Author's note: On the matter of caffiene as a writing aid, I have found the ideal beverage to aid me in my literary endeavours. It consists of one ordinary coffee with two sugars, a spoonful of hot chocolate powder, and a small quantity of Famous Grouse or similar whiskey. Perhaps I ought to try and sell it to Starbucks.
By the way, does anybody see why Godric's Hollow shouldn't be in Great Houghton, or that I shouldn't make Harry's parents my girlfriend's next door neighbours?
I didn't see Draco for several days after that, until we were at Stanstead waiting for our flight in fact. Fran and I were dropped off just after Hermione, which seemed in keeping with her personality as well as the fact that she lived a few miles away.
"I won't say 'don't do anything I wouldn't do because that would limit your options a bit, but try not to do anything illegal, dangerous or both," Hermione's mum said by way of a goodbye.
"You wouldn't even know how to do most of the things I do on a regular basis, Mum!" Hermione laughed. "You're a fortysomething heterosexual dentist. I'm a seventeen-year old student witch, and a lesbian! Have a good time in Germany with Auntie Harriet."
Luna was next, throwing herself into my arms with an overjoyed shout. I hugged her as hard as I could, kissing her passionately and pointedly ignoring the look Dad gave me. Cho, Lavender and the Weasleys arrived next, with Draco accompanying them. He was wearing a WEASLEY SWEATER, I kid you not, a blue one with a huge Gothic letter D on the front. We had all wound up with these things at Christmas, so a photo moment with them on had an air of inevitability about it. Ron seemed less bothered than I'd expected, actually.
"There are no Slytherins looking, now," Draco explained over a preflight coffee. "I don't have to pretend to be a git."
"We could make him an honourary Ravenclaw," Luna offered helpfully, ignoring the Gryffindor majority. She and Fran started bickering, then lobbing UHT milk tubs at each other, with Cho soon to join in on Luna's side.
"Are we going to have to put up with this kind of thing the whole time?" Harry enquired despairingly.
"Oh, we ain't seen nothing yet!" I predicted, watching them finally come to blows. Cho showed a certain amount of restraint, more so than she had with Harry and me one time over the holidays when she demonstrated her considerable martial arts skills in the back garden. I couldn't walk properly afterwards, and Harry had a black eye.
"Hey, that's our flight!" We hastily finished our coffees, grabbed our luggage, and ran for the check-in desk. There we discovered that it had merely been a first announcement rather than a last call, so we were first aboard.
It was a depressing flight, actually. I was stuck next to a noisily snoring man in a cheap suit, and the movie was The Dukes Of Hazzard Go To Hollywood, which I'd seen a dozen times before. Make of that what you will. At least I didn't get puked on by a little kid in the row behind like Draco did, to my great amusement and his considerable annoyance.
We disembarked with some relief, and got our first look at Budapest. Ex-Soviet architecture was much in evidence, as well as a general atmosphere of jerrybuilding that hadn't been looked after all that well; maintainence costs money, and overall it's frequently more cost-effective to let it fall down and build it again properly. You hear the same story all over Eastern Europe.
Charlie was waiting outside, in a minibus which looked like he'd got it from the local scrapyard. The hire firm probably had; I can't imagine rental cars being a growth industry in a country still recovering from half a century of Soviet occupation. We scrambled aboard, with a flurry of hellos, and hastily put on our seatbelts; there were terrible stories about Charlie's driving to be had from Molly, who'd once -and only once- allowed him to borrow Arthur's. He's got another one, now, complete with magical optional extras- the difference is, this time it's a Corvette. Being made minister put a couple of extra zeroes on his pay cheque, so why not?
I nearly suffered heart failure when a small black dragon crawled out from beneath my seat, and began raping the one printed on Cho's t-shirt. She called him -she could tell it was male, for reasons I won't go into detail about if you don't mind- something very rude in Chinese. She's a good person to watch Firefly with, by the way.
"Like my anti-theft device?" Charlie said, grinning. We all exchanged looks, recalling the film on the plane. Presumably Charlie had seen Hazzards in Hollywood too, though this beat Rosco's sackful of rattlesnakes in his RV all hollow.
"Hello, Norbert," said Hermione, totally unfazed. Well if she can control that damn great cat of hers, which we had unanimously voted to place in a cattery for the duration, a dragon ought to be a picnic. We adopted one of the kittens after he impregnated Mrs Norris, by the way; Filch kept the rest, which has made him unbend a bit.
Charlie drove us to a small clearing on the reservation, which had been loaned to us as a campsite. It was quiet and fairly secluded, but we weren't too far from a bus stop and from there it was only a short distance from town.
"Have fun setting up the tents, you lot!" And off he went in a cloud of uncombusted diesel and carbon monoxide, leaving us to it.
We got the tents up. God, how can one short sentence encapsulate so much strife? It took us nearly three hours, and everybody's tempers were fraying by the time we had them up. We arranged all seven in a rough circle around a small campfire, and divided our baggage between two of them. The original plan had involved Ginny and Seamus (I think; Ginny's the most indecisive girl I ever met in some areas) sharing and one tent exclusively for storage, but she wasn't on tent-sharing terms with Draco. Yet. So, after some arguing, we decided to put them in one of the tents each with half of our stuff. Draco looked secretly disappointed, and in fact so did Ginny, but I think we were all privately convinced they would end the holiday in the same tent.
By the time all of the initial hassle was sorted, it was early evening; time for a beer or five. This is the only excuse for Fran and Hermione performing an impromptu kareoke duet to 'Not Gonna Get Us' by tATu when it came on local radio, or for the applause it recieved. It seemed terribly amusing at the time when I looked into the digital camrecorder placed so that the evening could be recorded for posterity, and said "Please forgive us for this poncing about, we're all completely pissed," in a very slurred voice. None of our parents thought it amusing AT ALL.
Several hours later we staggered to our tents and flopped into bed, with the curious exception of Draco and Ginny, who hadn't been seen for a while. For some sleep followed, but for others...
"God," I muttered to myself, as Fran and Hermione achieved orgasm for the eighth time in an hour, "will they ever stop?"
"You're just jealous," Luna giggled. "Just because YOU couldn't keep going that long."
"Not after seven lagers, I couldn't," I admitted. "How do they do it?"
"Best not to ask, I reckon."
The noises changed to screams and curses, most of them directed at whoever had just undone the guy ropes and brought the tent down. "Thanks, Draco!" the rest of the camp chorused.
"How did you know it was me?"
The next morning presented us with two tasks. The first was moving all the stuff from Ginny's tent into the one formerly occupied (in a theoretical way) by Draco. The second was counter-cursing the Body Bind Ginny had put on Ron (Romanian law allows the use of magic by students at any time, subject to normal rules regarding concealment) after he saw her, and I quote, 'snogging a Slytherin.' He'd actually mellowed a bit towards Draco when he prevented Ginny from following the curse up with a good kick in the bollocks, albeit largely because she'd only hurt herself. And she wonders why everybody says she takes after her mother!
The third and most interesting task, though the one with the greatest potential for personal injury, was dealing with Fran and Hermione.
"Right, you two, here's the deal. I'll help you get out of there, but on two conditions. One: no more noisy bonking after, say, eleven PM. Two: you make no attempt to inflict any harm on Draco or anybody else as a direct or indirect consequence of spending all night tied together in extremely painful positions." Insert your own joke here. "Do we have a deal?"
"Yes, we promise, just get us OUT OF HERE!"
I wisely decided to give my broom a quick test ride just before they escaped. I hastily put on the bright yellow Lycra suit which had seemed most appropriate for the purpose of broom-racing, and strapped myself into the intricate restraint harness which I had recently attached to remedy a tendency to be thrown clear during high-G manoevres or periods of acceleration.
"You look like a complete and utter pillock," Luna informed me.
"I'm quite aware of that, dearest one," I replied evenly, "but at the speeds I plan on going nobody will notice."
"He's going to die," I heard Fran remark matter-of-factly, but I chose to ignore this. I calculated that we were at the furthest edge of the reservation, giving me a twenty mile run before I had to turn around. Hermione put a Disillusionment Charm on me, and the effect was like the ludicrous cloaking device in James Bond's car in Die Another Day. I waved my thanks, aware that this was a pointless gesture, and set off at full throttle. (Author's note: I was listening to 'I Believe I Can Fly as reworked by Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies when I wrote this bit!)
The small airspeed measuring device strapped to the stick was borrowed from my mother's godson, who worked in an aerodynamics research lab. It posessed a data-logging feature, which printed the results on a small sheet of paper so the others would believe me when I told them how fast I went. I lowered my skiing goggles and crouched as low as I could to reduce drag, trying not to notice the creaking of the restraints. If they went at this speed, and over a forest, I'd be killed instantly if I fell off. They'd have to bury me in a jam jar if that happened, I mused, unconsciously beginning to hum the Battle Hymn of the Republic; the version the French definitely DON'T sing. I'm sure you know the lyrics.
I skimmed the lake that marked the reservation's border, making an impressive ripple effect as I zipped over the water, then pulled back. Looping the loop at that sort of speed is a mistake, which one makes only once, and in my case it was very nearly a fatal one. I wasn't pulling QUITE enough Gs for a blackout or red-out, but the restraints might easily have given up and sent me falling eighty feet into the lake below. It was certainly a bit hair-raising.
I made a shaky landing, and Hermione helpfully Reillusioned me. "You're a bloody lunatic!" she exclaimed, somewhere between apoplexy and hero-worship. She looked at the strip of paper hanging from the speed counter.
"A hundred and thirty seven miles an hour... I don't BELIEVE it!"
"A hundred thirty-seven? WAHOOO!" Harry, Ron and Draco all but carried me on their shoulders as they each examined the evidence. Luna threw her arms around me, whooping as loud as I had. "You still look like a pillock in that catsuit, though," she added.
"This is NOT a catsuit!" I said indignantly. "I'll grant you I look like an anorexic banana when I'm going slower than about fifty, but a catsuit, now a catsuit is something totally different. You don't watch the right kind of telly, you!"
Several years later, a conversation of momentous import took place between the Minister of Magic, The Headmaster of Hogwarts and the longest surviving double agent in the history of the war against the Dark Lord.
"This plan is one of the chanciest we've considered yet," Arthur Weasley remarked.
"But if it goes right-" Snape began. Dumbledore waved him into silence.
"Whether that is the most likely outcome is still a matter for grave doubt, Severus," he said firmly. "I will not consider allowing you to undertake this mission until and unless you can prove, to my satisfaction, that there is at least an even chance of success."
"I can promise that, at least," Snape concluded. "It is far from certain that I will come back alive, but to my mind that is a secondary consideration."
"It pains me to say this, Severus, but you are right. There is too much at stake, and I would go myself if it were possible." Snape nodded. Dumbledore was a leader, a symbol, but he himself was expendable.
"Are you thinking of taking any weapon beside your wand?" Arthur enquired thoughtfully. "After all, the Dark Lord will be protecting himself against all forms of MAGICAL attack." He opened his briefcase, and produced a heavy-calibre revolver, which he handed it to Snape. "I think this calls for some lateral thinking, don't you?"
"Weasley, you're a genius!" Snape exclaimed. //Merlin, did I REALLY just say that?//
"Has Flitwick completed the trials?" Dumbledore enquired.
"He still has to perfect the process; Floo Powder and Time Turners strange bedfellows make. However," Snape said with a slow smile, "I have chosen a suitable ambush point." //If anybody is going to kill James Potter, I want it to be ME!// he didn't add. He didn't have to.
"What about Harry?" Dumbledore said thoughtfully. "Will he accompany you?"
"No, we'll do this ourselves. We're going to mess up history enough as it is."
"If the proccedure fouls up, and you happen across him, he will insit upon joining you." Dumbledore half-smiled. "He may even be of assistance."
"Hah! Well, anything's possible!"
By the way, does anybody see why Godric's Hollow shouldn't be in Great Houghton, or that I shouldn't make Harry's parents my girlfriend's next door neighbours?
I didn't see Draco for several days after that, until we were at Stanstead waiting for our flight in fact. Fran and I were dropped off just after Hermione, which seemed in keeping with her personality as well as the fact that she lived a few miles away.
"I won't say 'don't do anything I wouldn't do because that would limit your options a bit, but try not to do anything illegal, dangerous or both," Hermione's mum said by way of a goodbye.
"You wouldn't even know how to do most of the things I do on a regular basis, Mum!" Hermione laughed. "You're a fortysomething heterosexual dentist. I'm a seventeen-year old student witch, and a lesbian! Have a good time in Germany with Auntie Harriet."
Luna was next, throwing herself into my arms with an overjoyed shout. I hugged her as hard as I could, kissing her passionately and pointedly ignoring the look Dad gave me. Cho, Lavender and the Weasleys arrived next, with Draco accompanying them. He was wearing a WEASLEY SWEATER, I kid you not, a blue one with a huge Gothic letter D on the front. We had all wound up with these things at Christmas, so a photo moment with them on had an air of inevitability about it. Ron seemed less bothered than I'd expected, actually.
"There are no Slytherins looking, now," Draco explained over a preflight coffee. "I don't have to pretend to be a git."
"We could make him an honourary Ravenclaw," Luna offered helpfully, ignoring the Gryffindor majority. She and Fran started bickering, then lobbing UHT milk tubs at each other, with Cho soon to join in on Luna's side.
"Are we going to have to put up with this kind of thing the whole time?" Harry enquired despairingly.
"Oh, we ain't seen nothing yet!" I predicted, watching them finally come to blows. Cho showed a certain amount of restraint, more so than she had with Harry and me one time over the holidays when she demonstrated her considerable martial arts skills in the back garden. I couldn't walk properly afterwards, and Harry had a black eye.
"Hey, that's our flight!" We hastily finished our coffees, grabbed our luggage, and ran for the check-in desk. There we discovered that it had merely been a first announcement rather than a last call, so we were first aboard.
It was a depressing flight, actually. I was stuck next to a noisily snoring man in a cheap suit, and the movie was The Dukes Of Hazzard Go To Hollywood, which I'd seen a dozen times before. Make of that what you will. At least I didn't get puked on by a little kid in the row behind like Draco did, to my great amusement and his considerable annoyance.
We disembarked with some relief, and got our first look at Budapest. Ex-Soviet architecture was much in evidence, as well as a general atmosphere of jerrybuilding that hadn't been looked after all that well; maintainence costs money, and overall it's frequently more cost-effective to let it fall down and build it again properly. You hear the same story all over Eastern Europe.
Charlie was waiting outside, in a minibus which looked like he'd got it from the local scrapyard. The hire firm probably had; I can't imagine rental cars being a growth industry in a country still recovering from half a century of Soviet occupation. We scrambled aboard, with a flurry of hellos, and hastily put on our seatbelts; there were terrible stories about Charlie's driving to be had from Molly, who'd once -and only once- allowed him to borrow Arthur's. He's got another one, now, complete with magical optional extras- the difference is, this time it's a Corvette. Being made minister put a couple of extra zeroes on his pay cheque, so why not?
I nearly suffered heart failure when a small black dragon crawled out from beneath my seat, and began raping the one printed on Cho's t-shirt. She called him -she could tell it was male, for reasons I won't go into detail about if you don't mind- something very rude in Chinese. She's a good person to watch Firefly with, by the way.
"Like my anti-theft device?" Charlie said, grinning. We all exchanged looks, recalling the film on the plane. Presumably Charlie had seen Hazzards in Hollywood too, though this beat Rosco's sackful of rattlesnakes in his RV all hollow.
"Hello, Norbert," said Hermione, totally unfazed. Well if she can control that damn great cat of hers, which we had unanimously voted to place in a cattery for the duration, a dragon ought to be a picnic. We adopted one of the kittens after he impregnated Mrs Norris, by the way; Filch kept the rest, which has made him unbend a bit.
Charlie drove us to a small clearing on the reservation, which had been loaned to us as a campsite. It was quiet and fairly secluded, but we weren't too far from a bus stop and from there it was only a short distance from town.
"Have fun setting up the tents, you lot!" And off he went in a cloud of uncombusted diesel and carbon monoxide, leaving us to it.
We got the tents up. God, how can one short sentence encapsulate so much strife? It took us nearly three hours, and everybody's tempers were fraying by the time we had them up. We arranged all seven in a rough circle around a small campfire, and divided our baggage between two of them. The original plan had involved Ginny and Seamus (I think; Ginny's the most indecisive girl I ever met in some areas) sharing and one tent exclusively for storage, but she wasn't on tent-sharing terms with Draco. Yet. So, after some arguing, we decided to put them in one of the tents each with half of our stuff. Draco looked secretly disappointed, and in fact so did Ginny, but I think we were all privately convinced they would end the holiday in the same tent.
By the time all of the initial hassle was sorted, it was early evening; time for a beer or five. This is the only excuse for Fran and Hermione performing an impromptu kareoke duet to 'Not Gonna Get Us' by tATu when it came on local radio, or for the applause it recieved. It seemed terribly amusing at the time when I looked into the digital camrecorder placed so that the evening could be recorded for posterity, and said "Please forgive us for this poncing about, we're all completely pissed," in a very slurred voice. None of our parents thought it amusing AT ALL.
Several hours later we staggered to our tents and flopped into bed, with the curious exception of Draco and Ginny, who hadn't been seen for a while. For some sleep followed, but for others...
"God," I muttered to myself, as Fran and Hermione achieved orgasm for the eighth time in an hour, "will they ever stop?"
"You're just jealous," Luna giggled. "Just because YOU couldn't keep going that long."
"Not after seven lagers, I couldn't," I admitted. "How do they do it?"
"Best not to ask, I reckon."
The noises changed to screams and curses, most of them directed at whoever had just undone the guy ropes and brought the tent down. "Thanks, Draco!" the rest of the camp chorused.
"How did you know it was me?"
The next morning presented us with two tasks. The first was moving all the stuff from Ginny's tent into the one formerly occupied (in a theoretical way) by Draco. The second was counter-cursing the Body Bind Ginny had put on Ron (Romanian law allows the use of magic by students at any time, subject to normal rules regarding concealment) after he saw her, and I quote, 'snogging a Slytherin.' He'd actually mellowed a bit towards Draco when he prevented Ginny from following the curse up with a good kick in the bollocks, albeit largely because she'd only hurt herself. And she wonders why everybody says she takes after her mother!
The third and most interesting task, though the one with the greatest potential for personal injury, was dealing with Fran and Hermione.
"Right, you two, here's the deal. I'll help you get out of there, but on two conditions. One: no more noisy bonking after, say, eleven PM. Two: you make no attempt to inflict any harm on Draco or anybody else as a direct or indirect consequence of spending all night tied together in extremely painful positions." Insert your own joke here. "Do we have a deal?"
"Yes, we promise, just get us OUT OF HERE!"
I wisely decided to give my broom a quick test ride just before they escaped. I hastily put on the bright yellow Lycra suit which had seemed most appropriate for the purpose of broom-racing, and strapped myself into the intricate restraint harness which I had recently attached to remedy a tendency to be thrown clear during high-G manoevres or periods of acceleration.
"You look like a complete and utter pillock," Luna informed me.
"I'm quite aware of that, dearest one," I replied evenly, "but at the speeds I plan on going nobody will notice."
"He's going to die," I heard Fran remark matter-of-factly, but I chose to ignore this. I calculated that we were at the furthest edge of the reservation, giving me a twenty mile run before I had to turn around. Hermione put a Disillusionment Charm on me, and the effect was like the ludicrous cloaking device in James Bond's car in Die Another Day. I waved my thanks, aware that this was a pointless gesture, and set off at full throttle. (Author's note: I was listening to 'I Believe I Can Fly as reworked by Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies when I wrote this bit!)
The small airspeed measuring device strapped to the stick was borrowed from my mother's godson, who worked in an aerodynamics research lab. It posessed a data-logging feature, which printed the results on a small sheet of paper so the others would believe me when I told them how fast I went. I lowered my skiing goggles and crouched as low as I could to reduce drag, trying not to notice the creaking of the restraints. If they went at this speed, and over a forest, I'd be killed instantly if I fell off. They'd have to bury me in a jam jar if that happened, I mused, unconsciously beginning to hum the Battle Hymn of the Republic; the version the French definitely DON'T sing. I'm sure you know the lyrics.
I skimmed the lake that marked the reservation's border, making an impressive ripple effect as I zipped over the water, then pulled back. Looping the loop at that sort of speed is a mistake, which one makes only once, and in my case it was very nearly a fatal one. I wasn't pulling QUITE enough Gs for a blackout or red-out, but the restraints might easily have given up and sent me falling eighty feet into the lake below. It was certainly a bit hair-raising.
I made a shaky landing, and Hermione helpfully Reillusioned me. "You're a bloody lunatic!" she exclaimed, somewhere between apoplexy and hero-worship. She looked at the strip of paper hanging from the speed counter.
"A hundred and thirty seven miles an hour... I don't BELIEVE it!"
"A hundred thirty-seven? WAHOOO!" Harry, Ron and Draco all but carried me on their shoulders as they each examined the evidence. Luna threw her arms around me, whooping as loud as I had. "You still look like a pillock in that catsuit, though," she added.
"This is NOT a catsuit!" I said indignantly. "I'll grant you I look like an anorexic banana when I'm going slower than about fifty, but a catsuit, now a catsuit is something totally different. You don't watch the right kind of telly, you!"
Several years later, a conversation of momentous import took place between the Minister of Magic, The Headmaster of Hogwarts and the longest surviving double agent in the history of the war against the Dark Lord.
"This plan is one of the chanciest we've considered yet," Arthur Weasley remarked.
"But if it goes right-" Snape began. Dumbledore waved him into silence.
"Whether that is the most likely outcome is still a matter for grave doubt, Severus," he said firmly. "I will not consider allowing you to undertake this mission until and unless you can prove, to my satisfaction, that there is at least an even chance of success."
"I can promise that, at least," Snape concluded. "It is far from certain that I will come back alive, but to my mind that is a secondary consideration."
"It pains me to say this, Severus, but you are right. There is too much at stake, and I would go myself if it were possible." Snape nodded. Dumbledore was a leader, a symbol, but he himself was expendable.
"Are you thinking of taking any weapon beside your wand?" Arthur enquired thoughtfully. "After all, the Dark Lord will be protecting himself against all forms of MAGICAL attack." He opened his briefcase, and produced a heavy-calibre revolver, which he handed it to Snape. "I think this calls for some lateral thinking, don't you?"
"Weasley, you're a genius!" Snape exclaimed. //Merlin, did I REALLY just say that?//
"Has Flitwick completed the trials?" Dumbledore enquired.
"He still has to perfect the process; Floo Powder and Time Turners strange bedfellows make. However," Snape said with a slow smile, "I have chosen a suitable ambush point." //If anybody is going to kill James Potter, I want it to be ME!// he didn't add. He didn't have to.
"What about Harry?" Dumbledore said thoughtfully. "Will he accompany you?"
"No, we'll do this ourselves. We're going to mess up history enough as it is."
"If the proccedure fouls up, and you happen across him, he will insit upon joining you." Dumbledore half-smiled. "He may even be of assistance."
"Hah! Well, anything's possible!"