Terry had been right about attracting attention to themselves, but even if they had possessed the advantage at the time, the four of them had beaten Malfoy's vassals in combat before. What it does is it makes this the decisive hour. We have to keep either side from killing us, sure, but if we succeed we'll unite them against us as planned. That might not translate into getting recruits, but it's the only chance we have. We just can't win with our numbers and we can't hide either.
Ron's thoughts turned to Anthony, champion of 'doing the smart thing', as well as the short, sad letter he received from Charlie. Despite the way it turned out for the Ravenclaw, in the sense that he had to lose his leverage and flee again, it was impossible to say there was an explicit problem with the plan of hiding in an impossible space in an undisclosed location, as long as no one minded that he had a pair of hostages. The Gryffindor sighed over his assignment, setting down his quill. Anthony probably thought that no one would care where their siblings were as long as they were alive and safe, and with Ginny it made a bit more sense than it did with the young man that Charlie mentioned, who apparently had only helped him unwillingly. In the interest of getting an idea where he was, a few members of the Weasley family had looked into the Goldstein family, that turned out to have members living in other places, notably Canada, which was where Anthony's younger sister went. It had been easy enough to determine that Ginny and Harper had never been there, though the detail had been enough to provide the insight that there were families more inclined to spread out than the Weasleys, not a high bar to jump.
'Course, it made a difference to us, whether or not he'd have known it. Charlie and the witch might've figured going after Anthony would at least kill her brother, but it's better to be dead than some kind of permanent slave. The African wizard's situation almost made him feel sorry for Ernie.
Hannah had asked him how he had been feeling a few more times than he had cared to answer, especially when he had wished someone would ask about the twins, as he had seen neither of them in days. There was little doubt they knew what had happened to their sister, and there was simply no telling how they would respond.
Presently, he was working with her on their missing assignments, which the teachers had mostly overlooked. Makes sense if you think about it. They assign a fair bit to keep us from fighting in the halls, eventually they forget what they handed out. There was also the chance that anyone on the defense team had been given a temporary pass.
"Hey, Hannah, do you know what the Germanic rune for 'tree' is?"
"Not off the top of my... I think it's broken up into species, generally. There's a different one for ash or birch from oak. Don't ask me why," she answered, not looking up from her own work, which was an essay for Potions, a class he knew she hated, even after Snape left it to Slughorn. Oddly enough the four of them had been getting full marks in Defense. "It might have been something stupid like someone not realizing there were trees outside of their neck of the woods."
Ron smiled, but did not have it in him to laugh. The Hufflepuff girl looked up, the dark circles under her eyes made clear.
"What? Did I say something? I know you've had a lot going on since..."
"Don't worry about me," he said, not as softly as he meant. "You've an essay to write." Ronald Bilius Weasley that might be the first time you've prioritized anything relating to-
"I'm starting to hate Slughorn."
"Yeah, like you hated Snape. You don't fancy the class, doesn't matter who-"
Hannah glared, but her lip might have curled.
"No, I don't like Potions. I'm rubbish at it. I'm also pretty rubbish at History, but you don't see me hating Professor Binns." She shook her head. "Slughorn's a creep. He's teaching some of the older girls how to brew love potions, of all things- and he keeps trying to add famous students to his 'collection'. I mean, he's teaching everyone in that year how to make them, but it's highly dodgy to even allow that kind of thing."
"I think my mum and her friends used to make them for fun. No idea about the specifics; prob'ly aren't too proud of it."
"Well... I mean, I don't know exactly what they do, but isn't that kind of disgusting?" she asked. "I'm not saying your mother..."
"I don't really know what they did with them, but somehow it wasn't so bad as all that. I don't think my mother would... do anything like that, really." Change the subject. "Who's he got in his little celebrity collection?" he asked, scrawling a rune he hoped would go unnoticed entirely.
"He mostly talks about people we might know, like Quidditch players and members of the Wizengamot, but I'm pretty sure a few of the names he's just casually dropped here and there are Death Eaters." Might turn into something of a resource on the subject. Ron had not been paying any attention to the teacher's droning, since it managed to be less interesting than Potions.
"He's the Head of Slytherin, like he was a while back. Anyone we know?"
"Too many. Did you know Hagrid and Voldemort were in school at the same time?"
"No. Might be he's got a reason for not bringing it up in our section." I reckon there's a bloody good one. "Bet he never stops talking about how he defended Hagrid when he was accused of being the Heir of Slytherin." He produced an annoyed sigh. It was the sort of thing people did in hindsight. At the same time, something about what he said stuck out as being odd to him all of a sudden.
"Not really. He admits to thinking he was guilty when they took him off to Azkaban, most people did. I suppose that's how he justifies it." Ron remembered something about the half-giant getting a reduced sentence because there was basically no real evidence against him, but the Wizengamot decided it could not simply imprison no one and expect to remain on the bench. It's never just one bloody wanker.
Hermione and Terry walked in, identifying themselves quickly. It seemed they could never be too careful, especially not these days.
"It took us the better part of an hour to get in here," the dark haired wizard muttered, wandlessly summoning water from the tap. "I do hope you're pleased, there were three Hufflepuff first-years tailing us out of the Great Hall."
"Well, I hope you didn't have too much trouble with them."
"For your information, it's not as simple as stunning them whenever and walking off. We had to lead the first two in the wrong direction, stun them once there was no one around, and then another one started following us at the third floor going up to the fourth, so we had to stop on the fourth and to turn around and stun him too. If we're lucky, they'll think we're on the fourth floor for the rest of the day, but where will we be after that?"
"Ron, I hate to say it, but we might be overusing this room-" the Ravenclaw witch started.
"It's not even that- as long as we sleep here, they'll know," Terry continued. "On that, the two of us are going to have to start staying here in addition to you and Mafalda. There are three conspirators in our House to our knowledge."
"No one's saying we don't have problems," Hannah muttered. "If it's just three of them so far-"
"Okay, right, let's say it's just three of them. Tomorrow morning, they'll be up at the crack of dawn on the fourth floor, the dungeons, and the ground floor. If the one stationed on the ground floor sees us in the Great Hall before either of the others see us, they've eliminated the dungeons and the fourth floor. That gives us about three days before they know for certain, assuming they're using their time as liberally as possible-"
"We get it-" Ron started back.
"Now, if we don't assume that it's just three of them, we don't assume they're wasting time, and we don't assume they won't use the mind arts-"
"Well, what do you recommend?" Hannah asked, her voice raising through her question.
"You begin to understand the severity of the problem," Terry started. "I am out of ideas. I should really be going through funeral services-"
"We're not going to just die, Terry-"
"Why aren't we, Ron? What mad plan do we have to make some kind of sense out of this situation-" the Ravenclaw wizard asked, raising his hands above his head. "That's the question you have to consider- you say we can't die, why can't we? Dumbledore-"
"Panicking won't do us any good-" Hermione started back. "-no matter how bad the situation-"
"See, I'm not quite sure anything else will either, and I'm not quite sure any of you quite understand the severity- look, try and imagine the conversation they're having in Hufflepuff Basement right now."
There was a pause.
"I reckon they're trying to decide what-"
"No, that's just it. There's nothing left for them to decide. They had that conversation weeks ago when they decided Flora's trial was the school's last chance to come to the correct conclusion and just hold the Death Eaters' children hostage, or expel them and put them on terror watch lists- I don't know, whatever mad, unreasonable expectation they had. The law doesn't accomplish their objectives, but an angry mob will."
"Then the angry mob's going after the Slytherins, it's not going after-" Hannah started to object.
"It's not going after them, and the Slytherins aren't going after them. The conspirators need to get rid of us to get rid of any hope the fence-sitters might have had of law and order, a third side, whatever- Malfoy and his vassals have a personal grievance against us, and even if they were personally willing to let that stand, they've suffered an attack that does not come from the conspirators, which undermines the narrative that everyone who opposes them is working with the Department and the faction to tighten the Ministry's control. They're not going to be fighting, they're going to be tripping over each other trying to get to us."
The four of them stared at each other for a moment. Hermione looked like she was trying not to panic, if for no other reason than because of the consistent failure panicking usually generated. Hannah was glowering between him and Terry, who looked the angriest of all, with a visibly determined look about him. If I could think of anything to say I'd bloody well say it.
"I guess we would have been better of leaving Flora to the wolves," the Hufflepuff witch ventured at length, not entirely sarcastically.
"We would have been better off picking our battles- and don't pretend she would have been too much worse off expelled, her relatives would never allow-"
"It wasn't about Flora!" the Ravenclaw witch shrieked, raising eyebrows. "She, herself, can chew glass and die! It was about justice and law- and it was about the truth. Maybe no one would have ever found out if we knew she was innocent, but I can guarantee that there would be other attacks and other expulsions."
"If they were expelled, at least some of them would no longer be threats to us-"
"Then when they attack us in the future, we'll report them," Hermione insisted. "We can't fight them, not all of them, but at the beginning it will likely only be a few of them attacking at a time."
Terry took a long breath.
"There is no circumstance under which we can get them to attack in single file. If, in the unlikely event that a manageable number of them attack us, and fail, the next number will not be manageable."
Then we'll just have to find some way of funneling them through a pass or something.
"There are... methods of slowing them down, like funneling them through a pass," he started, a bit uncertainly. "I mean, that might not work against some of the older students, but the point is that we have to think of a solution, even if it prob'ly won't work." Can't just leave it there. "And then, maybe there isn't a solution, but we won't know until we try and think of one."
"What do you have in mind?" Hannah asked, probably trying to steer the discussion away from Terry's reasonably certain pit of despair.
"Well, first of all, we should have had this discussion a long time ago. We should have prepared for the Hufflepuffs to come after us before we defended Flora, and we should have thought that Malfoy would come after us when we had him expelled. Well, our memories were erased at the time, technically they're still gone-"
"That's not a plan," the dark-haired wizard stated.
"I'm getting to that. We can't see the future, so we didn't know about Flora getting jumped by the mad Hufflepuffs, but we shouldn't have decided to defend her without you being able to say anything about it. I can't say we'd have made a different decision, and at the end of the day I really hope we wouldn't, but we'd have been more prepared for the consequences if we had some idea of what they would be."
"That would have been better," Terry conceded at length. "I would have appreciated the privilege to register my disagreement with the group's decision." Noticed you're not calling it Hermione's decision; don't think I didn't. "However, we cannot move effectively if we have to discuss our every move as a group. That's what the conspirators purport to do, but Hannah has told us that is not actually the case," he concluded, looking over at the blonde witch.
"They might have tried that in the beginning, but they couldn't risk the consensus going against the narrative; the whole basis of the narrative being fact was 'well, everyone knows it'. I imagine that even if they had everyone on board with the narrative all the time, they still wouldn't be able to order the first-years and the fourth-years to do anything if they had to assemble and decide it as a group."
"I guess we've been too small thus far to really think about having a leader," Ron ventured. "It'd be really, well, I don't know what the word would be-"
"Pretentious?" Hermione suggested.
"Sounds about right. Anyway, if we had a leader, we'd be accepting the decisions of... whoever it is by accepting them as a leader."
"Should we vote?" Hannah asked.
"No, I think this is one thing we really should discuss as a group," Terry decided, apparently interested in the idea. He wouldn't be a rubbish leader. "If we gain additional members, we'll install a term system. Does anyone want to be leader?"
There was no response.
"I mean, if no one else will..." Ron started.
"I would be willing," The Ravenclaw wizard responded. "Hermione, would you be willing to be the leader? I believe you were effectively the leader of the defense in the trial."
"Well, I was the one who proposed the formation of the group, in a sense, but if I remember correctly, you decided to join us at the end of second year when we were not entirely sure there was a group."
"Terry's leader, he'll have final say; let's move on," Hannah decided. The four of them looked around a moment, but no one disagreed. "We've been slacking on learning-"
"We're up to our arses in assignments-" the red-haired wizard rejoined.
"We also have more immediate concerns," the newly appointed leader decided. "Research will not put us any closer to a specific solution to the specific problem. We can't stop studying in the library, but we need to be able to defend ourselves. Ron."
Everyone looked at him. Oh, I'm meant to suggest something. Can't say luck never did anything for me.
"Well, if we go everywhere as a group, they'll attack as a bigger group. We just need to stay within sight of each other. They probably won't attack in class; they don't want it to look like they're attacking our whole Houses. If you're alone, move quickly, like so they'll have to run to catch you, you can put up a shield charm over your shoulder and it'll hurt and block anything they were casting or trying to cast. Don't start anything; don't spend a lot of time in the Great Hall."
As the others received his advice, he had an idea that it probably sounded like he had only just came up with it, but there had been a natural progression when he thought about it. After the return of Voldemort, it seemed almost all of the students were on permanent high-alert, and it only seemed more and more like the school was going to the dogs with Dumbledore gone. War was not beginning anew, but reawakening, and he had already started preparing for the worst.
It had only taken him so long to realize it.