Disclaimer: These characters are not ours...if they were, the books wouldn't be so popular.
Shortcut to Alcoholism
This slur on Hermione's parentage had everyone worked up for days. Ron's ears turned a definite scarlet whenever he and Malfoy were in the same room. Handily, this situation cropped up at every meal time, which eliminated the problem of cold food for those surrounding Ron. It was while Harry was toasting a marshmallow on the veritable oven that was Ron's ear that he had a revelation.
"Ron, I've just thought of something," he said, getting so excited that he dropped the gooey lump of half-melted marshmallow on Ron's shoulder.
Ron was far too busy grumbling about slimy-gits-whose-Death-Eater- parents-were-far-worse-than-a-couple-of-Muggles-could-ever-be to even notice the hot, sticky thing currently sliding down his shoulder, slug- like, leaving a trail of marshmallow behind it.
"Oh no! I've just ruined your robes!" exclaimed Harry, proving he was a true Gryffindor, by facing his mistakes head on (in other words, very stupid).
"Who cares?" replied Ron angrily. "Malfoy calls Hermione a M... a bad word, and all you can think of is my robes! Besides," he added as an afterthought, "we are wizards." With a flick of his wand, he performed a quick vanishing spell.
"We're also SEVENTEEN. How can you hope to impress girls and..." Harry paused in thought, "do other 17-year-old things that we do all the time, if you sit there unconcerned, covered in marshmallow?"
"But I don't want to impress any girls," Ron said, hurriedly, unable to stop himself glancing at Hermione. "I don't obviously fancy ANYONE in this school." He glanced at Hermione again, his ears trying to be both crimson and an embarrassed pink simultaneously. This resolved itself by having one ear of each colour.
"Well I think that vanishing charm was enough to impress any girl," said Hermione shyly, twirling her hair around her fingers.
Ron's ears tried to convey just how embarrassed he was, gave up, and turned blue in exasperation. People reluctantly withdrew their warming food, unwilling to see the end of such a great heater.
Hermione, meanwhile, tried to understand just why she was behaving so oddly around Ron. Being the Girl who Knows Everything, she soon figured it out. (That's right: the author needed a way of removing Ron's role as a heater so he and Harry could have a private discussion.)
"I've got to go to the Library," said Hermione, because this was her response to everything, and rushed off.
This left Harry and Ron to have a private discussion (the rest of the Gryffindors were listening to a touching eulogy on Ron's ears).
"Getting back to my original point," whispered Harry, after shedding a single tear for their tragic loss. "We've been sitting around getting upset about Malfoy calling Hermione a name. At 17, surely we should get over such childish grudges and act our age.
"You mean go out pub crawling, get unbelievably pissed, and possibly high, and hope to wake up the next morning in bed with a random woman who we've never seen before in our lives?"
"Precisely."
So the two boys made a plan for the next Hogsmeade weekend: go out pub crawling, get unbelievably pissed, and possibly high, and hope to wake up the next morning in bed with a random woman who they had never seen before in their lives.
"Except for the random woman bit," amended Ron quickly. "Not that I'm secretly harbouring non-platonic feelings for anyone." He looked around for Hermione so that he could 'unobviously' glance at her, realised she was in the Library, then flushed pink anyway.
Harry thanked Merlin for Ron's easy-to-provoke emotions, because people were nervously approaching them holding ice creams, dying to test out Ron's capacity as a freezer. Besides, blue ears really clash with orange hair.
That was how Ron and Harry found themselves at the Hog's Head with shot glasses of firewhiskey sitting in front of them. They stared at the firewhiskey, at each other, and then back to the drink, neither wanting to be the first to find out how much (or how little) alcohol it would take to get them singing at the top of their voices while dancing on the tables.
"You know..." said Harry slowly, "Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea..."
There was a heavy pause. Not quite a ton, but getting there.
"It could get back to school," Ron continued for him, "that we've been out drinking."
"We could get into serious trouble!" hastily agreed Harry. "And you really can't tell who might be in here spying on us."
This was their cue to look around the dark interior of the Hog's Head at the assortment of hooded witches and wizards. Among them, to the boy's great surprise (OK. To Ron's great surprise and Harry's increasing paranoia) sat...
"Winky?" Harry and Ron said together.
The house elf was indeed seated at a nearby table, looking very pleased with herself – despite the incredibly annoying way she was introduced to the scene. Seated across from her was a hooded stranger, conferring with her in a low pitched whisper.
"Winky is not sure," squeaked the elf, her efforts at lowering her voice completely failing.
"Let's get closer," whispered Harry. "That's probably a Death Eater convincing Winky to put some sort of potion into our food."
Ron sighed, and reminded himself to ask Madame Pomfrey to up Harry's medicine again. Nevertheless, they moved towards the table in time to hear the mysterious figure finish a sentence.
"...and all of the Butterbeer you could drink"
The stranger didn't get a chance to say more because at that moment, Hermione entered with a great shout – "Winky!"
Harry and Ron spun to face their friend. She was dragging Dobby, who appeared to be holding a bag full of socks.
"Thank Merlin you found her!" Hermione hugged Harry in gratitude, and then vaguely patted Ron on the head. "Dobby and I were just discussing the possibility of only buying one of a pair of socks with the shop assistant when we discovered that she'd disappeared."
"Wonder why she did that," Ron muttered.
Fortunately, Harry was talking over him. "I knew it! She sneaked off to plot against us with strangers!"
"Is he still taking his potion?" whispered Hermione to Ron.
"Yeah. I think he might need a stronger dose. But there was somebody talking to Winky."
"What did they say?" inquired Hermione, affronted. If other people were going to go around talking to house elves, what was the point of her beloved S.P.E.W.?
"Something about drinking lots of Butterbeer."
"Ah," said Hermione, her mistrust in human kind restored. She glanced over towards Winky and gasped. Muttering to herself, she acted out some rather random gestures which, perhaps, if we had bothered to write out the pointless, or as it turned out, not so pointless after all, but humorous escapades that had occurred in the previous chapter, would not have been quite so irrelevant.
"What?" asked Ron, bemused, as she methodically re-enacted brushing her teeth. (In case you aren't quite as obsessive as Spinach is, then this is a reference to HP 4 when Hermione keeps running her hand through her hair while trying to figure things out, which is to do with the beetle – Rita Skeeter – being in her hair at the lake...she's read that book way too many times to be healthy)
"I've just figured it out! I should rush to the Library at this very moment to confirm my suspicions."
Harry and Ron looked expectantly at her; she looked back at them. There was another pause. Finally –
"Why are you still here?" asked Harry.
"Well, I still have quite an important part to play in the rest of this scene." Hermione took one look at their faces, remembered that because they were not Boys who Knew Everything, they couldn't be expected to realise that they were, in fact, characters in a story. She thought all of this very fast, so was able to quickly recover by saying, "I mean, there aren't any carriages back to Hogwarts for a few hours."
There was an awkward silence. This was quite difficult in the Hog's Head, as there were many other, rather boisterous customers. But they managed it somehow. (In this particular case, by performing a quick Silencio charm.)
Harry finally grew bored of the silence and cursed the quick thinking that had made Ron cast the Silencio charm.
The resulting Jelly-Legs curse afflicting Ron effectively dispelled all of the tension.
"Sorry," apologised Harry, as Hermione performed the counter-curse.
"I was just trying to create the right atmosphere," sulked Ron. Fearful of yet another lull in their conversation, Harry pulled something out of his pocket. It was a large, red fish.
"Here," Harry offered, realising that food is the answer to everything. "You can have some of this."
"What, exactly, is that?"
"That, Ron, is a red herring," Hermione said, proving that even if she had started to continuously call Ron, 'Ronald' in their third year, if only in a crude re-enacting of their movements which also included her making ridiculous and un-Hermione like comments about her hair (that's right, we didn't like the HP3 movie), she had returned to her normal, in-character ways. Just as Malfoy had re-established his habit of putting on at least three tonnes of hair gel every day. "One. A herring cured and dried, of reddish appearance."
"Where did you get that?" Ron asked, wishing he had long, scraggly black hair with dream catchers intertwined in it, and a two-pronged beard to create the proper effect. (Spinach is a Pirates of the Caribbean obsessive as well, but this is easier to forgive as it is a great movie, unlike HP 4, which is, in fact, a book.)
"Zonko's...Fish Stall," replied Harry, finishing with a suspicious cough. He examined his friends to ensure that they hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Luckily for him, they were not so paranoid as to interpret his every action. Luckily for them, they were not so paranoid as to start suspecting themselves.
Instead, Hermione simply continued her definition. "Two. A subject introduced to divert discussion as a herring drawn across a track would throw hounds out. Three. A false clue. Adj."
"Ah hah!" exclaimed Harry. "So the sole purpose of this whole chapter is to confuse any readers." Harry's paranoia, fuelled by Hermione's earlier slip up, was spiralling out of control. And was, rather worryingly, quite close to the mark.
"Now don't be silly, Harry," Hermione said gently, almost managing to stop her eyes from narrowing and glancing from side to side. "I think," she finally said, "that the alcohol vapours are getting to you. We should leave. Immediately." She looked back to Winky, calling, "Come back to Hogwarts with us. The Hog's Head is no place for a respectable house elf." They turned to leave.
Behind them, Winky, looking the height of respectability in her ripped, burnt and dirty dress, paused to pick up a small phial of liquid that had been left on the table.
A few days later, Hermione emerged from the library carrying some leaflets and badges.
"Have you finished researching your enlightenment from the Hog's Head?" Ron asked eagerly. It would save them a whole year of confusing and frustrating adventures if Hermione had already figured out Voldemort's plans
"Oh, that!" exclaimed Hermione. "That was easy. I double checked all of the information; I'm positive I know what he's up to."
"What?" shouted Harry, his eye twitching madly. "How's he going to try and kill me this time?"
Ron quietly handed him a small bottle of blue liquid. With a small murmur – 'Thanks' – Harry took the bottle and downed the whole lot.
"The problem is I can't reveal that to you. What would you do all year if you didn't have to try and understand what You-Know-Who was planning. It simply has to remain a secret until the end of the year."
Harry opened his mouth to shout accusations of switching to the Dark Side. Fortunately, at that moment the potion kicked in; a large, placid smile appeared on his face.
"That was close," Ron whispered to Hermione, returning from where he had been sheltering behind an upturned table. Hermione sighed, and started to help him clear up the mess he had created when he had flipped it.
It wasn't until a few minutes later that Ron said anything. "Hang on," he said, taking, as always, a very long time to grasp anything. "If you're not going to tell us about You-Know-Who's latest plot, what are those for?"
Hermione looked at the pile of badges and leaflets that she had just picked up again. "I've decided to expand S.P.E.W.," she explained, handing them each a leaflet and a badge. The potion had diffused somewhat throughout his body, so Harry's smile was gone, but his brain was, once more, almost fully functional. "It's a branch to help out elves who have succumbed to alcohol in an attempt to escape from their lives of endless servitude." She saw Ron's expression and added, "We're going to try and stop Winky from drinking."
"I understood what you were saying," replied Ron scathingly. "I was just wondering if you seriously expected us to walk around wearing these badges."
"Of course! It will show your support and boost funds."
"I think he's referring to the name," put in Harry.
"Why?" retorted Hermione. "I was going to call it Stop Drinking in Creatures With Less Efficient Livers, but I thought S.D.C.W.L.E.L. was rather forgettable. This acronym is succinct and far more memorable. What, exactly, is wrong with calling it the Alcoholic Reform Society for Elves?"
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Just so you know, that chapter was written by Spinach and edited by me, Bernard. All the stuff that was talking about Spinach being an obsessive was written by me, just so you don't start thinking that Spinach is a maniac who speaks in the third person, although she is.
Has anyone else seen HP3 the movie??? It is so terrible. Did u notice how, at the beginning, Harry is, on purpose, practicing magic, blatantly ignoring the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry, or whatever its called (the whole super-lumos thing). Why did everyone later get in a stress about him accidentally blowing up his aunt when he had been sitting, calmly, in his bedroom making lots and lots of light? And what was the point of hiding under the cover, if the spell is only going to shine through????
What did they do to the chronology of the thing???? Such random timing – why did he only get his Firebolt at the end????? And did they really have to have three pictures of Daniel Radcliff's, or whatever the guy-who-plays- Harry's name is, face right at the end. That was terrifying.
The dementors were so funny, though. We were laughing all the way through. Spinach, who had, admittedly, just watched Peter Pan, thought it was hilarious that they could fly, which must have been due to all the happy thoughts, which was why they had had to steal so many from other people.
Did you notice that Titanic bit with Harry when he's riding Buckbeak and Buckbeak sort of drags his foot in the lake and Harry puts his arms out and you can just hear him going 'I'm flying Jack, I mean Buckbeak, I'm flying!'. Honestly, the inter-specie romance between Harry and Buckbeak is too big an issue for the third book – it's being saved up for the sixth one. (HARRY AND BUCKBEAK 4EVA!!!!! - spinach)