It was cold, the air full of rushing wind and almost frozen particulates if water, steel clouds an impenetrable barrier between the earth and the sun, but there was a sort of burning feeling that raced across Hermione's skin. She didn't have quite the words to describe it beyond "wrong", something was wrong and her skin was screaming at her to move and fix it. She wished she could.
She tried to ignore her searing skin and the rain tearing at her eyes that were dried again as soon as the wind flushed her face a little more. She kept her dry eyes focused on the Quidditch match and tried to suppress what could only have been baseless superstition.
Yes. That was it! Superstition, nothing to it. Nothing was going to go wrong, everything was fine and normal and she was just a silly paranoid little girl.
She was so impossibly close to convincing herself to believe the train of thoughts that circled in her mind when she could see Hagrid pull his binoculars away from his beady eyes.
"Bloody Hell," Ron said, quiet in a way that made him sound scared as his pale face turned whiter. She flicked her eyes to the spot where her friends were focusing and watched in horror as the bludger flew at Harry.
The ball was meant to be batted around by beaters, not chase players like it had a vendetta against them. The ball tailing Harry who had to keep diving and darting in all manner of strange directions seemed to be ignoring its nature. Ed, Fred, and George all dived after the demonic ball, game forgotten, bats at the ready.
Ed got there first, steadying the wooden bat in his metal hand before hitting the ball with all the force he could. It was an insane hit; the ball flew over the stands and away from the pitch, disappearing in the distance for a moment. If it were a normal bludger then it would have been out of commision for the rest of the game. But it was no normal bludger. It passed just beyond the threshold of Hermione's vision before it turned around and began hurtling back towards them.
"Forget the fucking game!" Ed yelled so loudly Hermione was sure the beasts in the forbidden forest could hear it "Get off the broom and don't get hurt!"
Harry nodded meekly and dived towards the ground, hesitating only for a moment when the snitch zipped past his ear. In that brief moment the bludger caught up to him and he didn't even have time to reach for the snitch as he was being shoved away from the snitch by something much more considerate than an enchanted bludger.
"The game doesn't matter!" Ed had been shouting so much Harry was sure his lungs must burn but he needed to yell to be heard over the commotion of the crowd and the roaring of the wind. Harry hit the ground and ran from the hurtling ball, darting past Madame Hooch as she declared the rest of the game was to be called off, then through the bleachers as people flocked down from them. He kept running and running until every fibre of every one of his muscles protested his every move and his lungs felt like they were filling with ice.
A conglomerate of voices called out a series of spells until, at last, with a final yell in the distinctive tone of one albus Dumbledore, his pursuer fell lamely to the ground and rolled pathetically on the slight slope of the grassy terrain.
He collapsed a moment after, trying to draw air into his deprived lungs as the moisture from the grass soaked into his clothes and he hadn't the energy to care. Hagrid was by his side soon enough with a bottle of water that he gratefully took and greedily gulped at. There was this sort of vague outrage that hummed through the air, whether it was from the teachers who wanted to know who was responsible for the enchantments placed upon the bludger immediately, or from the Slytherin team who were pissed they had lost their chance for an easy win against Gryffindor - especially Draco who swore he was seconds away from catching the snitch when the game was called off.
Harry couldn't sleep. There hadn't been any students willing to own up to the bludger incident and his usual culprit was out if the question because there was no way Draco could have spelled the ball mid game. He needed to get up, get out of his room, get away from Ron's snoring, think in solitude and perfect silence. So he stood, slipped the invisibility cloak over himself and quietly made his way out of the dorm and then out of the common room.
He wasn't quite sure where he was going. His feet were carrying him as if they had their own consciousness and the rest of Harry's body was merely their cumbersome passenger. Still, they knew to tread silently and which paths to follow without leading him to certain death or a labyrinth of moving floors and stairs that had no rhyme or reason to them that would sooner have him find the Minotaur (he'd have to ask someone if that particular creature existed, actually) than a way back to the common room high up in Gryffindor tower.
With a distinct lack of anything maze-like or belonging to any myth he had not seen released into actuality before, he found himself standing somewhere familiar. He didn't know how or why he was there.
The school's medical bay stood before him, dim lights shining out from within, casting a faint orange glow that flickered like the conjured fires that produced it were doing the same. The door was hanging wide open, like it was being held that way, practically inviting rule-breaking wanderers in. He held his breath, aware of the gentle, undecipherable sound of nondescript words that were barely more than whispers, and passed through the open door.
He wished he hadn't.
Filch's cat had been left hanging like a grim message. This wasn't like that. This was no message; this was an attack that was meant to say nothing more than "you're not safe" because they could not yet be sure of exactly who it was that was in danger.
For, who was like Colin Creevey?
Depending on what way you looked at it, everyone would find something they had in common with the scrawny first year who held his camera so tightly one might mistake it for his life support. Everyone with an ounce of paranoia flowing through their arteries and veins or swimming in the pit of their stomach or hijacking a lobe of their brain would be able to think of a reason that it might be them: they might be the next to wind up flat on their back, stiff as a board in the medical bay, suspended in a still frame of whatever it was they happened to be doing before it got them.
"It's happening again, the chamber has opened," Madam Pomfrey spoke with a desperate urgency that was so opposed to her usual calming tones that never seemed to dip or sway from their soothing monotone. Now, though, they dipped, swayed, danced, leaped, and from from that balance into a kind of chaos that was also in the manic light in her eyes and the trembling of her pale limbs.
"I fear it may be," Dumbledore, however, remained cool and nonchalant, like nothing was anything different from what he had suspected would happen. It was like he was above the school, watching over every piece of disorder and giggling as he watched the students and staff try to fix what he could have done with little more than a wave of his wand and an amount of effort comparable to a single grain of sand.
Harry didn't stick around to see what else they had to say. He wanted to. But he just couldn't.
It was his traitorous feet again, rushing him away before he had time to compute the waxy statue that stared blankly at a ceiling it couldn't see and clutched a camera so tightly its knobbly knuckles had turned white.
When Harry woke up the next morning there was so little clarity in the world around him he felt it was fair to hope last night had been a twisted dream. There were no overzealous first years laying paralysed in hospital beds.
Except, there were. And everyone knew. There was chatter about it filling every corner of the school students could find their way into, some voices hushed, others loud, some scared, others sad, the odd one boisterous, whether through an odd display of nervousness or a sense of superiority would appear to vary from person to person.
Harry threw on his uniform so quickly he wouldn't be surprised to find out not a single article of it was worn quite correctly. He rushed from the tower, heading down the floors as quickly as he could on stairs with trick steps and patterns he still hadn't learnt, looking for his friends as if they might have answers he didn't. In his hurry, he bumped into a Weasley red-head, just not the one he'd been hoping for.
He granted Percy a quick greeting and rushed past, trying to ignore the exuberance on the older boy's face that seemed too out of place to be anything but off putting.
He was stopped not long after by a large hand on his arm, pulling him a little too roughly to the side.
"Ron!" he almost yelled, catching his voice just before it grew loud enough to send an echo ringing down the long corridor.
"Shush!" Ron commanded, eyes darting around skittishly as he pulled Harry a little further down the corridor and into a room Harry had never been in before. It quickly became evident why.
"These are the girls' toilets!" Harry insisted, just in case Ron was unaware and really as dull as Snape seemed to believe.
"I know," Ron inclined his head to a stall door that was slightly ajar "ask the two mad scientists what's going on, I haven't a clue, mate,"
Harry nodded wordlessly and walked across the room uncomfortably, nudging the door open with the toe of his shoe.
Ed and Hermione were sat on the dusty tiles, heads so close they were practically pressed together over the pewter cauldron that sat between their crossed legs, bubbling slightly as the colour shifted like a fog passing over a blue lake.
"What are we doing in the girls' loos?" Harry stood over them as Ron strolled over.
"Brewing Polyjuice potion," Ed told him with an airiness that made it seem like he had just said he was popping to the shops. He craned his neck a bit more as he traced a metal finger, no glove to be seen, over the aged page of a potions book.
"What?!" Harry insisted. Hermione opened her mouth to answer as Ed added crushed something to the potion, the coloured liquid running across steel making it clear why he had forgone the gloves, but Harry cut in with another question before a word had left her parting lips. "Why the girls' toilets?!"
"Relax," Hermione told him, for once seeming as if she was very much doing so "No one ever comes in here,"
"Why?" he hesitantly took a seat on the tiles next ro Ron who had apparently sunk to the floor a minute or two ago.
"Moaning Myrtle," Hermione shrugged, plucking a pencil from between Ed's left fingers (where had he gotten a pencil??) Before he could place it between his sharp teeth. She glanced momentarily at what looked to be a checklist before stirring the contents of the cauldron. Ed slumped against the stall wall.
"Who's Moaning Myrtle?" Ron asked, absently scratching at the side of his slightly crooked nose.
"I'm Moaning Myrtle!" an unfamiliar, nasal voice declared as the ghost of a bespectacled teenage girl wearing a Hogwarts uniform appeared. It seemed like she wanted to talk to Harry, like she was trying to flirt with him, but Ron seemed to upset her and the mistrust in Ed's eyes and whatever it was about him that seemed to frighten even the Bloody Baron certainly wasn't helping.
With a loud wail, somewhere between anger and anguish that Harry couldn't quite find a name for, she dove into the toiler of the stall next to them, sending a wave of water spilling out from it. The water hit the floor with a loud noise and began to move quickly across the floor. It was only stopped from reaching them by a quick, muttered spell from Ed that Harry couldn't pick up on. He hadn't even seen him draw the wand, but the darkwood tool had soon stopped the water in a straight line that was in no way natural, and, soon after, disappeared the mess entirely.
"So," Harry tried again "Polyjuice potion?"
"It's a complicated potion," Hermione began, handing the potion-making duties to Ed without any words or communicative looks - it was like they were working as a single, mechanical unit. "Essentially, it can give you the physical appearance of any human - be it wizard or muggle - whose DNA you add. I found it in book I so happened to have checked out from the library,"
"Brilliant," Harry suppressed an urge to clap his hands like an easily-entertained child.
"The problem is that it takes like a month to make," Ed drew another sloppy tick and tucked the pencil behind his ear as not to give Hermione a reason to take it from him again.
"Always gotta be the negative one, mate," Ron shook his head.
"And we need some ingredients we don't have," Hermione screwer up her nose.
"What kind of ingredients?" Harry tore his eyes from the ever-changing potion-in-progress to watch his friends.
He wished he hadn't when he saw that grin of Ed's that promised something bad was gonna happen.
"Like the kind we're gonna have to steal from Snape,"
A/N It's been a while, as in way too long, but here's a chapter! I know it isn't particularly long or anything spectacular, but it's something. I'm seriously sorry for how actually shit I am at uploading.All the best,We'reAllABitOdd