"I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions." - Stephen Covey.
Daphne was the one who spoke first.
"If you're wondering whether any of this has something to do with him," she said calmly, "then no. This time, you're mistaken. It's about Malfoy."
She paused just long enough to make sure Harriet was listening.
"In case you forgot, his father is missing an arm and is currently in very deep trouble with his master, because of you. You said something, did something, that pushed him sharply out of favor. The only reason Lucius is still standing at all is because his influence is still useful. Politically, he's too valuable to discard just yet. But his freedom is gone. Almost completely. And that pressure extends to his family. Draco. His mother."
Harriet leaned back slightly, thoughtful rather than surprised.
"I'll admit," she said, "I'd kind of forgotten about that whole mess. Still, not my problem, and I'm certainly not apologizing. But that doesn't really add up. You're telling me Lucius Malfoy ordered those idiots to move against me?"
She shook her head.
"I'm not stupid. Knowing how Voldemort thinks, if I'm going to die or suffer, it has to be by his hand. Anything else wouldn't satisfy him. So I highly doubt this came from Lucius."
Daphne nodded once. "For once, you're right."
She folded her hands neatly on the table.
"This is Draco. He's the one pushing for it. Either to avenge his father, or to claw his way out of the situation he's in. He didn't come out of this summer unscathed either. He was subjected to more than a few Cruciatus curses. The Death Eaters moved into Malfoy Manor."
Tracy's jaw tightened at that, but she didn't interrupt.
"If I were in his position," Daphne continued, "I would have gambled on Dumbledore. Tried to defect quietly. But Draco wasn't raised that way. He was taught to see himself as superior to everyone, everyone except You-Know-Who, and to despise anything even remotely associated with Muggles."
Her eyes sharpened.
"So now he thinks this is a good idea. Despite warnings. Despite reality. He's chosen to act alone and let Slytherin violence rain down on you through his network of contacts."
Harriet tilted her head, a faint smile tugging at her lips. Not amused. Not angry. Calculating.
"And does he actually have a plan," she asked, "or is this just wounded pride with a wand?"
The room went quiet for a fraction of a second.
Daphne exchanged a look with Tracy.
That hesitation alone was already an answer.
Harriet let out a slow breath.
"I'm not going to underestimate him," she said. "Even if he's started taking himself more seriously, he's still Draco. These events didn't suddenly give him a brain, if anything they probably did the opposite. But the little Slytherins following him? They could be dangerous."
Daphne nodded. "His plan is simple. Crude, but effective."
She leaned back slightly.
"He's noticed that you've lost public favor again. Doubt has crept back in. People who don't know the facts hesitate to support you, and even those who do know them are unsure. Dumbledore remains silent. So do the professors closest to him. From the outside, it looks like you're isolated."
Her voice hardened.
"The goal is pressure. Constant pressure. Make sure you can't sleep peacefully. Corner you eventually and strike. I doubt he's setting limits anymore. Breaking your mind, controlling you, using dark artifacts, or killing you outright. Whatever comes first."
Tracy swallowed before speaking.
"He's completely unhinged," she admitted. "Since the start of term, he hasn't mentioned his father once. He just sits on the common room sofa, staring at the wall, whispering about making you pay."
She looked at Harriet, uneasy.
"What are you planning to do about him?"
For once, Harriet didn't answer immediately.
Her thoughts drifted back to Draco Malfoy. To every provocation since her first year at Hogwarts. She had always been able to answer him, with words sharp enough to humiliate, sometimes even physically, without getting caught. She had never liked him, and she had never bought into the absurd idea that his behavior was some childish way of expressing affection.
If she had been an ordinary girl. A nameless half-blood. The threat "I'll tell my father" might have been enough to make her disappear without a trace.
That was the reality of this society. Or, as Dumbledore liked to dress it up, a necessary evil in service of the greater good.
Draco had been raised that way. It wasn't entirely his fault. But one thing was certain.
It wasn't Harriet's fault either.
And she had no intention of suffering for anyone's redemption arc.
"Savior" was a title the public had given her. She had never accepted it.
As an adult, you eventually learned a simple truth. You could only protect your circle. You drew a line, placed the people you cared about inside it, and defended that space. Everything outside was not your responsibility.
And at the center of that circle was herself.
"I'm not letting him walk away this time," Harriet said quietly. "When you choose to play an adult's game, you accept adult consequences. If he's ready to kill me, or worse, then he has to accept that he might be killed in return. That's the rule. There's no escape clause."
She stood, turning toward the door.
Daphne watched her carefully before speaking.
"I understand," she said. "Probably better than you think. I grew up in this society. Tracy told me about the outside world, the Muggle one. In the end, it's not so different. Law of the strongest. Or the cruelest."
A faint, ironic smile touched her lips.
"But at least out there, you pretend better. You build ideals. Laws. Equality. Even if not everyone follows them, they exist. We don't even have that illusion. So don't worry. We'll stay out of it. And believe me, we won't shed a single tear if Draco Malfoy truly dies."
Harriet turned back to them, her composure fully restored.
"Good," she said, with a charming smile. "I'll come back to you soon. Take care of yourselves."
She said it lightly, almost as an afterthought, the way someone does when they've already moved on to the next thing in their head. It was the most unsettling part, Daphne thought. Not the threat regarding Draco, not the barrier, not the debris cage. The fact that Harriet Potter walked out of a room she had hijacked, after a duel and a negotiation and an implicit promise of future cooperation, and made it feel like she was leaving a tea party.
She opened the door, released the silence spell, and walked away.
Daphne and Tracy looked at each other for a moment without speaking. The room was very quiet. Somewhere in the castle, a clock chimed.
"Well," Tracy said finally.
"Yes," Daphne agreed.
Neither of them elaborated. They didn't need to. The conclusion was the same for both of them. Harriet Potter was not a piece on someone else's board. She was something considerably harder to categorize, and considerably more useful to have on the right side of.
They gathered their things and left.
Back in her dormitory, she sat on her bed and stared out the window as the early evening light faded across the grounds.
Something in Daphne's words had lodged itself in her thoughts and refused to leave.
Not the details about Draco. Not the warning about his network. Something smaller. Throwaway, almost.
"If I were in his position, I would have gone to Dumbledore."
The phrasing had seemed natural in the moment, the kind of thing someone says without thinking. But Daphne was not the kind of person who said things without thinking. She came from a neutral family. A family that had spent generations not picking sides, not committing, not blinking first. And yet her instinct, when pushed to the edge, was to frame every choice as a binary. Voldemort or Dumbledore. Dark or Light. Destruction or righteousness.
As if there were nothing else.
Harriet understood why. The wizarding world had been shaped that way, two titanic forces occupying so much space that they had become the only reference points people knew how to use. It was comfortable. It was legible. It let people feel like they understood the world even when they didn't.
But it was also small.
Embarrassingly small, when you considered what else existed.
The magical community of Britain, for all its drama and history, was a local problem. Voldemort and Dumbledore, for all their power, were local figures. Outside these walls, in the world Harriet had begun to glimpse through France and Furina and the exorcists she had watched be knocked unconscious like an afterthought, there were forces that would not even register their names.
That wasn't a comfort. It was a reminder.
She didn't need to win this war. She didn't need to save anyone. She needed to position herself well enough that no one could use her, and then she needed to get out from under the ceiling people kept trying to build above her head.
The Pendragon family came to mind, though the thought had originated with Yuna, passed along in one of their calls with the casual precision she applied to everything. She knew the name, had come across it somewhere in the course of her research into the British magical world, but the how of it had eluded her. How a family of that kind had managed to exist entirely outside the reach of the Ministry, the factions, the endless recycling of the same war under different banners, without ever appearing to negotiate or justify or pay for the privilege. They simply operated on a level that made the question irrelevant, maintaining just enough of a presence to discourage curiosity, the way something very large and very calm discourages approach without ever needing to move. Yuna had flagged it as something worth looking into further. Harriet agreed. They didn't care about the conflict. They had never needed to.
That was the model. Not rule. Not leadership. Just freedom, purchased quietly and defended without fanfare.
She had the money. She had the network, in Yuna and Gringotts and a half-devil actress who had handed her a summoning flyer with a theatrical bow in a French alleyway. She had the grimoire, and the mana circuits slowly reopening in her body, and two years minimum before anyone would expect her to do anything conclusive.
She didn't want to save the world.
She wanted to watch what happened when the two giants fell, and make sure she was standing somewhere interesting when they did.
Harriet lay back on her bed and looked at the ceiling.
It was a start.
Furina came to mind next, unbidden.
The flyer was still in her bag, tucked between two books she hadn't opened in a week. A summoning flyer, handed over with a theatrical bow in a French alleyway by a woman who had spent five hundred years pretending to be a god and had somehow survived it. That kind of person didn't hand out contact information carelessly. It meant something, even if Harriet wasn't entirely sure what yet.
The supernatural world was real. She had known it intellectually since the portrait of Dorea had confirmed it, since Gringotts had offered her geopolitical summaries that mentioned devils and angels the way one might mention rival banks. But seeing Furina knock three armed exorcists unconscious with the casual efficiency of someone swatting flies had made it visceral in a way that information alone never could.
That was the door. And Furina, whether she knew it or not, was standing in the frame.
Yuna was already moving on the financial side, buying properties in Kyoto, making quiet investments in businesses that straddled the line between the magical and non-magical worlds. She didn't need to be told twice about anything. She had walked into Gringotts on her first visit and identified the most useful elements of the magical financial system within forty-eight hours, which remained one of the more impressive things Harriet had witnessed in either of her lives.
She made a mental note to call her tomorrow. Not about anything urgent. Just to talk. Yuna was one of three people in the world whose company Harriet found genuinely restoring rather than draining, and she had been neglecting that lately.
The third was Sirius, who was currently at Grimmauld Place doing something productive with his freedom, she hoped, and probably also something inadvisable.
She thought about writing to him. Decided she would, tomorrow.
Then her thoughts drifted back to Draco, as they had a way of doing now, quietly and without invitation.
She had known him since she was eleven. That was the strange part. Not that he was dangerous, not that he had made a choice that might end with one of them dead, but that she had watched him make every step that led here. The first year arrogance. The second year cruelty. The slow hardening of someone who had been handed a shape by his parents and never once questioned whether it fit.
He was no longer just the insufferable blond child who ran to his father over bruised pride. Whatever had happened at the Manor over the summer, whatever the Death Eaters had demanded of him or done in front of him, there was a real chance he had crossed lines that didn't uncross. That was what that kind of environment produced. She had seen enough of this world to know it.
He is sixteen.
She is fifteen, technically, though that number felt increasingly abstract.
She had told Daphne the truth. When you played an adult's game, you accepted adult consequences. She believed that. She had built her understanding of the world on it.
But believing something and finding it clean were different things.
She wasn't going to lose sleep over it. She was fairly certain of that. What she was going to do, she suspected, was remember it. File it away in the part of her that kept track of things that cost something, even when the cost was worth paying.
Harriet stared at the ceiling for another moment.
Then she turned onto her side, closed her eyes, and decided that tomorrow could handle itself.