Pilfered

It seemed to Teddy that there was something off about Hagrid during a class in the Forbidden Forest. Hagrid seemed distracted, and once told the class that it was best to feed Hippogriffs Venomous Tentacula. It was extremely odd, and Teddy was determined to figure exactly what was wrong. He had learned that when teachers started acting oddly at Hogwarts it usually ended up affecting the students too. James, Victoire, and Teddy headed down the rocky path to Hagrid's hut during their free time after lunch, mainly because of one of Teddy's crazy hunches—sadly, it was how many things they did usually happened, but sometimes it did work out. It was a rather unpleasant day. The sky was grey, with rain threatening to drop from the dark clouds that loomed overhead. The air was muggy with suppressed rain. Teddy was racing ahead, with James struggling to keep up on his shorter legs. Victoire lazily walked down the hill, many paces behind them, ignoring their competition all together.

"Victoire, come on!" Teddy yelled over his shoulder as he neared Hagrid's hut. The pumpkins that grew outside the hut were bright orange with darker streaks, and their vivid green vines waved in the slight breeze at James and Teddy as they approached. James looked curiously at a small bird that perched upon a pumpkin, wondering why, with the oncoming rain, it didn't go back to its nest, which probably sat high in a tree deep in the forest. It was the only creature he had seen on the walk down from the castle as all the others had wisely decided to hide in their respective burrows.

"I don't understand why you think this is necessary, Teddy," Victoire complained as she slowed to a stop next to James. "I have so many better things to do and you're dragging me down here. Not that I don't love Hagrid, but I don't want to spend the few hours I have before dinner pestering him about something that doesn't exist and isn't a problem. So when he denies it the first time, can we just say goodbye and go do something productive?"

Teddy shot her a glare over his shoulder and knocked on the door to Hagrid's hut. "Hagrid, could we talk to you?" he called. The soft thud of footsteps grew louder and louder until the door opened, revealing Hagrid's massive form. His large bushy beard had grey hairs here and there and his face was covered with dirt from his pumpkin patch, but he smiled at Teddy and James, and then back to Victoire, who stood a bit back from the other two with her arms crossed.

"Oh hello, Harry—James, sorry. Yeh jus look so much like yeh father. Teddy, Victoire." Hagrid stepped aside to let them through the doorway. "Come on in ev'ryone, I'm not doing much really."

The hut was just large enough for Hagrid and had barely enough room left over for a small gathering of people. The large round dining table off set from the center of the room with an oversized armchair near the window. It wasn't the most tidy James had ever seen it,—papers were strewn this way and that and plates were stacked on every open surface. Even by Hagrid's standards it was a mess. The fire, while dampened, still had bits of wood and embers that burned brightly in the late afternoon light slanting in through the window. Hagrid walked over to the stove where the kettle screeched to be taken off. "Tea anybody?" Teddy and James declined as politely as possible. James had no idea how his parents had drunk it, because it was completely foul, but somehow Victoire actually liked it.

"I would like a cup, Hagrid. Thank you," Victoire said as she closed the door. "One sugar please—brown if you have it."

"O' course, I use it fer rock cakes, but yeh th' firs' person ive' ever met tha' wan'ned it in tea." Hagrid poured out two cups of steaming hot tea—one in a large mug and the other into a standard, if slightly chipped, cup and plopped sugar into both. As he set the kettle down on the stove again, he redirected his attention to the three. "So, wha' can I do fer yeh?"

"Are you all right, Hagrid? You seemed kind of upset today in class," Teddy asked, attempting—and failing—to sound casual.

Hagrid set down his cup. "What do you mean I seemed upset? I don't have any reason to be." His voice rose in both volume and pitch as he spoke.

Teddy smiled internally. Gotcha Hagrid. "You couldn't really seem to find your words today in class and you ended lessons early."

James sat down next to Victoire, and sharing a look with Teddy, said, "We don't mean anything by it, Hagrid. We just want to be sure that everything's fine."

Hagrid fell silent, clearly thinking about exactly how to word what he said next. His eyes darted around the room and he was doing his very best to avoid the gazes of Teddy, James, and Victoire. Rain started to fall softly outside the window, and the few embers left in the dwindling fire crackled to fill the silence, but it could not cut through the tension that pulled the room taut. Teddy crossed his arms as he waited patiently for Hagrid to crack and Victoire sipped on her tea, trying her best not to glare at Teddy. James, however, was intrigued. He had always wondered if it was actually as easy to get forbidden information out of Hagrid as his father's stories had implied.

"Doesn' a teacher have the righ' teh be upset without bein' questioned an' harassed by me own students? Why is it yeh business anyway? It's not like you three would have any idea wha' happened teh The Book of Necromancy!"

"The Book of Necromancy?" They all exclaimed in perfect unison. Victoire nearly spilled her tea all over her freshly cleaned uniform when James leapt up from his seat next to her.

"I shouldn'ta said that," Hagrid muttered to himself. "I shouldn'ta said that." He turned to the three. "Why does it always happen like this! Yeh three have to swear yeh won't go talkin' teh people about this."

"About what, Hagrid?" James said, shrugging his shoulders and mimicking confusion.

"About The Book of Necromancy goin' missin'. And we don' even know how long it's been gone!" Hagrid insisted.

"Do they know who took it?" Teddy was smiling from ear to ear. He pointed a finger triumphantly into Victoire's face. "I told you so! I told you something was up!" He jumped around, disrupting the already chaotic setting of Hagrid's hut.

"Shut it, Teddy," Victoire snapped as she slumped in her seat looking defeated.

"So, who took it, Hagrid? Who took it?" Teddy looked at him eagerly, hoping for an interesting answer. "Have they been expelled yet?"

"We don' know who took it. It's not your business anyway to know tha' Pince thinks Belladonna snatched it outta the Forbidden Section."

"I knew it!" James yelled. He began to jump around with Teddy, both boys too overwhelmed to notice Victoire yelling at them.

"Shouldn'ta said that. I shouldn'ta said that." Hagrid had taken a seat at the table. His eyes shifted from his half full cup of tea to the boys and looked pleadingly to Victoire. "Yeh have to promise you won' go telling ev'ryone."

Victoire sighed, standing to give her tea cup back to Hagrid. She looked apologetically from the boys back to Hagrid. "I can only promise I'll try, Hagrid. Merlin only knows what those two will possibly do."

Without their interference, the school was quickly buzzing with curiosity about the legendary book that got stolen from the Restricted Section. It was impossible to tell who leaked the news, but before lunch the day after it had been discovered missing, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the matter. People questioned who took it, how anyone managed to get past Filch, and what the book could possibly be used for. The teachers constantly reprimanded the students in a futile attempt to quell the rumors. For once, something seemed to be more popular than Quidditch, which was a rarity in and of itself. A name was yet to be matched with the thief, and every meal a new favorite seemed to be in favor, some people even insisted that one of the teachers had taken it.

"I told you two it was a bad idea to talk so openly about it. Meals are the absolute worst times to talk about things that don't concern us, let alone the entire school. And since the fact that the teachers don't know how long it's been missing is not yet common knowledge, can we please try to keep quiet about it?" Victoire scolded. Teddy and Victoire had promised James they would help with a project for Transfiguration, but with each passing moment, Victoire was regretting her decision. The common room she had trapped herself in was filled with students, all proposing new and ever more ludicrous theories about the culprit.

"Ok, but it wasn't us. Everyone knew before we said anything. We weren't the leak. If we were, everyone would be wondering when it was stolen!" James insisted.

"Just because you didn't manage to tell them everything we know doesn't mean they didn't hear it from you!" Victoire snapped.

"But it's not like we could've known that…"

"No, that's enough!" Victoire said. She threw down the stack of papers she had been gathering for James onto the floor of the common room. "I've had enough of you to trying to defend your stupid decisions to stick your noses places they don't belong. You two need to get it together and quit poking around." She began to walk up to the second year girls' dormitory when she turned around and glared at both Teddy and James. "You two ought to apologize to Hagrid for your idiocy. Even if it wasn't your fault I'm sure he thinks it was you two, so say sorry!" With that she was gone, leaving James and Teddy to continue working on their own. They worked in silence for a moment before James set down what he was working on.

"You know, she's right."

"About?" Teddy continued to sort through papers.

"Apologizing to Hagrid. We did put him in a tough situation, what with two students breathing down his neck about something they don't need to be involved in. Even if we didn't blab about it to the whole school." James sat down on the couch in front of the fireplace, staring blankly at the flames.

"OK, fine. We can apologize tomorrow." Teddy gathered the papers off the floor and dropped them down next to James. "You should go to bed."

"You should too," James said as he rose from the couch.

"Tomorrow, we apologize. Right?" Teddy called after him as he ascended the steps.

"Yeah, yeah. Tomorrow."

It was an unlucky coincidence that James and Bel had been made partners in Potions, but they had called an uneasy truce that stood because neither of them was actually going to kill the other during class. Originally, Professor Thorne had let them choose seats, but after just a few classes of constant talking and a general lack of attention, he went back on his word and arranged the class himself. Scorpius and Cat had been exiled to opposite sides of the classroom, and Bel and James were given the desk only a few paces away from Thorne's. Most of the class agreed that he had been feeling particularly vindictive when he had rearranged the class.

James had one of their textbooks flipped open to the page about boils and curing them. "How many fangs have you crushed so far?" he asked, frowning at the vague instructions.

"Five," Bel replied as she reached across the table for the sixth. As she began to grind it into a fine powder in her mortar, she started to voice her gripes aloud. "I don't understand why we have to do this. What kind of job requires me to know how to cure boils? I can just buy it like everyone else."

"Maybe if you're an Auror or something," James suggested absentmindedly, as he attempted to decipher the page of the Potions textbook.

"They deal with dark wizards and dark magic and stuff, not curing boils." Bel's grinding was vigorous, and James couldn't tell if she was just being extremely thorough or if she were genuinely angered by the pointless assignment.

"My dad's an Auror and he insists he uses stuff from school that he never thought he would all the time. Maybe even curing boils." James passed her the pewter scales so she could begin to add the ground snake fangs to the cauldron. "What did your parents do?" he asked, attempting to divert the conversation and perhaps learn something interesting in the process.

Bel stiffened at the mention of her parents. "They…" Bel thought fast, "…didn't really do anything official. They were more…I guess entrepreneurs is the right word," she said as she measured out the snake fangs.

James was intrigued. It was not the answer he had been expecting. "What do you mean 'entrepreneurs'?"

"They really did their own thing," Bel evaded in a neutral disinterested tone.

James decided not to accept the evasion. "That's the definition of an entrepreneur. I mean, what did they do? Like, did they own a business like my uncle did or…?"

Bel cut him off and added the measurement of powdered snake fangs she had been holding. Sometimes a little bit of the truth goes a long way. "I don't know, James. I don't know exactly what my parents did." She let a little bit of her real tension leak into her voice, hoping that James would obey the unwritten rule that you didn't press the war orphans too much. It is probably too much to ask with James Potter though.

They were both silent for a minute while James carefully considered his next move. That last answer felt like the closest to the truth he had ever gotten out of her. "You have to have known something about your parents. Nobody would leave a kid completely in the dark about that. You have to know something besides their names. Come on…everyone's curious. There hasn't been a Black for ages, and one just suddenly pops up out of nowhere? Unless you're lying about that, of course. Someone want to use you to claim an inheritance?"

Bel scooped more of the snake fangs into the cauldron, desperately trying to keep herself from kicking James in the shin.

James could sense he was close, so he forged on. "But it's worse than that. You said your parents died in the war, but you didn't specify how. Your parents were Death Eaters, weren't they? Why else would you have come to grow up with the Malfoys? Nobody sane would just give their child to the Malfoys. If you were just an orphan, you would have had some family to take you in. Even Riddle was given to an orphanage."

Bel cringed inwardly at the mention of the name Riddle. "How would you know where Riddle was raised, James? Been researching things you shouldn't?" Bel taunted as she dumped the final measurement into the cauldron.

"That project we did at the beginning of the year, on famous dark witches and wizards? I did mine on him." James narrowed his eyes at her. "How would you know?"

Bel stayed quiet at she turned up the heat on the cauldron and stirred it. "It's none of your business James, but then again, isn't that your hobby—sticking your nose into other people's business? Besides, I didn't say I knew…I just asked how you did…but with your parents, perhaps that was a stupid question." Bel waved her wand over the cauldron and leaned on the table. "Listen, James," she sighed as she took in a breath and grabbed a fistful of her skirt…trying to hide her shaking hand. "You know about as much about my parents as I do. The Malfoys have left me in the dark and I know I'm a Black for the same reason you know you're a Potter. The people who raised me said so. I don't know if they'll ever tell me anything else, but if they haven't told me, it's for a good reason. All right?" She raised her hand and looked to the front of the room at Professor Thorne. "Professor, we're done," Bel declared. Looking back at James, she smiled defeatedly. "Please just leave it alone." She sighed and swept her textbook off the table into her bag.

James looked down to keep the fire in his eyes away from Bel's sight. "Fine."

"Good. Take your cauldron off the burner and place it in the back of the classroom. We're leaving them for next class," Professor Thorne roared over the chatter of students anxious for the end of a lesson. "Remember, everyone. I want your essay on a brew of your choice by next class; no exceptions for late papers." Everyone filed out of class eagerly while Bel lagged behind, slowly making her way to where Professor Thorne sat.

"Um, Professor," she said hesitantly "Could I possibly move to a different seat?" she pleaded. Professor Thorne looked down at her.

"I did notice you and Mr. Potter, but I thought it was best not to interrupt." Thorne sucked in a breath and folded his hands. "I'm sorry, Miss Black, but I can't do anything to move you or change your partner. It would be unfair to other students who would have to be inconvenienced to accommodate you. I can only apologize. I thought that you and Mr. Potter might challenge each other, but I was wrong."

Bel's mood deflated. She shrugged her shoulders. "It's all right. I figured you couldn't, but I hope you understand why I had to ask. Sorry to bother you, Professor." She left without another word to him, or even to Scorpius and Cat, who had waited patiently outside the classroom for her.

"James?" Cat commiserated, resting a hand on Bel's shoulder.

"James should be given a job as a Department of Magical Law Enforcement interrogator as soon as he graduates. No Veritaserum necessary," Bel spat.

Full Text Chapters One through Seventeen with illustrations available online and as a PDF now at www. BelladonnaBlack .wordpress .com