"For almost a minute the two of us were locked in a battle of wills that had no possible winner, only a different order of losing."
― Mira Grant, Parasite
Ron can't tell if he's more bothered by Hermione getting back together with Viktor right after Ron and Fleur had broken up or the fact that Harry seems to have permanently abandoned them for Draco Malfoy's company yet again.
Draco had bullied the three of them for years, and the three of them had always relied on each other to stand up to him: Hermione showed him up in class, Harry outshone Draco in Defense Against the Dark Arts and was a public hero who'd refused to be friends with him, and Ron was a pureblood in Gryffindor.
So what had changed? Ron can't think of any possible explanation for Harry's sudden change in behavior.
Currently, Ron and Hermione are sitting side-by-side in the Great Hall eating breakfast, and Ron can't stop himself from staring forlornly at the empty spot across from them where Harry once would have sat.
Meanwhile, Hermione is raving about how successful her attempts at reigning in Viktor's controlling tendencies have been. Words are flowing out of her mouth at such a swift and steady rate that Ron doesn't even bother trying to interrupt her. It's useless when she's like this.
". . . I just really think we might actually belong together, Ron. Every book I've read on the matter seems to confirm my theory that we're the perfect partners for each other. We challenge each other to grow as people while also providing one another with an appropriate level of affection. I'm just so happy, Ron," she finally finishes with a sigh.
By then, there's a pressure so intense emanating from Ron's hand that he looks down to see that he'd unknowingly clenched it so tightly around his goblet that his hand is bright red with white knuckles. Hot spikes of jealousy well within him, but it feels unfocused. His thoughts are crowded with thoughts of both bushy brown hair and toned muscles.
It's all so confusing that Ron shakes his head and looks away from Hermione.
"Why do you think Harry isn't sitting with us anymore?" he asks her, as his eyes simultaneously seek and find Harry.
The green-eyed boy in question is sitting further down the Gryffindor table, far enough away that he can't hear any of the words being exchanged between Harry and his group of admirers. It seems so unlike Harry to willingly surround himself with a large group of people like that, and Ron is only further confused by it.
Not only is he apparently happily surrounded by Gryffindors, but he's also sending paper airplanes back and forth to the other tables. Peering his head around, Ron can spot them going to Cho Chang, Luna Lovegood, and of course, Draco Malfoy.
Ron and Hermione were always the ones to make Harry smile the way that he is now smiling without so much as a glance at Ron or Hermione. As if he didn't miss their friendship at all.
He sinks further down onto the bench as Hermione finally replies to his earlier question with, "We've been his best friends for years, Ron. Not Draco or Luna or your brothers. Harry can't forget that. He'll come back to us."
The position of High Inquisitor is the best thing that has ever happened to Dolores Umbridge. She now has complete and utter power over creating and enforcing the rules at Hogwarts and it is glorious.
She strides out of her office, determined to find every student breaking her rules and punish them all as severely as the little brats deserve. Severe punishment is the only kind that has any effectiveness, she's found.
Immediately, she spots two older students kissing in a corner. "Detention!"
Then Dolores turns a corner and blinks as a puff of smoke suddenly clouds her vision. "Weasley twins!" she screeches as her skin turns green. "Another detention!"
Calming herself down, she takes a moment to point her wand at herself and transfigure her skin back to its normal color.
Around the next corner, Dolores' eyes immediately settle upon Luna Lovegood and Harry Potter whispering conspiratorially. She marches right up to them and hears the girl mention The Quibbler, a wizarding tabloid magazine run by her father.
"There will be no mention of that garbage in this fine establishment!" Dolores shrieks from behind Lovegood. The girl startles and turns to face her. "Detention!"
Dolores wants nothing more than to give Potter a detention as well, but he isn't openly breaking any of her rules at the moment, so she can merely purse her lips and silently promise him, Soon. I'm in charge here, young man. I make the rules, and you're bound to break one of them. I'll make sure of it, and then I'll catch you. Detention awaits you, Potter. You can't avoid it for long. For now, I have your mischievous friends caught already. They'll suffer for their misdeeds, boy. You can't protect them from me. You'll see.
Luna, the twins, and Cho had all been handed detentions earlier in the day, and they'd immediately come to Harry one by one to tell him and seek reassurance for the foreboding each of them felt. Not sure what awaited them but fearful for his friends, Harry had asked them all to meet him in the room of requirement after they were done that night.
Harry has never seen his new friends cry before. But after one detention each with Umbitch, they're all in tears (besides the twins, who'd had several detentions already and seemed more distraught by the pain their friends than what they themselves suffered)
"What happened?" Harry demands in horror, as Cho throws herself at him, already sobbing, the moment she walks through the door.
"She―she―just look!" Cho chokes out, flinging her arm out to Harry's face.
He looks at the faces gathered around her questioningly, but they've all held out their own arms and started gingerly caressing their non-dominant hands.
With building anxiety, Harry carefully pulls Cho's long sleeve down her arm to reveal the back of her hand. It's immediately obvious what kind of punishment happens during detention.
"Oh, Cho," Harry whispers sadly as he stares at the words, "I must not engage in PDA," engraved in stark red lines on her pale skin.
Harry doesn't want to see the rest of his friends bearing similar damage, but he has to know. "Did she do this to you too?"
Nods all around coincide with Harry's heart sinking even lower in his chest. He walks around and looks at the back of their hands one by one, his eyes stinging.
The message on Luna's hand says, I must not discuss the Quibbler in school.
The twins' hands don't have just one message. They each have at least half a dozen reprimands etched into their flesh, and that's only what Harry can see. He notices I must not dress up statues stretching across Fred's fingers. I must not host portrait gambling nights curls around George's palm.
Harry's friends don't deserve what's happened to them. He wants to march straight up to Umbitch and slap some sense into her. Cho is finally finding some happiness with another boy after her ex-boyfriend Cedric was tragically killed a year ago. Fred and George's pranks are ultimately harmless, and they maintain a good morale in the school. While everyone knows Luna is eccentric, her topics of choice are hardly a threat to anyone, let alone the High Inquisitor's agenda.
"We can disband SASA; I don't want to put any of you through this again," Harry begins.
But he doesn't get far with this line of thought before Cho interrupts, "No, Harry. SASA is too important to just quit! We all need it. We need you. I'm willing to risk it."
"That's so brave of you Cho, but if anything happens―"
"She's right, Harry," says Luna in her usual steady tone. "Besides, Draco helps us keep it hidden, and even Snape didn't tell Umbridge about it after he found us."
"Harry, we've had a marvelous idea," starts Fred.
"One that will make our SASA meetings so safe even you'll agree to keep having them," continues George.
"All we need is for the two of us to set up pranks around the school that go off during our meetings so that Umbitch's squad is busy dealing with them instead of looking for you," says Fred.
"And to make it even better, we can have Draco lead the squad. Umbitch wouldn't suspect he's in on this," finishes George.
Harry looks around at his friends. Their faces are firm, stances determined. They want this badly enough to stand up to him about it.
"Fine," Harry sighs, "I'll talk to Draco about the new plan."
That night finds Draco and Harry alone in the Room of Requirement. It's past curfew, so Harry had collected Draco from the Slytherin common room using his invisibility cloak, and the two had snuck all the way to the seventh floor from there. It had meant that the two boys were pressed tightly together for quite a trek, and the whole time, Harry could only think of when Draco's mouth was on his not so long ago.
But he'd been crying, Harry reminded himself. Draco misses Cedric, the guy he was actually in love with. He doesn't want me. Not really.
So his heart lurched and skipped a beat when Draco's fingers touched the back of Harry's hand, but he didn't do anything about it. Harry might have wanted nothing more in that moment than to give into the temptation of Draco's tantalizingly close body heat, but he kept the reminder firmly planted at the front of his mind that absolutely nothing good would come of such a lapse in restraint. Draco would end up hating Harry for taking advantage of his grieving state, and Harry would hate himself for the same reason. Even if Draco could forgive him, Harry wouldn't be able to forgive himself.
Once in the Room of Requirement, and sitting safely on separate armchairs (which Harry had been very careful to request as they entered), Harry sets aside all thoughts of throwing himself into the Slytherin's arms in favor of laying out the plan that the twins had come up with earlier in the day.
Draco seems entirely unsurprised by it. "Sure, I'll do it."
Harry had expected and prepared to have to do a bit more convincing, so he's rather underwhelmed by the lackluster response. "Just like that?" he asks.
"Just like that," Draco confirms.
"Aren't you worried that your fellow Slytherins might have noticed that you've been friendly with me lately and say something to Umbridge?"
"I have them under control."
Harry opens his mouth to retort something about being worried about Draco managing so much on his own, but the blonde effectively eliminates Harry's ability to speak when he stands up and crosses the room to place himself directly in front of Harry.
"You can count on me," he reminds Harry, inviting into the room unbidden a ghost of a conversation they'd had before.
"I know," Harry whispers as Draco inserts a hand under his chin, forcing Harry to make eye contact with him. Whatever he sees in Harry's face seems to satisfy him. Draco's thumb strokes Harry's jawline briefly before he drops his hand entirely.
Harry stands to walk Draco back to the dungeons. The two are silent as they walk, but Draco's presence at Harry's side remains as warm and tempting as before. Harry thinks Draco must be walking even closer to him than strictly necessary, thereby risking that the two of them might trip over each other's feet, but he says nothing and makes no effort to put additional space between them.
He still can't stop himself from shivering when Draco presses a featherlight kiss to Harry's lips right before he ducks out from under Harry's cloak and disappears into the Slytherin common room.
The journey back to Gryffindor Tower after that passes in a daze for Harry.
In hindsight, Harry should have known better than to talk to Colin Creevey and Ginny Weasley about Voldemort's return outside of Gryffindor Tower. But they had come up to him in the Great Hall, brandishing a copy of the Daily Prophet that boldly proclaimed Harry to be an attention-seeking liar and demanding to know how Harry would respond. So of course Harry had had to remind them that he did not, in fact, lie about his encounter with Voldemort during the Tri-Wizard Tournament, but that he unfortunately couldn't force everyone in the press to believe him.
And of course, none of them had noticed Umbitch sneaking up behind them.
"Just what is going on here? 'Voldemort is back,' you say. We all know that's not true. You must not tell lies, Harry. Detention!"
Ginny and Colin immediately shut up and held their breath, expecting to be the next ones thrown to detention.
But Umbitch, for once, seemed to have something else on her mind besides handing out as many detentions as possible. Her eyes didn't seem to even register the presence of the two fourth years. Instead, they were locked onto Harry with a hard glint.
Now, all Harry can think about is Cho sobbing after her detention, four hands bearing words of blood. Soon, he'll probably have one too. . . .
Harry trepidatively pushes the door to Umbitch's office for his detention. Immediately, his eyes are drawn to a wall covered with cat tea plates. The rest of the office is frilly and pink, sharply contrasting with the harsh woman to whom it belongs.
"Take a seat, Harry," Umbitch says as she stands from behind her desk.
He sits at a table with a piece of parchment and an odd-looking black quill laid out in front of him. Uninterested in attempting to make any efforts at pleasant conversation with her, he allows the stony silence between them to continue.
Seemingly unperturbed, Umbitch smiles at him and says, "You're going to write lines for me tonight. Specifically, you will write 'I must not tell lies.'"
"You didn't give me any ink," Harry points out.
She picks up the strange black quill and says, "You won't need any with my special quill."
Unimpressed, Harry asks, "How many times do I have to write it?"
She smirks then, a strange sight indeed, and merely says, "Let's just say you'll write it . . . until the message sinks in."
This seems like a far cry from the worst detention Harry's ever had, but he remembers what his friends hands had looked like after their detentions, so he reluctantly picks up the quill she's holding out for him to take. He begins to write 'I must not tell lies' on the parchment, and to his surprise, the words show up scarlet red on the parchment, despite the black quill.
That's when he notices the pain coming from his non-dominant left hand. With every stroke of the quill on the parchment, the pain intensifies, and when he looks at his hand, he can see that the skin is turning red, as if something were scraping at it.
Annoyed, Harry continues writing. His hand continues hurting, and after a few lines, Harry sees the words starting to appear on it. 'I must not tell lies.'
So, this is how my friends got their scars. Umbitch sat them all down in this pretty pink room and had them carve the words themselves.
Although Umbitch is watching him intently and has most definitely noticed that the words have already appeared on his hand, she seems determined to have him keep writing. Unable to leave until she lets him, Harry puts his quill to the parchment again, wanting this to end as soon as possible.
Strangely, however, Harry soon starts to notice the pain in his hand receding instead of intensifying. This seems counterintuitive to Umbitch's plan, but he doesn't want her to investigate, so he tries to keep his reaction off his face.
He spends the next dozen lines wondering what could be interfering with the effects of Umbitch's quill. After running into dead ends with every idea he can think of, something hard around his wrist clacks against the table, startling him.
Draco's bracelet.
Harry had almost forgotten about it in the months since he'd grown accustomed to its steady presence on his wrist. It was usually buried under his robes or long-sleeved shirts or even more securely hidden with an invisibility charm when he's around Draco, but he almost always had it on, including now.
Thinking back to when he'd first obtained the bracelet, he recalls Draco promising him that it would help to heal him. Harry had thought Draco was just trying to entice him to meet up with Draco so that the blonde could learn his identity and advance to the next round of the journal competition, but perhaps Draco really had been honest about the bracelet's effects.
Unfortunately, Harry can't ask Draco outright. He'd confessed far too much to both him and Snape anonymously through the journals, and he still can't bear the thought of connecting those confessions to himself. Especially not after the humiliating episodes of this summer, when he'd desperately turned to them for help when Vernon threw a vase at him and cut his eye.
For now, all Harry can do is keep writing and be grateful for the protective weight on his wrist that alleviates the pain in his hand. Not completely, but to a level that's bearable. And the words aren't as deeply-etched as his friends' had been.
By the time Umbitch lets him leave, Harry sees a vein throbbing in her neck, probably annoyed at his nonchalance throughout the detention.
He silently thanks Draco for helping him earn this small victory.
The Slytherin common room is nearly empty when Draco's magic starts tugging at his awareness. It only takes a moment after that for him to recognize it as the spell he'd cast on the bracelet he gave to whoever he was speaking to in the journal.
Pansy Parkinson shoots him a concerned look as Draco immediately throws himself off the couch he'd been lying on and flies down the hall to his dormitory. But Draco can't bring himself to give a damn about her or the disgruntled roommates he shoves out of his way in his haste to get to the trunk at the foot of his bed.
After a minute of frantically scrounging around in his trunk, Draco's fingers finally find what they're looking for: the leather cover of his journal from last school year. He pulls it out and takes it with him to his bed, snatching a quill from his bedside table on the way.
Opening the journal, he writes, Are you okay?
Draco had thought himself finally resigned to the fact that he's still unclear about who he's been writing to all this time, but now he's reliving the anxiety he felt over the summer as he watched Snape attempt to provide healing potion instructions in his own journal, unable to do anything more despite his eagerness to help someone so clearly in need of it.
There's still the lingering thought in his head, What if it's Harry?
But he can't bring himself to consider that too seriously. Harry is strong, stronger than Draco could ever be. And as the golden child of the wizarding world (well, except not now perhaps as The Daily Prophet attempts his defamation), he would never have gone through the experiences that Draco has heard about from someone through the journal.
No response is forthcoming, and it's maddening. Draco's magic keeps flaring up, telling him that the bracelet's owner is still being hurt.
It feels like hours pass by before he finally sees a response in his journal, making his heart thunder as he sees the writing appear.
I'm fine. Don't worry about me.
The tension that had been building in Draco's gut finally starts to dissolve, but he can't help feeling a twinge of sorrow that he can't go check on this student who has endured so much. He's relying on the word of someone who could very well be an unreliable narrator. But he has no choice other than to trust what he's told.
Instead of pushing the issue, Draco talks to his journal partner about more pleasant topics late into the night, eventually falling asleep with the book splayed on his chest.
