Chapter 23 : Five
Hogwarts Library — November 3, 1991, 4:12 PM
The table had gained a chair.
Matt noticed it when he arrived — the far table by the Restricted Section, their table, the one that had held five since the first week of September. Today it held six. Five occupied, one empty, waiting for its person.
"I added it," Neville said. He was sitting in his usual spot, Trevor in his pocket, Whisper on his shoulders. His voice had the careful quality of someone who'd done something small and was afraid it was too much. "For Terry. If — if he wants to join. I thought since he's your dormmate and he seems —"
"That's a good idea, Neville."
The flush on Neville's round face was worth everything.
The first week of November had been strange. The troll story had spread through Hogwarts with the efficiency of a magical virus — by breakfast on November 1st, every student in the castle knew that four first-years had knocked out a mountain troll in the girls' bathroom. The details mutated with each retelling. By the time the story reached the Hufflepuff common room, Matt had supposedly wrestled the troll into submission with his bare hands. By Wednesday, a second-year Slytherin was telling anyone who'd listen that Harry Potter had summoned a dragon to fight it.
The truth — four terrified children, a broken suit of armour, a levitated club — was both less dramatic and more remarkable, but nobody wanted the truth when they could have the legend.
Matt found the attention exhausting. He deflected questions with "Ron knocked it out, not me" and retreated to the library, where Madam Pince's aggressive silence policy protected him from celebrity. Hermione, who'd spent three days absorbing the fact that she'd been rescued and had lied to a professor about it, had channelled her complicated feelings into studying with a ferocity that alarmed even the older Ravenclaws.
The group dynamic had shifted. Before the troll, they'd been friends. After the troll, they were something else — something without a word, exactly, but that lived in the way Ron automatically saved a seat for Hermione at meals, the way Harry checked that Matt was eating, the way Neville arrived at the library first and left last.
Forged, Matt thought. That was the word. They'd been forged.
"Hermione," Matt said, settling into his chair. "Your Potions essay."
She looked up from her parchment. Her eyes were sharper these days — still analytical, still building her internal case file on Matt's impossible knowledge, but with a new layer underneath. Trust. The kind you couldn't earn through cleverness or generosity. The kind that only came from someone standing between you and a twelve-foot troll with nothing but a wand and a prayer.
"What about it?"
"You've got the moonstone interaction right, but you've cited the wrong edition of Magical Drafts and Potions. Snape uses the 1978 revision, not the 1985 update. If you cite the newer one, he'll dock points for 'sloppy research.'"
Hermione's quill stopped. "How do you know which edition Snape prefers?"
"I pay attention."
"You pay attention to everything. It's —" She stopped herself. Bit her lip. Filed whatever she'd been about to say in the same locked drawer where she kept her questions about Trevor and her questions about how Matt had found the bathroom before the troll did.
"Useful?" Matt offered.
"Unsettling," Hermione said, but she corrected the citation.
---
Potions Classroom — November 5, 1991
Snape's classroom was cold. Not architecturally — the dungeons were always cold — but atmospherically, the deliberate chill of a man who had weaponised discomfort into a teaching philosophy.
Matt sat between Terry and Anthony Goldstein, brewing a Cure for Boils with the precise, unhurried movements of someone who'd mixed medications in a veterinary clinic for six years and understood that chemistry was chemistry regardless of the universe's magical status. His potion was the correct shade of blue-green. The consistency was smooth. The temperature was exactly right.
Snape circled the room.
He paused at Harry's cauldron — a ritual humiliation that Matt had learned to expect and hate in equal measure. Harry's potion was acceptable but imperfect, the porcupine quills slightly crushed rather than sliced, and Snape dismantled it with three words and a look that could have curdled the potion by proximity alone.
Then Snape moved to the Ravenclaw row. He passed Anthony (adequate), passed Terry (struggling), and stopped at Matt.
The Potions Master stood behind him. Matt didn't turn. He continued stirring — clockwise, steady, the rhythm unchanged. Snape's presence was a physical weight, dark eyes boring into the back of Matt's skull with the particular intensity of someone who'd spent a career reading students and had found one who didn't fit the pattern.
"Mr. Summon."
"Sir."
"Your technique is... competent." The word was spoken like an accusation. "Unusually so for a first-year."
"Thank you, sir."
"It was not a compliment." Snape leaned closer. His voice dropped — not a whisper, but pitched for Matt's ears only. "I am curious, Mr. Summon. How does a first-year Ravenclaw come to be in a first-floor corridor during a troll evacuation? The prescribed route from the Great Hall to Ravenclaw Tower does not pass the girls' bathroom."
Matt's stirring didn't falter. "I heard a friend was missing, sir. I went to find her."
"Indeed. And you arrived... before the troll."
"Lucky timing."
"Luck." Snape straightened. His lip curled — not the standard sneer, but something more considered. "I have observed that certain students at this school seem to have remarkable quantities of luck, Mr. Summon. I trust yours will hold."
He swept away. Matt's hand tightened on the stirring rod, then relaxed.
Through the classroom's dim light, he caught Harry's eye across the aisle. Harry raised an eyebrow — what was that? Matt shook his head fractionally. Later.
At the desk behind him, Whisper — who'd been sleeping in Matt's bag with the passive innocence of a creature who absolutely was not allowed in Potions class — stirred. Through the bond: dark-man-dangerous-watching. The Kneazle's assessment of Snape hadn't changed since the first week.
He noticed I arrived early. He's tracking my movements. That's not good, but it's not catastrophic — Snape is suspicious of everyone. It's his default state. He suspected Quirrell before anyone else did. He's watching me because watching is what he does.
Matt finished his potion. Bottled it. Labelled it. Left the dungeon with his heart rate only slightly elevated, which he counted as a victory.
---
Hagrid's Paddock — November 7, 1991, 3:30 PM
Luna was dancing.
The Mooncalf had healed. The talon wound on her right foreleg had closed completely — dittany and three weeks of Hagrid's care had done what nature alone would have taken months to achieve. The leg was functional, if slightly stiff, and Luna had wasted no time testing it.
She danced in spirals. Small ones at first — tight circles in the paddock's centre, her oversized hooves tracing patterns in the earth with the geometric precision of a compass. Then wider spirals, expanding outward, her pale grey body catching the weak November sunlight and throwing it back as a faint silver sheen.
Matt sat on the paddock fence and watched.
Through their bond, Luna's emotions were a revelation. Mooncalf minds didn't work like Kneazle minds or Bowtruckle minds — they thought in patterns. Spirals and arcs and sequences, the mathematical underpinning of moonlight dancing rendered as emotion. Joy, for Luna, was a perfect circle. Contentment was a slow figure-eight. What she was doing now — the expanding spirals, each one larger and more confident — was gratitude.
She's thanking me. In the only language she knows.
"Beautiful, isn't she?" Hagrid appeared beside him, a bucket of beetle dung in one hand and tears streaming freely down his face into his beard. "Just beautiful. Haven' seen a Mooncalf dance this close to the castle in decades."
Matt scratched behind Twig's bark-fingers — the Bowtruckle had claimed his collar as today's perch — and smiled. Not the calculated smile he deployed in social situations. A real one.
"She's perfect," he said, and meant it.
Trevor chose this moment to escape Neville's pocket.
The toad launched itself from Neville's robe with the unexpected athleticism of a creature that had spent its entire life practising evasion. It hit the paddock grass, bounced twice, and disappeared under Ron's bag.
"TREVOR!" Neville lurched forward, face stricken. "He's — where did he —"
Matt didn't move. Creature Sense was passive, always running, and a non-magical toad within ten metres was as visible to the skill as a torch in a dark room. "Under Ron's bag. Left side."
Neville dove. Trevor was extracted, looking deeply unrepentant, and returned to Neville's pocket with the practised resignation of a toad who knew this dance and fully intended to repeat it.
Hermione, sitting on the fence beside Matt, watched the entire exchange with those calculating eyes. "You didn't even look."
"Lucky guess."
"That's the third time you've found Trevor without looking."
"He's a creature of habit."
Hermione said nothing. Her silence was louder than any accusation.
Ron, oblivious, was feeding Luna a moon fern through the fence. The Mooncalf accepted it with the dainty precision of a creature whose manners were genetically encoded. "She's actually kind of cute. In a weird, big-eyed, alien sort of way."
"High praise from a boy who called her 'that glowing thing' last week," Hermione said.
"She grew on me. Like a fungus. A cute fungus."
Harry leaned on the fence beside Matt, watching Luna dance. The November air was cold — properly cold, the kind that turned breath to mist and made fingers ache — and Harry had borrowed one of Matt's spare scarves because his own had vanished into the laundry and not returned.
"Five friends," Harry said quietly. "Is that normal? Having five friends?"
Matt looked at him. "I don't know. I didn't have many friends before, either."
"Before Hogwarts?"
"Before everything."
Harry didn't ask what that meant. He had the particular wisdom of someone who understood that before was a place not everyone wanted to revisit, and that asking could be its own kind of cruelty.
They watched Luna dance in the fading light, five friends and a Mooncalf and a Bowtruckle and a Kneazle and a toad, and the paddock felt, for a moment, like the creature reserve Matt was going to rebuild — small, and new, and full of things worth protecting.
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