leeemur's curated hp universe

"So you can ride a bike just fine, but you can't ride a broom?"

"I can ride a broom!" Theo scathed, hitting Harry with the full force of his glare. Harry only cocked his head to the side. "But riding a bike and riding a broom are completely different."

"He's unrecognizable on a bike, Harry," Blaise insisted, ignoring Theo's death glare. "The way he can dart through crowds of people! Quick as a fish, agile as a bird. I thought maybe he'd taken some kind of physical enhancement potion."

"I am capable of athleticism!" Theo insisted over the sound of his former best friend's snicker.

"I don't even know if I can ride a bike," Harry sighed.

Draco rolled his eyes. "If you can ride a broom, you can ride a bike."

Theo shot Draco a disbelieving look. "Are you kidding? You don't have the leg muscles for it. You used magic to propel yours half the time!"

Draco pinked. "I was on vacation! I didn't want to sweat!"

Harry cast a secretive smile Theo's way that did wonders for his mood.

Harry gradually drifted closer to him, letting Blaise and Draco go on ahead. They slowed, picking their way down the uneven path together.

"Do you think it would be hard to learn how to ride a bike?"

Theo took in Harry's downcast face. He could see that Harry was measuring himself against some imaginary ruler and finding that he had come up short.

"No, it's not hard. It's fun." Theo smiled when Harry's green eyes darted up hopefully. "It's a beautiful way to see the country."

"So is flying," Harry teased.

"Think of all the details you miss from way up there. Like those cowslips," he pointed out the dandy yellow flowers leaning into the sun. "Or the way the mica glitters on those rocks, or the sight of all the green leaves moving with the wind. You'd never see this from the air."

Theo's attention wandered for a moment, caught up by the magnificent beauty of spring.

When he looked to see why Harry had gone suspiciously silent, he noticed a large furrow in the earth directly in Harry's path.

"Watch out!"

"Merlin!" Harry side-stepped into him, holding on for balance, Theo's hand shot out and naturally curved around Harry's opposite hip. Almost reflexively, his fingertips tensed and dragged across Harry's shirt, feeling the smooth roll of skin and muscle underneath.

Oh. My. God. What are you doing? Theo yanked his arm back and shoved his hands in his pockets, prickling self-consciously. What a way to play that off casually, Theo, what the fuck is wrong with -

A stone overturned under his foot. Pain shot up his leg as his ankle rolled and knocked him off-kilter. His hands wouldn't come out fast enough to help him, so he yanked them around his face and braced to hit the ground.

"Got you!"

Strong arms wrapped around him. Harry slid over the rocky terrain, his leg bent like he'd caught Theo in a dip during a waltz. He curled Theo to his chest.

"Are you okay?" Harry panted.

"Mrrph," Theo said, careful not to move his lips as they were currently smashed up against Harry's pectoral muscles.

"Oh, sorry!" Harry relaxed his arms, but did not let him go. The world tilted. He saw white clouds, blue sky, a mess of black hair, and glinting green eyes behind a set of round glasses.

Harry was far too close.

"Theo?"

Merlin's beard, he smelled so good. How was that even fair? Theo did the only thing he could think of and tried to roll out of Harry's grip, but he held him close, scanning every inch of his face.

"I'm going to need a verbal response."

From this angle, he was too beautiful to even look at.

"You do this to me," Theo whispered, every lick of common sense and self control he'd ever possessed flying down the hill with what remained of his dignity. Harry's lips parted slightly. As Theo watched, Harry unconsciously darted his tongue out, wetting them.

"What do I do?" Harry asked.

"You make me feel -" like I'm in free fall, like I'm sprinting down a hill with no way to stop, like I'm always two seconds from smashing myself to pieces at the bottom of a cliff, like I'm -

"- clumsy," Theo finished lamely.

They stared at each other for a heartbeat too long.

"I don't know what to do," Harry blurted out. "I'm afraid I'll say the wrong thing, and then you won't talk to me ever again."

"Impossible."

"Get a ROOM already!" Blaise shouted at them from down the hill.

Harry closed his eyes. His cheeks were pink.

Theo began to feel the first stages of delight.

"For the love of...I'm going to kill him."

"Me too," Theo agreed, a slow smile stretching across his face. Harry looked at him and blushed more prettily.

"Come on. Let's go dig his grave." Harry hauled him up and looped one arm around Theo's waist, cinching him tight to his side to help him limp down the hill.

Something about his proximity to Harry made him say the stupidest, most impulsive things that came to mind.

"Sounds like a fun first date."

He was momentarily blinded by the radiant smile that lit up Harry's face. Then, he was obliviated on the spot by Harry leaning in to kiss his cheek - swift, gentle, easy, like he'd done it a hundred times before.

Deleted Scene

Shooting pain ran up his legs, but Theo pushed on.

The sky was overcast. Small mercy there was no wind nor rain, but it was cold. Theo's hands had long since gone numb, but he pressed on. He would walk until he couldn't see the fucking castle, he'd decided, even though the weather howled stupid, stupid, stupid! in his face.

Are you giving up? Father's voice growled in his head, so vivid that Theo actually flinched.

Honestly, the worst part of learning from his father hadn't been the spells that were beyond his ability, being quizzed on runic alphabets, or even the demonstrations Theo had to do out in the ruins of the old manor. It had been his tests of endurance.

His father, despite his limp, had an endless well of stamina. Theo had seen him stay awake for thirty-three hours one solstice without hardly a yawn. When they hiked through the woods, he never stopped unless he meant to. And when he wielded magic he'd been unstoppable. Theo had never seen him reach his limit, had never been good enough to force him to use more of his power than he needed to.

Once, before his mother died, Theo asked him how he'd become so powerful.

"Practice."

The practice of pushing past your limit.

'I know my limits, Harry.'

'Do you? Because Malfoy and Blaise clearly think you don't!'

Theo paused at a jagged curve in the path. A vine of witch-eye spidered up a silver birch tree, heavy with plum-colored berries. On the shore, a chorus of toads started to sing. Out on the Black Lake, an arctic loon bobbed up and down on the gentle current.

Theo ate some of the berries as he looked over the scene. He focused on the sweet, molasses-like flavor of the berries and felt his racing thoughts began to settle.

After about five minutes, he heard twigs snap in the forest.

"Shoot," a girl said.

He turned, carefully searching the tree line. It was significantly darker between the trees than it was on the shore, but Luna Lovegood's white-blonde hair sparkled like a moon beam. He watched her pick her way over the snarled roots, an iron bucket creaking in her hand.

She walked...right past him, heading deeper into the forest.

Dear Merlin, he thought, rolling his eyes.

He purposefully made a lot of noise as he followed her.

"Hello?" she called out nervously.

"Well met," Theo responded, stepping through to the clearing she was standing at the edge of. He moved away from the trees, fully illuminating himself. "I'm -"

"Theodore Nott," she finished for him, tucking her wand back behind her ear. "Harry's friend. Well met, I'm -"

"Luna Lovegood. Harry's told me about you. So has Daphne."

Lovegood rocked on the balls of her feet.

"You could call me Luna, I think," she said.

Theo wondered why she sounded so uncertain. "Call me Theo."

"Alright, Theo. Are you looking for the thestrals, too?" Luna asked.

He hadn't been, but now that she said it, he realized that he would like to see Ramses and the rest of the herd.

"They probably wouldn't be this close to the castle." He peered through the trees. Back home the thestrals used to -

A bolt of pain circled around his skull, followed by a flash of longing so deep it touched the ever-flowing grief he kept trying to bury as deep as he could. He took a sharp breath, looking at the sky and thinking, stop.

Luna didn't seem to notice his odd behavior. "The tamed herd bed down not too far away." She shook the bucket, "I already fed them. Professor Grubbly-Plank lets me."

Theo very slowly unclenched his fist. Professor Snape had warned him that coming off the memory potion entirely might result in stronger than usual unconscious psychological responses to outside stimuli which was the man's most annoying way of saying that Theo needed to keep a handle on his emotions as the anesthetizing fog cleared over his memories.

Suddenly, Harry's own struggles in occlumency made a lot more sense to him. If only thinking about the forest could arrest his tongue like this, Theo was afraid that his meditations might not be strong enough to control his reaction to something closer to his heart.

Theo rubbed his brow, trying to pull himself back into the present. "The wild thestrals won't come for meat," he told her. "Not from a human hand, anyway."

"I know," Luna said, a bit sadly. "But I thought, perhaps if they get used to me, they'd see I mean no harm."

Theo stared thoughtfully at the deep trees of the forest. This close to the water, the forest was tame. They'd have better luck pushing in if they wanted to find Ramses, but Theo knew it was unwise to lead a young girl through the forest just the two of them. If anything happened to her, Theo would be held responsible, and he wasn't confident he could even protect himself in the event of an attach.

He picked up a thick piece of wood. "Here." With an artful wave of his hand, he transfigured it into a small broach, using the witch-eye berries for inspiration. Luna looked surprised when he held it out to her. "The wild thestrals are used to me. The leader's name is Ramses. He's found me using my magic before, so maybe if you're wearing this, he'll show himself some day."

Luna took the broach carefully. It was still made of wood, but the magic had hardened and cured it. It was as long as his thumb, a little curve of witch-eye ivy with four berries on it. Instead of sticking it to her cloak, she set the bucket down and carefully pinned it into one of the plaits in her hair.

The weave of it jumped out to him. "Are you celebrating something?"

"This is not quite celebration," she said, turning so he could see. Indeed, she had five strands of hair wrapped together in the braid, not three. "It's meant to lift the spirit. I find the wrackspurts in the castle to be rather infectious, lately."

Theo nodded, filing that word wrackspurt away for questioning later. He studied her taltagia pattern, trying to map it to the ones he knew by memory. This one's meaning was hard for him to pin down.

"It's one of my own design," Luna explained, a tad shyly. "I think I'll call it Harken Here."

"Harken Here?" Theo repeated, hearing the echo of his father's stern tone in his own voice. "It's dangerous to wear an open invitation like that."

"Don't worry," she kicked up one of her feet, showing him a painted high-top sneaker. "The path I walk is well protected. After all, it led ours to cross."

Theo dragged his hands down his face. Harry, your friend is suicidally passive to the magic around us. He personally didn't think magic sneakers would do much to protect her, but Luna Lovegood didn't seem the type to be moved by logical argument. He pointed up at the darkening sky. "We shouldn't be venturing through the forest at this hour."

"Hmm..." She tipped her head back. "I suppose it would be silly of me to ignore the message of a traveler sent my way. Would you accompany me back to the castle?"

Theo nodded and led her to the shoreline trail, stopping to share a few witch-eye berries with her. As they walked back, he stood between her and the forest, keeping his ears perked and his eyes up. He could just imagine the betrayal on Harry's face if Luna got hurt because Theo was too weak to defend her.

"Your head is rather heavy with wrackspurts, too," Luna noted, stopping by some of the flat boulders that students like to sit out on in the afternoons. "May I repay your gift in kind?"

Theo stared at her for a full five seconds, trying to wrap his head around the fact that she was offering to braid his hair. I don't have time for this, he thought impatiently.

But - what was he going to do in the castle? Pace up and down the halls and mope?

It would be silly to ignore the message of a traveler sent my way. His heart twisted. That was something he could easily imagine his mother saying. Did Luna have some measure of the Sight in her?

He rubbed his face again and surrendered. "Alright."

He and Luna found an arrangement on the rocks. She sat on a taller boulder, legs crossed, while he sat just beneath her, giving her the ideal vantage point to braid his hair. There were a small handful of other students milling about, but most were starting to head back inside, and none of them looked their way.

"This is fine work," Luna praised as she undid what he'd done to his hair. Some of the ache in his head relaxed. "Quite a determined charm you attempted."

"Why do you say attempted?" He asked dryly.

She draped the threads he'd used in front of his face. Instead of two long strands, she held three or four broken ones together between her fingers.

"The threads snapped?"

"A sign it wasn't right for you today," she explained, shaking his hair loose. "I would say you already have as much quick wittedness and conviction as you need." She took up the top half of the left side, carefully parting it into five pieces.

Theo frowned, remembering how his lofty goals for the day had spectacularly crashed and burned after that horrible defense lesson. "I don't know about that," he muttered.

She didn't say anything else as she worked, her fingers moving softly through his hair. She plaited it far more loosely than he usually did, but when she pinned the tail to the back of his head, it didn't feel like it would fall out at any moment.

Harken Here, he thought, studying the magnificent outline of the castle in front of them. What could I possibly be inviting?

"There," she announced, pinning the second tail with the first. "Done!"

He got to his feet and held his arm out to help her down. She curtsied in thanks.

Theo smiled at her. He couldn't help it. She was sweet and entirely guileless, a refreshing change of pace.

"May I ask you a personal question?" She posed ominously as they started the ascent up the grassy knoll to the castle.

"You may," he said formally.

"Your mother's dead, isn't she?" Luna turned to look at him, holding his gaze mournfully before he could even summon a reaction. "Mine is too."

"Yes..?" He hedged, sensing this was not her question.

"What did she go with, at her funeral? My mother wanted to be buried with flowers from every seasons, in every color." Luna pointed at some yellow autumn hawkbits growing in tufts along the path. "It took all year to gather enough for her. For awhile, it made me hate flowers, but now whenever I see them I think of her, and how happy they made her. Then they make me happy, too."

Theo blinked, disconcerted by the wildly personal question. Sometimes, burial practices among wixen families were kept secret. But that was not the Nott way, necessarily, and she hadn't asked about their practices. She asked what his mother went with.

"She was...cremated. She didn't really...go with anything, besides what she was wearing." Theo said, feeling his body grow numb as his mind cast back and remembered it. He could hear the rush of the fire, see the tall wooden pyre. He remembered how white-blue the fire looked as it floated in the air, consuming her and linen she was wrapped in.

And then the sound hit him, thrusting him entirely back in time. He could see her violin magically playing the slow melody of a song she used to sing sometimes, when she had the health to sway in front of the fireplace and fill the whole Tower with her voice.

Before her funeral, he'd never heard the song arranged the way her lonesome violin played it, transforming the bright bouncing tune into something slow, melancholic, but no less full of love. He'd remembered how, despite the immense, crushing agony of grief, the song made him feel the slightest bit better, because it was all too easy to remember her smile, and the way her voice carried magic through the air as she sang it to him and his father.

"She had music playing. Her music." Theo said, with difficulty. "I guess she went with that, because I never heard it again."

Luna stopped a little ways ahead of him on the path. Theo's jaw worked as he tried to wrestle back those feelings, but it was nearly impossible with her sad eyes watching him struggle to contain the wave of grief he was suddenly drowning in. Her gaze was encompassing, and he felt that she knew exactly what he was going through in a way no one else he had met in his life truly did.

"That is what you should be offering him, then," she said cryptically. Her fingers stroked the broach he gave her. "Goodnight, Theodore Nott."

She finished the walk to the castle by herself.

Theo pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, snarling, "Fucking hell, Harry, why are your friends so weird?"

///////

"Is this what he is?" Blaise asked, falling heavily into Theo's bed.

"Watch it!" Theo hissed. His foul mood had only gotten worse through dinner when he saw that Harry was absent.

Blaise hauled himself up so Theo could wiggle his arm out from under him.

"What did you say?" Theo sighed, rubbing his burning eyes.

"Look at this," Blaise pushed a book over his face. "Is this what John is?"

Theo recognized the book instantly. Blaise was holding Mousefurd's Compendium of Fair Folk, a common encyclopedia of faeries that had long since verged into the realm of magical fiction. Theo had cherished his copy, keeping it on the shelf closest to his bed back in the Tower -

Focus.

He took the book from Blaise, scanning the image of a shadowy cat across from the entry about cat-síth. It was all spiked lines, long limbs, and tall, curved ears. Its mouth was curled into a sharp grin, exposing long fangs, and its eyes were simply two bells of flame.

Blaise raised his eyebrows. "Am I right?"

Theo just looked at him.

"YES!" Blaise wiggled excitedly and snatched the book back. "If I'd known I would have brought a better gift for him from Italy like my mum's port. Or, a gold candle?"

"What are you on about?" Theo prompted after Blaise trailed off into thoughtful mumbling.

"Gifts," Blaise pointed at a paragraph at the bottom of the page. "See? They like specific kinds."

Theo reached out to steady the book, reading

Funerary tokens such as flowers left by the graveside, or personal effects like jewelry, may be taken by the cat-síth to help ease the journey between life and death for the one who has passed on. In cases of a violent death, cat-síth were often deliberately summoned through offerings of the finest whiskey or wine available to the family, placed on the gravestone or at the altar of the dead, in the hopes that the fae would find the family's loved one and rescue them from the fate of becoming lost between worlds as a ghost or, worse, consumed by the dark creatures that made such purgatory their home.

Luna's parting words hit him like the Knight Bus.

"Oh my god," he groaned.

"What? Am I wrong?"

"No, you're not wrong." Theo hauled himself up. At the same time, he felt the braids give way and fall apart. The charm was finished. Theo had received what he'd needed to receive.

"Where are you going?" Blaise said, on the verge of sounding annoying.

"I'm going to see if I can catch Harry after his detention," Theo sighed, only half-way lying. He pushed his fingers through his hair, removing the two little bobby pins now tangled in his loose hair. He was too tired to deal with it anymore, so he flipped his hood up and toed his shoes back on.

"You don't want to help me plan a nice gift for John?" Blaise tempted one last time.

"I'm already a friend of John's," Theo shrugged, enjoying the way Blaise scowled at him. "Good luck."

The light was still on under Umbridge's classroom door when Theo arrived. He checked his watch. He's still in there? It's nearly nine o'clock. He'd assumed that since Harry wasn't at dinner at six-thirty that he'd already started detention, but maybe Theo was wrong and he'd just avoided the Great Hall entirely.

He bit his lip and went back downstairs to creep into the Music Hall, half hoping to find it was already in use. But the glowstones and candles flickered to life as he entered, proving that he was alone.

Theo went uneasily to the instrument book, dragging his finger down the list. He didn't even recognize half of them. He delayed a little while longer, looking nervously over his shoulder five times before he steeled her nerves and summoned a guitar from the instrument library.

He took it into one of the practice rooms, holding its long neck gingerly, and made sure to firmly shut the door.

Theo looked at it. The guitar had a deep red-brown face. When he experimentally brushed his thumb over the strings, it hummed pleasantly. To his ear, it sounded tuned, but then again Theo really didn't know what that meant. When he was young (young-young, so young that his feet swung in the air on the piano stool) he'd learned the basics of scales and keys and music theory from his father. His mother taught him about pitch and rhythm, and he had a vague recollection of understanding sheet music once upon a time.

But all that was gone, now. The truth was, music required a confident self-assuredness that his parents had possessed and he, most certainly, did not. The idea of singing out loud made his stomach twist. Music was utterly unforgiving - you were either good, or bad, and that was that.

That was what Theo had told himself for years, anyway. But, Harry had shown him lots of muggle music when they were together in the summer, and plenty of that music was bad. Theo privately thought of some of it as 'anti-melody'. It was as if muggles deliberately flaunted the rules of music to make it sound as jarring as possible.

But the weirdest part was that some of it worked. Theo's world expanded every time Harry showed him a new style of music that he had never heard before. So, maybe, the bar of what was worthy of being heard was not as high as Theo thought it was.

He had a feeling his mother would have a lot to say about that if she could hear his thoughts. I should check her letters, he thought as he pulled out a chair from the wall. Maybe she wrote about music in one of them.

He sat down and settled the guitar over his lap. He was surprised by how much larger the neck seemed with his fingers curled under it as he'd seen his mother do a thousand times. His fingers stretched across the strings. There were glowing magic lines marked up and down the neck, and when he plucked his way down one, he heard the notes tick up in order.

He let go and strummed a few times, testing pressure and strength, listening to the hearty ring of the notes fill the space.

Theo sighed and put his head on top of the body of the guitar. It smelled liked wood oil. It made him want to stand up and leave the room and never return. He wanted to go someplace cold and empty where he could roll his sleeves up and meticulously attack every problem he was facing. The foundation was a cracked mess. Albus Dumbledore maybe had tried to kill him, but now was obviously not trying to kill him, and that made absolutely no sense. Umbridge had set her toady sights on him and Draco, which didn't bode well for Narcissa's standing with the Minister. And Theo's very self - his body, his mind - was weak, wasted, wrung out and scarred and underfed and fucking useless.

How could he think that trying his hand at music, which he wasn't even good at, was worth his time?

He turned his head, resting his cheek along the instrument, and stared out the window that looked over the Music Hall.

I've been coming here for years. I've never even touched a piano key in all that time. Was that because I don't have any talent for it, or because...?

He slowly straightened up, arranging his hands on the guitar again.

Maybe, for all these years, he'd been responding to a message he didn't understand. Fate was like the current. Invisible, surprising, unrelenting, moving in patterns that the human mind could not easily comprehend and yet seemed crystal clear when one looked back on the past.

Perhaps Theo had been pulled here year after year for some other reason than to chase his mother's ghost.

Hermione was so distracted leaving the staff room that she nearly crashed into a gaggle of second-year Ravenclaws.

"Sorry!" She called out, powering away from them. As soon as she reached Ron and Neville, she breezed past them, jerking her head at them to follow.

"What did she say?" Ron asked.

"Well, the thing is, she already knew!" Hermione stopped in the Herbology wing, putting her back to the wall and stared blankly at some spot in the middle distance. "I don't see how she could have, though!"

"Maybe Umbridge told her," Neville suggested. "I bet she brags about that sort of thing."

"But punishing students for accidental magic is explicitly against the rules - the unassailable rules. It's in the Hogwarts Charter, signed by all four Founders! Even she can't -"

A few older students turned their heads curiously as they passed by.

Hermione lowered her voice to a whisper. "Anyway, Professor McGonagall said she was already planning to take care of it. I don't know what that means for Harry, but hopefully something good."

Ron and Neville exchanged a look. Despite the good news, Hermione still looked worried.

"What else is wrong?" Neville asked quietly. "Did she say something?"

Hermione tapped her fingers against her mouth. "No, but I...I just can't figure out who would have already gone to her. She said it was another prefect."

Ron recoiled, "A prefect?"

Hermione frowned. "Maybe - was it Alicia? Did you tell Fred and George, and did they tell her?"

"Hermione, we've been together since class ended," Ron reminded her. "I haven't seen any of them."

Neville lifted his eyebrows. "Could it have been Malfoy?"

Ron opened his mouth to rail against the very idea that Malfoy would ever intervene on Harry's behalf for anything, but then he caught sight of the conflict warring on Hermione's face.

"I think it...was," she whispered disbelievingly. "Why else would Professor McGonagall keep it a secret? I asked her who it was and she told me it didn't matter, but...he would have had to have gone to her right after class to beat me there."

"No way," Ron said, because one of them had to say it. "Why would ferret-face help Harry?"

Hermione looked horrified. "Because...I think they might be friends."

The three of them shared a grim moment of silence.

"I'm going to find No - er, Theo," Ron decided. "I bet he twisted Malfoy's arm to do it."

Hermione looked relieved. "You think so? That makes more sense."

"Yeah, definitely," Ron assured her, pretending not to see Neville's doubtful expression. "I think I saw him heading to the library."

"Alright, I'm going to go look for Harry. Want to come with me, Neville?"

Neville nodded, shooting one last glance at Ron. "You sure you don't want us to come with you, Ron?"

"I'll be fine," he waved his hand dismissively. "I can handle one snake."

Theo's searing blue eyes glared at him between his tattooed fingers.

Ron gulped. He was seriously beginning to regret not taking Neville up on his offer. He was beginning to regret even looking in any of the classrooms around the library when his search there turned up empty. He was especially beginning to regret closing the classroom door when he found the one that Theo was in.

"So, uh, you don't know who told McGonagall?" Ron clarified weakly. "You don't even know if it was Malfoy?"

"No." Theo dropped one of his hands from his face. Ron thought he was just stretching his fingers until a flash of orange on his finger caught the light from the setting sun. A spark of violet lit up his eyes. "Go away, Weasley."

"Ron," he corrected, swallowing dryly when Theo's fingers twitched. It was slowly dawning on him what a stupid tactical error he'd made. Theo hadn't had a pleasant time in defense either, and really, Harry wouldn't have gotten into trouble at all if Theo had played along with Umbridge. Ron wasn't a complete idiot, he could see he'd walked in on the Slytherin in the middle of a self-loathing session.

"Look, uhm, one last question. Do you know were Harry is?"

Theo narrowed his eyes. "Don't you think I'd be where he is right now if I knew where he was?" He said, lowering his voice to a snarl. "Get out of here, Ron."

"Okay, okay, I'm going!" Ron backed up toward the door, too wary to turn his back. "You know -"

The door opened suddenly, driving the handle into his lower back.

"Fuck!" Ron cried out, staggering to the side.

"Lord and Ladies, Weasley, I thought you were your sister," Blaise Zabini snarked as he swanned inside with pointy-faced Malfoy at his heels.

"Hey! Malfoy, did you um," Ron rubbed his back, hissing between his teeth. He could feel that he was already bruising. "Look, were you the one who told McGonagall about how Umbridge gave Harry detention for accidental magic? Hermione went to tell her so she could get the detention rescinded, but she already knew."

Zabini stopped and turned around, staring at Malfoy with a dozen emotions flashing over his face.

Malfoy hunched his shoulders sulkily. "Should have known she wouldn't keep her mouth shut."

"Draco Malfoy," Zabini breathed, grabbing Malfoy's chin. "By all the stars in the heavens, did you do a good deed?"

"Fuck off!" Malfoy snarled, slapping Zabini's hand away. "It probably won't help! She can still give him detention for a dozen other reasons. If you remember, he called her class a 'fucking joke' to her face, and then stormed out before it even ended, so -"

"She sent him away early," Theo's dry drawl interrupted.

"He's right," Ron agreed. "And cursing only carries a maximum punishment of one day of detention."

"For us, you mean," Malfoy sneered at him. "Professors can give one to three days, depending on the severity of the interruption and the language used."

Ron rolled his eyes. He didn't need the rules quoted at him by fucking Malfoy.

"She'll end up rewriting the charter at this rate," Zabini observed, swiveling to watch Malfoy cross the room to join Theo by the window. "I'm touched to see you grow like this, Draco, but by telling her what she can't do, she's only going to institute a new educational decree making it so she can punish us for accidental magic."

"Even High Inquisitors can't change the charter," Malfoy countered. Ron was struck dumb by how reasonable he sounded when he wasn't trying to be a total prick. "It takes an act voted on by the Board of Governors, the Headmaster, and a representative board of students to ratify a change. And in the end, the school still has to accept it. That's why it's never been done, the measure is too high."

"You heard her today," Theo piped up, crossing his arms. "The point is to build a brand new society where all magic is controlled, down to the individual spell. If Fudge and Umbridge have it their way, there won't be a Hogwarts for much longer."

Malfoy scoffed. "A politician and his toady can't get rid of the bloody school, Theo, get real."

Zabini cupped his ear, "Did my ears deceive me, or do you almost sound sad, Theo? I thought you hated this place."

"I do, but I hate the Ministry more," Theo sulked.

Oh my god, Ron thought, watching this all play out in front of him in disbelief. They really are just normal people.

"Be careful, boys, you never know who might be eavesdropping on your seditious conversations," a fourth voice interrupted.

Daphne Greengrass pushed the door open, her pale green eyes fixing on Ron immediately. His mouth went dry as she searched him over from top to bottom, her pink lips pursing slightly. For a terrifying moment, he wondered if his fly was down.

"Did someone invite him?" Greengrass asked the other three boys. When she finally stopped looking at him, Ron felt like he could breathe again.

"No," Zabini winked, "but I sort of like the idea of keeping him around purely so I can see how many shades of red he can go."

Ron's blushed deepened even more. Theo sighed.

"Ron, I told you to -"

"I know, I know!" He snapped. "Excuse me for coming to you about our mutual friend!"

"He's so passionate," Greengrass commented, sidling up to Zabini. "Perhaps that's the secret to the colors." Standing next to him, they looked sickeningly haughty, physical reminders that they had had all the opportunities and experiences to become the way they were, and Ron would never be able to be part of their world, no matter what he accomplished with his life.

"If you were passionate about something, what color would you turn?" Zabini said to her.

Ron and Malfoy made the same disgusted noise.

"Get a room," Pansy Parkinson jeered, making a rude gesture at Zabini and Greengrass as she also trailed inside, closely followed by Millicent Bulstrode. Parkinson outrightly sneered at him. "What the hell are you doing here, Weasel?"

"Merlin, I can't believe Harry hangs out with you people," Ron sighed, throwing his hands up. "I'm going to go find him now!" He called out, looking challengingly to Theo.

Theo stared him down coldly. "No, you won't."