25th September 1995, the Room of Requirement, night
The first meeting of the Magically Self-Defence Study Group wound down with the whole room pleasantly wrecked.
They had spent the back half of it on Protego, and twenty-odd students lay or sat about the floor in various states of collapse, wands gone slack, grinning the foolish grins of people who had worked hard at something and felt it pay. It had gone well — better than Harry had let himself hope. They'd learned a great deal, and they knew they had.
Cedric, in particular, was still glowing — and still turning over what he'd seen. "That girl," he said to Harry, nodding at Luna, who was helping a winded Hufflepuff first-year to her feet across the room. "Lovegood. She's — she shouldn't be able to fire like that, not at her age. The control on it. She nearly had me working, and I'm three years above her." He shook his head, half-laughing. "What is she?"
Luna, drifting past, heard him.
"I've been an apprentice since I was nine," she said serenely, and offered nothing further, and went on her way — leaving Cedric to stare after her, none the wiser and rather more intrigued.
Harry hid a smile. 'Apprentice. That's one word for it.'
He called the meeting closed, and he and Hermione handed round the notes they'd prepared — a single sheet each, the critical points of the evening's lesson set down clear and brief, so no one would have to trust memory alone. Then they sent them off in groups, five minutes between each, out along the Squad-free routes Draco had charted.
Harry and Luna would stay behind, and leave last.
It did not go unnoticed. As Ron, Hermione, Draco, Ginny, Astoria, and Viktor filed out, every single one of them found occasion to catch Harry's eye and wink — a whole procession of them, shameless.
Harry returned each with a long-suffering wry look. Luna, beside him, remained entirely serene, as though she had no idea in the world what any of it was about.
And then the Room was empty, and it was just the two of them, and Harry got to do the thing he'd been quietly looking forward to all evening: walk Luna back to Ravenclaw Tower, the pair of them tucked under his Invisibility Cloak, unhurried, in the dark and quiet castle.
It was lovely.
They talked the whole way — about school, about how busy everyone had become, the whole lot of them buried under O.W.L. and N.E.W.T. work and barely surfacing; about Umbridge's latest Defence-lesson absurdities, which had Luna laughing her small soft laugh. And then Luna talked about her own week, her own classes —
— and the trouble was that her week, it turned out, was rather full of Rolf Scamander.
She told him about it happily, with no notion at all of what she was doing to him: how she and Rolf had grown close, proper friends now, side by side in nearly every class, and in the Ravenclaw common room of an evening, and sometimes walking together after lessons; how he understood things about creatures the way almost no one did; how lovely it was to have someone to talk to about it all. And Harry walked along beside her under the Cloak and fought, with everything he had, to keep the fake smile off his face and the strangled note out of his voice.
He must not have managed it perfectly. Because Luna — who missed very little, whatever she chose to seem — trailed off, glanced sidelong at him in the dark, and seemed to register, for reasons she plainly couldn't account for, that Harry simply wasn't fond of Rolf.
And so, gently and without comment, she changed the subject — back to lighter things, to the M.S.S.G. and the funny shapes the Room had made and a Snorkack theory she'd been refining — and carried the cheer the rest of the way to the Tower.
At the door, before she slipped inside, she turned, and rose up, and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you, Hah-ree. For tonight. Goodnight."
And Harry, who had borne a blood quill without flinching, floated the entire way back to Gryffindor Tower on the strength of a single kiss on the cheek, very nearly skipping, and not minding in the least.
He came round the last corner toward the Fat Lady's corridor still half-glowing — and stopped.
Ethan was there. Talking to Filch.
It was a civil enough conversation, friendly even — the two of them low and easy, Filch nodding along — and Harry caught only a fragment of it before the rest dropped below hearing: something about an attempt. Then Filch shuffled off down the far passage, Mrs Norris at his heel, and the corridor was empty but for one Victorian-coated figure who had not moved.
"You can come out, kiddo. The Cloak's good, but I'd know you anywhere."
Harry's first reflex was how — and then he caught himself, and grinned, and pushed the hood back off his head. 'Right. My dad. The True Seer.' Of course.
"Dad." He hurried over. "What are you doing up here? It's late—"
"First patrol." Ethan knocked a knuckle lightly against the top of Harry's head, the old gesture.
"Professors take corridor duty, it transpires. Nobody warned me. And lucky for you it was me who caught a small invisible thing creeping toward Gryffindor Tower well after hours, and not the High Inquisitor's little squad."
His eyes curved. "Walk me to your door."
They went together up the passage. Harry glanced back the way Filch had gone. "You know he's hers? Filch. He does whatever Umbridge tells him."
"I know." Ethan said it without any heat at all. "And I don't hold it against him."
He considered, choosing the words. "Argus Filch is true to his job, Harry. Fiercely. It's near the only thing the man has, and he guards it the way a drowning man guards a plank — because of what he is, and how little the world has left him besides that post."
He didn't elaborate on the what, and Harry, who'd heard the word Squib whispered, didn't ask. "So when the person who holds his job over him says jump — he jumps. That's not villainy. That's a frightened man being loyal to the only thing that's loyal to him." A small shrug. "I'd not ask you to like him. Only — don't mistake him for the enemy. He isn't."
Harry turned that over, and didn't fully follow it, and Ethan — being Ethan — didn't press him to.
Some things you were handed to grow into, not to swallow whole.
"How did it go?" Ethan asked instead. "The meeting."
"Good. Really good." Harry couldn't keep the pride out of it. "They learned a lot."
"I'd expect nothing less." They'd reached the Fat Lady, who regarded the pair of them with sleepy suspicion. Ethan tipped his hat to her. "Go on. Bed."
"Night, Dad." Harry paused, hand on the frame, and grinned. "I'm looking forward to Divination. Properly. I want to see what you actually do."
Ethan grinned back, sudden and boyish under all the gravity. "Oh, you'll enjoy it. Goodnight, kiddo."
Late September 1995, Hogwarts
The week that followed found its rhythm, and the M.S.S.G. moved along it at a good clip.
Harry took them, meeting by meeting, through the working spells — the Impediment Jinx, the Reductor Curse, the Stunning Spell, and at last Expelliarmus, the disarming charm that was nearest to his own heart. Not to the standard he'd flogged the Grimmauld group to over the summer — he didn't have the time or the safety for that here — but far enough: proper verbal, with barely a flick of the wand, and above all confident, every member able to throw each spell and trust that it would answer. For most of them it was the first real defensive magic they had ever been allowed to cast, and the change in them, week on week, was something to see.
At the last meeting before the weekend, Harry gave them a glimpse of what it all built toward.
He asked Cedric — who had been quietly hoping for exactly this — to duel him.
The room cleared a circle, and the two of them faced off, and for a few minutes the M.S.S.G. watched something most of them had never seen: a real wizard's fight.
Cedric was good — a seventh-year, confident, deep in spells, with real experience behind his wand, and he gave a genuine account of himself.
But Harry — Harry cast every spell nonverbally, with almost no wand movement at all, his footwork neat and economical, reading Cedric a half-second before Cedric moved, turning each attack with the spare efficiency of someone trained for years by Ethan Esther. It was not flashy. It was quiet, and precise, and faintly terrifying, and the room watched in rapt silence and then erupted.
On the other side, for the group's safety, Hermione had been busy too: she'd charmed a set of coins, one for each member, with a Protean Charm. When Harry activated his, the numbers on every coin shifted to carry the time and date of the next meeting — no notes, no notices, nothing for the Squad or Umbridge to intercept. Hermione was rather proud of it, and deserved to be.
When the last of the members had filed out, the inner circle stayed behind — Luna, Hermione, Viktor, Daphne, Ron, Lavender, Neville, Draco, and Astoria — and fell on the desserts Lavender had charmed up out of the kitchens, carried in by Luna in a bottomless little pouch.
The talk turned, with great relish, to Dolores Umbridge's week of suffering.
"She is losing her mind," Ron said, around a mouthful of treacle tart, delighted. "Every time she puts up one of her precious Decrees, somebody jinxes it. Turns the words to nonsense, or makes it sing, or — yesterday it was sticking everyone's nose to it when they walked past, did you see? And she cannot work out who."
"She's tried everything," Hermione said, with deep satisfaction. "Detection charms. Alarm wards. I heard she put an actual curse on the last one. And every single time — she sets it all up, walks away, comes back a few hours later, and the Decree's been done over again, right through all of it, and not a trace of how." She shook her head in something close to admiration. "She has to keep changing them back. She's exhausted."
The whole circle knew, without anyone needing to say it, exactly whose quiet handiwork that was. They shared a knowing look around the desserts and said nothing aloud. 'Hello, Ethan.'
The Inquisitorial Squad, too, had spent the week getting precisely nowhere — patrolling, prowling and finding no sign at all of where the M.S.S.G. met or when. And — most curious of all — Filch had grown noticeably distant from Umbridge of late. Cooler. Less her creature than he'd been. Nobody could quite account for it, and Harry, remembering a low friendly conversation in a dark corridor and the word attempt, thought he might have half an idea, and kept it to himself.
"Anyway," Lavender said, brightening, "Divination on Monday. The first one. With Professor Esther." She and Hermione exchanged a look of frank, unconcealable eagerness — "not that Trelawney wasn't lovely," Lavender added quickly —
"Trelawney," Ron put in, "couldn't predict rain in a thunderstorm—"
— and received, for the slander, a sharp swat from Lavender that he bore with a wounded grin.
"I have applied to assist him, for the lesson," Viktor said, and there was no hiding his eagerness either. "It vas approved. I vant to see how he teaches. A true Seer—" he shook his head "—I have never seen one teach. I do not think many have."
Luna giggled softly at all their expectation, the only one in the room entirely unsurprised by any of it.
And Harry, listening, found he was the most eager of the lot.
His father rarely spoke to him of Divination — the true Sight was a thing Ethan carried close, and had only ever properly taught to Luna, quietly, at home. Whatever Ethan meant to do with a classroom full of fifteen-year-olds and a Ministry watching over his shoulder, Harry hadn't the first idea.
And he could hardly wait to find out.