“This is an absolute outrage.”
Cornelius Fudge’s voice was not quite at the level of a shout, but it was close enough to make the portrait of Wendelin the Weird wobble slightly on the wall behind him. He paced the length of his office, his lime green bowler hat abandoned on the desk where it had landed when he’d flung it in the middle of his tirade. His face was a worrying shade of puce.
“An Auror.” He said the word as though it tasted foul. “An auror, Dolores. Of all the— I want you to fully understand what it is I’m saying. A first-year Auror, barely out of training, with a record of tripping over her own feet and breaking equipment... she just outmanoeuvred the entire Ministry.”
Dolores Umbridge sat across from his desk in the high-backed chair she always occupied during their private meetings, her small fat hands folded neatly in her lap. Her expression was one of serenity, as if she had already thought of a solution and was simply allowing Fudge to tire himself out before she presented it.
“She didn’t act alone, Cornelius,” Umbridge said. Her voice was sweet enough to rot teeth. “She’s not capable of acting alone. Dumbledore’s fingerprints are all over this.”
“Dumbledore,” Fudge spat, stopping at the window and glaring out at the grey sky over London as though the old man were somewhere in it. “Always Dumbledore. I’ve spent the better part of a year trying to limit his influence and somehow, somehow, he always finds an angle. And now I’ve got his creature sitting inside Hogwarts right under my nose—“
“With a direct line to Amelia Bones, who has been making things difficult for us since last spring,” Umbridge added. “It’s not a coincidence, Minister. None of this is. The dismissal was meant to happen. Madam Bones and Dumbledore knew perfectly well that a direct ministerial order of dismissal would provide them with precisely the sympathy and the motive they needed to smuggle their person into the school.”
“You’re saying Bones wanted me to fire the girl?”
“I’m saying they anticipated it,” Umbridge said placidly. “Or rather, they made sure to put us in a position where we had every reason to dismiss her, and then they had their counter-move prepared before we’d even made ours.” She tilted her head in a way that made her look even more toad-like than usual. “Tonks was the bait, and we took it.”
Fudge made a sound that was not quite dignified enough to be described as a groan and dropped heavily into his chair. He leaned his elbows on the desk and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “This is what they do. Dumbledore. You push him into a corner and he’s already three steps out of it before you’ve even moved. Every single time.”
“He and Bones are cut from the same cloth,” Umbridge agreed, a touch of bile in her sugary tone. “Both of them convinced they know what’s best for the wizarding world, both of them perfectly happy to undermine the Ministry’s authority the moment they decide it’s inconvenient. The girl was just a tool.” She gave a small sniff. “An irrelevant Auror with a record full of mishaps, and they turned her into a problem for us. That does speak rather more to their scheming than to her own competence, I think.”
“I should have moved faster on that Decree,” Fudge muttered. “If it had been in place a week earlier—“
“Water under the bridge,” Umbridge said. “We passed it and Dumbledore moved first. That’s done. The question is what we do from here.”
“And what can we do?” Fudge picked up his bowler hat and turned it in his hands, a habit of his when he was frustrated. “The Auror is in that school now. She’s under Hogwarts authority. I can’t fire her from a position she holds independently of the Ministry, not without—“
“You can’t fire her,” Umbridge agreed. “But there’s no need for that.” She paused, letting the silence stretch in that practiced way of hers. “The problem we had before this all happened was that we needed a presence inside Hogwarts. We still have that need. And while the Defence position is now occupied, that doesn’t mean it’s the only position worth having.”
Fudge looked up from his hat. “Every other post at Hogwarts is filled, Dolores. It’s the start of term. They’ll all have their staff.”
“For now.”
He stared at her. “I can’t strongarm a Hogwarts Professor into handing in their resignation. Even I have limits.”
Umbridge’s smile widened. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. It never was. “Who said anything about strongarming, Minister?”
“Then speak plainly,” Fudge said, leaning forward, the hat abandoned. “I’m not in the mood for mystery for mystery’s sake. What is it you’re actually suggesting?”
The smile stayed. If anything it got worse. Umbridge uncrossed and recrossed her ankles and folded her hands in her lap, looking smug and composed.
“I’m suggesting we use what’s happened to our advantage,” she said. “Think about how it looks, from the outside. Dumbledore fills a vacant teaching post at the last moment with a dismissed Auror who has a documented history of performance issues. A young woman with two years of field experience and not a single day of teaching behind her.” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “Parents will have questions. The press will have questions. And we, Minister, will have answers.”
Fudge’s brow furrowed slowly as her meaning dawned on him. “We make it about the children.”
“We make it about the Ministry’s commitment to ensuring the best possible education for the students of Hogwarts,” Umbridge said. “We present ourselves not as interfering in the school’s affairs, but as responding to legitimate concerns raised by parents about the calibre of instruction their children are receiving. We can express our deep concern that Dumbledore has appointed someone so manifestly unqualified to teach such a crucial subject. We can speak about our obligations to the British wizarding community, our duty to ensure that their children are not being used as test subjects for an Auror-turned-teacher who has never stood in front of a classroom in her life.”
Fudge’s expression shifted from frustrated to speculative. “And the Ministry sending in an inspector would be... the natural response to those concerns.”
“More than an inspector,” Umbridge said softly. “An Educational Decree mandating oversight. High Inquisitor authority. Not interference, Cornelius. Accountability.” She let the word settle. “We position this as the Ministry standing up for the parents of Britain. Not as an attack on Hogwarts. As a service to it.”
Fudge was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, the tension around his eyes eased. He reached out and picked up a quill, tapping it idly against his palm. “And who, in this scenario, would be appointed as High Inquisitor?”
Umbridge’s smile was answer enough.
XXXXX
The last two weeks of summer were peculiar all last things are, moving simultaneously too fast and too slow. Sirius’s bedroom on the second floor of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, was cluttered in the way of a man who had been given space and very little reason to do anything about it. Books stacked at odd angles, an old Gryffindor scarf draped over the headboard, and a cracked enchanted mirror from the nineteen-seventies propped against the wardrobe. The curtains let in the grimy grey London morning, and the room smelled faintly of old wood and the sandalwood soap Sirius had started using recently, mostly, Harry suspected, because it irritated Kreacher.
Harry stood near the window. He’d been doing a slow tour of the room, restless in the way that always overtook him the night before something significant, and he’d barely slept. His trunk was packed and sitting by the door. Tonks leaned against the wardrobe with her arms folded, her hair cherry red, watching the two of them with the expression of someone who was trying not to look as fond as she felt and failing.
“I want you to listen to me properly,” Sirius said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his elbows on his knees, and his grey eyes steady on Harry. “I’m rubbish at this kind of thing, so don’t pull a face if it comes out wrong.”
“I never pull a face,” Harry said.
“You absolutely do,” Tonks said from the wardrobe.
“You’re not helpful,” Harry told her. She grinned.
Sirius exhaled a short laugh, and then the seriousness returned. “You’re walking back into that school today and it’s going to be harder than last year. Last year you had a reputation that was mostly untarnished, if we ignore the first few months. This year you’re going in as the boy who lied about Voldemort coming back, at least as far as most of that school is concerned. The Ministry will have made sure of that.”
Harry said nothing. He knew this already, had been living with it for weeks.
“What I want you to understand,” Sirius continued, “is that none of it changes who you actually are. You know what you saw. You know what happened. And more than that — and this is the bit I really need you to hear, Harry — you are not the same person who walked out of that school in June. You’ve spent this summer training. You’ve been working in ways most grown wizards don’t. You’re stronger than you were and you’re sharper than you were, and you’re going to keep going.” He paused. “Your dad would be incredibly proud of you. I want you to know that. James would look at the person you’re becoming and he’d be absolutely bloody insufferable about it to everyone he knew.”
Harry’s throat tightened. He kept his face even, but it was an effort.
“I’m not telling you to go in there with your head down,” Sirius went on. “I’m telling you the opposite. Hold your head up. Be your own man. Don’t let them tell you who you are, because they don’t know. They don’t have any idea.” He stood and crossed the room, gripping Harry’s shoulder. “You understand me?”
“Yeah,” Harry said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. “I understand.”
Sirius held his gaze for a moment, then nodded once, apparently satisfied. He stepped back and reached into the pocket of his robes. He produced two small mirrors, identical, about the size of a standard pocket book. He held one out to Harry.
“Communication mirrors,” he said. “Old Black family magic. You speak into yours, my face will appear in mine. Works at any distance.” He pressed his into Harry’s palm alongside the other. “Give me about thirty seconds before calling the first time, I’ll need to have the matching one in my hand. After that you can call whenever you like.”
Harry turned them over in his hands. The glass was slightly warmer than it should have been, like there was something alive in it. “These are brilliant.”
“They’re fairly old,” Sirius said. “But they work. I’ve had them tested.” He flicked a glance at Tonks. “She knows they exist. I’d prefer they stay between the three of us for now.”
Tonks raised her right hand. “Sworn to secrecy.”
“Good.” Sirius grinned. He crossed his arms and looked at both of them like he was going to make a very important announcement. “Right. One last piece of advice.”
“Here we go,” Tonks muttered.
“I’m advising the pair of you,” Sirius said, “for your own good, and really for the good of everyone at that school, to try not to do anything that lands you in front of Dumbledore before November at the earliest. I know, I know — you’re a Defence professor now, which means the roleplay opportunities alone are practically unprecedented—“
“Sirius—“
“And I know how difficult it must be, Tonks, not to abuse that kind of power—“
“Oh, I’m absolutely going to abuse it,” Tonks said brightly.
Sirius pointed at her. “See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That face. Harry, are you making that face too? You are. You’re making the exact same face.” He let out a bark of laughter, loud and full-throated. “Merlin, he really is his father’s son. And he’s got a bit of me in him too, which frankly is a lot more terrifying.” He shook his head, still laughing. “James would think this was fantastic. He’d be absolutely furious that he was missing it.”
Harry was grinning. He couldn’t help it. He stepped forward and pulled Sirius into a hug, and Sirius hugged him back hard, both arms around his shoulders, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
“Keep training,” Sirius said, quieter now. “Keep writing. And for the love of Merlin, stay out of trouble where you can.”
“I’ll do my best,” Harry said.
“Ditto,” said Tonks.
“Neither of you are remotely convincing,” Sirius said, “and I love you both very much.”
Harry pulled back, picked up his trunk, and followed Tonks out of the room.
Downstairs was already in full riot. The Weasley family preparing for the start of term was one of those events that seemed to generate its own weather system, complete with shouting, the sound of things falling down, and Mrs. Weasley’s voice cutting through everything else so loudly that it made the walls vibrate.
“Fred, I have told you three times—“
“That was George.”
“That was absolutely me,” Fred said cheerfully from the landing above. “I’m deeply offended.”
“You’re both going to be deeply offended when I—“
“Mum, Ron’s sat on my Charms textbook and it’s stuck to his—“
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Hermione said sharply.
Harry set his trunk down at the bottom of the stairs and took in the chaos. Ginny was pelting past with her bag over one shoulder and her robes half on. Mrs. Weasley had cornered one of the twins — George, Harry thought, though he wasn’t certain — and appeared to be fixing his collar by force. Mr. Weasley had retreated to the kitchen doorway with a cup of tea, looking like he had learned, over many years, when to stay out of something.
Hermione was standing near the wall to the left of the front door, out of the main traffic, watching everything with exasperation. Harry crossed to her and leaned his trunk against the wall beside hers.
“Morning,” he said.
“It’s organized chaos,” Hermione said, and then immediately: “That’s a contradiction in terms. It’s just chaos.” She paused. “Are you ready?”
“More or less.”
The noise level rose briefly as Fred and George managed to get past Mrs. Weasley and came clattering down the last stairs together, both of them looking extremely pleased with themselves. Mrs. Weasley came after them, still talking, and the twins deployed their usual technique of agreeing with everything she said in identical solemn tones until she couldn’t tell whether they were being genuine and gave up.
Harry and Hermione stood together, and the awkwardness that had been sitting between them made itself felt, the way it always did. Hermione turned her head to look at him and then looked away again, and he could see her working up to something.
“Harry,” she said. “I owe you an apology. A real one.”
He looked at her properly. She met his eyes and didn’t look away this time.
“I should have told you,” Hermione said. “I knew you were in the dark and I knew it was affecting you and I told myself it was for the best, that Dumbledore knew what he was doing and it wasn’t my place to go against his instructions.” She shook her head slightly. “That was wrong of me. You had a right to know what was happening in your own life. I chose Dumbledore’s judgment over yours, and that wasn’t fair.”
Harry listened to all of it without interrupting. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
“I know you feel bad about it,” he said. “I can see that. And I do accept your apology, genuinely.” He kept his voice level, not unkind. “But I want to be honest with you too, because I think that matters more than just saying it’s fine when it isn’t quite.”
Hermione nodded, her expression attentive and slightly braced.
“I’m not sure,” Harry said, “that if Dumbledore told you something similar tomorrow, you’d choose differently. I think you’d have the same internal argument and come down in the same place. And that’s your right. You trust him. I’m not saying you shouldn’t.” He paused. “But I need to know where I stand with people right now, and what I think is that I can trust you with most things but maybe not with things that put Dumbledore’s decisions on one side and my interests on the other.” He said it without heat, just plainly. “That’s not me punishing you. It’s just where I am.”
Hermione pressed her lips together and looked away for a moment.
“That’s fair,” she said finally. Her voice was careful. “I don’t like it, but it’s fair.”
“I know you don’t,” Harry said.
A pause. Then Hermione exhaled and gave a small, tight nod. “I’ll try to be better.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
He became aware, peripherally, of someone looking at them. He glanced to the side and found Tonks a few feet away. She was watching him with a tight little smile that wasn’t without warmth, and when his eyes met hers she gave him a single small nod — something affirming, something that said she’d seen and she was pleased. He held her gaze for half a second and she looked away, turning to say something to Remus, who had appeared from the kitchen.
“Right!” Mrs. Weasley’s voice went up like a signal flare. “It is time! I don’t want to hear a single word about anything from any of you, we are getting out the door, we are getting in the cars, and we are going. Fred! George! I mean it!”
“We heard you the first time,” Fred said.
“We heard you the first six times,” George said.
Mrs. Weasley smacked them both on the back of the head in rapid succession, and they both staggered forward with theatrical reactions of injury and outrage. Ron smothered a grin. Ginny didn’t bother hiding hers.
The front door opened and the chaos spilled out into the street.
Harry picked up his trunk and caught Sirius at the doorway, unable to come further, and Harry set the trunk down for thirty seconds to hug him again, quickly and tightly.
“The mirrors,” Sirius said, very quietly.
“I know.” Harry stepped back and picked the trunk up. “I’ll call tonight.”
“Good.” Sirius’s hand came up briefly and gripped his shoulder, then let go. He looked at Tonks over Harry’s head and they exchanged a look that carried a whole conversation in it, something about looking after each other, Harry thought, though neither of them said anything.
Then Harry turned and walked, and the door of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, closed behind him.
XXXXX
King’s Cross was busy, families in robes mixed into the crowd, owls in cages carried with no apparent awareness of how strange this looked, and the occasional flash of something green or silver on a trunk. Harry pushed his trolley through the barrier at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and walked straight into the noise of the Hogwarts Express.
The moment he emerged, it took him about four seconds to become aware of it. The ripple through the crowd. Heads turning. People nudging people. A girl of about twelve going up on her toes to see him better. A man in brown robes who stopped walking mid-stride, stared, and then resumed walking while pretending he hadn’t stared. The whispering was like a physical thing, not loud but present, following him through the platform.
“Just ignore them,” Ron muttered, pulling his trolley up alongside Harry’s. “Pack of idiots.”
“Half of them probably read the Prophet every morning and just accept whatever it says,” Hermione added. “It’s willful ignorance, really.”
“Willful or not, they’re still staring,” Ginny said from behind them.
“Let them,” Harry said simply.
Ron looked at him. Hermione looked at him.
“That’s it?” Ron said. “Let them?”
“I mean it,” Harry said. He kept walking, unhurried, not looking at anyone in particular. “They want to believe whatever the Prophet tells them, that’s their choice. Some of them are going to come around eventually and some of them aren’t, and either way I can’t make it happen faster by caring what they think.” He glanced at Ron, mildly. “I couldn’t care less, honestly.”
Ron processed this for a moment. Hermione looked like she was having a small internal adjustment of some expectation she’d been carrying. Neither of them said anything, but they exchanged a glance that Harry chose not to examine too closely.
Ginny had already spotted someone across the platform and was gone with a brief wave, her red hair disappearing into the crowd. The twins had been absorbed into a different subset of older students almost immediately upon arrival. That left the three of them, plus Tonks, who had appeared at Harry’s elbow looking professionally neutral except for the fact that her hair was a violent turquoise that she definitely hadn’t worn to Grimmauld Place this morning.
“New-term aesthetic,” she said, noticing Harry noticing.
“Right,” he said.
“I’ll find you lot on the train,” she said. “I’m going to see about the staff arrangements.”
The trio found an empty compartment toward the middle of the train, and Harry slid the door open to find it wasn’t entirely empty after all. Neville Longbottom was sitting in the far corner with a large Herbology textbook open on his lap and a look of minor relief at a familiar face.
“Harry! Room in here, it’s just me.” He shifted along the seat.
They settled in, trunks overhead, owl cages stacked carefully in the corner. They had barely got comfortable before the compartment door slid open again and Tonks squeezed inside, pulling it shut behind her with a definitive click.
“Right, there’s absolutely no way I’m sitting in the staff carriage for four hours,” she announced, dropping into the seat beside Harry. “It smells of mothballs.” She paused. “I like you lot considerably more than mothballs.”
“High praise,” Harry said dryly.
“It is, actually,” she said.
The train pulled out of King’s Cross at eleven on the dot, and the journey settled into the comfortable rhythm. The countryside sliding past, the food trolley arriving and departing, the easy half-attention of a long trip with people you knew well. Tonks proved to be excellent company in a compartment setting, with a gift for steering conversation that kept things moving without ever feeling managed. She and Neville got into a fairly involved discussion about the practical applications of certain plants as defensive tools, which surprised Neville so much he forgot to be awkward about it and started contributing with real enthusiasm.
Ron ate an implausible quantity of Chocolate Frogs. Hermione read. Harry talked, and listened, and watched the window.
He was mid-sentence in a conversation with Neville about whether Mandrakes could theoretically be weaponized in the field — Tonks had put the idea forward with no apparent embarrassment, Neville was simultaneously horrified and intrigued — when he caught movement in the corner of his eye. Someone pausing outside the compartment. He didn’t look immediately; the corridor was busy with people passing, it could be nothing.
But the pause went on slightly too long, and he glanced up without turning his head fully.
Cho Chang stood outside the glass. She had her bag over one shoulder and her hair down, and she was looking in at him with an expression that was difficult to read — not entirely happy, not entirely composed, something somewhere in the middle of several things she clearly hadn’t finished sorting out. Harry was in the middle of a sentence. He kept going with it, not changing his tone, though he registered her there.
He saw her take a breath. Saw, or maybe imagined, her almost raise her hand toward the door handle.
Then she turned and walked away.
Harry watched this happen in the corner of his vision and returned his full attention to Neville, who was explaining the acoustic properties of Screechsnap pods with great seriousness. The conversation continued undisturbed.
From beside him, barely perceptible, Tonks’s gaze tracked Cho’s retreating figure along the corridor. She didn’t say anything. Her expression shifted, very briefly, into something considering, and then she set it aside and turned back to Neville and his Screechsnap pods.
The rest of the journey was uneventful, time passing easily, nothing to mark and therefore a great deal to remember. By the time the train began to slow at Hogsmeade station, the sky outside had gone the dark.
They gathered their bags and shuffled out with the rest of the carriage into the cool air and the noise of several hundred students doing the same. At the door of the train Harry paused, and for a moment it was just the two of them in the compartment doorway, the others already on the platform. Tonks had her teaching robes on now, properly buttoned, and she looked different in them, more official, though her hair was still turquoise.
She looked at him.
Harry looked at her.
Then he stepped forward and kissed her, one hand coming up to the side of her face, and she kissed him back with equal directness, her hand gripping the lapel of his robes briefly, and it was brief but it was thorough.
They broke apart.
“You should prepare yourself,” Tonks said softly, her lips still close to his ear, her voice low and warm and doing funny things to his concentration. “I plan on breaking every detention record this school has ever seen this year.”
The heat in her voice went straight down his spine. Harry pulled back just enough to look at her properly, and his mouth curved.
“Careful,” he said. “That almost sounds like an incentive to misbehave.”
Tonks’s grin was frankly burning. “Almost?”
He laughed, and the sound of it pulled them both back to the present and the platform and the couple hundred students milling about just outside. He picked up his bag, stepped out onto the platform, and she followed a beat later, and then they were in the noise and the cold air and she was Professor Tonks and he was a fifth-year student and they went in different directions without another word, easy and unhurried, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
XXXXX
The carriages that lined the road to Hogwarts had always struck most students as self-propelled. Harry had thought the same for three years running. He knew better now. Had known since a warm night in June and a graveyard and a man whose name he didn’t know yet being killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Thestrals stood patient in their harnesses, big and bony and black, and Harry could see them clearly — every rib, every leathery wing held close, the pale eyes.
Malfoy found them approximately forty seconds after Harry joined the queue for carriages. It was almost impressive, really, as though he’d been waiting.
“Potter.” He materialized with Crabbe and Goyle flanking him like large decorative columns, and his expression was the particular brand of Malfoy contempt that Harry had noticed tended to come out when there was an audience. There was definitely an audience. Several clusters of students who’d been talking turned to watch. “I see you haven’t been arrested yet. The Ministry must be losing its edge.”
“I was wondering when you’d show up,” Harry said pleasantly. He didn’t stop walking.
Malfoy stepped into his path. “Careful, Potter. You’re not exactly popular this year. Might want to tread carefully with people above your station.”
“Above my station,” Harry repeated, looking at Malfoy with genuine interest, the way you might look at a peculiar piece of furniture that had turned up somewhere unexpected. “Remind me, you spent last year repeating some third year classes because you cried to your father about a hippogriff. Your family’s running charity dinners to stay in the Ministry’s good graces. And your single notable talent, as best I can tell, is turning up where other people are to announce yourself.” He tilted his head. “What station is that exactly?”
There was a sharp silence from the surrounding crowd. Then someone — he thought it might have been a Hufflepuff somewhere to the left — made a choked sound that was definitely suppressed laughter.
Malfoy’s face had gone a particular mottled red. “You’d better watch what you—“
“You’ve got about two seconds,” Harry said, conversationally, “before I decide this conversation is too boring to continue.” He kept his voice light. “I’d use one of them to think about whether you actually want to finish that sentence.”
Malfoy’s hand moved toward his robes. Harry’s wand was out before the thought to reach for it had fully formed, pressed very gently but very precisely to the underside of Malfoy’s chin. Malfoy went absolutely still. His pale eyes were wide, his wand half-drawn and going nowhere, and in his face was the specific unpleasant shock of someone who had done this move many times and was encountering for the first time the experience of having it done to them.
Harry looked at him for a beat. Then he lowered his wand, pocketed it, said, “Thought so,” and walked around him.
He didn’t look back. He heard the low murmur of the crowd starting up again, and Ron’s footsteps catching up to him, and Hermione making a sound that was half exhale and half disbelieving laugh.
“That was mental,” Neville said, catching up on Harry’s other side. He sounded admiring.
“He’ll be miserable about it for a week,” Ron said with satisfaction.
“He’ll be miserable about it for considerably longer than that,” Hermione said.
They found a carriage with a fourth seat that had Ginny already in it, sitting across from a girl Harry didn’t know. The girl had long, dirty-blonde hair that fell to her waist, and she was wearing robes that had the distinct look of someone who had decorated them herself, and she had a copy of a magazine on her lap that appeared to be upside down. She had large, pale eyes, slightly bulging, the kind that noticed a great deal, and she wore a necklace of what appeared to be corks strung on fishing line.
“Luna,” Ginny said, “this is Harry. Harry, this is Luna Lovegood. She’s a fourth-year.”
“Hello,” Harry said, settling into the seat.
Luna Lovegood regarded him with serene, unalarmed interest. “Hello, Harry Potter,” she said. “I’ve heard quite a lot about you.”
“Nothing good, presumably,” Harry said.
“Mostly in the papers, which are usually unreliable,” Luna said agreeably. “Although I thought that article in the Prophet last spring was particularly interesting. The specific wording they used in the third paragraph suggested the writer was either poorly briefed or actively lying, and either possibility tells you something useful.”
Ron blinked. Hermione looked at Luna with her head slightly tilted, the way she looked at things that surprised her and that she wanted to examine more closely.
“You can see them,” Harry said, looking out the carriage window at the Thestrals. It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yes,” Luna said simply. “Can you?”
“Since last June,” Harry said.
Luna nodded, without asking what had happened in June. “Most people find them unsettling,” she said. “I’ve always thought they look rather serene, actually. They understand something permanent has happened and they don’t pretend otherwise. I find that honest.”
Harry considered this. He found he didn’t have any argument with it.
“You’re quite different from how I expected,” Luna said thoughtfully, after a moment. She was still looking at him with that same composed, evaluating attention. “Most people who’ve been through something significant are either very loud about it or work very hard to seem unaffected. You don’t seem to be doing either.”
“What do I seem like?” Harry asked, genuinely curious.
“Present,” Luna said. “Which is rarer than people think.” She picked up her magazine and turned a page. “You’re quite intriguing, Harry Potter.”
The carriage pulled up the road to Hogwarts and the great castle came into view above them, lit against the dark sky, and for a moment no one said anything. Then it was all carriages stopping and doors and the noise of students funneling through the castle entrance, and they went with it.
XXXXX
The Great Hall was already loud when they arrived. The floating candles threw warm gold light across the four long House tables, and the Staff table at the top of the hall sat perpendicular to all of them. Harry slid into a seat and looked up at it almost immediately, because he couldn’t help it.
He found her fast, Tonks sitting in the middle stretch of the Staff table, having changed her hair to a more conservative auburn at some point during the carriage ride, wearing proper robes that still somehow managed to look slightly too bright compared to the rest of the staff. She was not looking at him. She was looking, with the tight, contained expression of someone keeping very careful control of what showed on their face, at something to her right.
Harry followed her eyeline, and immediately spotted what was troubling her.
There, two seats down from McGonagall, wearing bright pink robes with a bright pink bow at the collar and smiling with the sweetness of someone at a garden party, sat Dolores Umbridge.
Harry stared at her for a moment. Umbridge was not looking at him yet; she was talking to someone, that small toad smile going the whole while, her hands folded on the table.
Sneering, Harry turned back to his plate.
Ron was in the middle of saying something. Hermione was straightening her cutlery. Neville was reading the menu options. The Great Hall hummed around him with the noise of several hundred people at the beginning of a new year, with all its expectation and irritation and appetite and noise.
He looked back at the Staff table. Tonks was still not looking at him. Her jaw was set and her eyes were faintly hard and she looked like someone who had been told something very irritating very recently and was managing it.
He thought: at least he knew why.
He thought: of course they found another angle. He’d known they would.
He thought: this is going to be a very interesting year.
He exhaled slowly, picked up his fork, and reached for the bread.
Well. He’d been in worse positions than this one.
He settled in for the feast.
To be continued...