks you anything; and—”

“Granger, I know.”

“—and come straight back to me, when you’re finished,” she said, still gripping his sleeve. She was so pale that light might very well pass through her. “I have aloe, and Dittany, and Blood-Replenishing Potion. And plasters. And I’ll ask the house-elves to bring some food up. But come right back. I’ll wait in the common room.”

“We’ll be late.”

“I don’t care. I’ll wait for you.”

It was too much; if she kept talking in that high, tight voice, as if she were going to winnow away the moment they all left, he wouldn’t go at all.

He drew a gentle pressure on his cuff, and she released it, leaving her hand curled fretfully in midair. When he took a step back, she half-stepped forward, and snatched his wrist back. Her wand whispered out of its sheath and she tapped his right hand, quickly. A rush of cold tingles flowed up the skin of his hand, and he flexed his fingers, suppressing a wince.

“What—?”

“Numbing Charm,” she murmured.

His throat tightened; she avoided his searching look.

She gripped his hand with a tight, bruising press, and then let it go, tucking her wand away. She stepped back and took a short breath, lifting her eyes; they were dark and intense, and her mouth was set in a fierce line.

“Well, go on,” she said imperiously. “It’s only a detention. You’ve had them before.”

It was like her voice still echoed in the shadowy atrium of the stairwell: Come back. The tone lingered. It had been high-pitched and unlike her usual orders, which never showed so much uncertainty, or so much fear.

“Don’t worry,” he said, senselessly, because it sounded like she needed it. She made a little sound of disbelief. “I’m sure we’ll manage without you for an hour, somehow.”

“Hope springs eternal,” she whispered, and when he turned away, the ghostly, fretful smile was still plastered on her face.

The sun was near to setting when they reached the Defense classroom. A harsh lamp was suspended over each desk, like a soldier’s formation of miniature suns.

The corporal of this ghastly light assembly was Umbridge, stationed at the front of the room in a pink jumper and shimmery lilac cloak. One of the patrolmen stood behind her. In her face there was nothing, not even the usual simper or smile of malice that she offered when given the opportunity to introduce discipline. For once, she made no effort to smile at the sight of them.

“You are late. Fifty points from Gryffindor.”

Angelina choked. “We aren’t—”

“You are.”

“You said you wanted us here at four, and here we are, it’s three fifty-seven—”

“You are contradicting a teacher. Another fifty points.”

Angelina’s jaw dropped. The team’s loud protests cut off, replaced by a reverie of shock and silent loathing.

“You will find,” said Umbridge, “that in this room, you are late if I say you are late. It is four o’clock when I say it is four o’clock. And when I tell you something, you will do as I say.”

Her voice rattled the windows. Katie trembled.

“Sit down,” she said.

Angelina took a deep breath. She led the team down the aisles and took her seat at the front of the room.

“No,” said Umbridge suddenly. She pointed at another desk. “That one.”

Angelina stopped, halfway into her seat, and looked up at her incredulously. “Is there something wrong with this one?”

“You will not speak unless I tell you to speak. You will sit there.” She pointed, again, at the desk.

Slowly, Angelina moved. She had no sooner settled down in the other desk when Umbridge spoke up again.

“No. Sit at that one.” She pointed at another desk on the other end of the row.

Angelina exhaled shortly. “You just told me to sit here.”

“You are refusing a teacher’s order. Fifty points from Gryffindor.”

Fred opened his mouth, and George slapped his hand over it, expression grim. Umbridge watched the movement, her eyes flickering with chill amusement.

“Professor,” said Katie hoarsely, “please — what’s the point—”

“You will not speak unless I tell you to speak.” She pointed. “Miss Johnson. Move.”

Angelina closed her eyes. Three long seconds passed. Then she got up and walked over to the indicated desk.

“Good,” said Umbridge softly. “You see? Is it so very hard, Miss Johnson, to do what I ask of you? In silence?”

Angelina shook her head at the desk. Harry was shaking. Ron put his hand on his shoulder.

“You may say ‘No, Professor Umbridge.’”

“No, Professor Umbridge.”

“Good girl,” said Umbridge. She gestured to the rest of them. “You may take your seats. You will not need to speak. You will find all of this very easy,” she added, gently, “if you can simply learn the lesson that it has taken Miss Johnson so… very… long… to commit to mind.”

They filed in. Umbridge strolled down the row, examining each of them in turn. As she passed, she placed a quill on each desk. Each quill was the size and shape of an eagle feather, but studded with a long, serrated black nib. It reminded him of a steak knife.

On her way past, she reached out and pinched Katie’s lip piercing, twisting it until Katie gasped. “You will remove this,” she said softly, and kept walking.

When she reached Ron, she paused.

“What time is it, Mr. Weasley?”

Ron slouched.

“Bout four.”

“What was that? Speak up.”

“I said it’s about four.”

“No,” said Umbridge calmly. “An understandable mistake, Mr. Weasley. But no. It is seven o’clock in the morning.”

Ron wrinkled his nose. “The clock’s just there,” he said. “You can check—”

“I say it is seven in the morning.”

“I… alright.”

“Now I will ask you again,” she said. “What time is it?”

“I mean, I dunno what you want me to say,” said Ron, aggravated, “because obviously you think it’s seven, but it’s four, the clock’s right th—”

“You are lying. Fifty points from Gryffindor.”

“But it’s not, you’re mad, it’s r—”

She hit him.

Ron’s cheek snapped to the side, with a wheeze of shock. Fred leapt to his feet, and it took Katie and George combined to wrestle him back down, both of them hissing frantically.

“You are a liar,” she said sadly. “It is not a hard lesson I am trying to teach you, Mr. Weasley, and it makes me sad that you cannot understand it. I am afraid that even the best educations are wasted on those who do not want to learn. Isn’t that right, Mr. Potter?”

Ron gaped. She walked past him, to Harry’s desk, and then leaned down on her knees, staring into his eyes.

“Mr. Potter,” she whispered, “can you tell me what time it is?”

Harry stared at her, stone-faced, and said nothing.

“I would like you to tell me what time it is.”

Harry said nothing. Draco’s chest constricted.

Umbridge slowly placed one of the red quills on his desk. She patted it, almost tenderly, and slid it towards him.

“Pick it up,” she whispered.

“It’s seven o’clock,” said Draco quietly.

Umbridge straightened up, gazing at him. A beatific smile stretched her cheeks open.

“Isn’t it?” he added, ignoring the way Harry had turned his head to stare.

“Thank you, Mr. Malfoy,” she said quietly. “Yes, it is.”

And she retreated from his desk without setting down a quill.

“Lines,” she called. “I want you to write ‘It is seven o’clock in the morning,’ at least one hundred times each; and Mr. Potter will write it two hundred times, since he seems confused.”

She moved over to her office door and opened it. His teammates raised their quills grimly to the parchment before them, and with a chorus of winces and gasps, eked out the first painful scratches of their lines. Draco watched with a stomach in revolt as blood bubbled and welled from Harry’s right hand, spilling down Ron’s wrist, laced the knuckles of Fred’s left fist. Katie let out a grunt of badly muffled pain.

And he knew what the difference was. He knew, because he had lived with them for five years, what they had in common. He knew that Katie’s father owned a department store in muggle London, and Angelina’s parents were solicitors, and he knew why. And because he had lived with them for five years, he also knew why it felt like a knife slowly performing an open biopsy on his gut, to sit there and be the only man on the line free of scars.

There wasn’t dignity in it. He was no glutton for pain, but there was something disgusting about being the only man to walk out with a clean hand. He was tough as any of them. He could take his goddamn stripes.

He looked down at his own empty desk. Then back down the row of bloody hands.

“Professor.”

“Yes, Mr. Malfoy?”

Harry paused, eyeing him from his periphery.

“Draco,” Ron muttered. “It’s fine. Don’t—”

He closed his eyes, and prepared himself for regret.

“You haven’t given me a quill,” he said.

Umbridge paused, and then dimpled at him from the door.

“Oh, Mr. Malfoy,” she said kindly. “You are sweet to remind me. But I only have six quills to supply. You will have to use your own! I should think you can afford them.”

Fred let out a snort of laughter.

“…I see.”

She inclined her head. “Of course, if you don’t happen to have one, you may come into my office, and we’ll see if I can’t find a spare.”

“That won’t—”

“Come,” she called, and slipped behind the door. Draco slowly pushed back his chair and stood up.

“Oi. Draco.”

It was Ron. He had paused in his scratching, and the blood had slicked his knuckles red, giving his solemn stare a decidedly unnerving air.

“If something happens,” he muttered, nodding at the door, “just shout.”

Draco nodded shortly, and went into the office.

If one assembled a decorating committee of several artistically committed six-year-olds and a grandmother, they might have come up with something slightly less elaborate than Umbridge’s office. Doilies and handspun tea cozies abounded in frankly tasteless abundance, while taffy-pink drapes and a fluffy magenta carpet leant the whole room a kind of maddeningly monochromatic aesthetic that gave an impression of a funhouse. Extravagantly expensive sets of china and satin pillowcases flourished on bejeweled sideboards and, most appallingly, a zebra-print chesterfield. It would have given Narcissa seizures.

“Why, sit down,” she said, easing herself into a plush purple armchair. “I’ve been on my feet all day. These heels!” She laughed. “The things women put up with!”

He gave her an odd look. She blinked inquiringly at him.

“You seem confused, Mr. Malfoy.”

“I thought we were finding a quill.”

“Oh.” She grimaced and leaned down to wriggle out of her heel. “No. I do apologize for the to-do, but you understand; I must have discipline, and if a child doesn’t have it drilled in early, it has to be whipped in later by force. It’s not their fault, the poor dears, they simply can’t be asked to understand. Hence—” She gestured, imitating a quill. “The lesson.”

“To understand what?”

She giggled. “Such a wit! Just like your mother. I was a few years ahead of Lady Malfoy — I watched her Sorting. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the wedding, you know, but my friends who went said all the best things.” She smiled, and Summoned a tea set from the cupboard. “Libation, Mr. Malfoy? It’s herbal.”

“No. Thank you.”

“Have some anyway.”

He leaned back in his chair, twisting his signet ring. Her gaze snagged on it, and lingered while she poured.

She settled back in her chair, cradling her cup.

“So,” she said. “We’ve been bad, haven’t we?”

He did not answer that, and refused to.

“Your association with Mr. Potter,” she clarified, pleasantly. “It’s regrettable.”

He still hadn’t heard a question, so he said nothing.

“I must say, I was surprised to hear that someone of your breeding had fallen in with him,” she added. “Rita Skeeter seemed convinced that you were terribly cozy. Not that I blame you. It must have been incredibly lonely, being in Gryffindor by yourself for all those years. Often the most dangerous people are terribly charismatic.”

Harry was charismatic. Specifically, Harry had the charisma of a large dog that believed it was a Bichon; i.e., endearing, indeliberate, and patently un-manipulative.

“Potter and I have a history,” he said, guarded.

“Indeed. And I do not begrudge you the friendships of your past. But you must understand that Mr. Potter is leading you down a dangerous path,” she said, with sincere concern tightening her face. “Ask yourself: how often have you found yourself in harm’s way for him? How much have you suffered? And do you expect, honestly, that it will stop?”

“I don’t take your meaning.”

She leaned on the desk. “I mean that Harry Potter is a dangerous boy,” she said. It was the most serious he had ever seen her; there was no dimpling, no simpering, no tiny coughs. “He is positioning himself against the Wizarding government. He and Albus Dumbledore are in open defiance of the Minister. If you stand at his side for much longer, you will make yourself a suspect character in the eyes of your government, and you — with deepest respect, Mr. Malfoy — have not cultivated the allies you would require to endure that status comfortably.”

“I’m not a political figure. I’m a student.”

“That’s not something you really get to choose,” she said indulgently. “Power changes what you are. Lord Malfoy is not Draco Malfoy, if you can understand what I mean… even though you may be both at once. Harry Potter is not the Chosen One, but we must treat with both persons in the same individual… Potter understands this, I think. It’s why he’s attempted to collect you.”

Suggesting that Harry Potter had dedicated any thought to the nature and origin of power was easily the funniest possible way of revealing that she knew nothing about him.

“To collect me?”

“Yes. You lend him legitimacy; it bespeaks his worth to have the scion of a noble family at his side. Two noble families, no less! I myself doubted that Skeeter’s critical bent was well-founded, on the grounds that she had named you as his associate! Your name tells people who do not know him what his name means.”

“My name hasn’t been terribly useful for my purposes,” he said curtly. “And it’s not done much for his, either.”

“Of course not, my dear.” She rested her chin in her hand, smiling. “Because you haven’t laid claim to its greatest tools! The power of a title — and I thought I would be the last person to explain this to you — lies not in what you own, but whom you own.”

“The people I own?”

“A figure of speech. Your ‘people.’ Your connections. Your friends. As it were.”

“As it were,” he repeated.

“Mm. Your name will hold certain doors open to you for as long as you live. But they are not ones that Potter can follow you through.”

She added, slyly: “Would you like me to show you where they are?”

He tapped his fingers on the desk. He wondered how many lines the others had done yet.

He wondered how she got the bloodstains out of the wood.

He thought about Hermione’s fluttering bandage — about her sitting in that classroom, by herself, under the cruel lamplight — and his unease crystallized into something hard and cold. His fingers stilled.

“Why Hogwarts?” he said. “Of all positions. Do you have a passion for teaching?”

His tone seemed to indicate what he thought of that answer, because her eyes narrowed slightly.

“Education is a means to an end,” she said simply. “I do all I do knowing that it is for the betterment of young people. My own happiness… I am quite used to putting second for the needs of others.”

“So you don’t like it, then.”

“Who would?” she said mildly. “You see what I deal with in that classroom. If you seek gratification from your career, I urge you, do not work with children.”

“But you took a post that required you to do it.”

She sighed. “To have influence is to have enemies,” she said. “I was assigned to the Bureau of Education. Between you and me, there are some at the Ministry who sought to keep me away from London.”

“Shacklebolt?”

Her lip curled. “I bear no love for Kingsley,” she said, “but the members of the Wizengamot are ultimately quite irrelevant to the real work of the Ministry. Elections come, elections go; but the civil service endures. No. My appointment might best be understood as punishment for Lord Nott’s embarrassment and scandal last year… Lord Selwyn and Archibald Rosier have tried to strip Albert of his staunchest allies, and populate his cabinet with feckless, aging fools. If it weren’t for Rufus — auror friend of mine, well-liked in the Wizengamot, my own choice for head of Law Enforcement if something can be done about Thicknesse — I would have been posted somewhere even further beneath my qualifications. At least here, I can keep an eye on Dumbledore.”

“You make it all sound quite turbulent.”

“Oh, transitions tend to be. I don’t bother about it too terribly much; heel-dragging is the mark of the small-minded. It’s a sad thing, but so many people are so very small, Mr. Malfoy. And they need to be ruled.” She drew a picture frame from a drawer and placed it in front of him. “But you know that already.”

It was a pair of very young people, no more than eighteen or nineteen: one, a young man, his beard shorter, his cheeks pimpled, but for all that, no less recognizable as Albert Runcorn. The other had a mousy brown bowl of hair and an awkward, eager grin, sparkling with a guileless excitement that he had never seen once in the face of the woman she’d become.

They were pressed cheek to cheek. They held up a pair of Ministry passes: Umbridge, a student intern for the DMLE, and Runcorn, a legislative aide in the Wizengamot.

The wind piped through the windows, rattling them, and a dull splatter of afternoon rain glazed the pane. Across the grounds, trees knelt under the arm of the wind, crowned by the downpour, which left the eaves gurgling deeply like a quartet of bullfrogs. A lark fluttered to the window and alighted on the sill, warbling sadly in the rain.

“Do you have another one of those quills?” he said abruptly. “I’d like to take a look at one.”

“Perhaps a career in entrepreneurship, instead of politics,” she said indulgently, but she went to a drawer by the bureau. Inside, he glimpsed a wide bed of dark red feathers.

She removed one and held it out. He took it carefully and rotated it in the light.

“They’re lovely,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie. The tip fused seamlessly into the dark red spine of the quill, which sprouted a feather like a red plume, light at the edges, dark at the heart. Its tip was crooked, and when he drew his thumb across it, one of the edges caught and dragged the skin, leaving a faint white line.

“They’re horrid,” said Umbridge tonelessly. She shut the drawer and locked it with a tiny key. “Brutal things. But necessary. If a lesson cannot be learned easily, it will be taught hard.”

He flipped the quill over, testing the heft.

It was a brutish enchantment, more cruel than cunning. It took after its creator, in that sense. In fact, the charm oughtn’t even require any pain; it was a riff on the Everfull Inkwell charm, routed from the nearest vein, but clunkier, opening up the scars in the shape of the words being written — he could already think of ways to do it better, cleaner, and that was without having the blueprint in front of him.

He wondered what he could make them do, given enough time. He wondered what he could make them do to her.

He could see Hermione’s hand split open, a weeping mess of blood and skin, and thought of a hundred things that weren’t half ugly enough.

“That’s quite enough lecturing for one night,” she announced. “You may return to write your lines. Try… ‘I will conduct myself according to my station.’ Let’s say… fifty times. I have to give you something, after all. How’s that? Seem fair?”

He froze. He lifted the Sanguine Quill, questioning.

“No! No, gracious dear, just the normal ones,” she said, laughing. “To think what your blood is worth — I daresay it’s cheaper to write in gold.”

She leaned over the table and extended her hand. “Yes, let’s say fifty,” she said, “and that the next time we speak to each other, you will have thought carefully about whether someone who loves you would ask you to endure what Mr. Potter does.”

“You’re letting me off easily.”

“They really have treated you abhorrently, Mr. Malfoy, if it surprises you,” she said mildly. “Friends should make each other’s lives easier. You may not believe it, because of the person I suppose you think I am — who I must be, because of my station — Dolores is not always Professor Umbridge, you see. But I am, and have always tried to be, a very good friend.”

He lowered the Sanguine Quill to the table.

“Say you understand,” she repeated.

“I do.”

With a nauseated reluctance, he grazed her hand. As they parted, her fingers slipped along his, lingering on his ring.

On his way out, he wiped his hand discreetly on his shirtfront.

-Don’t have many notes today because The Fuckening is afoot in my life at the mo and it’s all I have in me to get this up on time. But I love you, and I hope you’re well. My heart is in your hands, and you take such great care of it. I hope that you set your playlist on random shuffle and you get all the songs you need for the vibe you’re at, in exactly the right order.

-Next chapter will be up in a week if the demons don’t get me, wish me luck; title: “The Night Patrol.”

-In which our favorite prefects will do what prefects do, and patrol. At night. Together.