2nd September 1995, Gryffindor Tower, morning
Harry came down to the common room to find Ron already there, balanced precariously on a chair, peeling something garish off the notice-board.
"What's that?" Harry asked.
"That," said Ron grimly, tugging the last corner free, "is my brothers, advertising in a place they have no business advertising." He held up the poster — a lurid, self-animating thing promising WANT TO MAKE SOME GOLD? FANCY A FEW GALLEONS FOR A LITTLE LIGHT PRODUCT-TESTING? — APPLY TO F. & G. WEASLEY. "Mum'd have a fit."
Hermione and Neville arrived as he climbed down, and when Hermione heard of the previous night's row with Seamus, her mouth thinned.
"I had the very same thing," she said, dropping onto the sofa arm. "Some of the girls in our year. Parvati's sister wrote to her that it's all hysteria — that the Prophet says so, and surely the Prophet would know." She huffed. "I pointed out that other papers say otherwise — Dumbledore says otherwise, the foreign press say otherwise — and got looked at as though I were the mad one." A small softening. "Lavender backed me up, though. Stood right there and told them flat that her Ron-Ron had seen things they hadn't, and they could keep their Prophet." She almost smiled. "She's growing on me."
Breakfast in the Great Hall was loud and bright and blessedly ordinary, the ceiling a clean September blue. Harry had a textbook propped against the marmalade, getting a head start on the day's reading, when a shadow fell across the page.
"Weasley." Angelina Johnson stood over where Ginny was, tall and brisk. "You'll want to hear this. I've taken over as Quidditch captain — Oliver's gone professional, Puddlemere reserves." She folded her arms. "So... Tryouts Friday. We need a Keeper, and I need the whole team to be there. Don't be late."
She swept off toward the seventh-years.
Ron sat with his mouth open. Then, slowly, he turned to Hermione and held out a hand, palm up. "Captain. I said it'd be Angelina."
Hermione, with the expression of a woman parting with a beloved pet, dropped a Knut into his palm. Harry and Neville busied themselves very intently with their breakfasts and did not, under any circumstances, let Hermione see them shaking with laughter.
"You know," Harry observed mildly, once Angelina was out of earshot, "you very nearly dissolved just then, Hermione. Lost a wager, took it on the chin — for a moment there I thought we'd lost you entirely to the Gryffindor hidden trait."
"The what?"
"The naughty-prankster gene. It's in all of us. You've been resisting it for four years, but I saw it slip—"
What Hermione did then was not, as Harry had braced for, to fume and aim a punch. Instead she pressed the back of one hand to her forehead and swooned theatrically against the table. "Oh — undone — corrupted at last — the noble scholar, fallen to gambling—"
"That's awful," said Ron, with genuine disdain. "That's the worst acting I've ever seen. Even Lockhart was better than that."
"You take that back—"
It was, Harry thought, grinning into his tea, a very good first breakfast back.
After, the three of them went to find the twins — Neville having peeled off ahead with Hannah Abbott, the pair of them heads together over something, which earned him three identical scrutinising looks he affected not to notice.
Hermione cornered Fred and George by the doors and delivered her verdict on the poster. "You cannot simply advertise for test subjects. They're children, half of them — first-years — and some of your products send people to the hospital wing—"
"They volunteer," said Fred, wounded.
"For gold," said Hermione. "Which is not the same as informed consent, and you both know it." She held up a hand against the protest. "I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying don't do it where any professor — or any prefect — can see it and has to act on it. Be subtle. Use a back room. Vet who you're testing on. Honestly, you're meant to be the clever ones."
The twins exchanged a look of dawning respect.
"She's terrifying," said George.
"We should hire her," said Fred. "Speaking of — doesn't matter how the year goes, this is the big one for us. O.W.L.s."
"You're worried about O.W.L.s?" Ron said, astonished.
"'Course not," said George. "Though — between us — we're not at all sure we're attending for the N.E.W.T.s. Don't see as we'll need them, not where we're—" He stopped, a half-second too late, and Fred trod on his foot. "—not that we've, ah, made plans. Nothing's decided. Forget I said anything."
They ambled off, leaving Harry and Hermione exchanging a knowing look — the shop, the Atid Stella partnership, the gold already moving; the twins were building a life that didn't run through a N.E.W.T. and were trying, badly, not to say so.
"Speaking of next year," Ron said as they walked, "we've got Career Advice this term. Choose what we want to be, so they know what N.E.W.T.s to push us into." He frowned at the middle distance. "I keep going back and forth. Professional Quidditch — like Oliver, like Krum. Or Auror." He brightened. "Auror, I reckon. Lavender's between being a florist or an editor at Witch Weekly, so—"
"You're choosing your career," Hermione said, delighted, "around what Lavender's choosing? Already planning a life—"
"I am not — I just — shut up—"
"It's very sweet, Ronald. Thinking so far into the future." She was openly grinning now. "Me, I can't decide. A professor, perhaps. Or the Ministry — proper reform work, the sort Percy's pretending to do." A beat. "Real reform. From the inside. There's so much that wants fixing."
Harry walked along letting them bicker, and found his own thoughts drifting where they always drifted. 'The Department of Mysteries.' An Unspeakable, like Uncle Sam — bent over some impossible problem in a hidden lab, taking the deep magic apart to see how it worked, the way Ethan did. Or out in the field, somewhere far and strange — a tomb in Egypt, a temple swallowed by jungle, the oldest and most secret places on earth. The thought warmed him.
They all knew Draco's path already — Healer, beyond question.
And Luna? Harry smiled to himself. 'Magizoologist, probably. Off after some creature nobody else believes in.' He found he very much liked the picture of it.
2nd September 1995, Atid Stella Headquarters, 12 Diagon Alley, midday
Ethan was halfway through a stack of requisitions — the upgrading of the wards on every Atid Stella premises in Britain, headquarters first — when a knock came at the door and Rachelle de Frautois put her head round it.
"Lunch," she said. "Verrona's cooking, Lupin's office. You're to come now, apparently, before it spoils."
She looked, Ethan thought as they walked, a great deal better than the woman he'd met at a prison gate six weeks before. The grey was still in her hair and the lines still around her eyes, but the eyes themselves had lightened; she walked easier. She'd taken to the place with a speed that had surprised even her — startled, at first, by the sheer variety of the people Atid Stella employed, and then, within days, thoroughly at home among them. The new friendly assistant, the whole building had decided.
And the two people most quietly grateful for her arrival were Verrona and Lupin — because for the first time in living memory, Ethan had brought home a new hire who reduced the workload instead of trebling it.
Lupin's office, when they pushed in, smelled wonderful — Verrona had a row of dishes going, something hearty and Scottish, and she and Rachelle fell at once into happy debate over the proper treatment of a cullen skink.
But Ethan's eye went straight to Lupin.
Remus sat at his desk with a parchment in his hand, and he was not eating, and he was frowning at it. A Ministry seal glinted at its foot.
"From Sam," Lupin said, holding it out. "He thought you'd want to see it before it's in tomorrow's papers."
Ethan read it.
Educational Decree Number Twenty-Two. In the event that the Headmaster of Hogwarts proves unable to fill a teaching post, the Ministry shall appoint a suitable candidate. And, appended, the candidate so appointed to the long-vacant Defence Against the Dark Arts position: Dolores Jane Umbridge, Senior Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic.
Ethan's eyes went sharp and cold. He understood at once what Fudge meant by it — a Ministry eye and a Ministry hand placed inside Hogwarts, dressed up as helpful administration. That alone was bad.
But it was the name that did it. Dolores Umbridge. The two words sat on the page and something behind Ethan's eyes shifted — the Sight rising unbidden, the way it did at the worst moments and never the convenient ones, a cold prickling certainty with no picture attached to it, only the shape of a wrongness coming. An ominous weight settled in his chest and would not lift.
"I don't understand it," Lupin was saying, his voice tight. "Why would Albus allow this? He's fended off worse than Fudge before—"
"He may not have had the choice." Verrona had come to read over Ethan's shoulder; her face had gone hard.
She took the notice from him and turned to Rachelle, who was watching, lost. "You won't know her. I do." Her voice flattened. "I came up against Dolores Umbridge more than once, in my newspaper days. People talk about Rita Skeeter as though she's the worst the trade has... Rita is a vain woman who'll print a lie for a story. Umbridge is something else. Umbridge believes. She'll do the cruellest thing you ever saw, smiling the whole time, and file it tidily, and sleep like a baby — because in her own mind she is always, always on the side of order."
She handed it back. "She's worse than Rita. Much worse."
Rachelle's face darkened as Verrona spelled out a few of the things the woman had done, and she said something low and unrepeatable in French.
Lupin was still fuming — and Ethan, setting the notice down, spoke to him gently.
"Remus. Think about it from Albus's side. That post has been cursed for as long as either of us has been alive — a teacher a year, every year, no exceptions, and everyone in our circle knows it. He'll have struggled to fill it with anyone willing to risk the thing; a year is a long time to wager your luck. And with the Ministry breathing down his neck and Decree Twenty-Two already drafted—" he spread his hands "—this was always coming. He couldn't have stopped it. He could only choose how to stand while it happened."
It did not soothe Lupin much. But Ethan, in his easy way, turned the talk back toward the food and Verrona's cullen skink and Rachelle's scandalised opinions of British cooking, and by the time the dishes were going round the office had warmed again.
Only privately, behind it all, Ethan kept turning the cold thing over. Umbridge. At the school. With Harry in it. He would write to his son tonight — in their usual exchange, nothing that would draw an eye — and tell him, quietly, to watch the pink woman closely. And to tell his father at once if she did anything at all that set the hair up on the back of his neck.
He had learned, long ago, to trust the back of Harry's neck nearly as much as his own Sight.
2nd September 1995, Hogwarts, afternoon
The day filled up fast with classes and a frankly criminal quantity of homework, and it was between two of them, in a crowded corridor, that Harry caught sight of Luna.
She was talking to Rolf Scamander — the Ilvermorny boy, the new Ravenclaw — the two of them deep in some animated exchange, Luna's hands describing the shape of a creature in the air, Rolf nodding with bright open interest. Same age as her, Harry thought, they'll have classes together, and it was perfectly ordinary, and he had no reason at all for the thing that happened next.
But it happened anyway.
That feeling — the cold half-recognised attention, the not-quite-danger he'd felt at the Feast — rose up sharp and sudden as his eyes settled on Rolf. Sharper this time. Closer to the real thing, the true life-or-death prickle his gaze-sense gave him before a fight. For half a heartbeat it was almost overwhelming —
— and then Rolf laughed at something Luna said, an easy harmless laugh, and waved a cheerful goodbye and went off with a knot of other Ravenclaws, and the feeling was simply gone.
Harry stood there a moment, unsettled. 'That's twice now.' He'd trained all summer to trust that sense. And it kept flagging a sandy-haired boy who looked about as dangerous as a hufflepuff's pet. 'Twice. That's not nothing.' But there was nothing to do with it — the boy had done nothing, was nothing but friendly — so Harry filed it, carefully, where he kept the things that didn't add up, and went to Luna.
"Hey." Her face lit at the sight of him, and the unsettled feeling eased. "Good first day?"
"Mostly." She tilted her head, considering. "Charms was lovely. And there's a boy from Ilvermorny who's read his grandfather's whole field journal, isn't that wonderful — he knows ever so much about—"
"Greengrass acquisition," said Astoria, materialising and seizing Luna's arm. "Sorry, Potter, she's mine, we've things to discuss." And Luna was towed off with a serene little wave, leaving Harry to find the others.
He caught up to Hermione, Ron, and Neville outside the Defence classroom, where they'd fallen in with Draco and were trading low, grim notes about Dolores Umbridge before the lesson even began.
The lesson confirmed every one of them.
There was no spellwork. There would be no spellwork — not this year, Umbridge announced sweetly from the front, her wand nowhere in sight. They would proceed through the Ministry-approved theory, at a sensible pace, in a structured, "risk-free way." Wands away. Copy the aims from the board. There was, she assured them, no call for any of them ever to use defensive magic in a classroom; the very idea was alarmist.
A hand went up — then several. Wasn't the whole point of the subject to actually defend yourself? What about the exam? What about — given everything — out there?
Umbridge smiled, and contradicted each of them in turn, in that horrible patient coo. There was nothing "out there." "
The rumours of a returned Dark wizard, currently hunted across the globe, hiding like some cockroaches, on top of that saying that he would bring about a... war" she laughed "were exactly that — rumours, spread by attention-seekers, and she would thank them not to repeat such dangerous nonsense in her classroom. And as for "actually defending themselves" — well. She quite understood why they'd got such ideas. Their recent Defence instruction had been, she said, most irregular. One teacher a known associate of undesirables; and the year before that — her smile sharpened — a werewolf. A dangerous half-breed, loose among children. Was it any wonder the standard had—
Harry's quill stopped.
The cold came up in him all at once, clean and total, and the shy boy who could barely order his own butterbeer from a stranger was simply gone, burned off in an instant.
"He wasn't dangerous," Harry said. His voice was quiet and it carried the length of the silent room. "Professor Lupin was the best Defence teacher this school's had in years. And he never hurt a soul that didn't come hunting him first."
Umbridge's smile froze a fraction. "Hem, hem. Mr — Potter, isn't it. We do not speak out of turn—"
"And there is something out there." Harry didn't stop. His eyes had gone flat and dangerous, fixed on her. "Lord Voldemort is back and was not hiding. He is preparing. And pretending he isn't — telling a school full of children there's nothing to learn to defend themselves against — that's not keeping us safe. That's the opposite. That's getting us killed the day it stops being a rumour."
The room had gone utterly still. Beside him, Hermione had half-risen, Ron's face was scarlet, both of them on the edge of erupting —
Harry put one hand flat on the desk between them, low, out of Umbridge's sightline. Don't. You're prefects. Don't give her the excuse. He felt them subside, furious, beside him.
Umbridge's voice had gone very soft and very sweet, which Harry was already learning was the dangerous register. "You have been misinformed, Mr Potter," she said. "Whatever frightening fancy someone has filled your head with — there is no Dark Lord. There is no war. To say otherwise is a lie, and a dangerous, disruptive one." She produced a small pink pad. "That will be a detention. And five points from Gryffindor — no, ten — for the deliberate spreading of falsehood and disruption of my classroom."
"It isn't a lie," Harry said evenly. "And you know it isn't. That's the part that frightens me."
Her quill scratched. She held out a sealed note, her smile a small pink wound in her face. "You will take this to Professor McGonagall. At once."
...
McGonagall read the note in silence, her lips pressing thinner with every line. Then she set it down, removed her spectacles, and looked at Harry for a long moment over her desk.
"Sit down, Potter."
He sat.
"I am not," she said, "going to ask you whether what you said was true. I know it was true. I was on those grounds the night the maze burned, the same as you." She drew a breath. "Which is precisely why I am going to ask you to stop saying it."
Harry looked up.
"Not because it's false. Because it's dangerous — to you." Her voice was hard, but there was something underneath it that was not unkind. "Professor Umbridge does not answer to me, or to Professor Dumbledore. She answers to the Minister, and the Minister has decided that the truth you keep telling is a personal insult to him. Do you understand what that means? It means a woman with the Ministry's full weight behind her is looking for any reason at all to make an example of a loud, truthful boy — and you have just handed her a week of them." She tapped the note. "Detention. Every evening, this week. Her instruction."
Harry's jaw tightened. "So I'm meant to just — sit there. And let her tell a roomful of kids there's nothing coming for them."
"I am asking you," McGonagall said, "to choose your battles. Most people in this castle do not believe what you believe, Potter — they have been told, every morning, in print, that the peace is solid and you are unwell. Shouting the truth at them louder will not change that. It will only get you broken on the wheel of a small cruel woman who has all the time in the world."
She held his gaze. "Keep your head down. Keep your friends close. And keep yourself out of her reach until this passes — because I promise you, it can get a very great deal worse than detention."
Harry was quiet a long moment.
Then he nodded, once. He understood it — understood, too, that McGonagall was right, and that being right and keeping silent could live in the same chest at the same time. Ethan had taught him that years ago: the loudest truth is rarely the most useful one.
"Yes, Professor," he said.
"Good." She replaced her spectacles, and for just a moment the severity gentled. "And Potter — for what it's worth. You're not wrong. About any of it." A pause. "Which is exactly why I need you whole when it matters. Go on. And — do try not to give that woman a second week."