9th September 1995, Gryffindor Tower, Saturday, morning
Ron, for his part, had noticed nothing at all.
He was three sausages into a plate that could have fed the whole table, fuelling for a morning of prefect rounds and entirely absorbed in his own running report.
"...and they're saying there's a proper Atid Stella shop opening in Hogsmeade now," he went on, around a mouthful. "A real one. The little moving-picture cameras, toys for the kids that actually do things, all the everyday bits — the appliances and that."
He waved a fork. "Half the village has gone over to those Runic Lamps now, no more candles guttering out on you. And some of the shops have put in the temperature boxes — the portable ones you carry about, and the big station ones that warm a whole room. Reckon the Three Broomsticks'll be like summer inside come December." He paused, impressed by his own news. "And I heard they've been taking on more Squibs an' all. Proper jobs, proper pay. Imagine that."
"Is the same in Bulgaria," said Viktor, who was the only one actually listening, and who had brightened considerably at the subject. "Ve have the branches too — in Sofia, in the bigger towns. My little cousin, she is mad for the toys. And the lamps—" he nodded approvingly. "Good vork. Quiet vork. The kind that changes things vithout anyone noticing it has changed them."
He considered. "Is clever, vhat your father's company does, Harry. Small steps. A lamp here, a varm room there. And one day the vhole vorld has moved, and no one can say vhen."
Harry said nothing.
Hermione, who had been giving Ron's monologue precisely one ear, had given the other to the boy beside her and noticed that Harry hadn't touched his eggs in some while, and was wearing a smile that had set on his face like cooling wax.
She followed it.
Across the Hall, at the Ravenclaw table, Luna and Rolf Scamander had their heads together over something, talking and laughing. Hermione's eyes curved.
Luna, with that uncanny way she had of feeling a gaze land on her, looked up, found Hermione, and waved — bright and unselfconscious. Hermione waved back.
Harry kept smiling his waxwork smile and did not wave, because Harry was not, at that precise moment, capable of fine motor control in his waving arm.
"You know, Harry," Hermione said, fighting a losing battle with her own mouth, "you've gone a bit strange. Again. You do that lately."
It worked — it snapped the table's attention round, Ron and Viktor both looking up and it had the side effect of mortifying Harry, who went red and retreated behind his glass of pumpkin juice. But his eyes, over the rim of it, never once left the Ravenclaw table. They had narrowed to something flat and fixed and frankly predatory — a large cat watching a small bird hop about, entirely unaware.
Viktor caught Hermione's look, glanced where she'd glanced, and understood at once, the corner of his mouth twitching.
Ron, naturally, did not. "What's strange? What're we—" He squinted round the Hall. "Is it the eggs? Are the eggs off?"
Hermione rolled her eyes to the enchanted ceiling, leaned over, and whispered the situation into his ear — safe enough, since Harry was far too occupied glaring a hole through an Ilvermorny exchange student to register anything so trivial as his best friends conspiring against him.
Comprehension dawned across Ron's face, and curdled, slowly, into a smile of pure and beautiful malice.
"You know," Ron remarked, to Hermione, with elaborate casualness and at a volume calibrated precisely to carry, "that Scamander lad's quite handsome, isn't he. And he and Luna are getting ever so close. Thick as thieves, those two. Lovely to see."
"He's all right," Harry said, before he had decided to say anything, in a voice that suggested Rolf Scamander was in fact a war criminal.
Hermione, Viktor, and Ron applied themselves urgently to their breakfasts and shook.
"Harry," Hermione managed, recovering, sweet as anything, "are you — would you say you're jealous? Of Rolf?"
"What? No. Don't be — that's — no." The words came out in a stammered rush, and Harry's face went a shade of red usually reserved for the Hogwarts Express, and he pulled the brim of nothing whatsoever down over it before remembering he was wearing a hoodie and yanking that up instead. "I'm not — there's nothing to be jealous of, it's perfectly—"
But across the Hall, Rolf had leaned an inch closer to Luna to see something, and Luna had laughed at whatever he'd said, and Harry's grip on his fork had gone white-knuckled, the metal beginning, very faintly, to bow — and his other hand had found the edge of his plate in a hold that promised to crack it clean in two.
The denial, it must be said, did not survive contact with the evidence.
"I give it one more inch," Ron announced, with the relish of a man calling a Quidditch match. "One more inch and Harry'll Expelliarmus the poor sod clean out of his chair, packs him in a crate, and posts him back to America. Second-class. No air holes."
Harry pulled the hood further down. Hermione had both hands clamped over her stomach now, wheezing, bent nearly double; Viktor watched her with genuine concern, murmuring that she would do herself an injury if she laughed any harder.
Ron frowned at the pair of them — "I'm funny, that was funny—" and received, for his trouble, Hermione's dearest backhand to the arm.
And then Harry let out a long, heavy sigh, and the laughter quieted, because there was something real in it.
"Is it wrong of me," he said, to the table, to his pumpkin juice, "to be this... protective. Of Luna."
The three of them raised their eyebrows at the word — protective, he'd said, as though that were the shape of the thing but none of them said it, and none of them laughed, because it had clearly cost him something to say even that much. Hermione's face softened.
And it was true, the better part of it: some genuine corner of Harry was glad, properly glad, that Luna had found a friend who lit up at the same impossible things she did, who didn't look at her sideways or drift away the way so many did.
Hermione opened her mouth, something gentle assembling behind it —
— and Harry's good resolution went straight out of the high windows, because across the Hall Rolf had shifted round to sit shoulder to shoulder with Luna, the two of them now reading together off the same upside-down page of Luna's Quibbler.
Harry was halfway to standing before he knew he'd moved.
Ron's hand clamped on his shoulder and hauled him back down. Hermione, with the swift decisiveness of long practice, simply plucked the holly wand out of Harry's sleeve-reach and pocketed it. Viktor turned a calm, authoritative look on the few nearby students who'd glanced over and said, mildly, that there was nothing to see, and they went back to their porridge.
The commotion, modest as it was, carried.
Luna's head came up. She found Harry — half-risen, hooded, being physically restrained by a prefect and her whole face brightened. She mouthed good morning, and waved at him, and at Viktor, and at Ron.
Harry's expression melted instantly into something soft, stupid and helpless as he waved gently back at her, the predator gone as though it had never been.
Then Rolf, friendly and oblivious, raised his own hand to wave at Harry's group.
He received, from Harry, a smile of arctic temperature; from Viktor, a wry one; from Ron and Hermione, two small pitying smiles that left the poor boy entirely puzzled as to what he could possibly have done.
And for the rest of breakfast Rolf Scamander sat with the distinct, creeping, unaccountable sensation of being watched by something large, patient and not at all friendly — until at last he gave it up, finished early, said his goodbyes to Luna, and removed himself from the firing line.
Luna, who had also finished, gathered her things and made for the Gryffindor table and Harry.
She arrived into a distinctly odd atmosphere — Ron and Hermione visibly suppressing something, Viktor the picture of innocence, and her own best friend buried so far in his hood that only the tip of his red nose showed.
She tilted her head, reading the table the way she read everything, and was just opening her mouth to ask when rescue arrived.
"What," said Draco, dropping onto the bench with Astoria beside him, surveying the scene, "is wrong with Potter."
"Nothing," said Harry, from inside his hood.
"He's gone foetal."
"Long week," said Hermione smoothly. "Detentions."
Astoria looked deeply unconvinced, but Ron — bless him — chose that moment to rescue Harry properly, by changing the subject to the one topic guaranteed to unite the whole table.
"Anyway. Saw the Pink Toad on the way down. Smiling. Hate it when she smiles, makes my skin try to leave." He speared a tomato with feeling. "And you'll love this — Nott and Parkinson were practically fawning on her. Cosying right up. Two days of being a prefect and Nott's already found himself a Ministry skirt to hide behind."
Draco's humour faded at that, and he set down his cup, serious. "That's worth watching. Nott doesn't fawn on anyone for nothing... he's always got an angle. And if his angle's Umbridge—" he glanced at Harry, the morning's silliness forgotten "—then it's not just schoolboy spite any more. She's got the Ministry behind her. Whatever he's brewing, if she's the pot he's brewing it in, it's going to get ugly. For all of us."
Astoria's face had gone cold and elegant. "Then we watch him."
"And we don't give him anything to use," Hermione added grimly, with a pointed sidelong look at Harry's hood. "Any of us."
The mood threatened to darken, until Luna, settling at last beside Harry and prising the hood gently back off his head with one finger, asked the table at large whether anyone had decided what they were doing in Hogsmeade and the talk turned, gratefully, to the weekend ahead.
...
It was a good day.
Hogsmeade in early autumn was crisp and golden, and Harry spent it contentedly — Luna's by his side, the others scattered and regrouping through the village, the whole grey weight of Umbridge and Nott and the watching world set down for a few hours.
They found the new Atid Stella shop exactly where Ron had promised it, and Harry felt a quiet warm pride watching wizarding families exclaim over moving-picture cameras and self-righting toys and lamps that never guttered — his father's small steps, pushing the whole sleepy world forward an inch at a time.
Luna bought a contraption whose purpose not even the shopkeeper could fully explain and was delighted with it. They drank butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks, warm to the bones in a way no winter Hogsmeade had ever managed before, on account of the new heating boxes humming softly in the corners.
If Rolf Scamander's name did not come up once all day, that was nobody's business but Harry's.
That night the common room emptied out, until only Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville were left by the dying fire — Crookshanks a smug ginger loaf across the warmest hearthstone, too pleasantly tired to climb to bed.
The fire turned green.
They were on their feet at once, wands half-drawn out of summer-trained instinct — and then a familiar shaggy head materialised among the flames, grinning at them.
"Sirius!" It was then the three looked at each other smiling wryly as they seemed to have forgotten about Floo call.
"Evening, the lot of you." Sirius Black's face glowed and flickered in the green light, propped at its impossible angle. "Don't mind me. Just fancied a chat with my favourite godson and his disreputable associates." He winked at Neville, who grinned. "Not really wanted to lift a finger after... a long day, so the fireplace'll have to do."
"How's the house?" Harry asked, dropping cross-legged before the hearth.
"Loud," said Sirius with feeling. "Kreacher's taken to following me from room to room muttering curses just under what I can quite make out. Yesterday I caught him polishing the family crest and weeping about it. Mad old creature. And the rest of the time—" his grin turned sly "—the rest of the time I'm doing terribly important and secret things for the Order that I absolutely cannot tell four schoolchildren about, so don't bother asking, it would only torment you to know how thrilling it all is."
"It's filing, isn't it," said Ron.
"It is not — well. Some of it is filing. Don't tell anyone." Then his face changed, the humour banking down. "Listen, though. Remus told me. About that woman, and her... quill."
The temperature of the room dropped.
Sirius's expression, in the green flame, went genuinely terrible for a moment — and then he said exactly what he thought of Dolores Umbridge, at length, in language that had Neville's eyebrows climbing into his hair and Crookshanks flattening his ears, and that Harry would not have repeated to Molly Weasley for a hundred Galleons.
When he'd run the worst of it out of his system, Harry told him, gently, that it was handled. That the quill couldn't touch him any more, that Ethan had it in hand, that the evidence was already gone south.
Sirius let out a long breath, and the fury drained, and something steadier took its place. "Good. Good. And — aye. If anyone can hang that woman by her own pink ribbon, it's Ethan. I'd trust him with it before I'd trust the whole Wizengamot." He nodded slowly. "She's not a Death Eater, you know — Umbridge. Don't make that mistake about her. She never took the Mark, never will; she'd think it vulgar."
His mouth twisted. "But she's got a hatred in her just as deep and a sight more respectable. Half-breeds. Anything she reckons is beneath proper witches and wizards — werewolves, half-giants, the lot. She doesn't need a Dark Lord to be cruel. She manages it all on her own, with a smile and the law on her side, and tells herself she's tidying up. That's what makes her dangerous. The Death Eaters at least know they're villains."
The four of them sat with that, the disgust settling deeper.
"Right." Sirius shook himself, and the grin came back up like a flag. "Enough doom by firelight. It's late, and you've got—" he peered at them, mock-stern "—O.W.L.s, haven't you. The big ones. So. Heads down, the lot of you. Work hard. Pass everything."
He pointed a flaming finger round the circle. "And whatever you do — do not take after me. Look how I turned out. Once wanted for crimes I didn't commit, living in a house I hate, talking to children through a fireplace at midnight." He grinned wider. "Be sensible. Be like Hermione. Goodnight."
And with a last wink, and a muttered "be good, or be careful," Sirius Black's head withdrew, and the fire flickered back to ordinary orange, and the four of them sat a while longer in its warmth before climbing, at last, to bed.