FWASH!
Harry blinked rapidly to clear his vision of the spots that had invaded as Colin Creevey rambled on about developing pictures and a special potion that would make them move. Hermione was looking on in amusement from beside him, and Ron was on the other side of the table stuffing his face as usual.
"Y-yeah, Colin, that's great...but could you give me a little warning next time?" Harry hedged as his hand knocked over a bowl of oranges.
Colin paused in his rambling long enough to give a sheepish, "Sorry Harry, but when a photo opportunity happens you have to strike before it's gone. Like going for an opening to catch the snitch in Quidditch."
Harry paused in his flailing to consider this, only missing soaking Hermione's book with pumpkin juice, before conceding, "I...Well, okay, I I can understand that..."
Hermione snatched her book out of the way as the flailing picked up right where it left off, pumpkin juice splashing everywhere.
"Great! Thanks Harry, and sorry for blinding you!" Colin shouted over his shoulder as he rushed out, presumably to develop his pictures.
What an odd boy." Hermione commented with a smile, but then Harry's hand impacted the back of her head and she smashed face first into her breakfast.
Contrary to Harry and Hermione's beliefs, Colin going to develop his pictures, or at least not the ones he took in the Great Hall. Instead of going down to his darkroom in the dungeons, he traipsed through a variety of shortcuts to get back to the Gryffindor Common Room and casually made his way up the dormitory steps.
The sixth year boys' dorms were unlocked, as always, so Colin had no trouble sneaking over to Harry's bed to check the multitude of tiny runic cameras he had placed there some weeks before. He smirked as he took out a special crystal from inside his shirt and carefully touched it to the glowing rune on the outskirts of each of the spiraling designs. They went dim as the recordings contained within were taken into the crystal, and with everything he needed, Colin crept out of the dorms.
"Let's see what we've got, then..." he murmured to himself as he climbed back out through the portrait hole.
Colin took great care to conceal his special little project from any who might deem it inappropriate. Teachers, for instance, or students like Hermione. So, after smearing some of his blood on an inconspicuous knot on the door, speaking seven different passwords in three different languages, providing a retinal scan, and singing a rather unique tune he had composed himself, the door to his darkroom finally swung open.
Predictably, pictures plastered every available surface except those he needed for developing. Also predictable was that these pictures were all of Harry. What was predictable, though, was the context of these pictures. Take the string of pictures that started near the door, for instance.
Harry in bed, biting the end of a quill rather cutely as he worked on an essay hours after curfew. Harry down in the Common Room, sprawled out on the couch as he dozed. Harry with his bottom lip between his teeth as he worked over a particularly difficult bit of theory for Transfiguration. They went on until the other side of the room, each one a moment that Colin couldn't possibly have captured without Harry noticing.
But then there were the shocking ones.
Harry stripping in the morning, rushing to get to class. Harry in the shower, lathering himself up after a long game of Quidditch. Harry in bed, back arched with a look of ecstasy on his face as...teenager things happened. Each one was dirtier than the last, and each one had a tiny little star-shaped post-it stuck on it.
Colin ignored the rather incriminating pictures with a practiced ease, ducking under swaying lines of photos to reach his workbench. He pulled what looked like a hand-mirror down from a shelf and fitted his crystal into an indent on the handle.
Immediately, the mirror lit up as a picture swam into focus, but instead of more of the inappropriateness Colin was hoping for, it was just Harry sleeping. He dragged his finger around the edge of the glass just to be sure, fast-forwarding through the entire video, but there was nothing usable.
"Oh well. I have enough here already for the next one, at least..." Colin sighed, before replacing the mirror and taking his wand out.
"Facere libro," he incanted, swishing his wand in a sort of triangle shape, and a line of photos flicked itself off its line and fluttered over to the bench. A small stack of paper blew over to cover the pictures, and with a flash of light the pictures transposed themselves onto the papers, scaled to fit and sharpened to crystal clarity. A further flick of Colin's wand had a few articles shuffled in amongst the pictures, and then a glossy cover fixed itself to the stack of pictures.
And lo, it was done. That week's Playwitch Weekly, Issue #94
"Ugh." Harry scoffed as he stormed in through the portrait hole, "I can't believe Snape assigned a foot-long essay about the use of peony roots in potions. Who even cares how flowers affect the smell?!"
"Don't let Hermione hear you say that, mate. She'd lecture your ear off about exactly why should care." Ron advised him, glancing over at the girl's staircase as if Hermione might appear on them any sec-
"Hi boys!" Hermione greeted the two from behind them, and Ron shrieked as he whirled around. After five minutes of glaring at his two best friends, who were unable to stand from laughter, he finally gave up and stomped over to play chess with Dean.
Harry and Hermione continued to have a long laugh at Ron's expense, quieting down for about a minute before glancing at each other and bursting into giggles again. This is how Ginny and Luna found them as they made their way into the Common Room, and with an exasperated eye-roll and a comment about nargles, they dragged the two over to a couch and proceeded to stare at them seriously until they stopped laughing.
"Good." Ginny said after about ten minutes of not blinking, which severely creeped out the two, "We need to ask you something, Harry."
"Indeed we do." Luna continued in place of the red-haired girl, "You see, there's a rather interesting magazine."
"It's going on sale down in the Great Hall." Ginny interjected.
"Tonight, in fact." Luna added.
"We'd love to go check it out..."
"But you see, we're rather swamped with homework at the moment."
"And so we'd very much appreciate it-"
"If you might graciously-"
"Generously-"
"Nobly-"
"Buy us two copies?" they finished together hopefully.
"You two aren't allowed to hang out around the twins anymore." Hermione concluded, and Harry nodded vigorously. The two girls said nothing, only continuing to stare at Harry hopefully, and so the Boy-Who-Lived sighed and gave a short nod of acquiescence. The girls squealed delightedly and launched themselves at him for a hug, each claiming an arm and nuzzling into his neck.
"Er...which magazine would this be, then?" Hermione questioned awkwardly, attempting to ignore how red Harry's face was getting, but when the two girls gave her a pointed look with a head jerk at Harry, she reddened up herself and bit her lip quite hard.
After a good long moment, she managed to squeak out a meager, "Buy me one too." before fleeing up the steps to the girls dorms.
"...Well that happened." Harry commented dryly, but Ginny and Luna merely giggled and snuggled back into his neck.
Now, when you ask somebody to buy something for you, it's polite to inform them of any inconveniences they may encounter. It may be far away, for example, or perhaps it's just a tad more expensive than you'd think. But no, what Ginny and Luna neglected to tell Harry was that the magazine went on sale at three in the bloody morning. He had made a promise, however, and he was going to stick by it. And so, he found himself sneaking down to the Great Hall four hours after he should have gone to sleep, grumbling in his head about coffee and fatigue and 'really, they couldn't have gone themselves?'
His train of thought cut off as he instinctively threw himself sideways, pressing up against the wall as Filch rounded the corner. The old caretaker passed without incident, thankfully, and so with a few calming breaths Harry resumed his walk.
"Whoever decided to put the Common Room on the seventh floor wasn't thinking about students trying to sneak out." Harry grumbled to himself.
Rowena Ravenclaw snickered madly as she gazed down at poor Harry through her runic viewing glass, a pouting Godric Gryffindor and sympathetic Helga Hufflepuff at her side. Salazar was absent, what with being busy with lacing Godric's tea with laxatives.
Harry dashed down the hall as fast and silently as he could, trying to stay ahead of the demon that was wearing a cat as a disguise. Biting his lip to keep from breathing to hard, he cast a wordless ventus to blow his scent further down the hall as he dodged into another alcove, breathing a silent sigh of relief as the hell-spawn raced past him without a glance. Glancing around, he was pleasantly surprised to find himself at the doors to the Great Hall. He pulled his cloak off, stowed it in a pocket, and eased one of the doors open to slip inside.
Harry was surprised. While there were no candles lit, the light of the moon filtering in from the windows revealed a sizable number of students present. He wondered what, exactly, was in these magazines to make them so popular, but he reasoned that he'd find out soon enough. He located the back of the line and settled in to wait.
The first five minutes was boring. The next ten were annoying. The fifteen after that were exasperating, the fifteen after were angering, and the thirty after were spent in a furious rage. Finally, though, as the people who'd already gotten their magazine milled around him and gossiped with their friends, there was only one person left between him and the seller.
"One for blackmail and one for Pansy, please." drawled an oh-so-familiar voice from in front of him. Harry was shocked to learn that Draco Malfoy, of all people, was here at the ungodly hour of five fifteen a.m., and just a bit miffed that he had missed the fact for the entire hour and fifteen minutes he had been behind him in line. The self-directed annoyance, however, was forgotten in favor of an icy glare when Draco crowed, "I can't wait to taunt Potter when these finally make it to the press!" whirled around, and seemed to turn to stone upon seeing him.
"And just what" Harry began in a low, pleasant voice, "will you be taunting me with, Malfoy?"
Quick as a flash his hand snapped forward, snatching one of the two magazines out of Draco's hands before he could react. Keeping his stare on the fair-haired boy as he flipped the magazine open to a random page, he chanced a glance down and was met with the unwelcome sight of himself in an not-safe-for-school situation. He didn't know how the pictures had been taken, or by whom, but he was about to find out.
He flipped the magazine closed again and shot his hand forward once more, fisting the front of Draco's robes and pulling him flush against his chest. With all the grace and danger of a scorned serpent, he hissed into Draco's ear, "How flattering. Enjoy the pictures, Malfoy." before pushing the boy to the side at the same time he returned the magazine. Draco stood to the side for a moment, frozen, before letting out a high squeak and high-tailing it out of the hall.
Sparing the Malfoy heir barely a glance, Harry stepped up to the improvised newsstand and was wholly surprised and yet also decidedly not to see Colin Creevy tucking Draco's galleons into a lockbox he had on the table before him. Smiling instinctively as he sensed another person, he finished stowing the money and said cheerfully, "Issue number 94 of Playwitch Weekly, featuring Harry Potter, now on sale for twelve Galleons. How many copies can I send you off with today?"
Then he happened to glance up and gave a loud shriek.
Everyone in the Hall turned their attention to the Potter heir and older Creevy brother, who seemed to be in a rather standoff-ish position. Slowly, very slowly, Harry reached into his pocket, rummaged around a bit, withdrew his hand, and calmly dispensed thirty-six Galleons onto the table. "Three, please." he said silkily.
Colin automatically reached over and plucked three issues from a bag enchanted to be bottomless, his petrified gaze never wavering from Harry's nonchalant one. "My thanks." he said, in that same soft tone, and turned to go. This seemed to snap Colin out of his daze.
"W-Wait! Harry, I can explain!" he pleaded with the boy gliding away from him.
Stopping, Harry turned smoothly, his school robes flaring out behind him like a Dementor's cloak. "One hundred points from Gryffindor, Creevy, for printing pornographic material of a minor." he said lowly, and as he turned to go, the entire Hall shifted their gaze to the hourglasses behind the staff table, where one hundred blood-red rubies were clambering from the lower bulb to the upper one.
"What do you think you're doing, young man?! Waking me up at six o'clock in the morning! I absolutely to let you in!" the Fat Lady screeched quite loudly, though her tone hardly seemed to faze the black-haired boy in front of her. To the contrary, a small smile grew upon his face. It would have been a very pleasant expression, if only his next words never happened:
"Open up or I'll see just what, exactly, happens to an enchanted portrait when it's exposed to paint thinner."
There wasn't anything in between that moment and the portrait being open; it wasn't, Harry blinked, and then it was. His now-creepy smile widening, he glided through the portrait hole and into the Common Room.
It seemed that Ginny, Luna, and a rather abashed Hermione had elected to wait up for him. They were draped over the crimson couches, the first two playing a game of chess and the last reading a book.
Harry Vanished the book and Banished the first magazine to its place, conveniently open to the centrefold he had glanced at earlier. Hermione shrieked and fell off the couch, drawing the attention of the other two away from Harry. He fluidly burned their chess board to a crisp and levitated their magazines, open to the same page as Hermione's, in front of their faces.
Turning back to investigate the flash of heat on their bodies, Ginny and Luna caught sight of the images at the exact same time. Ginny followed Hermione onto the floor with an even higher shriek, but Luna merely hummed appreciatively and smiled pleasantly at Harry. "Thanks very much, Harry!" she said cheerfully, plucking the magazine from the air and slipping it into her bag.
"Fifty points from each of you for purchasing pornographic material of a minor." was the only thing he said, but Luna's smile never wavered
Instead she asked, "Anything else?" resting an elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.
Looking to the ceiling in thought, he hesitated only a moment before musing, "I never knew Draco Malfoy swung that way."
Luna's elbow slipped off the table and sent her sprawling to the floor next to the others, who had stayed down to save face. As he climbed the stairs to the dorm, he called back over his shoulders, "Also, if you wanted to see me like that, why didn't you just ask for a live show?"
The magic of all three girls spiked, setting the furniture on fire.