Chapter Four
"Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts!" Dumbledore had gotten to his feet and was beaming at the students. "Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you!" Dumbledore sat down amid laughter and cheering. Madison snorted as she overheard Harry asking if the headmaster was mad.
"Mad?" Percy responded. "Oh, a little, but he is a genius. Are you going to eat?" Harry looked down at the table, amazement crossing his features as he saw the food had magically appeared.
Madison began to eat, starving, as she hadn't eaten anything all day. She'd been too focused on everything else. She heard Nearly headless Nick say something, and Harry respond, but she wasn't paying any attention until she heard Seamus Finnigan speak up.
"Nearly headless? How can you be nearly headless?" Madison, who remembered what it looked like, looked away as Nick pulled on his left ear, making his head swing off his neck. Looking at Theo, who had been unprepared, she saw him make a disgusted face along with the other first years. She shuddered, pushing her plate away as the conversation drifted to the Bloody Baron. Curious, she glanced over at the Slytherin table. Rumors had flown right after Harry Potter's death about a secret between the Bloody Baron and the Grey Lady, the Ravenclaw ghost, but they had never been confirmed.
"I'm half and half," said Seamus. "Me dad's a muggle. Mum didn't tell him she was a witch til after they were married. Bit of a nasty shock for him." Everybody laughed.
"What about you, Neville?" Ron questioned.
"Well, my gran brought me up and she's a witch," Neville told them. Madison nodded; she'd met Augusta Longbottom on several occasions. "but the family thought I was all muggle for ages. My Great Uncle Algie kept trying to catch me off my guard and force some magic out of me – he pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, I nearly drowned – but nothing happened until I was eight. Great Uncle Algie came round for dinner, and he was hanging me out of an upstairs window by the ankles when my Great Auntie Enid offered him a meringue and he accidentally let go."
Madison shot her head up. "Did he go to trial?" she asked interested. Everybody at the table looked at her in confusion.
"What?" Neville asked blankly.
"Hanging you out of a window is illegal," Madison said slowly, looking at the wizards around her. Theo raised his eyebrows. She'd never spent time with Neville outside of the DA, and though she knew about his parents, how they'd been aurors and were tortured into insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange, she'd never heard him speak about his childhood. It came as a shock.
Her statement was shrugged aside as Dumbledore stood up, and the hall went silent. "Just a few words now that we are all fed and watered." She vaguely listened as he went over the rules, how the forbidden forest was, well, forbidden, briefly mentioned Mr. Filch, quidditch tryouts, and then – "I must tell you that this year, the third floor corridor on the right hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a very painful death." A few people laughed, Harry included, but Madison stared at him intently. She knew very well what was in that corridor, and why. The question was, how did Harry learn the first time around?
"Madison!" she heard Hermione hiss, and she looked around to see everybody standing, Percy waving his arm above the crowd and calling for Gryffindor first years. She hadn't realized they'd already sung the school song, but she was grateful for that; she could barely stand the lyrics. She had always wondered what had possessed the person who'd written the damn thing?
Madison had never been to Gryffindor tower, so she followed behind the crowd very carefully, memorizing the route as she went to avoid getting lost in the future. Not that it would be a huge thing, after all, as far as anyone knew this was her first time setting foot in the castle. But even back then she's never wanted to get lost, she always wanted to know where she was.
They eventually reached the tower after a minor disturbance from Peeves. At the end of that corridor was a bigger woman in the pinkest dress Madison had ever seen, minus the outfits Dolores Umbridge had worn her fifth year. It was here Percy stopped and turned to the waiting eleven year olds.
"This is the entrance to the common room," he explained. "You get in by a password – Caput Draconis." The portrait swung forward. "Watch your step," Percy warned, as they all climbed in, where Percy directed everybody to their dorms. Madison stayed lingering in the middle of the common room with Percy and Theo, the three simply looking at each other, wanting to speak but being unable to for fear of being heard. With a sigh, they went their separate ways.
She and Theo met up in the common room the next morning, Madison quietly telling him about the plan to meet Percy that weekend in the Room of Requirement as they walked down together to the great hall. Neither of them wanted to wait that long to come up with their next plan, but they didn't have a choice. The first week of school was always frantic, and Percy, being a new prefect, wouldn't be able to get away.
"I'm a little hesitant," Theo confessed, as they entered a small room to the side of the hall. "About going to classes, I mean, and performing magic."
"Why?" Madison asked him curiously.
"That spell… the one he used." Theo stopped, looking around before continuing in a low voice. "Yesterday morning, before I left the house to go to the station, I attempted to use a packing spell. It worked, but only barely. My magic was much stronger the first time round."
"Maybe the … what we did weakened our magic?" Madison suggested. "I haven't tried a spell yet."
"Do it now," Theo urged, and she pulled out her wand, checking to make sure nobody was watching, before summoning a quill that had been dropped two feet ahead of them. The object zoomed into her waiting hand, and the two exchanged a look. "We'll see in class," he said heavily, and they left, heading to their table in the Great Hall.
It was easy to get lost at Hogwarts, between the moving staircases and trick doors, not to mention Peeves the Poltergeist, who would "help" students by pointing them in the wrong direction for their classes. Not that Madison or Theo really had a problem with this, they'd both already spent their seven years at the school, but they couldn't appear to know it too well, so they got lost just as much as the rest of them.
In Charms (after Flitwick did roll call and promptly fell off his stack of books when he realized Harry Potter was in the room) they simply discussed magical theory.
Transfiguration, however, was the first class magic was used. After her opening announcement, during which she turned her desk into a pig and back again, they were instructed to take notes, and then, turn a match into a needle. Hermione Granger succeeded first, not even ten minutes in, earning ten points for Gryffindor, and Madison shortly followed, having wanted to make sure she wasn't the first to perform the spell.
She was heavily disappointed in defense against the dark arts. She had known, of course, how bad Quirrel's class would be, and why, but it still bugged her. You-Know-Who had made it inside the school, and the great and powerful Dumbledore hadn't even realized. Oh, she was sure he suspected, but did he ever know for sure before Harry had killed the man?
But the class she'd been looking forward to the most was potions. In her time, she'd been extremely good at the art, as Snape had always called it, and being in Ravenclaw, she hadn't received the sharp edge of his tongue. But being in Gryffindor this time around, she knew that would change. She just hadn't realized how bad the first class would be.
He started by taking roll call, giving Madison and Theo a sharp glance as he saw them sitting at the same table, before looking up from the parchment at Harry's intent gaze. "Harry Potter – our new celebrity." Madison heard Draco's snort but ignored him as Snape continued listing off students' names. When he finished, he set the parchment down on his desk and folded his arms. "You are here," he began in a soft but commanding tone, "to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion making. As there is little foolish wand waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic." Madison listened as he went off on the speech that she'd always assumed he gave every year, but still gave a start when he snapped out "Potter" quite suddenly. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"
"I don't know sir," Harry said quietly.
"Fame clearly isn't everything. Let's try again, Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?"
"I don't know sir," Harry repeated.
"Did you think you wouldn't open a book before coming, Potter?" Silence filled the dungeon. "What is the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?"
"I don't know," Harry said for the third time. "I think Hermione does, though, why don't you try her?" Madison snorted, turning it into a cough as Theo nudged her with his foot.
"Sit down," Snape snapped at Hermione. "For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of living death. A bezoar is a stone taken from the stomach of a goat and it will save you from most poisons. As for monkshood and wolfsbane, they are the same plant, which also goes by the name of aconite. Well? Why aren't you all copying that down?" Snape proceeded to take a point from Gryffindor, and then continued the lesson.
The potion to cure boils was an easy one, and one Madison had perfected during the course of this year, so she wasn't completely concentrating on hers and Theo's cauldron when Snape swept by them and Theo put in the porcupine quills before she'd taken it off the fire.
"Idiot boy!" Snape snarled at Theo after vanishing the potion before it could explode, who flinched back in surprise. "You – Reyes – why weren't you paying attention? Five points from Gryffindor." Madison opened her mouth in shock and would have protested, but the potions master swept away, leaving her almost in tears.
"Theo, you know that potion," she whispered as they walked out of the dungeons an hour later. "What happened?"
He shrugged. "I was trying to prevent Longbottom from doing it – he did that in our first lesson, but Snape wasn't right there to stop it from exploding and he got his arm covered in boils. I didn't know he would snap like that, or blame you, for that matter."
"Oh," she said quietly.
The very next morning, Madison snuck out of the dorm early and headed to the room of requirement, determined to get some reading done before Theo and Percy joined her, but there was no such luck; the two of them were already waiting.
"It's only six," she said in surprise. "We agreed to meet at eight, didn't we?"
"We did," Percy told her, "but I couldn't sleep. I've been here all night, working on homework and a list of things we need to leave alone." She sat down at the table in the middle of the room next to Theo, and slid the list across to her.
1. Let Potter and his friends find the Sorcerer's Stone – they did this the first time, I don't want to mess with their success
2. Let Ginny open the chamber of secrets.
3. Figure out how Black escaped from Azkaban and how Pettigrew got to You-know-Who
4. Find Horcruxes before third task begins
"Is this it?" she asked him, looking up. Percy nodded.
"I have a list of specifics to change, but I thought that needed to be taken care of first."
"Why are we letting your sister open the chamber of secrets?" Theo questioned. "You said you'd explain when Madison got here."
Percy sighed. "Thing is, Ginny and Harry were so happy together before Harry died. If Harry had never saved her life, then I don't know if they would ever have begun dating. I want my little sister to be happy." His tone was mournful, and Madison remembered how Ginny had committed suicide soon after learning Harry'd been killed. "Nobody died that year, so it was fairly harmless, plus Harry himself destroyed a horcrux."
"Okay. But where do we come in for this year?" She waved the list around. "The whole point of us being in Gryffindor was to gain Harry's trust, wasn't it? So what, we just pull him aside, tell him that he's the chosen one and hope he doesn't have us sent to St. Mungos?"
"Not exactly, no," Percy said with a little laugh. "No, I thought you could guide him. He figured everything out on his own, eventually."
"Then what was the point?" Theo said frustrated. "I've become no better than a squib so we can watch Harry prance around and do exactly what happened last time?"
"What do you mean, you're no better than a squib?" Percy demanded. "I thought your magic would have been getting better?"
"He can't perform spells, Percy," Madison said, glancing over at Theo, whose nails were digging deep into his palms with anger. "He manages some, but they're very weak, and others he can't do at all. We don't know why, but it has something to do with the spell Lucius Malfoy used on him in the future, because my magic is just fine."
"But how would it have an effect here?" Percy was dumbfounded. "That doesn't make sense!"
"I know," Theo hissed, standing up abruptly and going to the wall, looking up at one of the paintings. "I'd do research, but it was dark magic and won't be in any book we can get our hands on."
"We'll figure it out, Theo," Madison said gently. "We will."