"Where did you find this?" Hermione asked him.
Harry had been toying with the star shaped-earring between his fingers since he came back to the common room that night. Events from earlier where still replaying in his mind. But he couldn't find any sense in it all.
"I picked it up in the astronomy tower. » He decided for a neutral enough answer.
She didn't seem affected by his answer, it had to mean she genuinely didn't suspect anything.
He couldn't suspect her.
Nothing made sense.
The strange happenings of that day were then packed somewhere far in his brain, surely through some unconscious will.
…
"I can't meet Hagrid tonight I'm sorry. I have to go to the library."
"You're always in the library Hermione, surely it won't refuse you access if you don't go there for an hour time? » asked Ron. « Besides, it's been a week since Hagrid's been asking us to visit him."
"Can't do tonight, I'm sorry." She said with a tone of finality and walked away.
"She's strange these days Hermione, don't you think?"
"I guess she has her reasons, Ron." Harry replied with a fake tone of detachment.
The Marauder map showed Hermione to be exactly where she said she'd be. Her name appeared in the library, and most importantly, it was alone.
Harry drank the strong tea offered by Hagrid with more ease.
…
They were asked to brew a Regenerative potion today. Of course, half of the ingredients had to be comprised of insects that crawled with unmatched speed as soon as Harry or Ron made a move to grab them. In the table next to his and Ron's, Malfoy was having no such difficulty with his own insects. Harry hated to acknowledge the fact that the bastard was gifted when it came to potions. The only person who managed better results was Hermione. An immense sense of pride overcame him at the thought of Malfoy Senior giving his son an earful for being thus beaten in class by a muggle born.
The scene forming in his mind made the mysterious earring incident come back to the forefront of his mind. As such, he didn't notice Ron adding an extra beetle leg into their shared cauldron until it was too late. The content that now was an ugly shade of purple bubbled and boiled over the cauldron to the table and down on the floor. It emitted a foul smell that made Ron, who was right above it, faint on the spot, as well as Neville, who was unfortunate enough to have been asking Ron for an ant. His own seemed to have fled him like the plague.
A gloomy voice snarled next to Harry.
"What have we got here, Potter. Not only you decide to waste valuable ingredients, but also choose to render unconscious other students in my class? I am afraid this will cost twenty points from Gryffindor."
« But… »
"And you will stay behind to clean up the mess. » Snape added, his tone final.
Harry cursed the man under his breath. Fortunately, Ron and Neville were slowly getting conscious again. But the purple hue of their hair was in itself less than fortunate.
He stayed behind in the classroom. Snape had left him to his own device, and Hermione had to bring Ron and Neville to the hospital wing.
He scrubbed the purple moss that seemed to adhere to the dungeon's floor despite the numerous scourgify spells he tried. If only Hermione was here, she surely knew how to remove that goo that has spread all across the floor.
Crawling under the table next to the one he previously occupied, Harry noticed a parchment on the floor that went untouched by the purple nightmare. It was severely balled-up but he managed to flatten it enough to make out the moving drawing that was sketched onto the parchment.
An inked-drawn girl with a mass of curls and faint traces of freckles on her nose was intently stirring the content of the cauldron in front of her. Harry gasped as his miniature best friend looked in his direction and blinked.
He recognized the style in this drawing. Its sibling was crunched in his bag since their last Defense Against the Dark Arts class, when professor Lupin had failed to show up and Snape had taken over. Harry had played against Hufflepuff on the Quidditch pitch that same evening. And true to the drawing's prediction, Harry had indeed been thrown off his dear nimbus that day. Just as Malfoy had hinted in ink.
It couldn't make any sense.
Thank you for reading!