Ten minutes before the welcome feast was to begin, as Harry walked into the dining hall with Hermione, Neville, and Susan all clustered around him, a hush fell over the room.
They were by no means the last students to arrive, of course. Hermione no more would have let them be late than she would have willingly forgone studying, but when they did get there, there were already quite a few students sitting at the three tables that stretched the length of the hall.
And every single one of them, it seemed to Harry, was staring at him.
He stood beside Hermione for several moments, both of them framed in the monstrously large doorway, and Harry couldn't help but twitch and fidget as he waited for the hush to disappear. He looked down at the floor and scuffed one of his shoes back and forth across the stonework. He balled his fists in the sleeves of his robe. He took two deep breaths and he tried to will away the heat that had risen to his cheeks.
Despite the fact that he thought he should be used to the attention by now, at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to turn around and walk right on back outside.
Running was an option, too.
Or, possibly, hopping on his broomstick and flying away.
He wondered what would happen if he did either of those.
As if she sensed his thoughts, Hermione linked her arm through his, curled her fingers around the bend of his elbow, and started walking towards the middle table. When Harry looked more closely at the students sitting there, he saw Seamus and Dean, Justin Flitch-Fletchy, the Patil twins, and a few other Hogwarts students that he didn't know as well.
That table, the middle one, was the unofficial Hogwarts table, apparently, which was not to be confused with either the Durmstrang table (to the left), or the Beauxbaton table (to the right). The students from the other countries and continents—the Americas, Africa, and Australia—were scattered between all three tables, generally sitting as far away from the three European schools as possible.
Their reluctance to co-mingle, however, didn't stop them from staring at him, too, so Harry just kept his attention focused on Seamus, who was patting the empty spot next to him and calling, "Potter! Granger! Longbottom! Susan Bones! Finally! We've been waiting for you lot to show up."
Harry followed Hermione when she walked down one side of the table—but that was mainly because she'd kept her arm linked through his, which essentially meant that he had no choice in the matter.
He also had very little choice in the matter of where he sat, because Hermione sat down one seat away from Seamus and patted the empty spot in between them.
Harry sat. Then he bent forward, resting his elbows on the table, so that Hermione could lean around behind him and give Seamus a hug of greeting.
"Seamus," Hermione said. "It's so good to see you! Did you have a good holiday?"
Harry heard Seamus begin talking quickly, excitedly, and when he glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the Irish boy's face had begun to turn a dusky red color that grew deeper and deeper the longer he kept talking without taking a breath.
Harry listened to four words of Seamus' speech—the "Oh, it was fabulous!"—before he tuned Seamus out.
Across the table from him, Neville was talking to Susan and Dean, with Justin dropping comments into the conversation occasionally. They, too, were all looking happy to see one another, talking enthusiastically, with lots of smiles and hand motions.
Harry sighed. He wondered what would happen if he tried to join their conversation, if the talk would inevitably turn to him and his great exploits. Or perhaps, they'd become really quiet, like so many people were quiet around him now.
He didn't join their conversation, though. Instead, he looked around the dining hall, focusing his attention on the vaulted ceilings, on the stained glass windows that lined the walls, each of which displayed a great moment in the history of the wizarding world.
After he'd given each of the windows a cursory look, Harry turned his attention to the students from Drumstrang and Beauxsbaton, trying to determine if he saw any of those that had come to Hogwarts for the Tri-Wizard Tournament his fourth year. There was a red-haired girl at the Drumstrang table who looked vaguely familiar, a black haired boy, too, and there were three blonde girls at the Beaxsbaton table who Harry was sure he'd seen before.
He didn't get much further in his examination, though, because the door to the dining hall opened again, and for a second time the noise in the room tapered off.
Harry looked around quickly, wondering if he'd unknowingly done something to draw people's attention in his direction again, but then he saw what everyone else was staring at and he couldn't help but stop and stare, too.
Because there, standing alone at the back of the room, framed by the solid oak beams of the doorway, was Draco Malfoy.
The blond was staring around the room defiantly, trying to meet everyone's gaze with a glare, it seemed, and when his gaze locked with Harry's, Harry couldn't help but shiver; the glare was harder, colder, more cutting… just generally more than the Malfoy glare Harry had been so used to.
The gray eyes that met Harry's were as shuttered as Harry had ever seen them, too, as if Malfoy had finally succeeded in building a wall between him and the rest of the world.
Harry didn't know what to make of it.
Then, the moment was broken, because in nearly the same instant, Malfoy jerked his head away and Seamus said, "What the hell? What's he doing here?" loudly, right in Harry's ear.
"I don't know," Hermione said, sounding puzzled. "He never said anything last year…"
"Why would he have?" Harry asked.
There was an edge to his voice, one that he hadn't intended and one that he hadn't been expecting. It surprised him, but from the look on her face, it looked as if it surprised Hermione more. She actually looked hurt—for the second time that day—so Harry swallowed, smiled as gently and as unoffensively as he could and said, "I just meant that we weren't exactly friends with him. Those weren't the sorts of things that we all discussed."
"But we certainly talked about it enough," Hermione said. "You'd think that he would have said something to us then. Just an, 'Oh, I'm going to be going to there, too. Just so you know.'"
Harry nodded, but didn't say anything in reply.
He was watching Malfoy out of the corner of his eye still, wondering whether or not the other teen was going to come to their table and sit with them, wondering what would happen if he actually did. Harry was sure that he wouldn't, because Malfoy was Malfoy and he was still Harry Potter, his arch-nemesis, but…
Then he didn't have to wonder anymore, because as he watched, Malfoy turned to the table that the Durmstrang contingent had claimed and sat down at the very end, as far away from every other person in the room as he could get.
"And this year was holding so much promise, too," Seamus said. "No Malfoy, no Slytherins at all, for that matter. No Snape."
"Well, we're still without the Slytherins and Snape," Hermione said. "We only have to deal with one, singular Slytherin, and from the looks of Malfoy now, he's not going to be going out of his way to associate with us."
"It would appear that there are still small miracles in this world, then," Seamus said. "If we had all of them here, it'd be just like being back at Hogwarts, and me Da says that half of the university experience is getting away from the things you know."
"That's what my parents said, too," Hermione said. "They were trying to get me to apply to one of the other Oxford Colleges, but I said, 'no mum, dad, I'm going to get my degree in Arithmancy, because that's what I'm really, really good at, and there's a need for good Arithmancers in the world.' I don't think they really understood, though."
"I didn't think it was so bad out with the Muggles," Neville said. "When I was working at the flower shop over the summer—"
"You bloody well fell in love," Dean said. "Yes, Longbottom, we've heard all about it in the eight minutes we've been sitting here. You fell in love with a nice Muggle girl, one who happens to believe in magic without knowing a thing about you being a wizard. But you know that love colors everything, don't you, mate? Just think about being out there all the time, with people who aren't magical when you are, and you can't say a bloody word about it? Harry, Hermione and I could tell you, couldn't we? About trying to live out there without love-colored glasses."
Before Hermione could reply, because Harry knew he wasn't going to, there was the sound of a spoon hitting the side of a glass—clink-clink-clink—and since it was magically amplified, the sound echoed around the room until everyone had quieted down.
Harry, and everyone else, looked in the direction that the sound had come from, towards the front of the room.
There were fifteen chairs set at the head table, thirteen for the professors of the various subjects that would be taught at Riddleway. One was for the Headmaster, the man in the bright red robes that was sitting one chair away from the center, and the other for Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, who was sitting in the place of honor in the very center. One of the chairs was empty, the second from the end of the table on the left side.
"Who do you think is missing?" Harry asked Hermione quietly, speaking the words out of the side of his mouth, hoping that only she would hear.
When she didn't immediately reply, he full-on glanced at her to see if she'd even heard him. She had, he could tell, because he could see Hermione's thinking face. He could tell that she was mentally adding things up, crossing things out, and then checking that information against the information that was in her head with regards to the various teachers she could see sitting in front of her.
"The potions professor," she said after a moment. "It has to be. That was the only professor that hadn't been hired when they sent out the course guide. I recognize all of the other professors from the Names & Faces book that they sent out a few weeks ago."
Harry nodded, to show that he'd heard, before he turned his attention back to the head table in front of them. He saw Fudge standing up from his chair, appearing to be a little unsteady on his feet—a war injury, Harry had heard him tell people, but Harry thought that it had more to do with the Minister's girth than anything else.
"Welcome, welcome," Fudge said. His voice was crystal clear, as if he was standing right next to Harry, speaking in his ear. Hermione had told him that all of the rooms had magically done acoustics, so that there would be no "bad seat" in the house. She'd learned that from the book that she'd purchased the day it had been made available: Riddleway, A History.
"It is my pleasure," Fudge continued, "to be the first to welcome all of you to Riddleway College, the premier educational facility in the world for advanced studies of witchcraft and wizardry."
"The only facility in the world," Seamus muttered loud enough for all of the former Hogwarts students to hear. Harry heard Neville and Justin and the Patil twins snicker quietly.
"As many of you know, the founding of Riddleway College has long been a dream of mine. When I assumed the position of Minister of Magic, I began making plans for this institution, plans that these last few years have only served to illuminate the importance of."
"He Who Shall Not Be Named," Hermione whispered. "He still won't say his name, will he? Mrs. Weasley says that if he could, she thinks that he'd try to sweep the whole war under a rug, that he'd pretend it never happened."
Harry looked down at his hands, at his fingers that seemed to be trying to twist themselves into knots in his lap. He swallowed.
"And though the immediate danger has passed," Fudge said, "the importance of what we're trying to do here has not. In fact, in these days of recent peace, it's seems even more important that we take steps to educate the best and brightest of the witches and wizards in the world—you all—the best that we can. It is only through knowledge, after all, that we can overcome evil. It is only through knowing more than the enemy that we can truly triumph.
"So it is with great pride and pleasure that I welcome all of you to Riddleway."
He paused, sniffled slightly, and raised a finger to wipe at a spot beneath his eye.
"Just looking out at all of your bright faces, at all of those minds eager to absorb more knowledge, makes this truly a dream come true."
And with that, he sat down.
Applause filled the room, although it was more polite than enthusiastic, and in an effort to distract himself, Harry turned towards the center of the table and waited for the food to appear.
It was because of that that he didn't see the small door at the right front of the room open to admit the potions professor. He didn't know anything was amiss at all until he heard Hermione gasp, Neville squeak, and Seamus say, "Oh bloody hell!" far too loudly in the quiet of the room.
Harry whipped his gaze back towards the head table and couldn't do anything more than blink. Because there, walking across the front of the room to where the Headmaster and Fudge were sitting, leaning down to talk to them, was Professor Severus Snape.
"What is he doing here?" Neville asked. His voice was quivering.
There was a moment of stunned silence amongst the group of Hogwarts graduates, and then Hermione asked softly, "Teaching potions?"
Neville whimpered. The rest of them just kept staring up at the front room, watching as Snape walked back to the empty chair, sat down as regally as he ever had, and scanned the assembled students. It wasn't Harry's imagination that Snape's gaze rested on their table—on him—longer than it did on most of the rest of the students, the tables. There was only one place that the potion master's eyes lingered longer, and it was out of curiosity that Harry turned too, to see what Snape was looking at.
What he saw didn't surprise him, because Snape was staring at Draco Malfoy, and Draco Malfoy was staring right back.
What did surprise Harry was this: out of all of the Hogwarts graduates in the room, Malfoy was the only one who didn't look surprised at Snape's presence.
He saw, and he wondered.
There had been times when the meal hours at Hogwarts had been quieter than one might expect, Hermione remembered, but generally there had been good reason for it: the death of a student, the passing of Dumbledore, the sudden realization that Harry's claims of Voldemort's return were true.
She supposed that discovering that Snape had followed them all from Hogwarts to Riddleway could be considered a good reason, too, but… somehow it didn't seem to merit the complete silence that had fallen over the Hogwarts graduates.
She looked down the table, at all of her schoolmates, and saw most of them looking down at their plates, listlessly poking at their food with forks, pushing beans and meat and salad greens from one edge of the plate to the other.
"This is ridiculous," she muttered and the rest of the students were so wrapped up in their own thoughts that it was only Harry who turned to look at her. He was arching one of his eyebrows at her.
"What's ridiculous?" he asked, just as quietly.
"This!" Hermione moved her fork in an all-encompassing circular gesture, indicating most of the rest of their table. "I mean, sure, I'm just as disappointed as anyone else—I was looking forward to getting another professor's perspective on the art of potions—but we've all survived Snape's classes before, several times before." She paused, speared a green bean with her fork, then bit the tip off of it. "Plus, it's not as if he can take any house points from us this year, as there aren't house points to take."
She almost expected Harry to disagree with her, to shake his head and adamantly declare that Snape's arrival at Riddleway was just the last straw, that he'd be heading back to the Dursley's that very evening, but he didn't.
Instead, he said, "You're right." He nodded seriously. "That should take a lot of fun out of ragging on us, right? Besides, it's not like we're Gryffindors anymore, y'know."
"We'll always be Gryffindors," Hermione said. She turned to look at where Draco was sitting, staring down into his goblet of pumpkin juice. "Just like he and Draco will always be a Slytherin. What I'm curious about is why he's here. I mean, he knew that you and I were going to be here, even if he didn't know about the rest of them all, and yet he chose to come here anyway. Do you think there's a reason for that?"
"You'd have thought he'd go somewhere else," Neville said. His voice was still pitifully small, his face pale, and his lips pinched tightly together. "He hates teaching. We all know that."
"Unless he just hated teaching at Hogwarts, with all the younger students," Hermione said.
No matter the rumors that Snape had wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts position, she knew that he genuinely enjoyed working with potions, that he was good at potions, and she seriously doubted that he'd want to deal with anything else for an extended period of time.
"This place would provide him with classes of students who at least had a cursory knowledge of what they were doing, as well as the advanced classes with students who truly wanted to be here," Harry said, obviously taking Hermione's train of thought towards the same place that she was.
"And we'll all be gone in two or so years anyway," she said. "It's not like he didn't wait seven years for us to be gone from Hogwarts. What's another two years to have us out of his life forever?"
"He could have thought of us, though," Neville said. "He may have decided that he can deal with us for another two years, but did he give us any choice at all?"
"Snape's never been a considerate one, has he?" Harry's eyes were suddenly dancing in a way that Hermione hadn't seen them dance in far too long. It was as if he'd consciously made up his mind to be amused by Snape's sudden reappearance in their lives. She decided that it was a beautiful thing to see, to watch the shadows lift from his eyelids just a little bit.
Hermione glanced back towards the front of the room, as surreptitiously as she could, and she saw Snape looking in their direction again, as if he knew that they were talking about him. She looked back towards her plate of food quickly, speared another green bean, and stuffed the whole thing in her mouth.
"Maybe we should go talk to him after the feast is over," she said. "Maybe he'll tell us why he's here?"
"Voluntarily go talk to Snape? Hermione, darling, are you feeling alright?" Seamus, speaking as loudly as he could, of course.
"Well, we're all here and he's here and we know each other, and it just seems as if it would be the polite thing to do?"
"Since when have Snape and polite ever gone in the same sentence?" Dean asked. "I'm going to try to avoid him until I have his class—God, another class with Snape. I never thought I'd be saying that again—because the last thing I want is to hear him starting sentences off with 'Mr. Thomas' before I'm good and ready for him to."
"Harry?" she asked, looking for backup.
She watched Harry look back and forth between her and Dean, clearly torn by the response he felt he should give and the one he wanted to give.
"I'm not going to be able to avoid him forever," Harry said slowly, keeping his eyes on Dean. "I might as well get it over with, I suppose."
Hermione pushed her plate away, as she suddenly noticed that many of the students had already done so, and prepared to stand—as many of the students were currently doing—when Dean said—almost gleefully—"Too late!"
Hermione looked over her shoulder, back to the front of the room, just in time to see the small door that Snape had entered through close, which only seemed to illuminate the fact that Snape's seat was empty and he was nowhere in sight.
She sat back down. "Well," she said. "We do have potions tomorrow, don't we?"
"Please," Neville sighed, "don't remind me."
Mary, the receptionist, hadn't been at the luncheon feast. She'd wanted to go, but the Headmaster himself, Headmaster Bonbourton, had told her that she needed to stay at the front desk, in case any stragglers arrived and needed instruction on what to do now that they were there.
She was a plain looking girl, or so her Da had always told her, tugging at one of her mud-colored curls and watching as it bounced back up towards her scalp. The color of her eyes was like a murky lake, he said, but she didn't agree with him on that. When she looked in the mirror, she always saw a spark of life there. She always winked at herself in the glass, always smiled, and in those moments, she thought that she was quite pretty, chubby cheeks and all.
She wanted to believe that her father, God Rest His Soul, would have been proud of her, finally, landing a job at such a prestigious institution. Or what would be a prestigious institution once it was a little more firmly established, anyway, but she knew that he wouldn't have been.
He would have said, "Mary, lass. You should'a been one of the students in the school, not their bloody receptionist."
As she sat at the desk, in the Muggle building that was the front office, she could almost hear him saying the words. He would have been leaning over her shoulder, jabbing his finger through the air until he finally rammed it into the desktop. Then, he would have glared at her, as if his injury was somehow her fault.
She tugged at one of her curls, twisting it around her finger until the entire digit was covered with the thick strands of her hair. She pulled until she felt the comfortable ache of hair pulling against scalp, and then she let go.
"At least I have a job, Da," she said. The room was empty, a fact for which she was glad, because the last thing she wanted was to get the reputation for being the loony receptionist on her first day.
"And I'm here from the beginning," she said. "This job is going to take me places."
She shivered, as a chill suddenly descended upon the room, and she couldn't help but call "Da?" because it was the same sort of chill she'd always felt whenever he'd entered the same room that she had been in.
There was no answer, though. No ghost of her father, no matter how diligently her eyes searched the shadows in the corners of the room, and it was because of that search that she saw the reason for the chill.
"You've never been the brightest button in the box, have you, Mary lass," she said to herself, as she stood up from her desk and walked to the opposite wall, where the fireplace that was the visitor's floo was located.
"Now how'd you get down so low," she said. "I'd swear you were burning away just a minute ago, but… Nevermind." She pulled her wand out, muttered "incendio," and shook her head back and forth, feeling her soft curls bounce against her cheeks.
The flames started right up again, as if they'd never left off their dancing, and Mary turned her back to the fireplace so that she could start back to her desk. Before she'd even contemplated taking a step away from the fireplace, however, she heard it: the soft hiss that sounded like two words, a name. Harry Potter.
She turned around again, and she would have screamed—because there, staring back at her from the flames, were two large, slowly blinking green eyes—but she found herself leaning towards the fire, felt as if the eyes were moving closer and closer to her.
Then she did scream, shattered by a pain worse than anything she had ever known.
But when a coworker, one of the witches upstairs, came running to check on her a few seconds later, to see what the scream had been about, Mary was just sitting back down at her desk again.
"Sorry," she said. She pointed to one of the six corners of the room. "Mouse."
And if the coworker noticed that her eyes flashed green as she spoke, she didn't mention it. Not to Mary, at least.
"Snape?" Ron asked. "Here? Bloody well teaching you all potions again?"
He probably would have said more, Harry thought, except that his best friend seemed to have decided it would be more productive and appropriate to bend in two and start laughing so hard that he couldn't breathe properly, much less form words into complete sentences.
Harry stared at him, frowning. He crossed his arms over his chest, started tapping his foot on the floor, quickly, impatiently, and waited for Ron to calm down.
"Oh," Ron finally gasped, his face unusually red and splotchy, "that's just priceless. Just when you thought you'd escaped him for forever and ever, well, no such luck. And here I thought that I'd be jealous, you lot being here without me. Now I'm thinking that I made the right choice in not coming."
He started chuckling again, rubbing at his belly as he did so, as if it was hurting him, but Harry had no sympathy for Ron at all. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Not if Ron was going to keep laughing like that, anyway.
"I couldn't imagine having to deal with Snape for another year," Ron continued, "let alone two or three or however long it's going to take for you blokes to get your degrees. That's just— It's just priceless."
Harry turned to look at his roommate, to see how he was handling Ron's amusement, and he was gratified to see that Neville was glaring in Ron's direction, too, even if there was a slightly amused, Neville-ish twinkle in his eye.
"Really, Weasley, there's no need for you to rub it in," Neville said.
"Ooh." Ron took a step back, away from Neville and towards the closed door of the dorm room. "I'm in trouble now! Neville's calling me by my last name. Save me, Harry. Save me!"
"Oh, save yourself," Harry snapped. "If all you can do is laugh at us because we're stuck with Snape for another year, you don't deserve saving. You want me to save you, you're going to have to show a little bit of sympathy and respect."
Ron sobered immediately, frowning as studiously as possible, forcing the corners of his lips down so far that it seemed almost unnatural.
"Right," he said. He clasped his hands in front of him and started rocking back and forth on his heels. He coughed, cleared his throat, and said, "It's absolutely tragic that you're stuck with Snape for another year. You have my deepest sympath—oh, who am I kidding? It's hilarious and no amount of frowning on my part is going to make it any less so. I'll just share my amusement with George when I get in tonight. He'll understand. I'm sure that if Hermione's told him, he's laughing just as hard right now."
Harry started tapping his foot again. The floorboards echoed hollowly underneath him.
Ron frowned deeply again. His eyes were dancing and his cheeks seemed to have turned even redder than they had been before, a telltale sign that he was truly struggling to hold back his laughter.
"Tragic," he said quickly. "Just… a true travesty. Yet another example of how little justice there is in this world."
Harry nodded at Ron, satisfied, and then moved to his bed, bracing his arms and pushing himself up onto the mattress.
The bed was taller than the beds at Hogwarts had been, with room for storing trunks and boxes underneath. Harry was unclear as to the concept of why that was, exactly, especially since they could shrink their belongings down to the size of peas, but it was the way the rooms were furnished. He wasn't going to complain.
In addition to the two beds, there were two desks, two closets, and not nearly enough floor space, because most of it, at this point, was taken up by Neville's trunk, which was only partially unpacked. Halfway, maybe.
Neville had arrived later than Harry had, thus he hadn't had time to unpack his belongings before the welcome luncheon and all of the tours and orientations that Hermione had insisted they go on and attend.
"So, Ron, how's the shop going?" Harry asked. "You and George getting it all set up? Is it going to be ready for the grand opening in two weeks?"
Ron nodded. He walked back across the room, stepping over Neville's trunk and various strewn belongings, and snagged Harry's desk chair, straddling it and resting his arms along the back.
"I never realized how much work it took to set a shop up," he said. "And it's not so much the shop itself, it's the lab in back. There are all these codes we have to adhere to, safety codes and the like, and someone from the Ministry has to come out and check everything before we open. And there are all of these Muggle repellant charms we have to get someone out to do, just incase."
"It's sort of like Muggle buildings, then," Neville said. "Like at the flower shop I worked at over the summer holiday. They had an inspection while I was there and I remember Violet Fairbanks, the owner, frantically running back and forth, making sure that everything was up to code. Something to do with fire extinguishers and making sure that the building wasn't going to fall down around our heads."
Ron nodded, as if he understood exactly what Neville was talking about. "George said that he and Fred did this all before, when they opened their shop on Diagon Alley, but he said that it doesn't get any easier." He turned to Neville. "What were you doing working in a Muggle flower shop anyway?"
As Harry turned to look at Neville, the other boy seemed to expand a little bit, as if he was puffing up with pride.
"Professor Sprout suggested it," Neville said. "She said that if I ever wanted to open my own herbology supply shop, it would help to know about Muggle plants, too. They have all sorts of properties that Muggles don't know about. And that Wizards haven't been as keen to study, because they're Muggle plants and all. It's fascinating, really. Really."
"Well, then you'll have to be doing all this stuff with safety codes eventually, when you get your shop," Ron said. "I don't envy you, mate. Never again, I say. And you can quote me on that. If either of you ever hear me talk about opening another store, you have my permission to curse me into oblivion. Or check me for memory charms."
Harry chuckled. Then he turned towards the door to the room, because it was opening, despite the fact that no one had knocked or called through the wooden panel to request entry.
George Weasley slipped into the room, stealthy-like, as if he was being chased. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it, giving Harry time to get a good look at him. His hair was mussed, his freckled face split by a smile. His cheeks were red and his eyes were dancing, and Harry knew what the first word out of his mouth was going to be, before the twin even said it. He was right.
"Snape!" George crowed. "Oh, you lot just never get a break! Hermione kicked me out of her room 'cause I wouldn't stop laughing." He shook his head back and forth, then frowned suddenly, looking aggrieved. "'Nice thing to do to your snuggle bunny,' I told her, but she doesn't seem to like that nickname. She just set me out on my ear that much faster."
Harry's lips twitched. He could imagine Hermione's reaction to George referring to himself as 'her snuggle bunny,' especially if he'd called himself that in front of Susan.
Despite the fact that he'd had nearly a year to get used to the idea of Hermione dating George, he'd never truly understood their relationship. While they bickered constantly in public, during the few chances he'd had to observe them in a private moment, they'd been quite calm and sweet, the picture of two young people who were very happy together.
"I don't blame her," Ron said. "Hermione's always had a sense of class… even if I don't know what lapsed to make her think it could be considered appropriate to date you."
"I'm charming," George said, fluttering his eyelashes and grinning as suavely as possible. "I'm a successful entrepreneur. I'm a stud muffin and I'm her snuggle bunny. She couldn't do any better than me."
Ron looked at Harry, rolled his eyes, and twirled his finger at his temple, mouthing 'loony' as he did so.
Harry just laughed. It felt good to laugh.
"Well, little brother," George said a few moments later, finally sobering. "You ready to head off? We've got to get an early start tomorrow, and these fine young academics have the pleasure of attending a Snape lecture. We should let them get as much rest and relaxation as possible before having to endure that, don't you think?"
Ron nodded and stood up from Harry's chair, shoving it back under the desk that he'd originally retrieved it from.
"I'll see you lads tomorrow then," Ron said. "I'll drop by after supper. Maybe you all can come on over to the shop and see the setup if you aren't already swamped with essays and reading and the like."
"That'd be good," Harry said. He hopped off the bed, then walked to the door and opened it, in a sense ushering Ron and George out of the room.
Just before he closed it again, he heard George call, "Give Snape my best wishes, won't you?"
Harry shut the door quickly, almost slamming it, and effectively blocking out the two Weasleys' laughter. Then he turned to Neville and said, "They really are insufferable gits, aren't they?"
Neville nodded.
It was as Harry climbed up onto his bed again that he realized he was still smiling. That he realized he might, possibly, have just had… fun.
It was half-past eight the next morning when Elvira Cunningham pushed open the Muggle Oxford-side door to Riddleway's main office and stepped inside. She had a monogrammed suitcase clutched in one hand, her owl's cage clutched in the other, and two house elves scuttling along right behind her, weighted down with her belongings.
She smiled at the receptionist sitting behind the desk, the one with the mud-brown curls. It was the smile that she reserved for the hired help, the smile that said, 'I value the work that you do for me' while at the same time saying, 'how dare you think that you're important enough to be in the same room as I am?'
Elvira didn't just think that the whole world revolved around her; she knew that it did. Or, she knew that one day it would. She was destined for Great Things, after all. She was Elvira Cunningham, the beloved (and only) child of Morton Cunningham the III.
"I've arrived," she said. She didn't look at the receptionist, even though that's to whom the words were addressed. She looked down at her fingernails and picked at the rough edge of her thumbnail, then ran it back and forth across the pad of her second finger, trying to smooth it out.
When there was no answer to her announcement, she deigned to look directly at the lady sitting behind the desk, and what she saw, made her blood boil, because the receptionist—Mary; there was a name plaque on her desk— was blinking stupidly in her direction, staring at Elvira with incomprehension.
"Elvira Cunningham," Elvira said slowly, enunciating all of the syllables as clearly as possible. "I've arrived. To what room should I direct my house elves to take my belongings?"
The receptionist opened her mouth, but Elvira continued speaking.
"I would have arrived yesterday, of course, but I was in Africa, helping my father tame a herd of wild tigers. Nasty creatures, tigers. Have you ever been up close and personal with one? No, no, I didn't think so. My father, Morton Cunningham the III, says that he wouldn't dream of tackling such a task without me. My father, he's just hopeless with wild beasts. I have somewhat of a… talent for it."
She let her smile turn somewhat feral, let her eyes glint. She watched as the receptionist flinched.
"Now," she said. "What room did you say that I was in? I do hope that it's the single I requested, rather than that double they said they were going to give me. Can you even fathom that? Me? Living with… another student?"
The secretary started ruffling through the papers on her desk, finally pulling out a single sheet with Elvira's name and a room number on it.
"There you go, Miss," the receptionist said.
"Thank you."
Elvira took the piece of paper gingerly between her thumb and forefinger, glaring at it until she saw that it revealed the only piece of information she'd wanted to see: the single room that she'd asked her grandfather to use all of his influence and connections and power to secure for her.
She turned to look at her house elves.
"Dimpy? Dinky? Room 106, if you will. I believe that I shall take a walk down to the headmaster's office, to formally introduce myself. You may unpack my belongings while I'm gone."
The two house elves snuffled and shuffled their feet and then they disappeared in small flashes of light.
Elvira started for the door. Now that the receptionist had given her the information that she wanted, the woman was no longer even a blip on her radar screen. Elvira knew what she wanted from her life and she knew that to get it. She couldn't let herself be distracted by people who just didn't matter.
She'd nearly reached the door that led to the Riddleway grounds when she heard the secretary call after her: "Miss Cunningham."
She turned around. She was no longer smiling. She glared at the receptionist—
—who was suddenly standing right in front of her, looking at Elvira as if she had a right to invade Elvira's personal space, as if she had a right to impose her presence…
"What do you think you're doing?" Elvira said, her tone calm, careful, deadly. "What do you think you're doing, standing so close to me? Do you know who I am?"
"Harry Potter," a voice said. The noise seemed to be coming from the secretary's mouth—her lips and tongue had moved in time with the words, anyway—but the voice was much deeper than it had been before. Raspy, gravely.
"No," Elvira started to say. No, she was not Harry Potter—although she would be very closely associated with him by the end of the year, if she played her cards right. Very closely associated.
She didn't say anymore than the 'no', however, because the secretary's eyes had suddenly glowed green, and those lips had suddenly opened even more widely, and this green something was leaving the secretary's mouth and was already tickling at Elvira's skin, pulling at her, burrowing deeply into her, all at the same time.
She felt a pain unlike anything she'd ever known before. She screamed so loudly, she didn't hear the mirror scream coming from the secretary's own mouth.
And a few minutes later, when a crowd had gathered to see what all the commotion was about, Elvira was kneeling over the prostrate form of the secretary, gently pushing the mud-brown curls off of the other woman's pale, sweaty forehead.
She said, "I don't know what happened. One moment she was just standing here, and the next, she fell to the ground, just like she is now. Someone call the mediwitch, please?"
And in the hustle-bustle that followed, with some people running to get a nurse, and others running to get blankets and pillows and hot cups of tea, and still others turning to their neighbors to start discussing what they were seeing, no one noticed as Elvira's eyes flashed green.
And no one heard her mutter softly, completely under her breath: "Harry Potter."
It was a gray morning, the air crisp and sharp, and as Hermione walked across campus, she couldn't stop herself from shivering. She didn't shiver long, though, because it wasn't even a second later that George's arm came to rest over her shoulders, gently tugging at her until she was pressed to his side, ensconced in his embrace. She squeezed herself closer still, trying to burrow into his warmth.
They were silent as they walked, moving slowly and in unison, but as they approached the administration building, Hermione leaned her head against George's shoulder, tipping her face up so that she could look at him.
"Thank you," she said. "For breakfast this morning. That was really very thoughtful of you, to come and get me and take me out like that."
George squeezed her shoulder.
"Wouldn't do to get your future off to anything but the best start possible," he said. "And what better start could you ask for than breakfast with me?" He paused, both in talking and in walking. "On second thought, don't answer that."
"I couldn't have asked for any better start than that, honey," Hermione answered, her voice as sticky and as sweet as she was able to make it sound. The corners of her lips twitched as she spoke, too, a byproduct of the giggles that she was just barely managing to hold in.
George didn't appear to notice, though. He just pulled her even closer to him, pressing a rough kiss to her hair, and started them walking again. Walking, until they were only a few meters from the school-side entrance to the administration building and they were forced to stop because the place was literally swarming with people, some standing still at the bottom of the stairs, most milling, talking loudly to other milling people.
"—collapsed, they're saying. Just fell ove—"
"—n't been able to wake her yet. They're going to take her to the inf—"
"—sick. That thing called the flu, it's got to be. No on just falls over, Maurice. My aunt on my father's side, well she—"
Hermione pulled away from George and quickened her pace. She looked for somebody, anybody in the crowd that she might know so that she could ask what was going on, but she didn't see anyone. Instead, she started jostling her way through the people until she was at the front of the crowd, right by the steps.
She didn't know that George had followed her until she felt his arms wrap around her waist. He whispered "What's going on?" in her ear.
"I don't know," Hermione said. "It doesn't look as if there's anything to see."
Suddenly, the doors to the building opened and a mediwitch came out, a stretcher hovering behind her. The first thing that Hermione saw was the limp, pale hand dangling off the edge; the next was that she recognized the face of the witch who had been sitting behind the secretary's desk in the main room. The eyes were closed, the brown curls were lying mussed on the pillow.
"Oh my," Hermione said. Then she was forced to take a step back, to let the mediwitch and the other witches and wizards who were following behind through. "That was the receptionist. We met her yesterday, when we arrived. She was very nice, I thought." She paused, watching the path of the strange procession. "I wonder what happened to her. I wonder if she's going to be alright?"
George squeezed her tightly. "Of course she will be, Herm. They've got the best mediwitches and wizards right here. You told me so yourself."
Hermione nodded, but it was more at the comforting tone of the words, rather than what George had said. She stayed where she was, watching the procession move across the campus, towards the infirmary building, until the students that surrounded her started going about their normal business again.
Until George tugged at her hand and said, "I've got to get back to the shop."
Even as he led her up the stairs, though, she kept her eyes in the direction the stretcher had gone.
Onto Part Three...