Harry turned up outside Professor Umbridge's office about five minutes before eight, or at least that was the time according to both his watch and a Tempus spell he cast. (Well, he cast two, and the first one said that the time was two fifty-six, but after a moment of confusion Harry realized he'd been thinking about a book that took place in New York and so had got American time.)
The door opened about ten seconds before the hour, and Professor Umbridge looked out with a bright smile.
"Ah, there you are!" she said, as if she'd been the one waiting. "In you come."
Harry took the invitation, looking around with interest.
When their Defence Professor had been Gilderoy Lockhart, he'd filled the room with things about himself – from the extremely rare experimental Firebolt he'd been given to his own fiction-disguised-as-fact books with him on the cover. Then there'd been Remus, who'd instead used the Defence Against the Dark Arts office to prepare for Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons.
Harry hadn't seen most of the others, but he assumed they were sort of somewhere in the middle – some things about themselves, some things about their class. He didn't know, though, and so Professor Umbridge's office was an interesting third example.
It looked a lot like someone had read one of Aunt Petunia's magazines on how to make a house look absolutely wonderful – a kind of absolutely wonderful that involved lacy covers, cloths, vases of flowers and knick-knacks, but didn't really allow for people to sit down and put things on tables and actually use the space.
An entire wall was covered in a rather amazing collection of ornamental plates with moving kittens on them.
In a way, you could sort of view it as a good Defence lesson. Professor Umbridge's pink cardigan blended in to the rest of the room, a bit like a predator hiding in ambush. (Though you didn't really need that lesson after a year of Mr. Moody as the Defence teacher.)
"Good evening, Mr. Potter," Professor Umbridge added.
"Good evening, Professor Umbridge," Harry replied, politely. "What sort of thing do you want me to be doing for my detention? I've never had one before."
"Now, now," Professor Umbridge said, tittering. "Manners, Mr. Potter."
She indicated a straight-backed chair and a small table. "Well? Sit down."
Harry sat, finding the chair a bit uncomfortable, and half-unfurled his wings a couple of time before managing to find a properly comfy position that didn't seem like it was going to rip part of the upholstery.
"You will be writing lines, Mr. Potter," Professor Umbridge went on, placing a piece of parchment and a quill in front of him. "That sounds simple enough, doesn't it?"
Harry had to admit that it did. It was the sort of thing that turned up in old books about people going to school – the Enid Blyton sort – though maybe it was done at Hogwarts as well?
The best people to ask would probably be Fred and George, though getting a correct answer out of them would be another thing entirely.
Harry inspected the quill, which looked like quite a fine-quality and sharp one, then checked the desk.
"Professor Umbridge?" he asked. "There isn't an inkwell."
"This quill doesn't need one, Mr. Potter," Umbridge told him, sounding amused and watching him closely. "I want you to write, I will not disturb class."
Harry waited to hear how many times he had to write it, then picked up the quill in one paw. "Is it going to be for an amount of time, or a number of lines?"
"I'll tell you when to stop, Mr. Potter," she said, with a peculiar lilt in her voice.
Harry shrugged his wings slightly, and started writing.
There was a vague sort of itching on the back of his paw, for some reason, and no ink… then the quill caught fire.
"What?" Professor Umbridge shouted, the enjoyment entirely gone. "What did you do, you stupid beast?"
Harry reached for his wand, not sure whether to cast a flame-freezing charm or something else, then decided to try and put the quill out with a jet of water instead. That was a spell he'd learned years ago, including to cast it with his breath – it had taken a while but everyone had agreed it would be safest if he could put out fires easily – so he inhaled, then spat out a jet of water with a mumbled "Aguamenti!"
The spray of water hit the quill, and the table, and some of it bounced off and sprayed the wall with all the cats on it. They fled their plates with meows and mrowls of terror, their differently-coloured bow ties going with them, and Professor Umbridge only just escaped the blast.
When the fire was finally out, there was a sort of long moment of silence, punctuated only by the sizzling of the still-hot quill in a puddle of water.
"What did you do," Umbridge repeated, this time in a voice of intense loathing. "That was the only one I had!"
"I've got a quill in my bag?" Harry offered. "Sorry about what happened to your quill, Professor Umbridge, but if you've only got one quill then I can give you one now and another one tomorrow morning – it's not a bother."
He may not have liked Professor Umbridge, but if she really was that poor then it seemed like the polite thing to do to help her out.
Professor Umbridge just stared at Harry for several long seconds after that.
"Get out of my office," she said, eventually.
"Oh, there you are," Ron said, when Harry climbed back through the portrait hole at about ten minutes after eight. "Blimey, short detention."
"It didn't really go as I was expecting," Harry replied. "She told me to write lines, but then the quill she gave me caught fire. I put it out, but she seemed really angry anyway and just told me to leave."
"Weird," Hermione summarized. "Well, you're here now. We've still got that Transfiguration homework to finish?"
"I kind of thought that learning to turn into a squirrel would help with Transfiguration," Ron grumbled.
"It's extra credit," Neville pointed out. "You still need, you know… regular… credit? Is that how it works?"
"Probably," Dean said. "Okay, so… Vanishing spells, right?"
Harry kept turning over the events of his extremely truncated detention in his head, sort of in the back of his mind, for the whole of Tuesday.
It felt like there was something there he wasn't getting. Professor Umbridge wasn't very nice, and she certainly didn't like what she thought of as beasts, but when he tried to think about what had happened as if she was a really nasty person he just couldn't work out what she'd been trying to do.
But when he tried to think about it as if she wasn't a really nasty person he couldn't understand why she didn't just have him write with a normal quill.
Runes helped distract him from it, because they were practicing how to write extremely carefully so that they would be able to outline sufficiently accurate Runes on their coursework, but Care of Magical Creatures wasn't nearly so helpful because it reminded him of how Professor Umbridge thought of magical creatures – especially the ones with wands.
And in Herbology Harry's conversation with Justin over a peculiar little plant called mimbletonia somehow ended up talking about what punishments were like in Muggle schools. Harry sort of remembered from Matilda that there were really nasty ways that an inventive horrible person could come up with to punish a pupil, but at least those seemed unusual instead of like they were in older books (where hitting someone with a cane was quite normal).
Then Justin told Harry about someone called Molesworth, and Harry decided to see if he could find one of that sort of book in a bookshop or library or something.
"Did you hear about what happened in Defence Against the Dark Arts today?" Flopsy asked, during dinner.
"Oh, not again," Neville sighed. "What's with that woman?"
"She might actually be worse than Lockhart," Dean agreed. "And Lockhart was a total fraud who had us write poetry."
Mopsy and Cottontail gave them an odd look, but Flopsy had already started explaining. "There was a bit of talking, or there might have been a bit of talking, and Professor Umbridge asked everyone to stop, in a kind of sweet you're-a-puppy kind of voice – then she asked Conal who had been talking."
"Had Conal been talking?" Harry asked, fairly sure the answer had to be no, and thinking that the Barlos sisters would have the best idea of who had been talking.
"Don't think so," Mopsy told him, shaking her head. "I didn't hear it, and I was sitting only a couple of seats down."
"But he couldn't answer," Flopsy went on. "And so she gave him detention for it, saying that she wasn't going to let people defend their friends from punishment like that because it wouldn't be fair."
"Then she asked anyone who'd actually been talking to own up, and nobody did," Cottontail finished. "She said he had to show up at five, so he's probably already doing detention… unless it's like your one and it was over really quickly."
"This is just weird," Ron contributed.
Harry had to agree.
He had a lot of homework that evening, and also got distracted for half an hour or so by needing to sort out an argument between two second-years (there'd been a mix-up which had resulted in one accusing the other of stealing socks, but Harry had been able to get a House-Elf by the name of Cassy to clarify what had happened), so it wasn't until nearly midnight when he was about to talk to Empress that Harry checked the Marauders' Map.
To his great surprise, Conal was still in Professor Umbridge's office, and he left a few minutes later to go straight down to the Hufflepuff dorm room.
Harry flicked the Map up to check on Professor Dumbledore's room, and saw that he was in his office and that he was alone. A bit more checking showed that he was in his office and not in the bedroom, so Harry got his wand out and cleared his throat.
"Expecto Patronum," he incanted, and Ruth erupted from the tip of his wand before turning to hover expectantly in front of him. "Headmaster, I think Conal has just done seven hours of detention with Professor Umbridge for not telling her who was speaking in class. That seems like a lot."
Ruth promptly vanished, and Harry waited to see if Dumbledore was going to ask him anything before eventually deciding to contact Empress.
On Wednesday morning, at breakfast, Dumbledore stood up.
He didn't say anything, or make any kind of noise, but just stood there in his purple and gold robes with a faint smile. The normal hubbub of breakfast conversation slowly died away, as people noticed, and once it reached a certain point people began looking around for why it was quiet and the sound all went away at once.
"I am sorry to disturb you breaking your fasts," he said, once everyone was looking. "But I am afraid I must announce a few more school rules – this time regarding the subject of detentions. To be precise, and in case there is any confusion, a detention at Hogwarts cannot take more than two hours and it is not permitted for any detention to involve either significant physical discomfort or any sort of serious risk."
He smiled pleasantly. "Naturally all this is the sort of thing I would hope would be obvious anyway, but I feel it should be said out loud. I also want to make it as clear as I hope it would have been anyway that writing lines and cleaning cauldrons are not things which involve significant physical discomfort. My apologies to certain twins amongst us."
"Rats," Fred said, which Harry suspected was the worst expletive available to any Weasley after their recent family history.
Dumbledore then swept his hand out to one side, indicating Professor McGonagall. "I believe that my colleague also has something she wishes to announce."
"Indeed I do, Albus," Professor McGonagall agreed. "If someone from Gryffindor has been given a detention which they honestly feel they do not deserve, then they can bring it to me and ask for me to supervise it instead. If the detention truly was for a frivolous reason, you can expect to be treated accordingly."
Her mouth thinned into a fine line. "I will not, however, allow people to get out of justly deserved punishment this way, and someone who tries to take advantage of me will not enjoy the result."
"I'll do the same for my House," Professor Sprout said, standing up, and Professor Snape nodded silently in a way that probably meant he was saying the same.
Harry couldn't see Professor Flitwick at first, partly because when he stood up the difference wasn't very noticeable, but when he leaned around where Ron was blocking his view he saw that Professor Flitwick was floating his cushion in the air.
"An excellent idea!" the Ravenclaw Head of House said, nodding. "In fact, a very appealing idea!"
Several people groaned, Harry among them.
After the second announcement in less than a week, there seemed to be a kind of drop in tension.
Maybe Harry was just imagining it, or something, and since he wasn't in all Defence Against the Dark Arts classes (or indeed any of them except his own) it might just have been because he hadn't seen Professor Umbridge since the second announcement except at mealtimes.
He did make sure to check on Conal in the first Unusually Shaped meeting, and the Hufflepuff colt said that his hand had hurt a bit from writing what must have been more than a thousand lines during his prolonged detention. There didn't seem to be any marks, so it was probably just muscle strain or something, and Harry told him to let Madam Pomfrey know to see if she could help.
Some of the rest of the same meeting was taken up with talking about Melody and how she was going to learn to fly (which was usually an outdoors pursuit, after all), and Harry thought maybe she'd have to be careful during the basic lessons and then do lessons during the evening in winter when days were much shorter. That depended on if Madam Hooch thought it was okay, but then again Harry was pretty sure Madam Hooch only had two classes a week so she could probably make the time.
Then there was a bit of a worry about what it was going to be like when Tiobald reached his OWL year, because some of the questions in OWLs were ones where you had to answer them out loud.
It seemed as though the simplest, albeit silly, solution would be to have both the examiner and Tiobald himself stick their heads in a paddling pool. (It was a bit of a work in progress.)
Just after breakfast on Sunday morning, Harry was on his way back upstairs when Draco Malfoy stepped out onto the landing in front of him.
"Potter," he said, as Vincent and Gregory stepped out either side of him. "I was looking for you."
"Draco," Harry replied, waving. "Is something wrong?"
He tilted his head a little, thinking about it. "Oh – do you want to go and see the dragons? I don't know if you've been going yourself, but if you haven't it must be months."
Draco looked a little surprised, then frowned, then finally nodded.
"Yes, Potter," he said. "That sounds like a good idea."
He waved at his two friends. "You two can go."
"But you said you wanted us for support?" Vincent asked, puzzled.
"Plans change, Crabbe," Draco informed him. "Very well, Potter. Lead the way."
"Actually the shortest route is behind you," Harry informed him helpfully. "If you go down that corridor to the tapestry of hopping frogs, behind it is a passageway that goes straight to a hidden postern gate. It's one of the ones that skips two floors."
Draco looked behind him, then shrugged and turned around.
The trip down to where the (other) dragons stayed was quite a pleasant walk, really.
It was still generally warm and sunny, and though there were clouds on the horizon which made it look like it might rain later that was still only a distant promise. It was the sort of weather that made Harry want to take off and fly, but that would be rude – he could do it later – so he stayed on the ground and asked Draco how he was getting on as a prefect.
By the sounds of things, Draco was finding it quite easy to be a prefect. That surprised Harry a bit, because he would have thought that Slytherin (being the house for people who were cunning and sneaky) would be more likely to sneakily break rules, but then he thought about it and realized that there were at least three reasons why that original guess might have been wrong (though not all of them would be going on at once).
Firstly, if someone was sneaky and didn't cause trouble because they were doing their rule-breaking in a way nobody noticed, then you wouldn't need to deal with it as a prefect because – well, nobody noticed. Harry supposed you really should try to catch someone, in situations like that, but he could see why it might not work out quite as planned.
Then, secondly, there was that Draco was probably especially good at working out things like that. He was a fifth-year Slytherin who'd been picked as prefect, after all, and one of the reasons for that might just have been that he was good at working out what was going on.
Thirdly, there was how you could say the same sort of thing about every House in a different way. Gryffindors were more likely to be reckless, Ravenclaws were more likely to do things in a really clever way (albeit not a sneaky way?) and as for Hufflepuffs, well, stereotypically a Hufflepuff wouldn't stop doing something just because they got punished for it if they thought it was the right thing to do.
And, fourthly – Harry had come up with four, not three, he'd decided now – there was that all that was just stereotypes anyway. Peter Pettigrew had been a Gryffindor, and with how he'd turned out you'd never have known, while Regulus Black had been a Slytherin and his brother had been completely surprised.
Ollie was the first to notice them, coming down in a dive before flaring his wings and landing with a hard thump – which, fortunately, he'd aimed so that he landed well short of the two prefects.
All three of the younger dragons were quite big now.
"Remember you!" Ollie announced, walking a little closer and giving Draco a sniff. Draco's expression turned a bit pinched, but he didn't move, and Ollie gave him a slightly confused look before turning to Harry. "Smaller?"
"He's not smaller, you're bigger," Harry told him. "You think he's smaller than you remember because the last time you saw him you were smaller."
Ollie's muzzle crunched up in ferocious concentration, then he nodded. "Bigger now!"
"What is he saying, Potter?" Draco asked, still trying not to move very much at all.
"He's just confused why you seem smaller now," Harry explained, turning to face Draco. "It's easier to understand that you're growing up and that's why everything seems smaller when it's happening a bit at a time."
He suddenly had an idea. "Do you want to introduce yourself to him?"
"Do you mean in English?" Draco checked. "Or in – what was it – Dragonish?"
"The second one," Harry told him. "Okay, so in Dragonish your name is-"
He turned to face Ollie, and continued. "-Draco."
"Draco," Draco repeated, trying it out.
"I think you should use both the English and Dragonish versions," Harry added, as Ollie watched in polite confusion. "So he knows both of them mean you."
Draco didn't get his name right every time, and Harry had to step in to help correct him a few times. That had sort of an interesting effect, because after about four times Ollie very visibly got what was going on and started correcting Draco on what his name was, though it took another couple of times before Harry was sure that Ollie knew that Draco was Draco.
Then they did it in English.
Then Gary showed up, and then Sally, and finally Nora (though Nora already knew Draco) and Harry walked Draco through saying that his name was Draco and it was nice to meet them.
"So, Potter… this dragonish language," Draco said, after Sally had got a bit distracted and started drawing something in the ground, and Nora had started trying to explain to her in a bright and pleasant way what numbers were. "Isn't it a bit confusing that my name is just… well, dragon?"
"It's not, really," Harry told him, and started looking back and forth between Draco and Gary to make sure his language switched at the right time. "Draco is Draco and dragon is dragon."
"Those sounded the same," Draco complained.
"They do to Hagrid, as well, and he speaks quite good Dragonish now," Harry said. "And if I say Light in Dragonish with my wand nothing happens, but if I say Lumos it does work even though they're the same word. I think it's magic."
Draco looked unsatisfied, so Harry clarified. "You know. Like Mermish."
"I haven't learned any Mermish and I'm hoping not to, it sounds dreadful," Draco muttered. "Anyway, Potter… there was something I was hoping to discuss with you, and this is as good a place as any."
Harry looked politely curious.
"I think we can both agree, Potter, that the teaching of Defence Against the Dark Arts this year is simply not good enough," Draco began. "I've heard from the upperclassmen that it was worse before, and it's true that we had that fop Lockhart in second year – and I would like to express my appreciation for getting rid of him, by the way – but this is our OWL year and I simply won't stand for it."
"Professor Umbridge isn't very nice," Harry had to admit. "And I suggested what I thought her lesson was going to be like but she just told me to sit down and be quiet… so that's probably not happening."
"Exactly," Draco confirmed. "Unfortunately, unless she does something even worse, I think we're stuck with her. I wrote to Father to ask him to sack her, but his owl arrived this morning and there just aren't the votes to do anything about her."
"There aren't?" Harry asked, surprised.
He frowned. "Actually, how do teachers get fired at Hogwarts?"
"Well, Quirrell just went away one day," Draco said, counting them off. "Mad-Eye quit in the middle of a lesson, and Lockhart got arrested. I actually think being arrested or leaving as an invalid might be the most normal ways."
He looked up at the castle. "Doubtless Dumbledore could fire her, but you heard him at the opening speech. She got hired because nobody else wants the job – well, nobody else except Professor Snape, but he's needed in Potions."
"That does make sense," Harry agreed. "But why do you want to talk to me about it?"
"Because I, Potter, have had an idea," Draco explained. "If we can't get rid of a useless Professor, what do we do instead? We ignore her."
Harry wasn't sure he followed, and said so.
"There's nothing in the school rules that defines what a school club can be about, so long as it isn't one of a few specifically banned things," Draco explained. "I checked. And there's nothing at all that's banned about having a club to practice Defence Against the Dark Arts."
"So… you're talking about setting up a Defence Club," Harry said, thinking about it. "And having people attend that to learn Defence instead of the classes?"
"Exactly," Draco agreed, sounding quite pleased with himself. "Oh, we should probably still go to the classes, so she can't complain, but if we're learning Defence in a club, what can she do?"
Harry couldn't think of anything.
He didn't think that meant Professor Umbridge couldn't think of anything, but, well, maybe there just wasn't anything she could do.
"So you think I should be part of the Defence Club?" he asked. "Do you mean teaching or learning?"
"Both," Draco answered. "You see, Father reassured me that I could learn Defence over the Christmas holiday, but that's a dreadful way to spend Christmas and it would only work for me."
He smirked. "I couldn't invite everyone around for Christmas. We don't quite have enough rooms."
Harry had never seen where the Malfoys lived, but he imagined they wouldn't have that many rooms either – not unless they lived in a castle as big as Hogwarts themselves – and chuckled at the joke.
"But I know about your godfather, and of course his friend is Mr. Lupin," Draco explained. "So I'm sure you already know more about Defence than most of us."
He looked sly. "And, more importantly, if I start the club then everyone thinks of it as a Slytherin club. But if you're involved with starting the club then everyone is going to want to come – including whoever happens to be best at Defence – and we can work out which people teach each year. If you and Diggory and Granger are there then all by itself that's better than what Umbridge can teach us."
Harry frowned, thinking about it. "Remus – Mr. Lupin, that is – did suggest a book series to me, and it was pretty good when I checked it. Practical Defensive Magic and Its Use Against the Dark Arts – I haven't finished reading through, but I was expecting to read them over the whole term. Maybe we could use that as the textbook?"
"I knew it was a good idea to get you involved, Potter," Draco declared. "So, what do you think?"
The idea was definitely tempting. It was a bit like the sort of thing that would happen in one of his novels, albeit in a sort of different way – it had the feeling of some of the church politics bits in The Sapphire Rose, or in the Tamuli books.
Which, honestly, was quite a good reason to say yes.
"I do want to make sure it's okay with Professor Dumbledore, first," Harry said.
"Oh, of course," Draco agreed readily. "If the headmaster agrees then it's going to be impossible to stop this."
AN:
The actual canonical name of the thing is a Black Quill, and the actual canonical inventor is Dolores herself.
This is not an actual canonical use of dragon's blood, but it probably works.