Eiram was too tired to believe in the tension she was sensing between the two men, and she felt it would be a bad job to ponder it. This was only the first time she had seen them together, anyway, and, as far as she knew, though she doubted what she knew meant anything anymore, it was the first time they had been together. Maybe they were simply taking each other's measure, and it had nothing to do with her.

After all, Diogenes had never liked Manson (and oh wouldn't he find a way to rub that in, now), even when they had been good. He hadn't liked Seven Inch Staples after the first record, and he probably didn't like A Flawless Trapezoid, because he didn't like Implement. And since Twiggy had never been in Implement, there was no reason to suppose it was anything other than coincidence that Diogenes disliked every band that ever did have Twiggy in it, or that this might have borne any sort of relation to Twiggy's being--as Twiggy had himself noticed--among Eiram's LJ interests, even if Diogenes was perfectly aware of that, having put her onto LJ in the first place.

Twiggy had also mentioned something about the fool who had let her go, which he hadn't gotten from LJ (for goodness' sake, Diogenes was on her f-list and at least half the rest of her list was on his; filter-schmilter--she just didn't blog about anything more personal than getting inadvertently dry-humped by two thirds of the pit when SIS played Columbiahalle. Oh well, Twiggy was a Legilimens; as Eiram's thoughts tended to wander to Diogenes exactly when her metaphoric guard was down, chances were she was not, in fact, occluding to any effect at such times, either. Like when she was asleep on Twiggy's shoulder at lunch. But it still didn't necessarily follow that Twiggy would resent Diogenes or anything.

She hoped she was occluding to effect at the moment.

Anyhow, it wasn't likely there really was any tension at all between them, and the seething hostility in the air was just her imagination, as were the sidelong glares that each shot at the other when they both stepped forward to help her out of the secret door from the Slytherin common room. Certainly it would be silly and self-serving to think that whatever staggeringly obvious element of egregious territorialism might possibly exist could have centered on her, even if she was picking up inexplicable images of them each pissing circles around her and getting some on the other's feet while he was at it.

"Please," she said, to change the subject, "tell me there isn't another meeting today."

"In five minutes," said Twiggy.

"In the Headmaster's office," said Diogenes.

"What happened to dinner?" she asked.

"Just ended," said Twiggy. "Everyone in the last couple of chapters missed it, too."

"So we came to get you," said Diogenes.

Eiram leaned heavily against the wall, then started to fall backwards as the secret door allowed her to pass. Twiggy and Diogenes rushed to catch her, grabbing her arms and appraising each other coldly as they righted her. It was just as well that neither of them let go, or she would have put her face in her hands and wept piteously. Another meeting.

Somebody hated her, that much was clear.

"I don't think this one will be long," Twiggy said, sympathetically.

Surely Twiggy hoped not as devoutly as she did. His makeup was much the worse for wear and had given way entirely to the circles under his eyes. His dreadlocks drooped, and even the red strands looked dim and blurry.

"With any luck," added Diogenes.

Diogenes appeared to have missed as much sleep as she and Twiggy, which, if she thought on it, he probably had. He had flown from the States through Charles de Gaulle, where getting through the line at Passport Control had taken so long that he had missed his flight to Heathrow. The Immigration queue in London had taken even longer, his cat had been taken to quarantine, and his checked baggage, he discovered, had been sent from Paris to Bratislava. He had already been in transit twenty-seven hours by the time he boarded the Paddington Express, he had to wait till morning for service on the Underground to resume to get from Paddington Station to King's Cross, and then the Hogwarts Express had unaccountably been followed all the way to Scotland by a flock of garrulous ravens. And, if she knew Diogenes, he would have been up all night before his trip, expecting to sleep on the plane, which he had not been able to do; the entertainment system in coach had malfunctioned, the Children's Channel had taken over the public address system in the cabin, and Barney had sung about not sharing germs all the way across the Atlantic. The purple dinosaur had been joined at random choruses by the entire Akron chapter of the International Association of Tone-Deaf Children, who were on an excursion to Oslo to serenade migrating whales. Diogenes had been sitting next to one of their chaperones, who had confided that she planned to throw herself from a fjord as soon as she mailed a postcard home to her boyfriend, who wasn't actually her boyfriend, as they had only had sex once, when she had slipped GHB into his beer at a party, and he hadn't called her afterwards. She would show him. When Trent had asked after the journey, Diogenes had only been able to reply aloud, "It was..."

Eiram was but vaguely aware of their progress through the castle. She wondered idly how she had managed to find her way to the Slytherin dungeon on her own. Eventually they reached the entrance to Trent's rooms, which she would never have recognized, as one of the pair of stone gargoyles had been removed. The author had belatedly recalled that there was only supposed to be one there, and anyway the extraneous idiot had let Ybbuh in earlier, which was just a total dereliction of duty, and it deserved to be sacked.

"Vollmilch mit Krokant," said Twiggy (the password had been changed in case the redundant gargoyle was feeling vindictive).

The remaining gargoyle leapt aside and they stepped into the staircase, but this time it did not take them to Trent's office. They rode the spiral downward and arrived in a poorly-lit tunnel. A set of arrows indicated that the stage was to the right and the dressing rooms were to the left. Twiggy led them left. About a hundred yards later, they reached another staircase, an ordinary, un-escalatory staircase. They climbed three flights, then crossed the length of another long hallway, turned three left corners, and arrived in front of a doggie door. Set beside it, on a Barbie Scene Starbucks table with tiny Starbucks napkins wedged under one foot, was an airplane bottle of Absolut Elderberry. Printed carefully on a Virgin Air luggage tag were the words, "Drink Me."

They passed it around and abruptly shrank, Twiggy into a teacup poodle, Diogenes into an Italian greyhound. Eiram could not tell what breed she had become, but she hoped it was not Chihuahua. They climbed through the doggie door, then raced across a stretch of grass on a levee overlooking a sludgy river to the far end of another hall and an ordinary door marked Dressing Room A. Twiggy hooted three times like a barn owl.

Trent opened the door, beckoned them inside, and pointed them to a squishy couch near the bar. They clambered up, panting.

"Rehominifico," he said, waving his wand around them. They returned to their human forms so suddenly that the cushions beneath them collapsed and they dropped down to the frame. Twiggy and Diogenes tumbled into Eiram and it took a moment to disentangle their robes and limbs and hair. Eiram ended up with two wands, neither of them her own. Diogenes had a wand, but it was someone else's; hers was poking out of Twiggy's left boot.

They sorted out the wands, and set the spare on the coffee table in front of them.

"Oh, that's mine," said a young woman who was sitting on a couch opposite theirs.

She was wearing jeans and a Theseus & the Black Sails tee shirt, and had short pink hair.

Now why didn't I think of pink hair? Eiram thought.

"Wotcher Eiram," said the woman. "Your hair's gone pink! And you didn't even have to scrunch up your face to change it!"

"Er," said Eiram, examining the hair hanging over her shoulders, which had been starting to look rather like Twiggy's dreadlocks (it had been a long time since he had scourgified her, and she had spent most of the intervening hours twisting her hair in response to...well, to pretty much everything). It was, indeed, pink. She kind of liked it, but it was a bit late to be original. It returned to its ordinary hue without a fuss.

"Hmm," said Trent. "Try changing your nose."

She thought about wearing an elephant's trunk. It would be handy, as she could douse herself in cold water if she started drifting off again.

"Are you trying?" asked Trent.

"Yes," she said. "Any difference?"

"It looks a little straighter," said Diogenes. "It's pretty subtle, though."

"I was sort of going for blatant," she said. "And prehensile."

"And I think I accidentally reset it," said Twiggy. "When we changed back into humans, my elbow was about to slam right into her face, so I imperturbed it to keep from breaking anything. I was a little alarmed and I might have overcorrected."

"So not a true Metamorphmagus, then," said Trent. "Too bad, really; that might have come in useful. But in a pinch a Criniscolorismorphmagus could provide a diversion..."

"By the way," said the woman with the pink hair, "I'm Tonks, and this is Remus." She indicated the man sitting beside her.

"Remus Lupin?" cried Diogenes.

"You know Remus, too?" asked Moody, who was hovering near the fireplace.

"No," said Diogenes. "But he's my godfather."

"I am?" asked Remus.

"Sirius couldn't really tell you," said Trent, "since he was supposed to be dead, and he figured you had enough to worry about with the werewolf thing to bother you with the knowledge that he had actually just tripped through a hole in the plot."

"Well," Remus said. "Bellatrix' Killing Curse must have finally knocked some sense into him."

"Dumbledore's portrait said the same thing," said Moody, nodding. "But it was still risky making you Diogenes' godfather."

"Oh come on, Mad-Eye," said Trent. "Who else would Sirius have named godfather to his only-begotten son?"

"Does anyone else know?" asked Moody.

"My mother," said Diogenes. "But as she is mute and illiterate, I don't suppose she would give anything away."

"Bellatrix' Killing Curse must have knocked a lot of sense into Sirius," said a fatherly-looking man with thinning red hair; he was seated on the couch to the right.

"Hopefully enough sense," said the motherly-looking red-headed woman beside him, "that you--" she looked pointedly at Diogenes, "aren't predisposed to carry on his hostility towards Twiggy. And you--" she looked pointedly at Twiggy, "aren't going to hold anything against Diogenes just because he's Sirius' son."

"We have nothing against each other," Twiggy said.

"Nothing at all," Diogenes said.

Eiram, they both thought.

"We like each other," Twiggy said.

"We have a lot in common," Diogenes said.

Eiram, they both thought.

"The both of ye might want to give Eiram a little room," said Hagrid, who was sitting by himself on the last couch. "Yer starting to crush her."

They respectively scooted a few inches in opposite directions, each measuring the exact distance the other left between himself and Eiram.

"We should get started," said Minerva, who was sitting on the couch with the red-haired couple. She succinctly introduced them as the Weasleys and pointed out Kingsley Shacklebolt standing beside the door to the bathroom.

"We need to discuss the status of the Order," Trent explained. "Headquarters is a problem, since the Secret Keeper died and there's no one to tell Eiram, Diogenes, or myself where it is. Also, obviously, we need a new Secret Keeper, and I'm not sure it should be me."

"Don't be ridiculous Trent," said Minerva. "The rest of us have to interact with the students at least occasionally. You're just a cipher who exists primarily to provide whatever connections happen to become necessary and you can't even leave your office ever again in case Hermione, who seems to have regained at least some of her native intelligence, follows you around and discovers that you're not really Alastor's personal assistant."

"Oh, Merlin's teakettle," said Twiggy. "That reminds me, she was hanging around after Potions today. She was trying to sneak Amortentia ingredients from the store cupboard. Said she wanted to help clean up. I told her I had locked the cabinets because I heard there had been problems in the past with people making Polyjuice Potion on the sly. But she misunderstood, probably because she had been one of those people, and thought I said someone was at it again, and I couldn't correct her because she didn't say anything out loud."

"Is anyone making Polyjuice Potion again?" asked Trent.

"Probably," said Twiggy. "But not with my supplies. I wish I could have told her something else, something that wouldn't get her thinking about disguises at all, but I was too mortified by the ideas she was entertaining about what she would do to whom with the Amortentia to come up with anything that hasn't happened already."

"Well, that's exactly why none of us used it this time around," said Moody. "Makeup and wardrobe for Twiggy, and Minerva's incredibly powerful and previously unheard-of transfiguration of appearance for me. And who knows? Maybe if Hermione's on the lookout for Polyjuice transformations, it will completely distract her from our own camouflaged identities."

"I hope so," said Twiggy. "but she stops being quite such a stupid cow when she takes off those headphones."

"I never would have expected Hermione to fall for hexed CDs," said Mrs. Weasley.

"Oh no," said Eiram. "If it's actually to our advantage that she has, maybe I shouldn't be teaching the students about that particular Dark Art."

"It'll be fine," Twiggy said. "Muggle electronics aren't supposed to work at Hogwarts, so even though everyone knows she's got her Discman surgically implanted, and takes it for granted, it won't ever really sink in that she's playing CDs at all, let alone hexed CDs."

"But what about Hermione 'erself?" asked Hagrid. "That's exactly the sort of thing that she would be the one person in the whole place to figure out."

"Yes," said Mr. Weasley. "What if her batteries die and she can't listen for a while? How long before she throws off the hex?"

"The hex is self-perpetuating," said Eiram. "That's one of the things that makes the CDs so insidious. Once you succumb to it, you will never, ever believe a band could be mind-numbingly rotten unless Hot Topic stops selling its merchandise."

"It's why we had to get our swag on their shelves," said Trent, wrinkling his nose. "It was our only hope of preventing every suburban teenager with a bad attitude and a big allowance from becoming puppets of the Dark side. So long as the kids can buy SIS stickers at the mall, they will think we rule, too."

"Well then you'd better not take five years to get your next record out," said Minerva. "Or all hope is lost."

"We'd also better enchant Hermione's batteries," said Twiggy. "Even though she won't accept that listening to My Chemical Romance makes her dumb as a box of rocks, she will still get smarter whenever she stops--the longer she stops, the smarter she will get, and that could be dangerous."

"I'll take care of it," said Tonks.

"Better let me," said Kingsley, gesturing at Tonks' shirt. "She knows you don't listen to her kind of music, so she won't think you're cool enough to be around anymore. She'll walk by like she doesn't see you and you won't have any time to get the spell off."

"True, that," Tonks said, frowning. "It's all you, then."

"I wonder..." said Mrs. Weasley. "Maybe you should Obliviate any ideas about Polyjuice Potion she might have? Just to be on the safe side?"

"Better not," said Remus. "We can't Magic away all our problems. That would be too straightforward."

"We can't be havin' meetings all the time, either," said Hagrid. "What was this one about, again?"

"What to do about the Order," said Trent. "Headquarters, Secret Keeper, new members and their roles..."

"Right," said Hagrid. "Well, Headquarters is easy enough. This place didn't even exist till now and no one knows about it except us."

"But the entrance is a difficulty," said Remus. "With all the safeguards we've put on this room, it remains that it won't be much of a secret if anyone can see all the members of the Order going in and out of Trent's office."

"We could put an SEP field in the corridor," said Diogenes.

"A what?" asked Hagrid.

"Somebody Else's Problem," said Eiram. "The effect is pretty much the same as ignoring Hermione's CD player. Nobody would pay any attention to anyone who shouldn't be in the corridor."

He shoots, Kindergoth, Diogenes thought at Twiggy. He scores.

"I've got a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy downstairs," said Twiggy, thinking at Diogenes, He rebounds and sinks it from the three-point line, Badger Boy. "Or wherever my room is in relation to this place. I'll look up the instructions."

Diogenes gave him a baleful scowl.

"Secret Keeper, then," said Minerva, quickly.

"I agree that it should be Trent," said Moody. "It can't be me; I'd be the first one they'd expect."

"Definitely Trent," said Remus.

"Well then, we'll do the Fidelius charm before we leave," said Trent. "And I think it best to include the truth about Dumbledore's death as a secret that can't be divulged."

"Oh, that's a good idea," said Mr. Weasley.

"One less thing for Twiggy and Eiram to have to not think about when Voldemort's around," agreed Tonks.

"Better make my participation privileged information, too," said Twiggy, "since Voldemort is under the impression that none of you knows who I really am. Eiram is meant to be my proxy."

"Eiram, yes," said Trent. "I've been mulling it over, and I think it's a good thing after all that Eiram is Head of Slytherin. It fits the scheme."

"Even if Phineas was a right pain in the arse about it," muttered Moody.

"What about Diogenes?" asked Hagrid. "Maybe no one should know about his dad."

"That's wise," said Remus. "Harry's likely to be upset that Sirius never told him he was still alive."

"Not to mention jealous that Sirius had a real son," said Kingsley.

"Is there anything Harry doesn't take personally?" Eiram asked.

"No," said Twiggy, Trent, Tonks, Remus, Hagrid, Kingsley, Moody, Minerva, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, and Diogenes.

Eiram looked quizzically at Diogenes.

"Hermione turned in an essay the old Runes professor had assigned over the summer," he said. "Her title was, 'teh b0y Wh0 NeEdz 2 gEt 0vEr H1ms3lf'. Three rolls of parchment. I had not realized runes could be coerced into netspeak, but nevertheless she made the point."

"I think I am going to have trouble getting him to trust me," Eiram said. "From what I've seen so far, besides his general resistance to admitting anyone else might ever be right, the Slytherin thing, I believe, is going to be a problem."

"Oh, he'll be clinging to you for validation by next week," said Diogenes. "You're a walking study in codependence."

Twiggy started humming "Love is not Enough".

"I think that's it for tonight," said Trent. "Let's get that Fidelius charm going."