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Harry, 9pm.
At first, affairs in the Gryffindor tower were quite typical for a Saturday night.
As usual, Hermione stood alone in the middle of the crowded common room, tapping her foot impatiently. Her insistent shouts of "Harry! Ron!" could be heard even above the boys' noisy search. Harry fleetingly wondered whether Hermione had placed a sonorus charm on her foot, since the sole of her shoe was emitting an audible tap despite the thick scarlet-and-gold carpeting. "Only Hermione would spell her shoe just to make a point," Harry muttered under his breath as he ran his hand between the wall and his bookshelf. He came up with a handful of dust, but no cloak.
"Blimey, Harry, if I owned anything as expensive as an invisibility cloak, I'd keep a closer tab on it," Ron huffed, throwing a pile of dirty shirts away from Harry's bed. "No wonder Hermione insists on keeping the map in her room. It'd look like just another scrap in this mess, and some house elf would have tossed it years ago."
Shouts of "Harry, Ron, please hurry up and do whatever you're doing!" began to filter up through the open dormitory door. Harry could distinctly hear Seamus trying to convince Hermione to "please, just stop, my ears are falling off," and exchanged a rueful look with Ron before diving back into the mess that was the boys' dormitory.
Three minutes later, his hand brushed against a familiar soft cloth buried underneath his bedsheets. "Got it!" Harry held the silvery cloak above his head with an expression of triumph.
Ron dumped the armful of books he was holding onto the floor and jumped to his feet with a grateful sigh. "Finally. Now let's go down before Hermione's foot falls off." Harry stuffed the invisibility cloak inside his robe and nodded wholeheartedly. The tapping had increased in both pitch and volume, and both Harry and Ron walked down the staircase with their hands covering their ears.
Hearing footsteps, Hermione's foot stopped its movement halfway to the carpet. The few people who hadn't fled the deafening noise gave small cries of relief, sending grateful looks toward Harry and Ron as they approached Ground Zero. "Took you long enough!" she exclaimed, brandishing a familiar piece of old parchment like a weapon. Pulling the boys into a curtained corner of the common room, Hermione's hands flew to her hips in frustration. "We have a D.A. meeting in two hours," she hissed, looking around to make sure they couldn't be heard.
"Two hours is a long time," Ron muttered.
"Not if we actually want to be prepared, Ronald."
"It's winter break, Her-mi-o-ninny," Ron told her, faking a bad Bulgarian accent. He earned only a scathing glance from Hermione and a surreptitious kick in the ankle from Harry.
"So, Harry, what do you have planned for tonight?" Hermione asked cheerfully, turning away from Ron, who was sulkily ignoring Harry's attempt to make him shut up.
"Mobilicorpus. Thought it would be necessary during battle, to move the wounded," Harry replied promptly-- the last time he hadn't thought of a proper D.A. subject ahead of time, Hermione had barely restrained herself from physically beating him. "Bit more accurate on bodies, levitation can backfire and send someone too high in the air. And," he added with a sly grin, "we can always mention a little story about Snape and the dangers of mobilicorpus."
Hermione tapped her chin in thought. "Mobilicorpus would work, I suppose, especially if Voldemort decides to attack Hogwarts and there are plenty of injured students." The name, so often avoided by wizarding-folk, rolled easily off her tongue, but Hermione could not seem to supress a small shudder at the thought of their beloved Hogwarts under seige.
"Let's just hope it doesn't come to that," Harry answered grimly. Privately, he thought that Voldemort would have to win control of Hogwarts if he wanted to truly decimate the Order of the Phoenix; the school was the safest place in Britain as well as the home of Albus Dumbledore and many of his most powerful associates. Which, Harry thought ruefully, possibly included himself, at least in Dumbledore's mind. After all the mistakes he had made over the years, Harry wasn't sure he merited the esteem that Dumbledore had granted him, but …
Hermione gave a little sigh, breaking into Harry's reverie. "I wish we had a way to practice ennervate. I imagine that would be more useful, but short of knocking people out, I don't see how we can do more than theoretical work. It wouldn't help our side if the D.A. manages to incapacitate half its members."
"Mobilicorpus will at least get people out of the way," Harry argued, and both Hermione and Ron nodded in agreement. "We haven't done as much of this stuff as we have hexes and curses. If we're going to practice it, though, maybe we can get the room of requirement to produce padded floors and walls, just in case." Almost every student fourth year and up, including the D.A., had stayed over break to attend Dumbledore's Holiday Ball, and Harry intended to put the time to use.
Ron grinned maliciously. "Don't want anyone's head to scrape the ceiling, do we?"
All three laughed at that, savoring the memory of Snape's head scuffing the rough surface of the Shrieking Shack's tunnel. With a final chuckle and a quick furtive glance around the common room, Harry raised his wand to the map in Hermione's hands, uttering the password set so many years ago by the Marauders. It wasn't curfew yet, but the Room of Requirement was a closely guarded secret of the D.A. As far as Harry knew, none of the Inquisitorial Squad who had invaded the room had been able to find it again, and he meant to keep it that way.
"Hallways clear?" he began to ask Hermione, who had suddenly clutched the map in both hands. "Hermione, what's wrong?"
"Front gates," she answered in a quiet voice, pointing to a section of the map at which the trio rarely checked. The boys' heads snapped toward her instantly. Raising her gaze from the old parchment, she stared at Harry, worry sunk deep within her eyes. "Professor Lupin is at the front gates, with others." Indeed, a series of unfamiliar names floated eerily above the ink-sketched gates, clumped together in a huddled group.
"Dumbledore," Harry breathed, and all three of the students broke into a run toward the portrait hole.
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Author's notes: Sorry about the boring introduction chapter. Really.