16th September 1995, the Great Hall, morning
The morning began well enough.
Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Viktor had a quiet corner of the Gryffindor table to themselves, and the topic, as it so often was these days, was Dolores Umbridge — and the one consolation of her tenure, which was that she had managed, in barely a fortnight, to unite the entire school against her.
"Every house," Ron said happily, buttering toast. "Every year. I heard a pair of first-year Slytherins moaning about her yesterday — Slytherins. That's how you know it's bad." He lowered his voice. "Even Snape can't stand her. He hides it, mind, but you watch his face when she does the little cough. Goes all..." Ron pulled a pinched, murderous expression that was, Harry had to admit, a fair likeness.
"She's been everywhere," Hermione added, with the weary disgust of a prefect who'd been on the receiving end. "Loitering outside classrooms. Reading the noticeboards. Following people down corridors at a distance, just... watching." She huffed. "She hasn't actually done anything yet. But it's like being studied by something that's deciding whether you're worth the trouble of swallowing."
Viktor's face had darkened. "She tried it vith me," he said, low. "Caught me after a Charms lesson. Very sveet. Asked vhat I thought of the staff — vhich of them vere... unsound." His mouth thinned. "Vhen I said nothing, she tried to tell me things. About Professor Lupin, about your headmaster. Trying to — to pull me to her side." He shook his head. "I think she forgets I am a guest, not a fool. I told her I came to learn the castle, not to spy on it."
"What did she do?" Harry asked.
"Smiled," said Viktor grimly. "She alvays smiles."
It was then that Draco and the Greengrass sisters arrived — and Luna trailing behind them, which lifted Harry's spirits at once, both because she was there and because she was, for once, conspicuously not accompanied by a sandy-haired Ilvermorny boy. He half-rose to greet her —
— and then he saw their faces. Draco's set and grim, Daphne's cold, Astoria's openly furious.
"What's happened?" Harry asked.
Draco let out a long breath and dropped a folded Daily Prophet on the table in front of him.
"It's happened," he said. "She's got teeth now."
Harry read the headline. EDUCATIONAL DECREE NUMBER TWENTY-THREE — MINISTRY ESTABLISHES POST OF HOGWARTS HIGH INQUISITOR. And below it, in the smug warm prose he'd learned to loathe: the Ministry, in its tireless devotion to educational standards, had created a new office to inspect, assess, and ensure the quality of those teaching the nation's children — and the post had been offered to, and graciously accepted by, Dolores Jane Umbridge, who would carry it alongside her teaching duties.
Harry's eyes went dark.
Beside him, Luna settled quietly onto the bench, and her usually serene face flickered — a brief shadow, blue at the edges, the look she got when her own lesser Sight stirred at something coming.
"High Inquisitor," Hermione read over his shoulder, and her voice had gone flat with dread. "She can inspect the teachers. Assess them. That means—"
"It means she can do whatever she likes now and call it standards," Draco said. "New rules whenever she fancies — Educational Decrees, one after another. Inspect any professor. Sit in any class. Roam the grounds. And nobody... not McGonagall, not even Dumbledore can tell her no, because she's not a teacher overstepping any more. She's the Ministry."
Daphne laid it out, cold and precise, while Ron and Viktor hurried through the article. "And it's exactly what Theodore's been waiting for. He and his lot have been shadowing her for a fortnight — fetching, flattering, making themselves useful. Now you see why. She has power, so they have power — borrowed power, the kind that runs downhill from her to whoever's nearest and most loyal. They'll be insufferable by lunch."
That was all it took to send Astoria fully into what Harry privately thought of as thorny-mouth mode — a low, elegant, devastating monologue on precisely what she thought of Theodore Nott, the pink toad, and the sort of person who fetched and flattered their way to borrowed cruelty until Draco laid a hand on her back and murmured something that brought her, gradually, back down.
"Watch him," Draco said again, to all of them. "Both of them. Because it's about to get a great deal worse."
He was right.
It became clear, over the following days, exactly what Dolores Umbridge had been sent to Hogwarts to do — not to teach, but to take it, room by room, rule by rule. The Educational Decrees came thick: this banned, that restricted, the other requiring her personal approval. And her racial loathing came with the power now, less and less disguised — her contempt for "half-breeds," for centaurs, werewolves, merpeople and any creature she deemed beneath proper witches and wizards, surfacing in the margins of everything she touched.
She began her inspections.
There was, Harry had to concede, exactly one pleasure in it: watching Severus Snape endure a Ministry inspection of his own dungeon, visibly seething behind a mask of icy compliance, unable to do a single thing about the pink woman taking notes on his teaching. The class held its collective breath and enjoyed it enormously.
The rest was not a pleasure at all.
Watching Umbridge harass Professor Flitwick — who treated her with such relentless, gracious courtesy, ushering her to a chair like an honoured guest, that her own rudeness had nowhere to land was uncomfortable.
At lunch, Fred, George, and Lee Jordan turned the whole thing over with Hermione, somehow steering it round to O.W.L. grades and how Flitwick had killed the toad with kindness while she inspected Charms.
Watching her inspect Trelawney was worse. Harry sat through Divination while Umbridge loomed over the nervous, fluttering Professor in her shawls and bangles, demanding a prediction on the spot and then receiving the inevitable vague, trembling result with a small unimpressed smile and a great deal of scribbling, the cruelty of it plain to everyone in the misty room.
In Defence itself, Umbridge informed the class, with satisfaction, that in her considered view the only Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher Hogwarts had employed in years who might have passed a Ministry inspection was the late Professor Quirrell.
Harry leaned, very slightly, toward Ron. "Quirrell," he murmured, barely moving his lips, "had Voldemort growing out of the back of his skull."
Ron made a sound like a kettle being strangled.
They shared one fleeting, helpless grin before Umbridge's head snapped round — "Hem, hem. Is there something you'd like to share, boys?" and they were each given a warning, which, given the source, Harry counted as a clean escape.
Transfiguration was the bright spot. McGonagall conducted her entire lesson as though the pink woman in the corner simply did not exist — answered her clipboard questions with a clipped, withering disdain that made the whole class want to applaud, and gave away precisely nothing. Harry rather loved her for it.
Care of Magical Creatures was the low point. Umbridge was delighted with Grubbly-Plank — all smiles and approving notes and when she asked, sweetly, whether anyone had ever been injured in this class, Theodore Nott had put up his hand at once and recounted, with relish, the time a Hippogriff had wounded him in Hagrid's class two years before. Harry stared at him, flat and cold, across the paddock, and said nothing, because there was nothing safe to say.
And then there were the corridors. Umbridge took to "adjusting student behaviour" in the hallways personally and began scrutinising the prefects, their rounds, their reports, their every decision. Ron, Hermione and every other prefect in the castle went about under a constant low-grade dread of doing something, anything, that she might mark down. Every one of them, that is, except Theodore and Pansy, who patrolled now with the swagger of children who knew the High Inquisitor would back them whatever they did.
Harry and his friends learned, fast, to be very careful indeed. None of them fancied another week of evenings in the pink room.
The one mercy was that even Umbridge kept her ego on a leash around the exchange students — and around Viktor — because they were international guests, and any incident involving them would carry across borders and embarrass the very Minister whose plan she was here to serve. Around them, and only them, the smile stayed sweet and the claws stayed sheathed.
So they went back underground. Or rather — upstairs.
The Room of Requirement became their refuge again, as the Grimmauld basement had been over summer: a place to breathe out of range of her eyes, to talk freely, to keep their hands in at duelling.
....
And it was there, one evening, with Ron groaning theatrically through an account of his day's prefect rounds for the amusement of Astoria, Luna, Viktor, Neville, and Lavender, that Hermione, Draco, and Daphne cornered Harry properly.
"You have to teach them," Hermione said. "Not just us. Properly. Defence. The real thing — the way you taught us at Grimmauld."
"There are people in this castle," Draco said, "who are going to walk out of here in a year or two into a war. And the one teacher who's meant to be preparing them is making them copy a textbook with the wand left in the bag."
He set down a fresh Prophet, the one the others had been passing round — Voldemort sighted again in Egypt, the body-count column longer: bounty hunters, mostly, who'd gone after the price on his head and not come back, but Muggles too, now, more of them. "It's not theoretical, Harry. It's out there, and it's growing."
"And it isn't only Gryffindors who want to learn," Daphne added quietly. "You should know — there are still a good many in my House who've never gone over to Theodore, whatever he threatens, whatever borrowed power he's waving about. They've stayed with Draco. With us." She held Harry's eye. "And they want to fight, when it comes. On the right side. They'd want to learn from you, too."
Harry looked round at them — at the Prophet, at the faces, at the weight of what they were asking — and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was actually considering it.
He'd hated standing in front of even his closest friends that first day at Grimmauld. The thought of doing it for strangers made his stomach knot.
But.
He thought of Cho's furious he's out there, getting ready; of Neville rounding on Seamus; of Molly's Boggart; of the green light in the graveyard.
Someone has to teach them. And no one else is going to.
"...All right," he said. "Yeah. All right. I'll do it."
And the moment the words were out, his face went slightly red — because at some point during the conversation Viktor, Ron, Astoria, Luna, Neville, and Lavender had all stopped what they were doing and drifted over to listen, and the instant he agreed, the whole lot of them broke into applause, Luna beaming, Ron whooping, Lavender clapping over her head.
"Stop," Harry pleaded, to no effect whatsoever.
"I'll arrange it," Hermione said, brisk and delighted. "We can't just put up a notice — that's exactly what she's watching for. We'll invite people quietly. Spread the word by mouth, only to people we trust. And we'll meet them somewhere off the grounds first... somewhere she'd never set foot."
She considered. "The Hog's Head. Next Hogsmeade weekend."
"I can help carry the vord," Viktor offered. "Quietly. People listen to a teaching assistant who is also—" a small, dry smile "—a Trivizard champion. I vill be careful vho I tell."
Hermione giggled into a kiss to his cheek.
23rd September 1995, the Hog's Head, Hogsmeade
The Hog's Head was everything the Three Broomsticks was not — dim, grimy, smelling of goats and old smoke, its few scattered patrons keeping their hoods up and their faces turned to the walls, the sort of establishment where nobody asked your business and nobody wanted you asking theirs. Which was, Harry supposed, precisely why Hermione had chosen it.
What Harry had not expected was how many of them came.
He stood near the back as they filed in, and his stomach dropped further with each one. Not just his own circle, and not just the ones he and Luna had drilled in the Grimmauld basement over summer — but face after face after face. Dean Thomas. Parvati and Padma Patil. Sue Li. Cedric, grinning, with Cho — and a curly-haired friend of Cho's Harry didn't recognise. Katie Bell, Alicia Spinnet, Angelina Johnson, the whole Gryffindor team, near enough. Colin and Dennis Creevey, vibrating with excitement. Ernie Macmillan, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Hannah Abbott, Susan Bones. Anthony Goldstein, Michael Corner, Terry Boot. Ginny. Zacharias Smith, wearing a sceptical frown. Lee Jordan. Nigel Wolpert, looking thrilled to have been included at all.
And — to a low ripple of surprise through the room — a handful of Slytherins. Tracey Davis. A boy called Pike. And a small younger boy in glasses, Nathan Weaverbrooks, who looked at Harry with an expression of such shining, naked admiration that Harry recognised it instantly.
'Oh no,' he thought. 'It's the Creevey thing. He's got the Creevey thing.'
It was a crowd. And every one of them was looking at him.
Harry's old shyness rose up his throat and welded it shut.
Hermione, thank Merlin, took over — stood up, called the room to order, and explained the whole of it plainly: that Umbridge would teach them nothing useful; that the times were what they were; that Harry had agreed to teach them to actually defend themselves.
It did not go entirely smoothly.
Zacharias Smith, arms folded, wanted to know whether they were really meant to believe Voldemort was back and a great war coming — said it half-challenging, half-afraid and it was Draco and Hermione together who answered him, flat and unanswerable, until he subsided.
Off to one side, Luna and Astoria conducted a serene parallel conversation about whether heliopaths were real, entirely unbothered by the meeting around them.
Ernie Macmillan felt moved to deliver a short speech about Duty. Somebody raised Quidditch practice and the impossibility of finding a time everyone could meet; somebody else pointed out there was nowhere safe to hold it anyway — until Ron, with the air of a man holding a winning card, hinted that the where was already sorted, and would be revealed to anyone who signed.
Through all of it, Harry managed to say almost nothing beyond the one thing that mattered: that yes, he would teach them defensive magic, and that he'd do his best by them.
It was Cedric, in the end, who tipped it — stood, and said simply that he'd seen what was in that maze, in the graveyard with his own eyes, that Harry knew what he was talking about, and that he, for one, was signing.
And that broke the dam; one by one, they came forward to put their names down.
The parchment they signed was Luna's doing.
She'd prepared it beforehand and laid into it, Harry realised as he watched her smooth it flat, a piece of genuine ritual magic: anyone who signed was bound by it, and should they speak a word of the group or the meeting to anyone outside it, the betrayal would unmake itself, the spoken secret turning to nothing in the air before it could carry.
Hermione watched the parchment with naked, dazzled curiosity, plainly dying to know how it worked. Harry just smiled at Luna, and thought, not for the first time, how very good it was to have a best friend who'd been quietly apprenticed to his father in the true Sight.
He did manage one more thing, before the end.
He stood — went red, but stood and said that he wanted them to understand something before they signed up to learn from him: that the stories they'd heard, the things they credited him with, had a great deal of luck in them, and a great deal of help from other people. He didn't want anyone signing up expecting a hero. Just someone who'd teach them what he knew.
Nobody much listened to the modesty, which embarrassed him further. And then he announced what he'd decided to call the group — the Magically Self-defence Study Group.
There was a pause.
The M.S.S.G., several of the Muggle-borns and half-bloods in the room thought, in near-perfect unison, sounded an awful lot like MSG — the savoury flavouring out of a Muggle kitchen cupboard. Hermione bit down very hard on the urge to say so. The name stood, because nobody quite dared tell the Boy Who Lived that his secret resistance army was named after a seasoning.
Harry, catching something in the held silence, retreated into his hood. Luna patted his head fondly.
The meeting broke up, and most of them drifted back out to enjoy what was left of the Hogsmeade day.
Harry, however, had to deal with Nathan Weaverbrooks — who approached as though approaching a shrine, shook Harry's hand with both of his, and asked, scarlet, for an autograph. Harry gave it, mostly to make it stop, and watched the boy float off to join Nigel and the Creeveys with a wry, resigned smile. 'A whole little colony of them now.'
Ron, meanwhile, had discovered — from something Ginny let slip — that his sister was dating Michael Corner, and was working himself up into proper big-brotherly outrage about it, right up until Hermione, Astoria, and Viktor all turned identical flat looks on him, and Lavender ended the matter entirely by pinching his cheek and then kissing the pinched spot, which reduced the sulking Ron to a flustered silence.
Harry and Luna laughed.
It was then that Harry felt the familiar tug, and looked up to see Hedwig sweeping in through the grimy window to land on his arm.
Ethan's letter was short. His father had clearly seen the news — Decree Twenty-Three, the High Inquisitor — and his concern threaded through every line: How are you all holding up under her? Tell me true. Harry read it warmed, already composing the reassurance in his head.
And then his eyes reached the last line, and lit.
And don't fret about that woman too long, kiddo. The surprise I promised you is nearly ready. Soon. Very soon now.