What Would Broz Do

The Midnight "Duel"

"The way I see it, we'll trash talk Malfoy for a few minutes, get in the right mood for it. Then we'll just run up and punch him square on the nose, the knob won't even see it coming."

"Hmm," Harry replied in a non-committal whisper, taking a turn at the portrait of three sleeping women next to a picnic basket, the one in the pale blue dress was snoring softly.

"Not exactly what the dueling circuit is made of, I know, but – Harry this isn't the way to the trophy room, we need to go that way," Ron pointed in the opposite direction than the one Harry was leading them.

"Yeah, but we're not going to the trophy room."

Ron hurried forward to catch up. "We're not?"

"Nah, Malfoy… I know the type." Harry muttered darkly, thinking of the cousin he had left behind less than a month ago. "He'll make a big show but he'll tattle on us, he probably went to Filch as soon as he boasted to us about the duel and is trying to set us up."

"Oh…" Ron paused, thinking that through. "Yeah, sounds about right. Grew up in a house of five brothers but even Fred and George never did anything like that." Harry could see Ron's face glowing a slight red in the flickering light of the corridor torches. "That little… wait, so why are we out here anyway? If there's no chance of giving Malfoy a good thrashing."

Harry grinned. "Filch is going to be sitting up in the trophy room for the next hour or so, more than like. Which means we have free run of the rest of the castle."

Ron gave Harry a look of appreciation that eclipsed even his look of awe when he first saw Harry's scar on the train. "That's brilliant."

As they soon discovered, they did not have free reign of the castle; it turned out that the Professors did not entrust the entire castle full of students to the perpetually angry caretaker. Twice, Ron and Harry had to duck or push themselves up against the walls and hide in the shadows from ghosts. Footsteps that Harry swore reminded him of his Head of House and Transfiguration professor came from a corridor that had the two of them scrambling in the other direction as quietly as they could manage; Harry did not want to imagine the hundreds of points McGonagall would take from him and Ron if they were caught; maybe this wasn't such a good idea.

Harry and Ron had thought that skulking around a castle at the dead of night would be great fun; and to be fair it had been at first, but as time went on the fear of getting caught started to outweigh the mystery of what was just… a bunch of empty halls and classrooms. "Maybe we could go to the library?" Harry suggested. Ron stared at him with a look of total incomprehension at that statement, and Harry grimaced. "Yeah, um… I dunno. Sorry mate."

Ron shrugged. "Is what it is, I s'pose. Be a bit better if we knew where everything was, but I suppose that's going to take a while until we've been here a lot longer."

Harry nodded pensively at that. "Let's just keep looking around then. Maybe we'll come across something to come back to later."

Ron seemed satisfied at that, and so the two of them skulked down the corridors, avoiding the grand staircase as they assumed anyone out at night would be using that, but before long they were having a good enough time, especially after Ron was poking behind a tapestry and found a secret room. There wasn't anything in the secret room, it was literally just an empty room, not even the remnants of whatever class used to meet here, but the prospect suddenly had them imagining all sorts of other secrets and that made the whole thing more exciting.

"Maybe we can find the other House common rooms," Ron whispered gleefully. "Don't think Fred or George have ever managed that – reckon they would have boasted about it by now if they had."

"How would we get inside?" Harry asked. "Even if someone found the Gryffindor entrance, they'd have to get past The Fat Lady, right? Probably the same for the other Houses."

Ron's face fell a bit at that, but after a moment he shrugged, with a glint of determination in his eyes. "Dunno, but reckon we can find a way. Must be loads of spells for that sort of thing; dad's always complaining about people running around disguising cursed items as things muggles use day-to-day."

"We probably shouldn't cast curses on ourselves," Harry replied, deadpan.

"Well yeah not curses obviously but other sorts of disgui- oh very funny," Ron hissed as Harry snickered.

"Imagine though, if we snuck into the Slytherin common room. We could find out all their dark magic secrets, maybe bewitch Malfoy's bed to strangle him, or drop a dung bomb in his trunk."

"Dung bomb?"

"Oh right, sorry. They're um… well basically these little balls about the size of your thumb that explode and smell like sh-"

However Ron was about to finish off his explanation (and Harry had a pretty good idea where it had been going), was overtaken by the events suddenly playing out in front of them, when the door to a classroom opened without warning, and while it had been completely silent before, now emerged giggles and whispers and a yelp that did not sound particularly upset about whatever had caused the yelping.

Two students, an older boy and girl both in yellow Hufflepuff robes, tumbled out the door a moment later, looking very disheveled. Ron and Harry froze right in the middle of the hall, so utterly unanticipated was this new turn of events that even jumping behind a rather ugly statue of a warlock did not enter their heads.

Thankfully – such as it was – the two had no interest in anything but one another, and in the gloom of the corridor didn't so much as notice the two first years staring at them with wide eyes.

"I'll show you naughty little witch," the girl declared with an air of triumph, poking the boy in the ribs. And then out of bloody nowhere she began to grow, seven, eight, nine feet tall, until Harry was sure she was going to hit her head on the ceiling above.

There were literal monsters in the castle, Harry thought to himself. His feet were frozen, but her partner did not seem particularly afraid or even bewildered by the elongating witch who – and it was a testament to how bizarre she was that Harry only just noticed – had hair as pink as muggle bubble gum.

The boy looked like he was about to say something, but at precisely that moment Ron let out a scream. Harry shot him a dirty look, but to be fair Harry was fairly certain his own mouth had been halfway open and ready to scream himself. A fraction of a second later Ron clamped his hands over his mouth and shut up, but by then it was too late, and the two older years turned; giving Harry and Ron a full view of them for the first time; or as good a view as they could get when the wizard's arm was tangled up in the girls ever rising robes.

Nobody said anything – there wasn't really anything to say, and it suddenly began to dawn on Harry that he was actually witnessing the aftermath of the sort of thing that happened in Aunt Petunia's afternoon serials, or that she tutted about happening among the neighbors or national celebrities. The girl wasn't a monster at all, they were just –

"You're Tonks!" Ron blurted out a second later. "Charlie told me loads about you. Harry, she's a um… a morph something or other. Can make herself look like anything she wants." Ron sounded thunderstruck, and Harry couldn't blame him, he was impressed himself.

"I think we should learn how to do that," he said to Ron instead, forgetting to keep his voice down in the waves of revelations that were suddenly coming in hard and quick.

The girl laughed, shrinking back to a more normal height, but still keeping the bright pink hair. The boy next to her was still gaping at Harry and Ron like a fish. "Not something you can just pick up, I'm afraid, but thanks for the show of approval." She fussed over her robes for a minute, mumbling about her wand.

"Charlie's little brother, eh? Didn't know he had another. What's your name then?"

Ron didn't even look put out at just being a little brother, and an apparently forgotten one at that.

"I'm Ron Weasley. Erm, just uh Ron. And this is Harry."

Tonks's eyes darted over to him. "Blimey, you're Harry Potter!" Tonks grinned and turned to her partner. "Imagine me telling my grandkids one day that I got caught snogging James Smallhill by Harry bloody Potter."

"We didn't see anything," Harry hastened to clarify. "We just um… well you came out and surprised us is all."

Whatever further jokes were about to be made at his and Ron's expense were stopped by another set of footsteps coming down the hall. "Bollocks," Tonks hissed. "Got distracted, forgot about the prefect patrol." She turned to Harry and Ron – and shook her head toward the room her and James had just come out of.

"Get in there, quick."

Unsure what else to do, they hurried in along with James, as Tonks closed the door on them. "What's she going to do?" Harry hissed at the older boy. James just smirked and pointed to the crack at the edge of the door, and both he and Ron put their eyes up to it, where they could just make out the figure of Tonks that was rapidly shifting like molten wax into… Harry's eyes went wide, as suddenly Tonks disappeared and in her place was the spitting image of their awful potions professor, Professor Snape, right down to the grease at the end of his nose that shown in the firelight. Her robes had changed to, so that she was completely identical to his hated teacher.

"Not my favorite look," James said, "but dead useful."

"Who's there?" A voice called up from the end of the hall, and Ron tensed against Harry. Giving Ron a look, the other boy just shook his head. They looked back out the window, as a second figure appeared, one that Harry thought he recognized. But before he could finish his thought, the second figure spoke again.

"Who is – oh, oh my sorry professor. Just doing the Prefect rounds, sorry." Percy sounded like a balloon with half the air being let out.

"Do you think I need to identify myself to students?" The imposter Snape asked, sounding every bit as quietly demeaning as the real one Harry had to deal with at least once every other day. "Do you think being a Prefect gives you a position over a professor, Mr. Weasley?"

Percy audibly gulped. "No, professor. I'll just ah, carry on, shall I?"

"See that you do, Mr. Weasley." Percy's footsteps rapidly faded back the way he had come.

"Brilliant." Ron whispered.

Harry was inclined to agree. James snickered, and when Tonks opened the door; still looking like Snape but now with bubblegum pink hair, the older boy replied, "Think you've got a couple of firsty fanboys."

"Yeah well, maybe you're just jealous, James. Imagine what mum will say when I tell her I had to keep the Boy Who Lived out of certain peril," she rolled Snape's eyes, which was very disconcerting and thankfully a moment later she turned back into… well, Harry didn't know if it was what she actually looked like, but at least she looked like a girl again.

"You two should probably get back to your tower," Tonks said after patting herself down again. "And be more careful, like – teachers like to make a big example of firsties being out of bed; you don't want to be the first in your year caught out that way, trust me. Usually sometime around Christmas everyone goes down to breakfast and one house has lost a lot of points in the night, because some silly firsties went for a walkabout and got caught."

Harry and Ron shared a look; the two were on pretty good terms with their fellow Gryffindor first years and not a few Ravenclaws and Puffs as well – they didn't want to lose all of that because they cost their house half a term's worth of points by being careless.

Tonks continued, as if reading their thoughts. "Go back down that corridor and then up the ladder next to the portrait of the drunk monk. Should put you near enough to your tower; don't know where it is precisely but that's always the way Charlie and the rest of his gang snuck back after a lark. Should do for you."

As they hadn't come by the ladder, that was a nice nugget of information at least to end the night on.

"Sure. Thanks, Tonks. James." Harry replied, and a moment later he and Ron were left to themselves as the two older students were sneaking off in the other direction, hands once again all over each other.

"We could follow them, see if they lead us back to Hufflepuff," Ron suggested, but Harry could tell his heart wasn't in it. Getting almost caught sneaking out by his own brother had clearly sapped him of any remaining sense of adventure for the evening.

"Let's just head back," Harry said at last. "We have loads of time to explore the castle, but clearly we need to be a little more prepared. Let's do something a little less risky tomorrow."

"Like what?"

Harry thought about it for a second as they headed back down the corridor towards the promised ladder that would take them (mostly) back to safety. "Let's go see Hagrid; I bet he knows all sorts of stuff about the castle."

Ron nodded. "Sounds good. Not going to have any of his scones though, no offense," he added, looking slightly chagrined as he knew that Harry considered Hagrid to be a genuine friend.

Harry snickered. "None taken. In fact, maybe our next mission should be to find out where the kitchens are."

And on that happy note, the two boys found themselves not far from The Fat Lady, and five minutes later were safely ensconced in the First Year dormitory, Harry dozing off to fleeting thoughts that somewhere there must be a spell to giving him his own morphing powers.