Disclaimer: We do not own Harry Potter or any of the characters (be thankful). We just like writing about them. In amusing ways. Enjoy, mortals.
The day started off normally enough. Which at Hogwarts tended to be a bad sign.
Unlike every other day, it started off without a crisis of some sort. There were no food fights in the Great Hall. No major cases of hexes going around. The Gryffindors were studious, the Hufflepuffs helpful, and the Ravenclaws brainy as ever. Even the Slytherins seemed only mildly conspiratorial, which for them was a vast improvement over the normal state of affairs.
No trolls appeared in the lower dungeons, and the giant squid chose to lazily enjoy the late fall sunshine of the lake, as opposed to attempting to get its jollies with the castle.
All in all, things seemed to be progressing, contrary to the state of minds of all within the school, normally! And that is when the first victim was discovered.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione were walking down the stairs to Potions when one of the many coats of armour collapsed into the hall in front of them. The trio jumped back in surprise, though only Harry managed to remain standing after the backpedal as Ron's course had somehow sent him careening onto Hermione.
"Ow! Ron! Watch where you're going!" Hermione exclaimed from beneath the lanky redhead.
"I didn't mean to fall into you!" Ron replied grumpily, struggling to get up. "What happened?"
Harry was about to reply when a groan was emitted from the innards of the armour. Hermione's eyebrows rose, and Harry stepped forward to make sure that whoever had been in the armour was all right.
Pulling off the helmet, he discovered a Hufflepuff boy he had never met.
"Are you all…" Harry trailed off when he further examined the boy's appearance. He seemed to have a small reddish substance smothered all over his face, his hair looked to have been mussed into a very unbecoming arrangement that put nearly all of it on end and without pattern.
"Help me pull him out!" Harry cried. The others grabbed the boy's shoulders and pulled him from the armour.
The boy looked worse than Harry had first anticipated. The red, he'd hoped to be blood. But as it appeared, it was something far more sinister.
Lipstick.
The boy's shirt was torn down the middle. Whoever had attacked him had not even bothered with the buttons and saw fit to rend the material nearly in two. Small cuts dotted the boy's arms, and strange, purplish bruises were seen on his neck. But most sinister of all, that caused Ron to nearly faint, were the hundreds of red lips that dotted the boy's chest. All of them the same colour as the mysterious lipstick.
Ron, considerably paler than usual, spoke first. "This poor bloke looks like he's had a bit of a rough, but good time!"
Hermione looked scandalized. "Ron! How could you say such a thing! You know that every time this happens, that there could be a Mary Sue on the loose! We might have to recall the D.A. to deal with this immediately!"
"Actually," Harry said, "the best thing would be to get him to the Madame Pomfrey. Then maybe we won't end up with a detention for being late to Snape's class."
The trio reflected bitterly on the number of occasions they had suffered through Professor Severus Snape's infamous detentions, and decided that it would be best to avoid it. The last time all three of them had been together, Snape had threatened to sick Filch on them. Given the Squib janitor's profuse dislike of teenagers and most humans in general, they decided that detention should be avoided at all costs, lest the cactus and croquet mallet threat be carried out.
As the day was less eventful than usual, there were no patients in the infirmary when Harry, Ron, and Hermione carried the poor, exhausted boy in for care. Though, reflecting upon it, Harry thought that too much care might be the reason for the boy's condition.
"Madame Pomfrey! Someone needs help!" Hermione called as Harry and Ron gently lay the boy on one of the beds. This produced a rather interesting reaction in the boy.
"NO!!! FOR THE LOVE OF MERLIN, NO!!" the boy screamed, struggling to get off the bed. Harry pushed his shoulders down.
"Stop! You're in the infirmary. It's alright!" he said, trying to calm the hysteric student.
Madame Pomfrey came running out of her office at the boy's screams.
"What are you doing to him!?" she demanded.
Ron jumped away from the bed. "We just put him on the bed. He was in one of the suits of armour! I mean, jeesh, we just carried him here."
Pomfrey shoved Harry out of the way to examine her patient.
"Where did you find him?" she asked, not looking at any of the children.
"In the one of the stairwell coats of armour," Hermione answered. "It collapsed in front of us while we were walking to Potions, and Harry heard him moan and that's when we figured out someone was inside of it."
Harry nodded in agreement. "We don't know how he got into the armour in the first place. We just found him the way you see him now."
Pomfrey nodded absently, waving her wand over the boy, who was still struggling to get off of the bed.
"No, please no. No more beds!" he cried.
Pomfrey looked slightly irritated and grabbed a potion from a cart behind her. "Drink this," she ordered. The boy had a moment of self-preservation and downed the potion in one gulp. Exactly one second later, he was out like a lamp.
"You three have an astounding ability to find trouble," Pomfrey chided, turning to face Ron, Harry, and Hermione. "Did you see anyone or anything unusual when you found him?"
The trio exchanged looks, but came up short.
"Nothing," confessed Hermione. "Not even a way for him to be put into that armour."
"It was almost as if it were done by magic," Ron added.
"Very astute, Ron," Hermione replied sarcastically.
Pomfrey turned her attention to Harry, who was characteristically quieter than his other two friends. "How about you, Harry?"
Harry was at a loss. Hermione had explained everything that they knew, and Pomfrey probably knew any other details that they might have missed.
"I don't think so, Madame Pomfrey. The things on his chest looked almost like..." Harry struggled a moment to say the word. "Kisses..." He finally managed to spit it out, yet in two syllables made a perfectly romantic word sound worse than any four letter colourful metaphor ever could.
Ron looked horrified. Hermione looked annoyed.
"Kisses, Harry? Seriously! It was probably some sort of spell that we've never seen before!" Hermione retorted.
Pomfrey shrugged. "Whatever it is, I'll take care of it and be sure to report it to the headmaster. You three should get alone to class. I'll write you a note."
Pass in hand, Harry, Ron and Hermione once again trudged toward potions. At least with Pomfrey's pass, Filch would be avoided for the moment.
"Twenty points from Gryffindor for tardiness. Your pass gets you out of detention. For now." Professor Snape was his normally pleasant self when Harry and the others reached potions.
Harry sighed and set up his cauldron next to Ron. The greasy haired professor, who in Harry's opinion could use to be informed about the wonders of shampoo, had always had a great dislike for Harry and his friends. And the professor seemed to find it his personal mission in life to make Harry's life miserable, if just to keep him humble.
As if the traumas of his life weren't enough. Taking some wurm root, he apathetically started chopping it into concise sections.
"Is your clock wrong, or does the concept of time just not apply to you, Potter?" the sharp tenor of Draco Malfoy inquired from the row next to him. Characteristically, Harry ignored him.
"Ah, again with the silent treatment. You know Goyle, I don't think Potter likes me very much." Draco continued, shaking his head, causing his platinum blond hair to sway back and forth vigorously.
"It could be because he does not hold the same, undying affection you hold for him," Ron said snidely under his breath. Harry laughed out loud, and then regretted it as a book impacted the back of his head.
"Quiet, Potter," Snape growled.
Resisting the urge to stab the professor in the back with his knife, Harry quickly added the wurm root to his potion and attempted not to think about potions. Which surprisingly was not difficult. All the root needed do was congeal with the other ingredients, so it left Harry his allotted thinking time.
"I wonder what happened to the boy in the armour," Ron whispered, stating what Harry had just nearly thought.
"I don't know," Harry whispered back, "but I do know what I saw. Hermione may think otherwise, but I think that there is a Mary Sue on the loose."
"But we haven't seen one in ages! I think it might be another student!" Ron replied, strangely siding with Hermione for once.
"Who in this school would attack another Hogwarts student, and leave kisses and hickies all over him for goodness sake?" Harry hissed, trying to gain strength for his argument.
"Draco?" Ron offered, indicating toward the blond, who presently was found to be fingering his wand. "I mean, he may have that thing for Pansy, but it could be a cover."
Sadly, Harry had to admit Ron had a point. But Draco had never struck before, so in all likelihood it was probably someone else. But who?
The coagulation of the potion was going well, and Snape was looking menacing, so the conversation would have to wait.
But the more Harry thought about it, the fewer answers he could find. Very few students he could think of would deliberately defile another in that manner. At least, those who would did it made sure the other was willing. The boy they found seemed to have been a very unwilling victim. No one, not even a Slytherin would steep to that low a level. Not even Draco Malfoy.
The puzzle persisted in its lack of being solved for the rest of Potions, and with Divination coming up, there would be ample time for discussion.
Professor Trelawney was her usual, mystical self in Divination.
"Today, class," she began in her 'epic' tone of voice, "we will begin our journey to probe the mysteries of Horary Astrology!"
Lavender Brown and Pavarti Patil exchanged awed glances and reverently gazed that the bespectacled professor.
"Please Harry," Ron begged in a whisper, "please tell me this isn't the astrology of hair!"
Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. "She said 'horary' not 'hairy', Ron."
"In class, we will learn how to probe the mysteries that the stars hold for us," Trelawney continued. "There are no questions that you can have that the stars do not already know the answer to."
"Yeah," snickered Ron, "like when the professor will actually get the time of your death right, eh Harry?"
Harry chuckled back. The near constant predictions of his death, while amusing, had not come true. In fact, it was nearly daily that Trelawney found a reason why he was 'doomed by the fates' to some sort of grisly end or another. However, her obsession with his death had done wonders to his grades in Divination, as he and Ron had partnered up to find increasingly creative demises to present to her in the various assignments she gave.
Whether or not the stars held the answers, Harry did not know. He knew that if he asked Hermione about it, she'd give him the 'why are you asking me retarded questions' look, and tell him it was all bollocks.
"Maybe we should ask the stars about who attacked that kid?" Ron suggested.
Harry gave him a quizzical look.
"Hey, we don't have to tell Hermione," Ron said, raising his hands defensively. "I'm just saying, maybe this time it'll work for us?"
Harry had to admit that there really wasn't much that could go wrong with that equation. If anything, it would bring about some amusement, and he and Ron could at least feign their interest in Divination as a subject.
"May as well," he replied with a shrug, grabbing the star charts and his divination book.
After several minutes of calculations, re-calculations, and other confusing variables like drawing lines between the planets on the zodiac, Harry and Ron got their finished star chart. As well as the conclusion that they had no idea what they were looking at.
"Well, we better ask the professor," Ron said dejectedly. The pair sighed and carried their results to Trelawney.
"Professor, could you interpret this for us?" Harry asked.
"Ah, you have completed your first probe into the horoscope's mysteries?" Trelawney asked, her large eyes looking excited behind her bug glasses.
Ron handed over the parchment, and Trelawney began her analysis.
"Hmm…fascinating. Oh, this is rather interesting," she said, ogling over the chart.
"What does it say, professor?" Harry asked.
Trelawney was silent a moment as she continued her examinations. Harry wondered if it was just for effect. Finally, she spoke.
"Well, I see three answers here," she said, looking at the two boys.
Harry and Ron looked at her expectantly, though had to wait a bit longer as Trelawney seemed to be lost in thought.
"What are the answers?" Ron finally asked, slightly impatiently.
"Well, first of all, several violently seductive acts will occur, but none of them will effect you," Trelawney answered. "Secondly, it will have something to do with a relative of yours, Ron."
Harry looked at Ron quizzically. A relative of his? He doubted the twins would do something like that as both were very interested in women. And Ginny just didn't seem to be the type.
"What is the final answer?" Harry asked.
"Oh, it just says that the stars are insulted that you ask them stupid questions."
Ron cocked an eyebrow at Harry. "Thank you, professor. We'll continue to work on our question asking."
Harry and Ron reconvened at their private table to deliberate the results.
"A relative of yours?" Harry asked. "Who could it be?"
Ron looked scandalized. "You've got me. I know that it's not Fred and George, and while Ginny is rather popular with the guys, I don't think that she'd resort to that to get attention. I mean, for real, she's just like our mother."
Harry puzzled over this a moment. Who was the other Weasley? It wasn't likely at all to be from Ron's family. The Weasley family may extend a long ways, but other siblings was out of the question. Neither Weasley parent would be likely to find themselves in extramarital affairs; Mr. Weasley would fear death as a result, and Mrs. Weasley was too loyal to think of it. So who was this mysterious relative that the stars talked about?
"I don't know, Ron. I just don't know." Harry said, shaking his head as class ended. The mystery would need solving, and more than likely, long hours with Hermione and the library were to come.