"Okay, so..." Hermione took a moment to peer at the roster they'd constructed. "We still need four more people to defend our own base. Here, Blaise, Lyra made a list of the better duelists in the upper years — not even going to ask how she knows that... Do any of them have decent occlumency skills?"

"She asked Gin. We have a dueling club, now, remember? And... I'd say no on Corner, Jordan, Bagnold, and Lofton... Bletchley's a pretty good occlumens, but she wouldn't take direction from you. Same with Wilkes. Really the only decent prospect here is Nick Jones."

"Well, crap. Still, I don't suppose we should really be concentrating on duelists, anyway. I mean, yes, we'll need people who can fight, or at least defend themselves, but it would probably be a good idea to find people who could help fortify our position after we deal with the initial wave, then we wouldn't have to try to intercept every attacker individually, and— Oh! A healer! We should have a healer! You know, just in case..."

"Ah...we could ask Moreau. Violet, she's a seventh-year Hufflepuff. If you've been to Pomfrey this year, you might've seen her around, she's trying to get a jump on healer training."

"Okay, so that's two."

"And if you want a fortress," "you should talk to Mal."

"Mal? Who's Mal?"

"Mallory Prince."

"The Ravenclaw prefect?"

The twins nodded. "She's the reason" "we don't fuck with Ravenclaws." "Can't take a joke." "Likes to make traps." "Ironic little have a taste of your own potion sort of traps." "Kind of like Snape, really." "But prettier." "And less miserable." "And more talkative." "So, more like Maïa, really."

"She is, isn't she? I hadn't really noticed, but you're absolutely right," Blaise said, sniggering slightly.

"Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

The boys exchanged amused looks. It was the Slytherin who answered, as cryptically as ever. "I think we'll let you decide that for yourself. I'm going to find Nick."

፠

The twins went with Hermione to invite Violet to join the team — largely because Hermione didn't spend much time in hospital (and so had never properly met her), and the twins rather doubted that the Hufflepuff healer would believe them if they were to tell her that Lyra and Harry wanted her on their team. Probably not an unreasonable concern, honestly, knowing the twins telling random people that they were being recruited for the Hogwarts team was exactly the sort of thing they'd think was hilarious. Especially if they weren't on the team themselves. It would be a 'funny' let-down for whatever poor saps they invited under false pretenses in a ha, ha, made you look sort of way, and also annoy and frustrate Lyra when people started showing up asking what they were doing and such. Not unlike Hermione imagined Dumbledore and Crouch had been annoyed when Lyra's extra judges and dignitaries had started showing up in Britain (though of course at a much smaller, actually amusing rather than enormously disruptive scale).

Hermione had almost finished explaining to the unofficial trainee healer how Lyra and Harry had left everything to the last minute as usual, but if she could possibly manage it Hermione thought she would be a great asset to their school's team, when they were interrupted by a patient stumbling out of his curtained-off cubicle, a sheet wrapped around himself awkwardly, one hand bracing his lower back beneath it, she thought. It took her a moment to recognise Cormac McLaggan. The fifth-year prefect looked terrible, his face drawn with pain and exhaustion, hair lank and greasy — a far cry from the overconfident arse who thought he was God's gift to witches. Which, Hermione didn't want to think it was a good thing, exactly, that he looked so completely miserable, but she did get a little frisson of satisfaction seeing him like this. He just made everyone else — or, well, mostly Chelsea and Eloise, and Patty and Laura (Hufflepuffs in his year) — miserable, either hitting on them (Chelsea and Laura) or continually mocking and degrading them, much like Malfoy used to do to Hermione herself (Eloise and Patty). It seemed like karma of a sort for him to obviously be in such a wretched state.

"Cormac?" Violet said, crossing over to him and laying a hand on his shoulder to guide him back toward his bed, obviously trying to be firm with him, but Hermione could tell she already knew he wasn't going to do whatever she asked him to do. "Madam Pomfrey said you're to stay in bed. The pain-killing potion you're on can produce dizzy spells. You know that."

"Piss off, Moreau, you're not a real healer! If you don't let me go to the bloody loo, I swear I'll take a piss right here in the middle of the fucking ward!"

"Okay, okay, just— Sit down, I'll call Andrew to—"

"I don't need a fucking minder to walk two dozen steps, take a leak, and walk back, you overbearing harpy!"

"Madam Pomfrey said—"

"I know what that senile old hag said, you stupid bitch! I was here, in case you don't remember! I don't care!" He twisted, jerking his shoulder out of her grip and stalking toward the toilets at the end of the ward. He did, admittedly, look steady enough, he probably would be fine, but sometimes those symptoms could come on awfully suddenly, if Madam Pomfrey said someone needed to go with him someone should. (And either way, there was no call to be such a jerk to Violet over it!) "See! Walking! Just fi— Aah!"

He cut off with a surprisingly high scream as he pitched forward, the sheet he'd been wearing as a makeshift toga suddenly wrapped around his ankles, one twin tucking his wand back into his pocket as the other maintained the levitation charm that had caught the wanker two inches from a very painful encounter between his nose and the unforgiving stone floor.

"Careful, there, McLaggan!" he said sarcastically.

Obviously they'd just done that on purpose. If Hermione weren't so distracted by the sight presented by the loss of the sheet, she might have said something, at least pointed out that it hadn't been a very kind thing to do to someone who was already in hospital (even if McLaggan entirely deserved it).

"Is his hand...?" It...looked like it was stuck to his bum. Except, not exactly. More like, his right wrist just...abruptly ended... As though his hand were...inside his— How had he even done that?

"Yep." "Looks almost like someone" "was trying to make a point of some kind."

(Oh, right, obviously he hadn't accidentally done that to himself, Jesus, Hermione...)

"What the hell are you arseholes talking about? Let me down!"

"Weren't you just up in front of McGee for grabbing some girl's arse?" the twin who had tripped him asked, as the other obliged his request to be let down...though he 'accidentally' raised the prick a few more inches before dropping him flat on his face. He yelped, scrambling to sit up and cover himself with one hand (hiding the fact that he wasn't nearly as impressive as he liked to imply).

"Oops. Kind of poetic, if you ask me, Forge."

"Indeed, Gred. If I thought our dear Potions Master were inclined to mete out justice for crimes so minor as arse-grabbing, I might attribute it to him."

"But he's not. Prince?"

"Not her style. Yaxley?"

"Out of the game, lately. Shame — such talent! such moxie! Not Lewis herself, surely."

"No, she's hardly the type to avenge herself on wizards who take advantage. If she were, this little worm wouldn't take advantage in the first place. One of the blokes making a stab at honest chivalry for once?"

"But who among our fellow blokes has a single chivalrous bone in his body, when he's not trying to get an un-chivalrous bone in—" The boy cut himself off with a slightly embarrassed clearing of his throat as Violet made a rather horrified squeak of offended disapproval at his raunchy joke. "Sorry, ladies. Black?"

Wait, what?

"Why would she bother?"

She hadn't, had she?

"Because the arse-grabber's arse-grabbing hand is stuck in his own arse, and that's fucking hilarious?"

That did, admittedly, seem like a very Lyra Black reason for somehow shoving a boy's hand into his own arse-cheek, but...

"You do have to admire her style, Forge," said the twin who had previously been identified as Forge. "Ironic."

"Devious."

"A little bit cruel."

"But undeniably amusing."

"You can stop, now," Violet said drily, as one of the other trainee healers (presumably Andrew) helped the irate (and very red-faced) McLaggan off to the loo. "But thank you. Maybe he'll actually listen to me next time. I kind of doubt it, but... Where were we?"

"I was asking you whether you might be able to join our team for the War Game on Saturday," Hermione reminded her, trying not to think about Cormac McLaggan, his bum, and her girlfriend going anywhere near it.

Violet grinned. "Of course! I'm not working and it sounds like fun, count me in."

"Great! Thank you!" Good, they could check healer off her list... "We're having a strategy meeting on Friday after dinner, just to get everyone in one place at one time and make sure we're all on the same page, I'll let you know when we figure out where."

"Sounds good—"

A young girl's voice interrupted, calling sleepily from one of the other curtained beds. "Hello? Is anyone there? Can I have a glass of water?"

"Just a second, sweetheart! I'll be right there! You can see yourselves out, right?"

"Of course." Hermione shooed the boys back toward the corridor. "Thanks again, Violet!"

She managed to make it about four steps into the corridor before she caved to the urge to ask, "You don't really think Lyra could have done that to him, do you?"

The boys exchanged a look over her head, probably for effect. (Much like their 'speculation' about who might have thought doing that to McLaggan was both reasonable and amusing.) One of them cast an anti-eavesdropping charm over the three of them as the other pulled her into an empty classroom.

"Absolutely." "Who else would have?"

"But... Why? What possible reason could she have had?" Yes, McLaggan was a prick, but he hardly ever made passes at anyone in their year, and Lyra barely even noticed that sort of thing, anyway.

"Maïa, we think there are some things you need to know about your girlfriend." "Things we're not sure you can possibly know if you're surprised that she'd do something like that."

Hermione scowled at them. The question wasn't whether she would — she certainly had the means to creep into the boys' dorm, and Hermione would be shocked if Lyra couldn't give her at least five ways to shove someone's hand into their arse-cheek off the top of her head. And since she apparently never bloody slept (which Hermione still thought couldn't possibly be healthy), she obviously had opportunity. What she didn't have was any motive to speak of. She would undoubtedly think it was funny, but the idea wouldn't have occurred to her in the first place if McLaggan hadn't somehow attracted her attention. "If you're about to tell me that she's really Bellatrix Lestrange, don't bother."

"No, we know you know that." "Everyone knows that." "She's not even trying to hide it anymore." "No, we're about to tell you that our parents were in the same year as Bellatrix Black," "and she and Mum are second-cousins." Hermione actually knew that — the cousin part, she did share a room with Lyra and Gin, it had come up. "They don't like to talk about her," "or the war in general, really," "but the Bellatrix Black they knew in school was Mirabella Zabini's enforcer." "Went around pranking people and screwing with their heads at her direction." "We're talking 'pranks' like driving Trelawney insane or 'killing' Harry Potter, not just dosing the whole school with a babbling potion or melding that prick's hand into his own arse."

"Oh, come off it, Lyra didn't actually mean to drive Trelawney insane, and she didn't know how badly Dumbledore would react to her taking Harry on holiday." Probably. "She doesn't plan things, she just...does things."

"If you think she didn't plan for people to think Harry was dead, you're deluding yourself." "But that's not the important part of what we're trying to tell you," the boys said, uncharacteristically serious.

"Well what is, then?"

"She—" "Bellatrix" "—used to do this sort of shite for Mirabella Zabini." "Her girlfriend."

Lyra probably had, too, before coming here. But Hermione somehow doubted that Lady Zabini had asked her to do this. "What exactly are you implying, here?"

"Calm down, firecracker," "we don't think you asked her to." "That's kind of the problem." "And yes, we know that Lyra and Bellatrix aren't exactly the same person," "but she is a bloody clone of her —" "same brain." "And you can't deny that Lyra obviously has a few of the same limiting phrases scratched out." Hermione presumed that was the magical equivalent of having a screw loose. "And Bill said her childhood was a lot like Bellatrix's," "minus the whole Dark Lord thing." Had she— She hadn't told Bill Weasley who she was and where she'd come from, had she? Damn it, Lyra... "So it might not be entirely wrong-headed to think that some of Bellatrix's behaviour could be used to predict how Lyra might act in certain situations."

"...Go on..."

"We think it seems unnervingly likely that if someone were to tell her that she wanted Lyra to convince McGee to let our baby sister stay in her dorm room," "or complain loudly and at great length about their Divs professor being a useless fraud," "or how no one ever does anything about arseholes like McLaggan going around acting like the chauvinist pigs they are," "Lyra might just take it into her head to do something about it." "Without taking into account that it's really not okay to go around threatening professors in their own bedrooms," "or driving them insane," "or casually maiming prefects." "Even prefects who are complete boors and set themselves up perfectly all the time."

What?! They couldn't possibly believe that Lyra had– had done that to McLaggan for Hermione, could they? They had to know she wouldn't — Lyra had to know she wouldn't approve of... Had they said casual maiming?!

"You can't be serious, she hasn't— She..." Hermione wanted to say she wouldn't, but she had a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that Lyra actually would maim someone who annoyed her badly enough. She had to know Hermione wouldn't like it, but that would explain why she hadn't mentioned it, wouldn't it? And McLaggan had even come up earlier — Hermione had (reluctantly) suggested him as one of the few upperclassmen whose skills she knew anything about. He was one of Professor McGonagall's best Transfiguration students — that was one of the reasons, Hermione suspected, that their Head of House had chosen him as a prefect in the first place — so he might have been useful on their team.

"McLaggan is going to need his entire hand reconstructed, you know." "If that were a transfiguration effect, or even a straightforward insertion of intact hand into otherwise intact arse, Pomfrey would already have fixed it." Which would be why Lyra hadn't just done that. "We're betting she found a way to physically meld the muscles of his arse and hand together. That's not easy healing." "It'll probably be years before he can cast properly again."

Hermione felt her eyes go wide at that — it made sense, of course, magic was channelled through the nerves, causing major damage to the nerves in someone's wand hand would almost certainly have long-term consequences for their ability to use a focus like a wand — but...but Lyra would know that. And she'd...done it anyway. Because...because...

"And in that case, that someone should maybe think carefully about what she may or may not ask her girlfriend to do," "problems she might or might not imply need to be solved," "especially if she's not specifying exactly how such problems might or might not be solved."

"What are you trying to say, here?" she asked, mostly because they trailed off all expectantly, she had to say something... Something other than oh, my God, I'm dating a crazy person, what the hell was I thinking, she's going to end up killing someone — another someone — and it's going to be my fault.

"What we're saying is, you're lucky she didn't turn him into an actual pig and feed him to an acromantula or something." "Because she was bored, and you suggested that he's a pig and the world would be better off without people like him." "Just something you may want to keep in mind."

Seriously? She couldn't even— Okay. First off, they didn't know for certain that Lyra had done this, and even if they had, they didn't know why, there could be some other perfectly innocent motivation (meaning one that didn't implicate Hermione)...like, maybe McLaggan had molested Gabrielle, or something. But... But even if there were, the fact that Hermione was so willing to believe that this — all of this — sounded horribly, horribly plausible didn't say anything good, did it?

She was going to have to ask, she realised. She didn't want to know, and she had to ask anyway. And if the answer was yes, Maïa, of course I did it, he was harassing Lewis, and you went on a twenty-minute tirade about the lack of feminist sentiment in Magical British society. Obviously he oughtn't to have been allowed to continue going around molesting girls with impunity. So I punished him. If you didn't want me to casually maim him, you should've been more specific — she really had no idea what she was going to do.

(Hermione was in so much trouble.)

፠

"Hey, Jones," Blaise greeted the seventh-year Hufflepuff, taking an uninvited seat at his table in the library. From the look of things, he was attempting to build a small fortress out of Defence textbooks.

"Zabini. What's up?" he asked distractedly, flipping to an index.

"Oh, well, I was going to invite you to join the Hogwarts team for the War Game this Saturday, but if you're busy..."

It took a second or two for that sentence to sink in, distracted as he very clearly was. "What? Yes, of course! I was going to watch with Sheena—" His girlfriend, a seventh-year Gryffindor. "—but I think she'll understand! Er...was there anything else? I mean, meeting times, or...?"

"There's going to be a meeting with everyone after dinner on Friday, I'm not sure where, yet, Lyra will let you know. Or more likely Maïa Granger, she's commanding the fort — I'm just helping with recruitment. And then obviously they'll be meeting Saturday morning, and all heading down to the arena together."

"Right, right, okay..." The Hufflepuff scribbled a note about the meeting for himself. "So...is that it?"

"Yeah, pretty much. What are you so preoccupied with?" Without actually slipping into his mind, it felt like...werewolves? That was kind of weird, Blaise thought, because Cassie was definitely making sure her classes covered them before OWLs...

Jones clicked his tongue in annoyance, glaring at the pile of books. "It's this essay for Snape..."

"Since when is Snape teaching Defence?" Blaise prompted him, when he trailed off again.

The older boy sighed. "He's not. We're doing mind-altering potions. We're supposed to be figuring out the mechanisms behind the efficacy of Belby's Wolfsbane Potion, and literally everything I've found on the ingredients suggests it's mostly a soporific. A targeted soporific, which is bloody weird, and obviously the thing he wants us to look at, but I hit a dead end on the Potions side of it. I have no bloody clue what it's targeting, or how, or why you would want to target part of a mind and force it to sleep. So I thought I'd try looking at it from the werewolf side, but all of these books are bloody useless."

Blaise snorted. "Yeah, pretty much everything on werewolves is. Out of the Wyld is good, and Hairy Snout, Human Heart, but they mostly talk about the social side of the Curse, the question of embracing it, whether reservations are the way to go and so on. Hela's Observations is pretty much the only thing that's been written on what the curse really is, how it works." In English, anyway. "There's a couple things in Human Heart about what it feels like, trying to fight it, but other than that..."

"You...know a lot about werewolves, Zabini?" he asked, thinking very clearly that that was bloody weird.

Blaise shrugged. Most people thought he was bloody weird. He'd take that over them being scared of him because legilimens any day. "I've met a few. Mother does tend to have friends in the oddest places, you know. And they're not nearly so ostracised in the Americas as they are here."

Plus, he'd heard about werewolves when he was six or seven — before he learned about animagi — and had thought it was the coolest thing ever, being able to turn into an animal. He was fully on board with Harry's ambition to become animagi as soon as possible, they'd just questioned Sirius about how the whole process worked, using Lyra's portal to pop down to Ancient House for a couple of hours. (Part of Blaise and Gabbie's effort to make Harry feel less shite about being dragged into this bloody Tournament.) It was kind of an intimidating project, honestly. They'd decided to just focus on one step at a time so it wouldn't seem so overwhelming.

The first step was to figure out what animal resonated with their soul and self-image. Practically, this meant a fair amount of reading about animal symbology, and a lot of meditating. Sirius recommended getting drunk and possibly taking a couple different hallucinogens first, because of course he did. It supposedly helped the whole process along much more quickly than just meditating, and Sirius was almost as impatient a person as Lyra. (And it was hardly as though Sirius actually needed a reason to get fucked up, anyway.)

Harry hated the idea of doing drugs, especially drugs that would alter his perception (control issues, Blaise wasn't surprised), so they definitely weren't doing that. Which was honestly fine by Blaise. He might not mind the idea in theory — eavesdropping on Sirius when he was high and kind of getting to experience it vicariously really had been a lot of fun — but in practice, even drinking too much made it hard to keep his empathy locked down. Everything tended to get very loud and overwhelming, very quickly.

Harry and Gabbie were convinced that Harry would be a bird of some sort, and Harry insisted that Blaise was a cat (his patronus was a cat, and reminded him of Blaise, which was fucking adorable — he'd laughed his arse off at the memory of Harry's Divination exam last year), but it would probably be weeks, if not months, before they could confirm that for themselves.

"Yeah, okay. You said Hela, right? What kind of name is that?"

"A pseudonym. Norse goddess of death, I think? She ran with Greyback's pack for years. They called her Hela because she was basically Fenrir's adopted sister." Not that that was in the essays. Mira had told him that Hela was actually Bellatrix when he was maybe ten, but it was Lyra who'd told him that Fenrir treated her like an annoying little sister. (Which was funny as hell — she was the bloody Blackheart.)

"Wait, you mean the Fenrir Greyback? Paedophile, cannibal Fenrir Greyback?"

"I have it on good authority he's not actually a paedophile, that's just Light propaganda. And I'm...pretty sure he's not a cannibal, either. The Curse wants to propagate itself, so werewolves hardly ever kill their victims. I'm sure they eat them even less often."

"Good authority — you mean Black? I heard that, but I thought it was just a rumour."

One of the more reasonable ones, Blaise wasn't surprised Jones thought it sounded plausible. There was a certain werewolf-like intensity about Lyra. Though if she had been raised by werewolves, she'd probably actually be a werewolf, and she clearly wasn't. Blaise shrugged. "I'm sure I couldn't say. But you said you were looking at potions that just target part of a mind, right?" he asked, changing the subject. "Have you looked at the potions they use on legilimens who've managed to fracture themselves?"

Jones gave him a disgusted sigh. "Zabini, I don't even know what that means. I'm not a mind mage or a Potions nerd, I'm a Charms-and-Transfiguration guy. I'm only taking this bloody class because the Aurors want a NEWT in Potions!"

Blaise briefly considered explaining that you didn't actually need to take Snape's NEWT class to take the exam at the end of the year — if you did, hardly any Hogwarts students at all would be qualified to continue into Auror training or Healing or half a dozen other disciplines that wanted a NEWT in the subject. He covered everything on the NEWT before OWLs. But if Snape had thought it would be a waste of time for Jones to take the class, he would have told him that himself.

"Er, there's an occlumency trick where you can split your focus to think about two things at once — you might have heard of that, a lot of duelists learn it." Jones nodded. "A legilimens can sometimes accidentally have their mind start resonating with someone else too thoroughly, so they think they are that person. Losing yourself, that's called. If that happens to one half of your mind while your focus is split, you can start thinking you're multiple people, sharing one body. That's fracturing. Sometimes it happens to non-legilimens, too, with emotional trauma at a young age, but point is, there are potions that are used to target one part of the mind and force it to sleep, so it can be properly reintegrated with the primary personality. I think the Wolfsbane Potion does that to the instinct to propagate the curse. Basically."

It was far more complicated than that, really, and potions that only affected part of the mind were ridiculously difficult in the first place, but that was more or less what he'd managed to pick up in legilimency lessons last year, while Snape was brewing it for Lupin all the time. (Blaise wasn't really a Potions nerd, either.)

Jones's relief to actually have some direction for his research, and consequently his essay, was nearly palpable. "Really? Thanks!"

"You can thank me by kicking arse on Saturday, yeah?"

Jones laughed. "Sure thing. Tell Black and Potter that I'm in."

፠

Hermione tried to put her suspicions about the origins of McLaggan's predicament out of her mind as she made her way back up to Ravenclaw Tower in search of Mallory Prince. Unfortunately, that was much easier said than done.

Honestly, how was one supposed to ask one's girlfriend whether she might have just possibly caused serious, lasting harm to a boy over... Well, Hermione didn't really consider his constant harassment of the girls in the year above her to be a minor offence, but compared to ruining his ability to use a wand for years, it kind of was — and a rant fueled more by Hermione's annoyance over Professor McGonagall ignoring her than anything else. Yes, McLaggan was a jerk, and he definitely didn't deserve to be any sort of authority figure, but he didn't deserve that.

...Maybe she hadn't done it.

They'd had several discussions since returning to school about whether Lyra ought to turn in the unfathomably stupid cowards who had kidnapped, beaten, and attempted to obliviate her at the end of last term, and the core of Lyra's argument against turning them in was always that the punishment would be disproportionate to the crime. Which, Hermione couldn't really disagree — the dementors had been quite bad enough stationed at the very edge of the grounds, she couldn't imagine being so close to them as they had been on the train, or in the carriages coming through the main gates, for an extended period of time.

She did think that Lyra was a bit too blasé about people causing physical harm to others, and especially to herself. It was also a key point in her argument that they hadn't done any lasting damage, Lyra had been beaten far worse by her own father — they hadn't even left any lasting scars, since she'd managed to get herself partially eaten by a bloody lethifold a bare month and a half later!

Sometimes, Hermione didn't know whether she wanted to throttle Lyra, or never let her out of her sight, lest she go off and get herself killed and not even bother telling Hermione that she'd done something ridiculously dangerous and absurd or even patently impossible, like getting herself stuck between planes in the first place, or running off to join in a bloody riot, or hunting the fucking spiders...

But that was a different discussion. One which Hermione didn't want to have again because, well, she really didn't want Lyra to tell her when she did (or recently had done) something that might kill her. She really wanted Lyra not to do things that might kill her, and she knew that Lyra would consider that to be an unreasonable thing to ask of her. She'd just kiss her and grin and say Hermione worried too much, she was very difficult to kill, and then skip off to do something else absurdly dangerous, like pestering Angelos or Bellatrix, or trying to sneak onto the Durmstrang ship to see how it worked, or dueling with Sirius — Hermione knew they used deadly force in their sparring matches, Gin had told her as much, as well as that Sirius had almost taken Lyra's wand arm off last time...

The point was, while Lyra probably didn't consider maiming someone's wand hand to be nearly as bad as Hermione or the Twins or anyone sane would, there was also no way she could possibly think that that was a proportionate response to McLaggan's chronic arse-grabbing and innuendo-making, which probably didn't even register to her as problematic. If he'd tried to grab Lyra's arse, she'd probably have broken his fingers — Harry had told her about their 'adventure' going clubbing in Los Angeles — but she'd probably expect Chelsea to do the same if it bothered her so much. She certainly wouldn't intervene on her behalf, and to have done so just because Hermione had been annoyed was ridiculous, even for Lyra.

So, maybe she hadn't done it.

...Except, that didn't really make it better, because Hermione still thought she might have, and that was the problem.

That, and that she didn't know how to bring it up without being a bit...accusatory, about the whole thing. Which she really didn't want to be, especially if she was wrong — her face still burned at the memory of accusing Lyra of faking the attack on herself at the end of last term — but she didn't know how to– how to bring it up more...casually. Lyra already hadn't said anything about McLaggan when he'd come up in conversation earlier today, there was no guarantee she'd admit to anything even if Hermione were to bring up having seen him in hospital. Not that she thought Lyra would lie to her, but...well, she hadn't mentioned that she was sleeping with Sylvia for months, because she thought it had nothing to do with Hermione.

Of course, if the Twins were right, this had everything to do with Hermione, but somehow, if she were to say, oh, Lyra, did you know someone shoved McLaggan's right hand into his own arse-cheek she didn't really think Lyra would volunteer that she'd done it, or that she'd done it for Hermione. She knew that the idea of her doing things for Hermione — cursing Malfoy and buying her books and so on — made her uncomfortable (though of course she couldn't understand why). If Hermione asked her directly (as in, did you do that to McLaggan, and if so, why?!) she was sure Lyra would tell her, she just didn't think Lyra would tell her if she didn't ask directly.

And if she asked directly, she rather felt like she'd be implying that she thought Lyra was the sort of person who might just go around casually maiming people — which, while perhaps not inaccurate, seemed like a bad thing to think about her girlfriend, even if she had had the potential to grow up to become Bellatrix bloody Lestrange. (The fact that Lyra almost certainly wouldn't mind the implication didn't make it better.) And worse, if Lyra hadn't done it, or hadn't done it for Hermione, and Hermione implied that she thought she might have done, there was a very real possibility that she'd be giving her ideas — ideas like I could do nice things for Maïa by doing awful things to people who annoy her or Maïa would appreciate it if more people who annoyed her ended up leaving Hogwarts for whatever reason. (She was sure McLaggan wouldn't be staying here — if he couldn't do magic anymore, what would be the point of attending classes?)

"Er...Hermione? Earth to Granger?"

"Oh! Mandy, Lisa! Hi!"

"Alright there?" Lisa asked, causing Hermione to pay attention to her surroundings for the first time in several minutes. Right. She was just standing awkwardly in front of the Doorknocker, thinking about Lyra and McLaggan's arse.

"Er...yes, sorry. Just...lost in thought. What was the riddle again?"

"I shave every day, yet my beard stays the same. What am I?" the Eagle repeated. (Presumably — she hadn't heard it at all the first time.)

"A barber," Mandy answered immediately. "What are you doing up here, Hermione?" she asked, leading the way into the Ravenclaws' Common Room again.

"Oh, I was looking for Prefect Prince. The Weasleys said she was up here somewhere."

"What time is it?" Lisa asked, apparently rhetorically, since she immediately cast a tempus charm. "I think she'll be running the Potions Study Group, right?"

Hermione frowned. It still rather irked her, knowing that every House except Gryffindor had organised study groups to ensure that the younger students didn't suffer from the invariably poor instruction in Potions, History, and, until this year, Defence. She hadn't even heard about them until she'd started time-turning with Lyra last year, but honestly, it would have been so helpful to have a couple of older students around to answer questions about Potions Theory in first year. Yes, she had made it through the class just fine with her outside reading, but she would swear Harry, Ron, and Neville hadn't had the slightest idea why they did anything they did in Potions until the beginning of third year. (Which was when Snape started teaching Potions Theory, supposedly because he wanted them to get the basics of magical theory — wizardry theory — down in Transfiguration and Charms before inundating them with an entirely different way of thinking about Magic — Hermione suspected he just hated answering stupid questions, and thought that if he waited a couple of years he'd get fewer.)

"Yeah, first-years' parlour. They should be almost done, though, the firsties have Transfiguration this afternoon."

Right, good timing, then.

Or, maybe not such good timing, Hermione was nearly bowled over by the entirety of the Ravenclaw first-year class halfway up the stairs. When she managed to fight her way past the tide, the room was empty. She had to chase Mallory up another two levels before she finally caught her.

"Hi! Mallory!" she said, slightly out of breath.

"Er...Granger? Hermione, right?"

"Yes, hi! Do you have a minute?"

"I suppose. What is it?" she asked, as though she couldn't for the life of her imagine why Hermione had chased her down.

"Ah. You know the Weasley Twins?" She immediately wanted to kick herself, of course she knew the Weasley Twins.

Mallory groaned. "What have they done now?"

"Oh! No, it's nothing like that! They suggested that you might be a good addition to the Hogwarts Team for the first task, this Saturday."

"Oh, did they, now?" she asked, faintly amused.

"Yes," Hermione said firmly. "So, would you like to be on the Team?"

Mallory apparently needed a couple of minutes to consider it, because instead of answering, she said, "I thought Black was our Champion. And Potter," the implied question obviously being why are you inviting me to join the Team?

Hermione entirely failed to suppress the huff of annoyance which occurred whenever she was forced to recall her girlfriend's entirely unconcerned attitude toward this whole Triwizard business. It wasn't just this event, she was apparently convinced that it should be no trouble at all to put on a decent showing in the Tournament without putting forth any real effort — or at least no more than she put into anything else. (Which could actually be an absurd degree of effort, but was hardly consistent.) To say she wasn't exactly taking it as seriously as Hermione would if she were the Champion, with the eyes of the entire school on her, was putting it lightly. "They are, yes. Lyra will be leading an offensive group, and Harry will be on aerial defence. They've delegated the ground defence to me."

"And what, precisely, would we — myself hypothetically included — be defending?"

By the time Hermione was halfway through explaining what they knew about the Game, and who else had already been recruited for the Team, she was fairly certain that Mallory's participation was no longer hypothetical. By the time she had finished, there was a mischievous sparkle in the seventh-year's eyes, and she'd taken a seat on a nearby coffee table to begin scribbling down notes.

"Did Black's informant happen to mention how much time we would be given to prepare our ground?"

"Ah...no. Does that mean you're in?"

"Of course." She looked up from her notes, apparently surprised to see Hermione still hovering near the stairs. "Did you have somewhere to be? Sit down." She waved her quill rather impatiently at the nearest armchair. "Generally speaking, teams for this sort of thing get at least a few minutes to prepare their own defences before the game begins — up to an hour or so, depending on how quickly they want it to progress. The longer you give the teams to dig in, the harder it is to steal their treasure or flag or whatever.

"I suspect that the organisers will want to kick off the first event of the Tournament with a bang, so if they do give us time, it probably won't be very much. Five, ten minutes, maybe fifteen. But we should have an incremental plan in place for the fortification process — things we can do immediately, in the event that we have veela fire-walking in ten seconds after we reach our starting positions, but then a series of additional defences we can enact in the event that they do give us time, dependent on how much time we have.

"I'll need to go out and take a few readings of the magical currents in the field and make at least a rough map of the arena— Do we know where our base will be located, precisely? Are they assigned, or do we get to choose our hill?"

"No, and I have no idea."

Mallory nodded, making a few more notes. "We should still go scout out the area, in case we do have the choice. Are you busy at the moment?"

"Er...no?"

"Good, let's go." When Hermione hesitated, somewhat taken aback by her decisiveness, she added, "You do know where the arena is, right?"

"Well, yes—" Lyra had mentioned it was in the Forest, near the paddock Hagrid had used for their very memorable first Care lesson.

"Well, I don't, so do you want my help or not?" She raised an eyebrow at Hermione in a very Snape-like, challenging expression, leaving her to chase her down the stairs.

"Let's talk resources," the prefect said, casting an anti-eavesdropping charm around them as soon as they left Ravenclaw Tower. "Ash isn't going to be any help with the defences, and I imagine Weasley will also be fully occupied as soon as they blow the whistle—"

"If they do give us time to set up first, though," Hermione said, warming to the older girl as the shock of her enthusiasm began to wear off, "the Twins' strongest casting area is illusion and glamoury. They're also rather good at environmental transfiguration — you know, turning the floor of an entire corridor to ice, and the like."

"Ooh! That's good, I like that! Throw some conjured oil on the ice to make it extra-slippery and hide it under an illusion or two, could make a good first line of defence — like a moat, but much easier to effect within a minute or two. And relatively simple to work into a self-sustaining circuit, too."

"That's geomantic wardcrafting, right?" Hermione was only vaguely aware of the concept because—

"Yeah, like what Black did to the World Cup stadium. I thought Ashe might crack a rib trying not to laugh when she explained exactly why Public Works can't get rid of the palings she tied into it."

Yes, that. "If we have time, she can probably do something similar for our base. Otherwise...I suppose I could probably get a few rune-cast defensive palings in place, at least long enough to mock up physical defences." Simple ones, obviously, but Hermione was confident she could cast them without blowing up their entire team.

"You can do runic casting?"

"No need to sound so surprised," Hermione said, bristling slightly at her skeptical tone.

"Aren't you a fourth-year? And muggleborn?"

Er...right. Maybe it was a bit surprising, to people who didn't spend all of their time around Lyra and Harry, that a fourth-year would be practising that sort of magic. Though, "What does my being muggleborn have to do with anything?"

"Well, for one thing, it means you couldn't possibly have even heard of Runic Casting until three years ago, and for another, it means you hardly would have had the access to resources you'd need to try to learn it independently — presumably, not until Black showed up last year. And since you wouldn't have been able to practise it over the summer, what with it being a Class Three Dark Art, and the Ministry and the press looking for any excuse to haul you over the flames to take the heat off Dumbledore... Colour me impressed, Granger."

"Oh." Hermione felt her face grow warm. "I'm not nearly as good as Lyra, but yes, I can do basic runic casting."

"Basic like a really big protego and a few explosive fire-charms, or basic like..." She scribbled something in her notebook, passing it over to Hermione. "Could you do something like that?"

There were only nine symbols, but Hermione didn't recognise any of them. "Er...maybe. What does it do?"

"The first three runes divert streams from nearby magical currents and pool them to create a temporary, artificial reservoir. The fourth is a linking-direction element. Take this power and use it to do whatever is specified in the second clause, which in this case is a description of a very basic earthen rampart — sinks a one-meter ditch around a circular area ten meters in diameter, twelve trough to trough, the displaced soil pulled inward to raise the enclosed area to form a defensive bowl."

Oh. Could she just casually build a hill-fort for them, with just a handful of runes, just go ahead and leverage ambient magic to move literally tonnes of dirt around, and...

Actually, despite the ridiculous forces involved, she didn't see any reason she couldn't — magic was just absurd sometimes. "Well, I've never tried anything like this, and certainly not on this scale, but...maybe? It might take a while, and I probably wouldn't be able to hold a defensive paling as well..."

"It does, yeah. That last symbol is a limiting-regulating function, controls the rate at which magic from the reservoir is pulled into the spell, and therefore how quickly it takes effect. The way I've written it, it would take about ten minutes or so. Really shouldn't do it any faster, makes it too easy to accidentally bury bystanders, and since all our people will be around...yeah. Jones and I, and maybe Weasley, can set up shield-palings and booby-traps, take care of the more active defences if you don't have time to finish before they call start. Your thief will obviously want to be outside, and we shouldn't draw attention to her by having her help with the defences anyway, and Moreau's about as good at Defence as Ash, so who else does that leave us?"

"Theo Nott. And we haven't decided on the final defender, yet."

"Hmm...maybe someone who's into elementalism?"

"We'll keep that in mind." Honestly, Hermione had no idea who they ought to bring on to fill the final slot, she was rather hoping Lyra or Blaise would have a suggestion.

Mallory nodded, moving on as they strode into the trees. "Does Nott have any particular areas of expertise?"

Someone asked in a comment somewhere (I lost track of it) how Mallory and Sev are related. They're first cousins. Mallory's father is Sev's mother's younger brother. They never really met before she started school because Sev's not a Prince, and the Death Eaters wouldn't have talked about him like he and Zorian were related. She knew about him as the Spy, not as her cousin. —Leigha

It amuses me that "Hermione is in so much trouble" is, like, the Hermione/Lyra thematic sentence xD

Right, one more putting the team chapter left, woo. —Lysandra