March 12, 1993
[enclosed: Cantankerous Nott's The Sacred Twenty-Eight, eighty-ninth edition]
Dear Hermione,
Thank you for the book! I've never gotten a book for my birthday before. I didn't know there were so many different kinds of shields. Our Defense professor this year is absolutely useless, even worse than Quirrell was. The guy's written books - Gilderoy Lockhart, you might've heard of him - and he can't even Stun a pixie. We spend all his classes reading stories out of his stupid books and not actually doing anything, we're learning so little that we don't even really know what we don't know. You've been a lot of help with that, we have a better idea now of what to look for in the library, so thank you! We've got notes and stuff, now, too, not just from the one I'm returning with this letter - do you also need your Fundamentals book back?
Ron Weasley
March 26, 1993
Ron -
Yes, please.
HJG
Ordinarily, Hogwarts was a great fan of April Fools' Day. The Slytherins and the Ravenclaws largely liked to pretend they were too mature for that kind of thing, though some of the Ravenclaws occasionally devolved into extremely elaborate prank wars if someone thought of something that was too clever not to do. Among the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors, however, it was usually an explosion of bright colors, peculiar sounds, and giggling; there was a running contest to see who could make Dumbledore laugh the hardest. Ordinarily, the castle glittered and shone with enthusiasm on that particular day of the year, and the halls echoed with the bright booming sound of the headmaster laughing. The contest had been cancelled without fanfare, this year, because Dumbledore wasn't here.
Some of the Hufflepuffs still made a valiant effort to cheer up the student body in the absence of their friendly Headmaster, because that was what they did, but their friendly rivals in Gryffindor didn't even really try.
The first of April, after all, was Fred and George Weasley's birthday. There was usually cake, and singing, and increasingly absurd magical tricks. For more than the two years since they'd started school, even - it had been happening since Bill Weasley's first year, seven years previously, when his six-year-old brothers had somehow contrived to send him a cheery Howler full of glitter. It was the one day every year that the elder and more serious Weasleys would smile and indulge their brothers' silliness, and encourage their classmates to do the same. After all, the twins were never malicious. They didn't have it in them to be really mean for such a friendly holiday. It was always funny, reasonably benevolent things, like "suddenly you have feathers" and "the stairs are temporarily pillows, let's go banister-diving" and "everyone is ginger today!" and that sort of thing. Or maybe the food at the Slytherin table exploded in showers of sparkly red paint (that had been their first year), which wasn't much fun for the Slytherins, but it wasn't like anyone got hurt. And even some of the Slytherins (the ones that had ducked quickly) had found some humor in the situation.
This year, the Weasley twins were in the hospital wing, silent and mirthless, and no one in Gryffindor House really felt right trying to have April Fools' Day without them. So there was silence in Gryffindor, and strained smiles in the direction of the friendly Hufflepuffs who tried to cheer them up. Ron got up early and spent the morning in the greenhouses with Neville, doing what he could to help with the Mandrakes who would awaken the Petrified students. Ginny sat at breakfast humming sadly, and Percy sat next to her with his book of curses and sang quietly along. Happy birthday to Fred, happy birthday to George, happy birthday ... you're not here ... happy birthday to you.
Lucius Malfoy spent his April first trying to break the locks on his library door, accompanied by the faint sound of scratching quills and the slightly less faint sound of Jared Nott and Augusta Longbottom bickering about rune charts. Honestly, he had no idea how they hadn't tried to kill each other yet.
Hermione Granger-now-Nott, on the other hand, whose voracious interest in protection magic for reasons she refused to explain to anyone, had made her more than only the top student in her Battle Magic class. She was, by now, also the go-to expert on cursebreaking for anyone at Durmstrang who lost a duel or failed to dodge a prank and was too embarrassed to go to the Life Magic professor for help; and so she had a very amusing April Fools' Day. She spent most of the day taking apart various very creative hexes, ranging from a plague of unusually stubborn tongue-tying jinxes among some of the younger students to a sixth-year whose ex-boyfriend had turned all of his clothes a truly eye-searing shade of neon yellow. "You know you could be asking them for favors," said Adriana around two hours past lunchtime, when she and Jarek had dragged Hermione to the Hearths-hall to make her eat. "No one would think it unfair."
"It's good practice," protested Hermione. "And I like helping people."
Her roommate sighed. "British idealism, ah. Strange and cute. Jarek, where are Viktor and Natasha?"
"Why should I know?" protested the Icelander, shooing away a seventh-year with his ears smoking who really ought to know how to solve his own problems. At the totally incredulous looks from the two girls, which said, you literally keep obsessive charts of the entire school's whereabouts, of course you know where they are, he sighed. "Third floor. Some absolute idiot carved a bunch of Grindelwaldian iconography into the walls."
"Ah."
The news that anyone at Durmstrang still thought Grindelwald had been in the right was, sadly, not surprising to Hermione. She hadn't read as much history as she might have liked, however, so busy had she been with her frantic quest to learn to defend herself, and she had no idea what Grindelwaldian iconography might actually look like or how one went about recognizing it. Nor did she have any idea how to ask without looking like an idiot, so she just filed the question away for later inquiry. At some point. And the others did return eventually for their lunch, looking rather pleased with themselves.
After her Languages class, a little first-year came running up to them, tears running down his face. His hands were bruised and disjointed, as if someone had stomped on them. "Miss Nott," he said shakily, pleading, "can you help me?"
Natasha said something absolutely scathing in Russian, which Hermione could not immediately translate but recognized the general tone of. "No," she added for good measure. Jarek sneered in the kid's general direction and didn't bother to address him, Viktor outright pretended he wasn't there, and Adriana rolled her eyes.
Hermione, startled, said, "What? Of course I can help you, sweetie, what happened?"
"I - um - "
"He fell down the stairs," said Natasha, her voice high and sharp and mocking.
It had been a long time since Hermione heard so clearly the alarm bells in her head that said, you have made friends with people who are evil.
Still, school had to struggle on, without its gamekeeper and without its Headmaster. Professor McGonagall was looking increasingly frazzled; as Deputy Headmistress she was obligated to take on the duties that Dumbledore wasn't performing due to his summary eviction from the premises. The forest edged glacially closer to Hagrid's hut, unchecked by his usual maintenance; Professor Sprout started setting her sixth-years to the task of calming down some of the flora on the grounds that wasn't contained neatly in greenhouses. OWLs and NEWTs for the fifth and seventh years were approaching, slowly but surely. Early in April Ravenclaw scraped out a victory over Slytherin by only twenty points, putting them just barely in the lead for the Quidditch Cup. Luna Lovegood presented a very startled Cho Chang with a bright blue feathered hat, and then ran off to the library again before the Ravenclaw Seeker could respond properly to this bizarre prize.
Some of the sixth-year NEWT Defense students put on a tournament of exhibition duels near the end of the month. Percy Weasley declined to participate, even though he was one of the three students in his cohort who'd actually managed to pass the Defense OWL the previous year, but he showed up anyway. Many other students appeared in the Great Hall to watch or to try their hand at fighting Hogwarts' ostensible best; there were few enough people in the actual class that they'd let other people sign up to participate, like Cedric Diggory who was still in fourth year but was far and away the top of his class, and Jack Rosier who had failed his OWL but knew a truly ridiculous number of curses, and so on. It took hours for the other second-year Gryffindors to talk Ron out of volunteering, and it only eventually worked because Neville pointed out that his mother would probably actually ground him until he graduated Hogwarts if she found out.
But they did turn up for the show, anyway, because they couldn't not. And predictably, getting a bunch of kids together in the Great Hall with the express purpose of having a duelling competition started to produce unsanctioned fighting almost immediately. Although, in defense of the NEWT students, it actually happened slightly less quickly than it had at Lockhart's original attempt. Still ... people using unapproved spells, people punching each other, people on the sidelines fighting over who they wanted to win or who they'd bet on ... they were barely a quarter of the way through the randomized tournament brackets (supplied by an amused NEWT Arithmancy student who was dating one of the organizers) when things started to get out of hand. Lockhart, of course, was useless to handle this, and Professor Flitwick had his hands full playing host for the people from the Auror Office who'd turned up to watch the show.
Ron of course was busy fighting with Draco's erstwhile minions, who were a bit lost without their leader but nevertheless basically understood that they were supposed to oppose the nearest Weasley wherever convenient. The rest of the second-year Gryffindors, however, calmly edged the rest of the crowd away from this conflict, stood in a little ring separating Ron and Crabbe and Goyle from everyone else, and thereafter ignored the problem. Blaise Zabini and Daphne Greengrass, who'd also turned up to watch the show, participated reasonably amiably in this process; they clearly were more interested in preventing Crabbe and Goyle from embarrassing their House than they were in actually preventing them from getting hexed repeatedly by Ron. Various awkward nods were exchanged, and the Slytherins seemed to appreciate that none of the Gryffindors were commenting on the somewhat anxious way Blaise was keeping an eye on his unusually pale and quiet cousin.
In between uncomfortable House relations, and occasionally paying attention to the actual competition that was taking place, they got to watch Percy. He was a head taller than most of the other students, now; he had the same too-tall-and-too-skinny build as Ron did, and four more years of growing. It ought to have been ridiculous-looking to see him stalking around in his obsessively pressed robes, wireframe glasses glinting in the light of spellfire, with his bright red hair and freckles, looming over everyone like an awkward, irritable scarecrow. It would have been funny, probably, except that he was breaking up unauthorized fights with absolute silence, complete lack of discrimination by age, gender, or House, and absolutely brutal efficiency. "Ah," said Parvati, watching with interest as Percy disarmed yet another pair of bickering would-be gamblers, glued their wands to the nearest wall, and moved on without a word, "that's why he didn't sign up to fight."
"I had the impression he just didn't believe in duelling," said Blaise.
Parvati shrugged. "Well, that too."
"Diggory's winning," observed Lavender, who was actually still paying attention to the competition.
"What, the Super Hufflepuff?" said Seamus, startled. "Really? Isn't he only, what, fourth year?"
"The Super Hufflepuff?" repeated Neville.
Seamus gave him a confused look. "You haven't heard that? You spend practially all of your free time with Professor Sprout."
" ... I have never heard that," agreed Neville. "Seriously? People call him that?"
"Yeah," said Lavender. "He gets perfect grades, he's on their Quidditch team, he's probably going to be their Captain next year, he's taking all the electives and still getting perfect grades, he runs tutoring sessions, he's ridiculously nice to everyone ... he's a Super Hufflepuff."
"And also he can duel, apparently," said Parvati.
"That's not fair," grumbled Seamus. "He can't be good at everything."
"Maybe he's secretly gay," suggested Daphne.
Everyone else gave her a baffled look. "Would that be bad?" said Dean, eyebrows rising.
"It'd be bad for the girls," snickered Blaise.
"Luna," said Ginny patiently, "this is just some prank by the Slytherins. There is no such thing as the Chamber of Secrets."
A bespectacled cat slipped in the door of the Hog's Head Inn and hopped smoothly onto the bar. She padded across the surface and snagged a couple of peanuts off the bartender's plate. He rolled his eyes and scratched her behind the ears, which treatment she suffered with a somewhat stern glare before hopping back off the bar and gliding into the shadowy rear of the room. "Cats, mate, can't get rid of 'em," he said cheerily to the one wizard currently sitting at the bar, who didn't show any particular signs of being interested in the proceedings.
A moment later, a stern-backed, grey-haired woman with a pointed green tartan hat was sitting politely across a table from a tall wizard with long white hair and dark purple robes, having drawn exactly zero attention as she crossed the room. "Good evening," she said, refraining from addressing the subject of her attention by name. Aberforth had a thing about that, and in any case it was usually best not to draw the ears of people who might be interested if they heard the name of the headmaster who was currently banned from the premises of the school. Hogsmeade wasn't actually part of Hogwarts grounds, but all the same, it was best to be cautious about these things.
"And to you," nodded the old wizard, doing his deputy the same courtesy. "How did the duelling tournament go, might I ask?"
"Not surprisingly, better than when Gilderoy tried," sighed the ex-cat. "Which is, I am sure you realize, not an exceptionally high bar."
"Indeed."
"Still, I am quite impressed with some of my students, I must say."
The last practice session of the month of April for the second-year Gryffindors found them squelching somewhat muddily into the Transfiguration classroom, having just been rained on the entire way back from Herbology. They were short Neville, who had stayed behind in the greenhouses to help Professor Sprout with her rather rowdy Mandrakes; they were moody and temperamental this late in their growth cycle, and needed careful management. He would be a little bit late, though not a lot, and they had originally planned to start without him. But they arrived to find a rather unusual surprise, for all that April Fools' Day had been nearly an entire month before.
"I'm not imagining that, right?" said Ron.
"Nah," said Seamus.
"That's illegal, right?" said Ron.
"Yep," said Parvati.
Thus it was that Neville came in fifteen minutes late to find his classmates still staring rather shockedly at the desk at the front of the room, upon which sat a parchment reading in neat, familiar script, For my unusually dedicated students, and on top of that, a slim book which belonged very much to the Restricted Section of the Library: the revised 1928 translation of Rowena Ravenclaw's Animali Fieri, the original instruction manual on how to become an Animagus.
"That's definitely illegal," said Neville.
The others all nodded.
It was very, extremely, utterly illegal for minors to become Animagi. It was even more illegal than just trying to do it without a license. It was also supposed to be horrifyingly difficult and potentially dangerous, which in theory was why it was illegal. It was the sort of illegal that people got thrown in Azkaban for encouraging or enabling. You could get in trouble just for owning a copy of this book if you weren't on record with the Ministry as attempting to learn. You were supposed to have passed a Transfiguration NEWT with at least an E to even be allowed to apply for a learning permit. They, on the other hand, were second-year students. Second-year students with better collective Transfiguration grades than any cohort in decades, sure, but second-year students. There was no way this was safe, or a good idea, or even possible.
And there was a cat, with very distinctive spectacle markings around its eyes, sitting calmly on Professor McGonagall's desk, smirking at them.
