Screams echoed through the hall.

All of them came from the Ravenclaw table, a specific section centered around a small blond girl in too-large robes, who had received an unmarked envelope from one of the schools' owls only moments before.

She had, after a moment to turn the envelope over in search of any identifying marks, opened it. A fine yellow powder had puffed into the air, coating the girl and touching several other students as well. Almost immediately, everywhere the powder touched human skin, nasty boils rose up.

The students affected and those around screamed, scrambling away from the noxious cloud, several with arms and faces covered with the painful but harmless infections.

Shouts and screams spread through the hall, McGonagall leaping to her feet and practically apparating to the knot of students, when one, the girl to originally open the envelope, fell to the ground.

She, unlike the others who had simply been touched by the powder, had inhaled some.

Some students screamed, some sneered in disdain, others ran out of the hall in a panic as the girl (Serena, most of them didn't recognize) was speedily taken to the hospital wing by Professors McGonagall and Flitwick.

But one student simply watched.

He watched, as he had been doing since the very first "harmless" prank had been pulled on Serena Wendal. He watched and took note of everyone, every single person, who looked pleased or flashed a smirk, and observed those who went out of their way to help her.

Yes, Janus Agmundr watched, because that was what he always did.

But this… This was too far.

Janie didn't have friends; he openly admitted he was too neurotic and perhaps a teeny bit too sociopathic for that. But Serena was definitely one of the few people he counted as slightly more than an acquaintance, whether she knew it or not.

He couldn't very well have her be dying.

Not when he had an unwritten two-foot essay due in the next two days. Letting his smartest acquaintance languish away in the hospital wing or cowering in constant fear would not be conducive to getting his homework done with minimal effort, and he couldn't have that.

It was high time someone put a stop to it.

"This has gone too far, Albus," McGonagall said, hushed but earnest as she glanced at the small girl in the hospital bed across the room. Madam Pomfrey hurried busily around the unconscious student, muttering words that were less than appropriate for the bedside of a twelve year old.

"I know, Minerva," Dumbledore replied in kind.

However the answer wasn't so easy as simply saying they needed to do something. The girl's harassers had done a remarkably good job covering up who had orchestrated the more malicious pranks, such as the one that had currently landed her and several others in the hospital wing, and although they had a comprehensive list of those who had simply hexed her (which resulted in detention but not much else) they couldn't seriously act without some kind of proof.

Proof that seemed increasingly unlikely to surface before something irreversible occurred.

Honeywater

Mint Sprigs

Stewed Mandrake

Syrup of Hellebore

Janie glanced over the last four ingredients he needed for the potion he was planning to brew, something he had read theoretically about a few weeks ago, and tucked it into his cabinet of things that could be useful if the future.

Not a literal cabinet, of course. He didn't even own a cabinet. It was really his trunk, but cabinet sounded more secret-agent.

Either way, it had totally come in handy, so his squirreling tendencies were justified.

Now he just needed to sweet talk his way into the last ingredients.

Easy peasy.

Serena awoke at around dinner time, feeling surprisingly well for having been covered with boils and suffocating a few hours earlier. She still did have a general soreness pretty much everywhere, but it seemed Pomfrey had been able to magic away the boils well enough that only her throat really actively hurt anymore.

Taking a glance around, she realized she was in the hospital wing- she'd deduced this before, it wasn't really that hard to figure out given the circumstances.

There were a few more people in here with her, she noted. None of the other boil victims though; they must have been released a while ago, since their cases were much less severe. The other inhabitants of the white room didn't look up to talking much (some were sleeping, one was reading, a sixth year Gryffindor was waxing poetic to herself about how she really didn't even need to go to the hospital wing in the first place so why was she still here as everyone else ignored her), and Serena felt that trying to speak while her throat hurt so much was probably a bad idea anyway, so she focused on the area around her instead.

There wasn't much to look at. Just a small glass of water and some type of potion in a vial- Serena thought it could perhaps be the dreamless sleep drought or maybe a cure for boils, but didn't really know what either one of those looked like (having only come to the hospital wing perhaps twice before and leaving within an hour). Underneath those, which Serena had almost missed, was a simple piece of parchment.

"Ah, Miss Wendal, you're awake," Madam Pomfrey declared as she hustled towards the girl's bed (Serena had noticed the nurse seemed to move everywhere very quickly, but perhaps that was only when she had patients). Before giving Serena a thorough once-over, she placed a quill and an inkwell down on the table. "How are you feeling?"

Serena opened her mouth to respond, but before she could Pomfrey was already shushing her and handing her the quill.

"Don't talk, you'll only make it worse! I brought the parchment for a reason," she tutted. After a moment, Serena wrote I'm okay. My throat hurts though. Pomfrey nodded as if that was exactly what she expected which, Serena supposed, was probably true since she had preemptively brought the writing equipment. "...on top of everything everything else…" Serena heard her mutter to herself as she poured some of the potion into the water.

Was Madam Pomfrey exasperated at having so many patients? Was she struggling with something personal and now having yet another stupid little kid who got herself in trouble to take care of was just icing on the cake?

Sorry to bother you, she wrote under her previous words, holding it up when Pomfrey turned to give her the glass. The woman looked surprised at first, before her expression melted into a slight smile.

"Dear, if no one ever bothered me I would be out of the job," she replied plainly, handing the glass over, "drink that all up, it'll help your throat."

Slughorn looked down at the innocently-smiling student before him. He vaguely recognized the kid; Janus was his name (Slughorn remembered that simply because it had sounded interesting enough to belong to an extraordinary student), but since the boy seemed completely average in all but height (in which he was severely lacking) Slughorn hadn't paid much attention to him.

"Of course I have the ingredients, my boy," Slughorn admitted, not noticing the small twitch at the name, "but what do you need them for?"

The professor was already leading him to the ingredient closet, Janie noticed, but decided to answer anyway.

"Scientific inquiry."

Well that was a lie. Whatever.

"Hmm," Slughorn nodded like that made sense, "I used to be quite the scientist myself, when I was young."

Oh, yeah, this was shaping up to be just the type of thing Janie didn't care about at all. However, in the interest of getting what he wanted, he kept the smile (which was looking more and more like a pained grimace as time passed) and tried to look as interested as possible.

"And that is why, Janus," Slughorn pontificated as he pulled the stewed mandrake from a high shelf. Janie must have zoned out or something; he had been eying the innocuous unmarked jar in the very back of the top shelf, wondering if there was a way he could figure out what was in it and apparently he'd missed the whole story as well as Slughorn handing him the first three ingredients.

"Janie," he corrected almost automatically, cutting the professor off mid sentence.

"Hm?" The large man asked, turning with the last ingredient in hand.

"My name's Janie. I don't like Janus, so it's not my name," Janie stated plainly, eying the mandrake that was just out of his reach.

"A man of decisions," Slughorn laughed after a moment of inquisitive staring, handing the second year the final ingredient.

"Yeah, sure," Janie agreed, leaving as soon as he had a grasp on everything he needed, giving the potions' master a strange look before he slipped out of the room.

"Strange child," Slughorn mused. Perhaps he should pay more attention to that one…

"Why are you still in here? Are you dying or something?"

Serena looked up from the book she was reading in surprise as Regulus' unexpected voice rather rudely interrupted her. He was standing ten feet away from the bed, as if afraid he might catch whatever she had (or maybe afraid someone would see him speaking to her), arms crossed and scowl set firmly in place. His brow was furrowed a bit, though, which Serena thought made him look more concerned than anything.

"I'm fine, actually. Madam Pomfrey just wanted me to stay for another day or two to make sure, because she's never had anyone inhale bulbadox powder before."

It was nearly lunchtime the day after she had been sent to the hospital wing; she had been confined for over twenty four hours for an ailment even the worst of the others had been released within hours of contracting. Her dorm mates and Narcissa had already come to check on her, the latter leaving a few chocolate frogs "for morale" she'd said. Janie, too, had popped in. He stayed long enough to ask how long she would be kept in the hospital wing and left immediately after she told him, muttering to himself and snagging one of the chocolate frogs as he walked out.

He was a strange fellow, and Serena liked to think that was his way of expressing concern.

Regulus had been able to convince himself not to check up on her in the interest of his image all of yesterday and most of the morning (it wasn't all that uncommon for Serena to miss meals after all), but he had casually asked one of her Ravenclaw friends whom he didn't know the name of and she told him Serena hadn't come to class.

Well, to not go to class, Serena must have been dying.

Except she wasn't. She was totally fine. And Regulus tried to scowl because darnit he had been worried and it was for nothing because she was fine, but the best he could manage was keeping his smile down to a mere quirk of the lips; he had been worried for nothing. She was fine.

"Well you better get out of here soon," he lectured abruptly, turning away and marching out without another word. Serena smiled after him, glad that he cared enough to drop by.

"Ooh, he totally likes you," the Gryffindor girl (who had admitted, grudgingly, that perhaps a broken leg and a strangely long-lasting locomotor charm was a reason to go to the hospital wing, but only after her escape attempt) sang from across the room.

Serena shook her head in exasperation and went back to reading, ignoring the girl's overdramatic moaning about being forever ignored.

Janie had not shown up to classes today.

This was not unusual.

At this point, his teachers merely made a mental note to give him, yet another, day of detention.

What was strange was that he was skipping out for a productive purpose. Usually when asked why he would answer something along the lines of "I couldn't go to transfiguration; I forgot I wanted to sit by the lake" or "had to waylay potions today, got some very important food business to discuss with the house elves" or even "I didn't want to get out of bed. So I didn't."

But this time, Janie was holed up in his room in the dungeons, having completed his potion, feverishly writing and casting spells, glancing every now and then at an unmarked notebook filled with scribbled writing that had been mailed to him just that morning.

This was going to be glorious.

AN: I live! And since school has started and all I don't think I'll be updating all that much, but hopefully I'll be able to get out something every month or two... writing is hard, guys. But it's fun, and totally worth it, so I'm not gonna let this story die!