Hey, look, I found another oneshot that's just been lurking on my hard drive. This takes place sometime in November of 1993 in Mary Potter.

Hermione flushed to the roots of her hair. "No, of course not – why would I -?"

The boys stared at her in shock. "Why wouldn't you?" they asked in one voice.

"It'd – it'd be like – like… like the two of you snogging!"

Fred, or at least the twin who was calling himself Fred today (the one with the star-shaped pattern of freckles on his left cheek), looked to his brother in confusion. George (the one with the thinnest of scars just to the outside of his right eyebrow) hesitated, then shrugged and gave him the faintest of nods. Fred smirked.

Hermione glared at them. "What?" she demanded. They knew she hated it when they did the silent-twin-talk thing and left her out of the loop.

"It's really not," Fred claimed.

"Nah, not at all," George confirmed.

"What's not?"

"Snogging yourself," "and snogging each other."

The bushy-haired bookworm was torn between curiosity and a knee-jerk reaction that screamed wrong in the back of her mind. She would examine her socially mandated reaction to the suggestion of incestuous behavior later, she decided. For now, curiosity won out, and she crushed the latter thought with the same single-minded ignoring that which allowed her to function in close proximity to other, time-turned versions of herself.

"How on Earth would you know?"

The matched pair shrugged, false innocence practically radiating off of them. "We tried it, of course," George answered.

"That's the whole reason we stole Percy's time turner back in third year."

"Yeah, this idiot insisted he was the better snog!"

"You said the same thing, you prat!"

"Yeah well, I was right, wasn't I?"

"Don't listen to Georgie – he's a liar," Fred insisted.

"So… you snogged yourselves, and then each other… as an experiment?" God, the magical world was absurd some times. If Hermione had told herself five years ago that she would one day say that sentence aloud…

"Erm," "well," "no," "not exactly."

The girl pinched the bridge of her nose. "For the love of magic, spit it out!"

The boys looked uncharacteristically serious. "Well, Firecracker, it's like this…" Fred started.

"When a boy reaches a certain age, he starts to have… feelings. Of a certain physical sort."

"Urges, you might say."

Hermione sighed. "I have had the sex talk before, thanks."

The boys flushed, but soldiered on, Gryffindor bravery to the fore. "Well, erm…" "it's not entirely unusual for twins to…" "go through that sort of thing," "around the same time…" "And for the sake of convenience…"

"Are – are you trying to tell me you'd been snogging each other…"

"Non-experimentally, you might say," George confirmed.

"For years," Fred said boldly, almost confrontationally.

The Ravenclaw felt her cautiously amused smile grow plastic and fake as the reality that her friends (for once) weren't joking set in. "That's erm…" wrong! Absurd! Ridiculous, and not in a funny way. Please tell me you're kidding – boys don't – and you're brothers – you shouldn't…

Fred snorted as awkward silence filled the empty space between them. "Figures you'd be just as judgmental as everyone else."

"I'm not being judgmental!" Hermione snapped.

George laughed harshly. "Sure you're not. And I'm Bonny Prince Charles."

"I'm not!" She hadn't freaked out at them or run off back to the tower to avoid spilling all the first thoughts that she instinctively knew would be the end of their friendship if she said them (weird, freaks, incest, wrong, mental). She couldn't, wouldn't risk losing two of her closest friends over a hasty, ill-considered word. (If there was one thing she had managed to learn from Snape in the past few months, it was the value in thinking before speaking. Thoroughly.) She needed time to process – time to come to terms with… whatever this was. "Wait –" she exclaimed, grasping at straws in an attempt to change the subject before she fucked everything up. "Who else knows?"

The boys exchanged an inscrutable look before they answered. "Prince and Strega caught us earlier this year." "Oliver." "Lee knows – he has to know." "Stacy turned us down to Hogsmeade last year." "Luna, probably. Mrs. Lovegood was the first one to spot it." "Bill." "Charlie might suspect, but he doesn't know." "Mum suspects, too." "It's a… a Prewett thing, apparently…" "Quirk of the family magic, soul-bonded twins…" "Her younger brothers," "Fabian and Gideon," "they were in a triad with Marlene McKinnon."

"A – a triad? Like a couple? There are – this is… normal? But no, it can't be – you said others had been judgmental…"

This time they looked at her, warily, as though expecting her to explode at any moment. "It's… not unheard of," George said carefully.

"Not common."

"More popular on the continent, or so we hear."

"The more unusual part is, well… not the threesome, but us."

Hermione thought she understood Fred's point – it was, after all, where her initial hang-up had gotten caught – but she was still wary of outright accusing them of incest. "So the, um… the two of you? Are… together?"

Fred made a sort of waffling motion with his hands, as George hedged: "Technically…"

"Technically?" she repeated drily. "What is that supposed to mean? Surely it's a straightforward yes or no question, whether you're… more than brothers."

Fred grinned. "Of course we're more than brothers. We're twins."

"But it's not," George added. "Simple, that is. Come on, let's sit."

He led the way to the transfigured sofa (today's tartan pattern an homage to House McGonagall), Fred following behind her, as though to ensure she wouldn't suddenly run off.

"Why isn't it simple?" she asked when they were finally seated, herself perched awkwardly on one arm as they lounged at the other end. Their practiced nonchalance didn't quite fool her – after learning to read approval in Snape's expressions, the anxiety in the tension of their body language was clear.

George sighed. "You… you can't really understand what it was like, I don't think, growing up together."

"We don't finish each other's sentences on purpose, you know," Fred added. "Well, most of the time."

"We didn't think of ourselves as individuals until… third year, I think."

"Some time around then, yeah. We were always an 'us,' a 'we,' you know?"

"We hadn't spent more than half an hour apart, ever, until we started having different electives."

"And even then, the soul bond, it's like… sharing a brain, literally, sometimes."

"Like one mind with two bodies, almost." George sounded a little… wistful? She wondered why.

Fred nodded. "Saying I'm Fred and he's George means… almost nothing to us, honestly. If I think about it, I can remember what George has been doing when we're not together, and vice versa."

"It's more noticeable when we don't spend all our time together."

"And it's still a bit weird, honestly, having to think of ourselves as two separate people."

In that moment, Hermione realized that this must be the real reason they had been so upset about her labeling prank – she knew now that running the risk of expulsion meant very little to them, but it sounded as though they really did think of themselves as Gred-and-Forge, rather than as two individuals with their own personalities.

Remembering memories that had happened to the other sounded… frankly a bit disturbing. Like a very limited, but constant form of legilimency. It might, she thought uneasily, be inevitable, thinking of themselves as one person, if they had never had any privacy even at that level. It had taken her almost the entire summer to come to terms with effectively having been Ginny for an entire year, and distance herself from the younger girl's experiences and emotions and thought processes (which were quite unlike her own in some ways, and disturbingly similar in others).

If she had grown up so close to another person, if that had been her only experience of how things should be, she didn't know that she would have been able to do it. She was practically itching to see what she could find in the library on soul bonds like the one they had mentioned, but George was still talking, and the conversation was moving on without her.

"It's not simple because, well… We both like girls, but it was natural to… experiment with each other."

"Beats snogging a pillow for practice," Fred joked weakly.

She gave him an equally weak smile in response, flushing horribly as she realized that 'practice' probably hadn't stopped at snogging. She had had the sex talk, after all (several, over the years, in fact, from her parents and her Year 7 teacher, and Madam Pomfrey when she went to ask about spells to deal with her period and magical birth control at the end of the previous year), and from the way they were talking, it sounded as though they thought of their activities less as incestuous and more as… masturbatory. "I… see," she said, after what was, probably, too long of a pause. "And – and you've only told… seven? Eight people?"

They shook their heads slowly. "No, we've only told you," "and Bill," "and Oliver." "And Oliver doesn't know about the… snogging."

Yes, that pause definitely suggested that it wasn't just snogging. Her blush, slightly faded, came back in full force. The boys didn't appear to notice.

"Nah, just why we're the best beaters he's ever likely to fly with." "Prince and Strega don't know about the bond." "They might think the snogging was covering up for a prank, actually." "That'd explain why the whole school hasn't heard about it." "Lee's never said anything," "but he's not an idiot," "he can't not know." "Stacy thinks we're a bit weird for both asking her out, but she didn't ask why." "Mum," "and Charlie," "they know about the bond, and so does Percy," "but we're pretty sure they don't know about…" "Anything else." "And we've certainly never talked about it."

Hermione let them continue to talk, though she had gotten stuck back at 'we've only told you.' "Why?" she asked, slightly hysterically.

"Why not talk about it with Mum?"

"Would you talk about snogging and stuff with your mum?"

"I – what? Maybe? Okay, probably not, but… No – I mean, why did you – why are you telling me now?"

The boys exchanged another look, then shrugged uncomfortably. "It came up," Fred answered.

"We… trust you."

"You might be our best friend, Firecracker."

"I'm…? But – what about Lee? Or your other dorm-mates? Or your Quidditch team? Or –"

Fred cut her off. "Try to give a bird a compliment, George, and you see where it gets us?"

"Indeed, brother, indeed. It's true, Hermione."

"You don't see any of them, here, helping us with research, do you?"

"Well, no, but –"

"Or sharing their own secrets. Merlin – the things you've been reading – and the time turner…"

Hermione considered this for a moment – all the secrets she had been keeping for what felt like at least half a year (though for them it had been only two months and a bit) from her so-called best friends – before she answered hesitantly: "I… I think you might be my best friends, too. Um… thank you for telling me?" she added belatedly.

She still wasn't sure what she thought about the whole matter (still needed time to sit and think) but she did understand that she was one of three people in the whole world they had talked to about this, one of three people to whom they had actually explained themselves, and she couldn't help but feel a bit warm and fuzzy that they trusted her with what was, apparently, one of their biggest secrets, incest be damned. It was a little funny how the revelation of their trust and friendship almost completely overwhelmed that bit. But honestly, it wasn't like that should have any effect on her, anyway.

Apparently thank-you was an acceptable answer, because the twins relaxed genuinely almost at once. Then Fred clapped his hands and grinned, returning to their earlier discussion with no hesitation. "So, Firecracker, you've never been even the least bit curious about what it would be like to snog yourself?"

Hermione could feel herself blushing again. "I, well – that is… I've never – it's not… no."

"Wait," George said, looking a bit stunned. "Are you trying to say you've never been kissed?"

She shook her head, mute with embarrassment.

The boys exchanged a look, and a smirk. The girl began to feel distinctly nervous, just before they said, "We can fix that," "if you like?" "Seems like a damn shame, you know," "a pretty, feisty girl like you," "never having been kissed." "And we're not bad," "if we do say so ourselves." "Lots of practice, you see…" "We could teach you," "if you wanted, of course." "No pressure." The last bit was said together, belied by their expectant grins.

"I'll… think about it," she said, still red-faced and more than a little uncomfortable.

They gave her their best, most charming grins. "Okay."

And she did. Think about it, that was. She could hardly stop thinking about it. Any of it.

She couldn't help wondering what it would be like to be kissed – a subject she had not previously given much thought to, outside of skimming the occasional description in a romantic novel. She brought to mind every movie scene she could think of, every story where the hero's first kiss was the highlight and the climax of the tale. She thought of her parents' occasional serious snog, on New Year's or their anniversary, when they thought she was safely otherwise occupied, and the everyday, near-chaste pecks on the cheek or the lips they allowed her to see. She considered the furtive couples who now seemed to be everywhere she looked in the halls of Hogwarts, holding hands and sneaking into alcoves when there were no teachers about. To her complete and utter shock, some of them were in her very own year!

She spotted Leanne Malone and Eric Bennett on her way to Charms one day, and Terry Boot with Tracey Davis disappearing into an empty classroom after class. She had caught Blaise Zabini practicing his charms on Stephen Cornfoot, Sally-Anne Perks, and Sophie Roper, the cad. (Apparently they had similar taste in secluded nooks, he for snogging and she for time-turning.)

She couldn't help pondering what it would feel like, strong hands and arms holding her close, as firm lips were pressed to her own. What did kisses taste like? Would it be… strange? Wet? Would there be… tongue?

She also couldn't help dwelling on the boys' revelations. Why had they told her about… them? Was it… was it because they fancied her? She did find a book detailing the sort of bond they claimed to have, and had been more than a little disturbed by what she had found: that soul-bonded twins almost always ended up in a triadic relationship – they were so accustomed to sharing everything that it would be stranger for them not to share a partner than to do so. If that was the case, and they did fancy her, her dismissal of their incestuous behavior as nothing to do with her might, in fact, be premature. It might, after all, have a great deal to do with her, if she wanted it to.

And to her very, very great embarrassment, she thought she might.

She couldn't help, in the privacy of her own dorm, behind drawn curtains, picturing those so-similar, strong, Quidditch-roughened hands playing with short, red hair, and brown eyes smirking at each other as they came together, mirroring each other's movements perfectly, closing the gap between them and – no! It was wrong to think of her friends that way, even if they probably wouldn't have minded… or if they might have found it flattering, even, how hot and bothered those imagined scenes made her, how they made her squirm, uncomfortable, but unable not to think of them, together.

After all, she had decided, after many, many hours of reflection – it wasn't like – like they would have children together, with birth defects because of their relatedness. That was the real danger of incest, and the reason it was so wrong, wasn't it?

And it wasn't as though there weren't plenty of alliances in magical families that weren't technically what muggles would consider incestuous, anyway, with first-cousin purebloods thinking it perfectly acceptable to marry each other so long as they didn't have the same family name, especially among the so-called Sacred Twenty-Eight. Lilian had once outlined the Rosier family tree for her, and they had married their maternal first- and second-cousins so many times, Hermione thought it properly ought to be depicted as more of a sort of multi-dimensional argyle pattern than a tree.

She had, briefly, at that point, wondered whether magic somehow prevented the more egregious problems that so many generations of inbreeding ought to create, but that wasn't the point.

Wizards did have their own concept of incest, and just like muggles, they mostly worried about the fate of the children of such a union: the only clear references she could find to siblings having offspring were in reference to the Black family in the 17th Century, and they were very closely linked to the entire family apparently going insane. That lasted for seven very short, very wild generations before they apparently got a handle on things and re-established themselves as near-royalty among wizards (she might argue that they had never actually recovered, given recent history, but they seemed to have been… less mad, for a while, historically, at least). The overly-close matches were considered to have caused madness in the children, but… well, those accounts sounded awfully superstitious to Hermione, and anyway, as she had already thought, regarding genetics, it wasn't as though the boys would be having children together, anyway.

So was it really any worse for two brothers to do… things with each other than any other pair of boys?

She tentatively thought that… maybe it wasn't.

And she had already come to terms with the widespread acceptance of homosexuality in the magical world, back in first year, when her housemates had blatantly informed her that she knew basically nothing about what was 'normal' in their world, and she ought to stop trying to act as though she did.

She spent several more hours wondering if she had been too quick to accept the situation simply because she liked the twins, and they were her friends, and she didn't want to not accept them and their… rather unconventional relationship before she decided… so what if she had?

It wasn't like she was going to tell anyone anything about this, so no one would know that she had been less than objective in her evaluation of the issue, and if there was one thing her reading had shown her over the past few (subjective) months, it was that the world really was less black and white than she had thought as a child. Opinions and emotional intent could and sometimes did matter every bit as much as cool and objective logic. If that was true for magic, she didn't see why it couldn't be true for her social life as well.

Once she had come to that conclusion, however, her mind had wandered back into speculative territory. She couldn't help putting together the things she had read in the book about soul bonds and the boys saying we trust you and you're our best friend and wondering what they actually wanted from her. Was this offer of kissing lessons a prelude to asking her to be their girlfriend? Was that something she wanted? Was she ready for it? She wasn't even sure she was ready for kissing, let alone being someone's girlfriend, or worse (well, maybe not worse, but certainly more daunting), two someones'!

And what if they didn't want to date her, afterward? Would this change things between them? Would it ruin their friendship? It might seem ridiculous, since they had been at each other's throats just at the beginning of term, but their Truce and the time they had spent together since had put all that behind them. She hated the thought of ruining what was (sadly, or perhaps terrifyingly) quickly becoming the most open and genuine friendship she had at the moment. (Not that she told them everything, but they were older and more mature than Lizzie and Lilian, and less forbidding than Snape, and they had gotten to know each other quite well brewing the Veritaserum, and…)

She felt so betrayed – this always seemed so much easier for the heroines in the novels she had read before Hogwarts!

And yet she was intensely curious, about kissing, and about what they were expecting, and the more she thought about it, the more thoroughly her thoughts were consumed, to the point that Snape rebuked her for her inattention during their weekly meeting, and it took her three tries to muster enough concentration for Professor McGonagall's latest spell, and she actually considered writing her mother for advice (though she didn't do it, because she still wasn't sure how she felt about her mother after the revelation of Mabon, and besides, she was fourteen! She should be able to figure out if she was ready for snogging for herself!).

And all the while, she continued meeting up with the boys for several hours each day, working on their copy of the Marauders' Map, testing new potions, and learning how arithmancy was used in spell creation two years early, or just talking about Hermione's reading or the boys' latest product ideas and whatever happened to be happening around the school – upper-year gossip and the latest developments in the Binns Petition and the Slytherins' crusade against flobberworms, which Fred and George found highly amusing, though they did feel rather sorry for Hagrid. It was easy, talking to them, spending time together, just as they had nearly every day for the past six (nearly seven (or twenty-ish)) weeks. If she didn't know better, she would think that they had never offered to kiss her, had never told her about the soul bond or their… experiments with each other.

But she did know better.

She didn't think she was imagining the new hint of tension between the three of them – that little frission of potential and maybe and we could…

She wondered if she was overthinking all of it.

And then, when Fred (today the twin with the eyebrow scar) said, firmly, "Yes, you probably are," and George asked, "What are you overthinking?" she realized that she'd wondered it aloud, and in their company.

If that wasn't a Freudian slip, she didn't know what was.

"Your, erm… offer. From last week. About, um… kissing." She bit her lip to stop her stuttering (both habits that infuriated Snape, and which she was trying to quit, but at the moment she couldn't – focus, Granger!) suddenly very conscious of its chapped, un-glossed surface, and oh, God, when was the last time she had brushed her teeth? What if they wanted to do it right now – she hadn't prepared at all, and – and her hair was probably a mess (it was always a mess, the best she could do was pin it up or braid it out of the way, and today she hadn't even done that) and she was wearing her everyday uniform and no makeup at all, and she really felt that one ought to try to make some sort of effort to dress up for talks about kissing, especially when they might more or less immediately lead to kissing, and –

The boys laughed, a warm, rolling, mischievous sound, which always seemed to invite anyone who heard it to join in the joke. Her own lips curved up of their own accord. "Yeah," Fred said, as George nodded. "You're definitely overthinking it," "if that look of horror is anything to go by."

"I'm not horrified," she said defensively, feeling her face grow very, very warm.

"Hermione," "Firecracker," "we meant it when we said," "only if you want to." "No pressure." "We won't be offended if you say no." "We aren't offended that you wanted to think about it." "We don't have any expectations." "We just offered because we're friends." "And we thought you might be curious." "But you are probably overthinking it."

"I am," she admitted, very quietly, but, she thought, under the circumstances, admirably firmly.

"Overthinking it?" George asked, raising an amused eyebrow.

"Or curious?" Fred followed with a teasing smirk.

Oh, God, she was so red – she could feel it. "Both?" Her answer came out more as a question than she had intended.

The boys exchanged one of their looks that she couldn't read, and for once she was less offended and more relieved not to know.

"Well…" George began slowly. "I think we know a solution," "to both of those problems," "if it is, in fact," "a solution you're looking for…"

She didn't trust her voice at the moment. With her luck it would come out as an embarrassing squeak. She just nodded, first hesitantly, then rather more firmly. A slow, genuine smile bloomed on both boys' faces at once – not the smile that generally accompanied pranks and experiments: a less-manic, more joyful expression. She didn't think she'd ever seen it before, but she rather thought she might like to see more of it in the future.

"I – I don't know what I'm doing, though – I haven't ever – and I've not prepared – I don't even know how to prepare – my clothes and hair – and –"

Thankfully, Fred cut her off before she could worry aloud about the state of her breath, and not with a laugh. He stepped close enough to lay a single finger across her (chapped, un-glossed) lips, and her words halted with the feared embarrassing squeak, a cut off 'I', abandoned to process the completely overwhelming, completely foreign sensation that there was a boy touching her face, her lips, his one finger hotter, she thought than any part of her, enough so that she could not help but be hyper-focused on that brief point of contact.

Then, predictably, he broke the moment, and the tension.

"Look, Georgie! I found the off button!"

She jerked her head back from his touch. "Shut up, you!"

But then she was distracted again as George, who had come closer when she wasn't looking, skimmed his hand down her arm and tangled her fingers with his, and pulled her toward the sofa, today an over-stuffed, dappled greyish white, like a trapped cloud.

"Come sit," he said, redundantly, as she was already halfway there. She could feel Fred trailing behind her, and was unsurprised when he fell into place beside her, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, too warm, but in a good way, she thought. Maybe. It certainly suited the fluttering in her stomach. One of George's hands was still holding hers, though their arms were now awkwardly across their bodies, inclining her shoulders toward his, ever so slightly, leaning back against the hot line of Fred's chest, the curve of his arm – it all fit.

It was madness, surely, how well the three of them seemed to just… fit together, sitting here, as they had half a hundred times before at least, but never before like this – a proper tangle of warm limbs surrounded by the wholesome, slightly spicy scent of cinnamon and cloves and soap and boy that she knew she associated with the twins, though she had, somehow, never properly noticed it before, and the tingling excitement of anticipating whatever was going to happen next, clinging tenuously to the edge of nervousness in the face of the as-yet-unknown, lest she make a fool of herself.

When she reached up automatically to push a stray curl back behind her ear, the boys' free hands beat her to it.

"You know, we're not dressed up, either," Fred said conversationally, addressing, she realized after half a beat, her hasty, nigh-forgotten protestations against her own readiness only minutes (perhaps ages) before.

"And we love your hair," George added. "It's wild." "Chaotic." "We like chaos."

Hermione had to laugh at that – it was such an understatement. Chaos, confusion, and consternation were like air and water to the twins. She didn't know if they could go a day without causing some form of mayhem, or at least planning to do so.

The laugh came out high and breathy – nervous – prompting Fred to murmur, behind her, and sounding suddenly very close to her ear, "Relax, Firecracker."

"This isn't, like, some sort of test, or something," George assured her.

"It's like Sorting – you can't fail." She could hear the smirk in Fred's voice as surely as she saw it on George's face.

"Lee said that," she muttered. "You arseholes told us we'd have to wrestle a troll or we'd go to Hufflepuff."

They laughed, almost overwhelming in stereo. She could feel Fred's chest move against her own as his body shook with the tiny exhalations. "Didn't you know…" he said, then trailed off until she looked over her shoulders to meet his eyes.

"We're liars," George finished.

She whipped around to look at him, his face now only inches from her own, and he leaned in, pressing his lips to hers with unerring accuracy. They were smooth and dry, and if it weren't for their slight movement as he smiled against her, she would have said they were not altogether different from her own. She froze at the suddenness of the touch, and, after perhaps two seconds, he pulled away, grinning broadly, eyes sparkling with mirth. His breath, exhaled so close to her, still, was faintly minty, and she rather suddenly wondered if he had slipped a candy when she wasn't looking.

Before she could begin to feel self-conscious again about the state of her own breath (Why hadn't she thought of mints? Or gum?) Fred leaned around, his free hand guiding her chin to the side and up – had they always been so much taller than she? And stole a simple, chaste kiss of his own – this one more teasing than George's firm approach, brushing lightly – almost tentatively – across her lips, followed by a darting peck at the nearer corner of the lower one.

George's mouth traced a tickling, nibbling line up the sharp edge of her jaw, from chin to ear, before, rather to her surprise, engulfing its lobe, his tongue hot and wet and strange but not altogether… bad. Shivering, yes, and throwing her writhing insides into a riot, yes, but not bad. In any case, she had no time to dwell on it as Fred latched his mouth onto hers, no longer tentative or teasing, but authoritative in its movements.

She whimpered as she felt herself respond to their ministrations, her own lips moving of their own accord as she pressed herself against the twin at her back. There was a hand playing with her hair, and one cradling her head between itself and the one at her chin. One of hers was resting on the face that was still doing distracting things to her ear (Who knew ears were so sensitive?) and nibbling at her neck. And the other was held firmly by one whose thumb was stroking across her palm, rhythmically, in a way that ought to have tickled, but didn't – well, it did, but not in a way that meant she wanted it to stop. Everything smelled even more strongly now of that musky, spicy, boyish scent, of soap and cinnamon and… and camphor?

That wasn't right!

She sat bolt upright, turning toward the neglected cauldron on the work-bench just as it exploded, thoroughly ruining the moment (and the potion which was intended to turn the recipient into a giant canary for several minutes per drop). Fortunately the boys had been slightly less distracted than Hermione – she had no idea where her wand even was, and if she had known, she probably wouldn't have been able to snap off a shield charm in time. As it was, every organic compound in the lab except for the three students, their hastily-shielded couch and clothing, and the ingredients in their stasis-charmed and warded cabinet, was instantaneously transmuted to piles of obnoxiously yellow feathers in a puff of smoke.

As the smoke and the sounds of shattering glass (ink bottles and stirring rods and lab equipment falling to the floor as wooden shelves and tables vanished) died away, the Marauders' Map wafted down and landed in Hermione's lap, with what she felt certain was some sort of situationally directed prop-comedy charm. Its otherwise blank surface read:

Mr. Moony suggests that whatever greasy potions-git is attempting to damage our marvelous creation will have to try a bit harder than that.

Mr. Wormtail agrees with Mr. Moony, and invites the vandal who has attacked our property to do his worst!

Mr. Padfoot extends his condolences, for there is, in fact, nothing any saboteur could do that the Marauders will not already have thought of, so he might as well go boil his head.

Mr. Prongs bids said saboteur good day, and advises him to keep it up, and see where it gets him, the prat!

Hermione sighed as the boys, already squabbling about which of them had been responsible for taking the cauldron off the fire, hauled her to her feet to help assess the damage and see whether anything could be done to reverse it, all snogging and discussions thereof apparently on hold.

It had been nice while it lasted, at least.