This fic is dedicated to Lady Alyssa and Random Flatmate/Dent who wrote the awesome 'Bagenders' and gave us permission to rip off some of their work in this fic.
Episode Six: Sickness, Insanity and the Monthlies
Padding down
the stairs, Harry fought down another bout of nausea and silently cursed the
throbbing in his head. He'd been up for hours, trying to fall back asleep but
had given up when dawn had sent light spilling in through the huge bedroom
window. Upon sitting up, his general feeling of nastiness had increased a
million times and he'd been forced to run to the bathroom to avoid retching all
over his carpet.
With a sigh he unbuttoned the top button of his pyjama
top to ease the choking sensation and stepped into the kitchen. The smell of
coffee nearly sent him running for the bathroom again but his surprise at
seeing Sirius Black and Remus Lupin sitting at the
kitchen table drove the thought from his mind and replaced it with shock. He
liked them both very much, but along with everybody else in the house, he
tended to forget they were there.
"All right there, Harry?" his godfather asked in a tone that would
have suggested that they had the conversation every day.
Harry's jaw dropped open enough that he resembled a sea-bass or some other
large mouthed fish.
Lupin smiled slightly, his amber eyes showing some concern at Harry's pale colouring. "You don't look so good. There's a good
chance you've got the same flu we had."
"Er... flu?" Blinking, Harry made a few
incoherent noises of disbelief before managing to form a sentence. "It's
not flu, it's ebola!"
Sirius laughed, a sharp noise in the silent house.
"I suggest you take a shower and steam some of that out, if anyone else
catches it you may never see the bathroom again."
Harry nodded, his eyes falling on the booklet Lupin was fingering on the table.
"I think... I have to go... vomit."
Darting from the room, Sirius sent a crooked grin at his friend across the
table. "Harry's a good kid, but he doesn't seem very articulate, does
he?"
"He's sick," Lupin said with a shrug, pushing back his chair and
standing. "I don't think you see him enough, Padfoot."
Nodding in agreement, the two men took their coffee mugs back with them to the
basement. Forgotten, the booklet remained on the table.
*****
When Harry finally emerged from the shower, he was surprised to see that the
line outside the bathroom consisted only of Ginny. He wasn't even sure if she
was in line for the bathroom, seeing as she was wearing a green swimsuit and
inching around the hallway on her stomach. Upon seeing Harry, she wriggled her
way over and hissed at him before inching past him and into the bathroom.
Puzzling out Ginny's behaviour was a difficult task
at the best of times, and Harry didn't really fancy trying it when his head
ached so badly. He set out to find clothing suitable for a day when he felt so
nasty.
What he ended up with, was a pair of flannel pajamas that had been Dudley's, so the red material was pinned at
his waist and pooled around his thin body. Over that he wore his newest Weasley
sweater. On his feet a pair of thick black socks were
bunched around his ankles and covered in house slippers. He completed the
ensemble by draping his duvet over his shoulders like a cloak. Ready to face
the day, since his second attempt at sleep had failed, he headed back to the
kitchen to get a mixing bowl as a puke bucket just in case.
Passing the living room, he glimpsed Snape staring vacantly at the television.
He too was wearing comfort clothes. In this case, black jogging bottoms and a
T-shirt proclaiming 'Dark Wizards Kick Ass!' Snape had sworn on numerous
occasions that the T-shirt was left over from his old death-eater days, a
statement somewhat belied by Voldemort's denial of
ever having seen the T-shirt before coming to the houseshare.
Snape looked rather pitiful, clutching his cauldron in his lap, just in case.
Feeling an actual pang of sympathy for the man, the first one ever, Harry
trudged on into the kitchen in search of toast or something equally uncomplicated,
which he could throw up later. At the table, instead of Sirius and Remus, he found Hermione laying
with her face pressed up against the Formica worktop.
"You dead?" Harry managed as he scrunched
two pieces of bread into the toaster.
Hermione lifted her head, with difficulty. The leaflet her head had been
resting on was now stuck to her cheek. She peeled it off and threw it in the
general direction of the bin. It fluttered off to the left and landed in the
sink, instead.
"Erg... uhhh."
Hermione's lack of witty conversation, added to the fact that she was wearing
shell suit bottoms, a giant sweatshirt bearing the legend 'British Dental
Association' and rainbow toe socks, suggested to Harry that she was in the same
predicament as him. "I guess you don't want toast then?"
Covering her mouth and widening her eyes, Hermione whimpered and pulled a huge
saucepan closer to her, then shoved it away again just as quickly, since it
still had a faint odour of eye of newt.
As he was sure that he would be forced to vomit if Hermione did, Harry busied
himself with pouring a glass of water and throwing his blackened toast onto a
plate.
"Has anybody seen Ginny?" Ron asked as he listlessly entered the
kitchen in his pajamas. "Ooh, you two look like I feel."
"If you feel like your stomach wants to burst out of your bellybutton,
your brain hurts and you can't feel your teeth, we're right there with you,
mate. Oh and Ginny was in the bathroom last I saw her, "
Harry answered, taking a seat across from Hermione who had progressed
into moaning in pain under her breath.
Ron scrunched up his face in thought. "She's not there now, Malfoy jimmied open the lock when no one answered his
shouts and threats. The window was open though."
"Maybe you should ask Hagrid then," Hermione suggested, though the
words must have unsettled her stomach because she immediately began moaning
again and shaking.
"Come to think of it... Ginny was crawling around in her bathing suit this
morning. Maybe you ought to look for her before she hurts herself, " Harry said around nibbling on his toast.
"She's not sick, so she'll be fine." Ron headed for the sink to get a
drink of water. He found Sirius and Lupin's discarded
leaflet and made the mistake of fishing it out and reading it.
Harry watched as Ron's eyes got very round. He was almost knocked over as Ron
lurched from the room and raced for the stairs. As the sound of his frantic
footsteps faded, Harry heard the unmistakable sound of vomiting from above,
closely followed by the sound of outraged shrieking which usually indicated the
destruction of one of Draco's dresses.
Hermione picked up the kitchen tongs and carried the open leaflet over to the
bin, but not before Harry had got a glimpse of some of the pictures inside it.
Hermione had fallen asleep on that leaflet! Katie Bell had once told him that
if you slept with a book under your pillow you absorbed its contents during the
night. He'd tried revising that way and knew it didn't work, but he couldn't
help wondering what kind of dreams sleeping on that leaflet would give you.
Harry looked at his toast, then pushed it away in
disgust.
***
Snape glared at the diary room
camera, cauldron still clutched defensively in his hands. His scowl would have
been frightening if his hair hadn't been in two matching plaits. "I don't need
to justify my actions to that lot, do you hear me? My decisions are precise and
my actions are deliberate. I'm a very intelligent man, and I have a dark past.
Do you understand me?"
The small room fell into a
dignified silence, or would have if Snape hadn't begun toying with one of his
pig tails. " My original intention was to wear one
plait, for convenience and to keep it off my neck. But that Ginny Weasley,"
Snape bit out the words, "tried to attack my back more than once fearing it was
a serpent. The girl's quite mad, I still have the marks."
Sneering around the room Snape
rose and crossed his arms across his chest, plaits swinging with the movement.
"This hairstyle is just as convenient, albeit less socially accepted. If they
knew me at all they'd know that I don't care for conventional attitudes. I have
a dark past, did I mention that?
***
By lunchtime, most of the household had assembled in the living room. Nobody
felt like eating, but they'd all gravitated towards the same room on the
principle that misery loves company. They were all trading stories about
illness... well, all except Ginny, who was still nowhere to be found.
"I once h-heard that if you c-crumble an aspirin into a
g-glass of Seven Up, then h-heat it in the microwave and d-d-drink it.
It'll cure you instantly."
There was a round of groans in response to Quirrell's
suggestion.
"That's disgusting!"
"When I was little, my mom would make me these vitamin C drinks whenever I
was ill," said Hermione. "They were these horrible sachets of chalky
powder that went all greasy when you poured the water on. It was like drinking
cooking oil except every so often you'd get this pocket of powder that hadn't
been mixed in and practically choke to death."
Ron snorted, rudely. "If you think that's bad you should try growing up in
a wizarding house. I've got four words for you: Madam
Malefica's Magical Malady Remedy."
Everybody but Harry and Hermione winced reflexively.
"Actually, there's one thing that's guaranteed to clear a cold right
up," Snape said. "I'll make up a batch if you like."
"Don't!" Said the others with one voice.
"You don't even know what I was suggesting, yet!"
Harry fixed him with a steely gaze.
"Was the main ingredient eye of newt by any chance?"
"As a matter of fact, it was." In spite of the faces everybody was
making, Snape ploughed on. "Eye of newt boosts the immune system!"
Fortunately, Snape didn't hear Harry's reply, since Quildemort,
who had been sniffling all morning, suddenly sneezed from both heads at once.
This immediately started an argument between Draco and Voldemort on the
importance of people with two faces carrying two hankies at a time so they
didn't cover other people's belongings with snot.
***
Hagrid, blissfully unaffected by the illness plaguing the rest of the
household, awoke to see a pair of bare feet hovering over his head. After a
moment's thought, he realized the feet were attached to Ginny, who was dangling
from the drainpipe on the side of the house, dressed in only a swimming costume
and hissing furiously.
"Are you all right there, Ginny?"
The hissing stopped. Ginny seemed rather surprised to see him.
"Yes, thank you, Hagrid."
He pondered this for a moment, then decided he must
still be dreaming, so he closed his eyes again.
***
Back inside the house, the smell of eye of newt hung thickly in the air. Snape
had followed through on his promise to brew up a cold cure, despite the
household's adamant refusals. Dumbledore, who was lying in his hammock watching
horse-racing on Channel Five, showed no physical signs of illness. Only the
absence of the sweet wrappers that usually surrounded his hammock bore silent
testament to the fact that he too was feeling under the weather.
Hermione had progressed from lethargic whimpering, to
full out gut-clutching on the floor and emitting moans that could aptly be
described as a warped version of an emu death-cry.
The smell of Snapes' cure was doing bad things to the
house-share. Draco alone kept his cool, subscribing to the belief that vomiting
was unattractive so he wouldn't do it.
"How does this 7-up and aspirin remedy work exactly," the blonde
mused, despite the fact that Quildemort had retreated
to the cupboard under the stairs, where dual sneezing could be heard every few
minutes.
"It's a lost cause, Malfoy. No one wants to
venture toward that smell," Harry said, jerking his finger toward the
kitchen. The ammonia smell was more potent than usual.
"This sick thing is not working for me," Draco whined, crossing his
arms and glaring off into space. "There has to be a cure that doesn't
involve eye of newt."
"Sirius made a suggestion this morning, before you lot got up," Harry
said thoughtfully, rubbing idly at his sweaty face. He was at that eternal sick
quandary: Too hot for the sweater, but without it he'd be prone to chills.
He was very close to admitting that the universe, in fact, hated him.
Ron paled noticeably at Sirius' name. "It wasn't_ well_ gross was
it?"
Hermione curled up tighter into a fetal ball, glazed eyes glued to the
television screen. Harry resisted the urge to prod her with something, seeing
as though her moaning had promptly died out. Seeing as though he didn't have
anything sufficiently long enough to poke her with, this thought was abandoned
and he was forced to explain the idea to Ron.
"He told me to steam it out, in the bathroom."
"Ok, let's get to it," Draco said with a commanding tone, jumping to
his feet. "To the bathroom, we've got to steam it out."
"Dunno_ if that will_ work", Hermione
muttered from the floor under the coffee table, only her brightly colored toe
socks were readily visible. "Will help the symptom_.
Not the cause_ ugh_"
Draco leaned over the coffee table, and looked Hermione in the eye. "Do
you want to ingest something that is ripe with eye of newt?"
Looking stricken, Hermione pulled herself up off of the floor with a grimace. "To the bathroom then?"
Lined up in a row, Draco, Harry, Ron and Hermione were huddled up against the
side of the tub. The shower curtain was pulled back and the spray was hot and
on full. The four were dressed in bathrobes, silver silk on Draco, red linen on
Hermione, green terry-cloth on Harry, and a pink fluffy concoction on Ron. All
in all they looked like the cast of a very deranged Japanese tea ceremony, or
at the or at the very least escapees from the nearest loony bin.
"I'm just getting wet," Hermione complained,
resting her head on the edge of the tub and catching the leer that Malfoy sent her way. "It's all hot in here."
"What did you think steam implied?" Draco drawled, kneeling perfectly
on the rug. "I will admit, that this is the worst
steam room I've ever been in."
"It's the best we could do," Harry said, tapping on the porcelain.
Draco smirked. "You wouldn't know high class if it smacked you upside that
scarred head of yours. Now the villa the family weekends at for Easter, you
could lose a bludger in that steam room. At least
that's what my father said when I became locked in there_"
A disturbing look crossed Draco's face and Harry
decided it was best to look away and make no sudden movements. On his other
side, Ron, who had kept hitting the water with his palm and splashing him,
nudged the trash bin over the floor vent with his foot. "I think I can
still smell it all the way up here."
"Stop getting me wet, git," Harry mumbled,
pushing Rons head under the spray. Looking more
ridiculous than normal, Ron pushed his sopping hair out of his face and shoved
Harry into Hermione. Immediately Hermione shoved Harry into Ron, looking
positively green at the movement.
"Do you two really want me to throw up on you?"
The two boys glared at her, which was becoming increasingly hard seeing as
though the room was becoming thick with steam. Seeing as though he couldn't see
anything anyway, Harry removed his glasses and stared off into steamy, space.
That was until someone's hand began to molest his ass in a not so subtle way.
"Hermione," Harry hissed, his voice low.
"Are you touching me?"
"No."
With a sigh Harry turned to his right and punched Ron on the shoulder, causing
him to lean into the rushing water. "I am really beginning to think all
you Weasleys are as messed up as Draco says."
"What'd I do?" Ron asked, once again soaking wet. Harry refused to answer,
but to at that point Hermione shrieked and the unmistakable sound of a slap
filled the room.
"Pervert! You didn't touch me at all Draco Malfoy!"
Dracos snickering turned into a cough, then a gag.
"I think I am going to be sick."
Despite the general queasiness of the lot, Harry, Hermione and Ron squashed
back against the wall away from him. This motion however brought them face to
face with Ginny who, still wearing her swimsuit, was crawling across the toiled
with her feet still stuck out the window. Locking eyes with Hermione, seeing as
though her face was about three centimeters from the other girls, Ginny grinned
and said, "ShhhSHHhHhsssssssss!"
From the other side of the room came the sound of retching. Prodding Hermione
in the back Harry replaced his glasses on his face and muttered, "Suddenly
eye of newt sounds.. appealing."
***
To the universal amazement of those involved, Snape's
cure actually worked, although it had taken several attempts before most of
them had been able to ingest it, much less keep it down long enough for any
curative effects to take place.
With the household restored to full health, they had retired to the lounge in
order to avoid Snape's truly unbearable smugness.
Dumbledore was in the middle of a Shortland Street marathon, but had been overruled and
the screen was now filled with John McCrick
gesticulating furiously.
"What's going on with that bloke's sideburns?" Ron asked. "They
look like they're trying to eat his face."
"He always looks like that," said Hermione dismissively. "Now
shut up, I want to hear about the horses."
"Okay, but what about the glasses then?" Ron persisted unwisely.
"My Mum used to do that to our mittens when I was younger, so we wouldn't
lose them. Every time we got new mittens she'd run a length of wool between
them and thread them through our coats. At least, she used to..."
Draco snorted.
"What you mean, Weasley, is that she never stopped, but you feel too
embarrassed to explain that you still wear mittens on a string."
"No, I mean that she used to do it, until the time Fred and George knotted
their mittens together and tried to hang Percy from the third floor
banister."
Draco gave Ron a searching look.
"There are times when I'm glad I'm an only child. Siblings send you
weird."
The others nodded in wholehearted agreement, except for Dumbledore, who claimed
that he was perfectly normal, in spite of having a younger brother. A large
amount of surreptitious eye-rolling ensued.
"And of course, " continued Draco,
"since you Weasleys have about ten times the
normal number of siblings, it stands to reason that you're ten times as
bonkers.
Ron's half hearted denial would probably have carried more weight if Ginny
hadn't chosen that precise moment to crawl into the lounge on her stomach,
alternately hissing at her brother and bitching about the carpet burns on her
elbows. Ron wisely decided to change the subject back to John McCrick.
"Anyway, all I was trying to say is that the commentator bloke looks a bit
weird. He's got all that crazy facial hair and the odd glasses, plus his
clothes don't really match and he talks a load of rubbish."
Voldemort looked from John McCrick to Dumbledore and
started giggling uncontrollably. Affecting not to notice, Dumbledore unwrapped
another lemon sherbert and smiled at Ron
condescendingly.
"Perhaps his attire is a little unusual, but he is certainly an expert in
his field. They do say that true geniuses are always slightly eccentric."
"So you must fit into that category, you're showing all the signs,"
Draco offered, looking from the slightly rocking hammock to the half eaten
sweets embedded in the long white beard to the elder wizard's face. The more he
thought about it, the more he could imagine a much younger Dumbledore with
nasty sideburns, perfecting his double talk and working on his omniscient act.
It had to be an act, right?
Dumbledore regarded the boy, noting his slightly unfocused look. "In my
younger days, it wasn't unknown for Nicholas and I to
spend a little time on horses."
"Spend time on horses the way your brother spends time on goats, or some
other way?" Voldemort snickered out, causing Ron and Harry to exchange
looks.
Draco however, was not put off his seemingly genius idea. "I imagine you
got rather good at predicting who would win."
"It is a game of odds and probability, my favourite
kind of wager to be honest. It was a method that Nicholas perfected, while I
came away with some moderate skill."
"Fancy a wager, then?" Draco tried to infuse his tone with sincerity,
but he was so unaccustomed to producing that emotion that he ended up sounding
sick to his stomach. The truth was he couldn't lose, Rico and Juan had been
slipping him the racing papers for weeks along with tips and rumours about possible set ups and sketchy dealings. All he
had to do in return was make sure things in the house share remained insane.
The repairmen were making a killing.
Either Dumbledore wasn't aware of the plotting of the young Slytherin, or else
he knew something no one else did so he took the challenge. Looking seriously
at the television set quickly, he looked back at Draco with a benign smile.
"I would be surprised if Shergar II didn't take
the kitty in the 4th race. I believe we haven't agreed on the exact terms of
the wager, what do you say young Malfoy?"
Draco frowned, for the first time in his life it was with difficulty. Inside he
was squealing like a little girl who had gotten a pony, a tiara and Beach Bingo
Barbie for her Birthday. If he wasn't careful megalomaniacal giggle, followed
by ominous finger wiggling was going to bubble to the surface. In he 4th odd were on Flying Snail, almost unanimously. Shergar II was unreliable, quirky and more than a bit odd
for a horse. The parallel between Dumbledore and the horse was not lost on him,
and while it was enough to make him suspicious he easily ignored it.
"Let's say… 1000 Galleons reflective of the calculated odds? My money is
on Flying Snail… I sure fancy that name."
Harry's face contorted as he tried to come up with a snide or witty comment on
that remark, but failing to do so he returned his attention to the television.
"A fine wager," Dumbledore said while extending his hand regally from
the hammock for Draco to shake, "and just in time for the 4th, how
delightful."
As the gate opened, everyone eyes were riveted to the screen. Everyone but
Ginny, that is, as she was busy applying disinfectant cream to her knees,
elbows, chin and palms with intermittent hisses. On the screen the horses were
off and the commentator was working himself up toward a minor coronary attack.
Draco was at the edge of his seat, grasping the couch so hard that his knuckle were stark white and he was seriously endangering
his manicure.
Dumbledore was distractedly picking the sweets out of his beard and popping
them in his mouth for another attempt. Similarly Snape was popping eye of newt
into his mouth from the container, a maneuver that drew repulsed stares from
the rest of the non-betting house members. There was something wrong and more
than a little worrisome about a person who could take the dreaded ingredient
straight.
On the couch Draco was grinning madly, perilously close to letting the laughter
and finger movements to have free reign. He was going to win! He would have
scammed the, arguably, greatest sorcerer the world had ever known!
With only seconds to go Flying Snail had just rounded the bend and was
thundering towards the finish line, lengths away from the competition when the
television suddenly turned off. Draco turned to glare at Dumbledore accusingly,
as he suspected the older wizard wouldn't be averse to pulling out the plug if
it meant saving his image as an infallible eccentric. It was at that point,
however that all the lights went out as well. Ignoring Draco's
anguished shrieks, Hermione went and glanced out of
the window.
"It's not just us, the whole street's got no
power. Has anybody got a torch or some candles or something? I assume Lumos isn't going to work..."
"They've got candles in the basement," said Ron in a gloomy tone.
"I've seen 'em."
"There's a camper lamp in the cupboard under the sink," offered
Harry. "It runs on meths, I think."
"I'll get it!" Ginny hissed, before Draco launched himself across the
room in the direction of her voice and managed to sit on her.
"I think, on reflection, that we won't let the lunatic near the methylated spirits and naked flames, actually. Potter, get
the lamp!"
"What did your last slave die of?"
"Insubordination."
Harry, made some huffing and puffing noises, but nevertheless headed off to get
the lamp. Unfortunately, in the dark, he opened the wrong door and plunged
headfirst down the basement stairs. Ron, the first one to realise
what had happened, made a half-hearted attempt to have his friend, by chucking
the Firebolt down the stairs after him and yelling
"Catch."
The upshot of his quick thinking wasn't that Harry came soaring out of the
basement uninjured, but rather that when he landed in a crumpled heap at the
bottom of the staircase, a rather heavy broomstick came hurtling after him and
hit him on the head.
"Sorry Harry!" said, Ron, instinctively backing away from the stairs.
"If I pull the curtains back you should have enough light to get back up
though, it's a full moon tonight."
As it happened, Harry was already aware that it was a full moon. There was
something about being six inches away from a slavering werewolf that gave you
an unerring perspective on these things.
"Waaaaaaaaaah!"
Harry came charging out of the basement, just as the power came back on. This
meant that the other occupants of the lounge got a full view of Lupin bounding
out after him. Popcorn went flying as everybody dived out of the way. Ron and
Hermione both leaped up onto the windowsill and attempted to hide behind the
curtains. Draco pulled the coffee table over to form a makeshift barricade and
ducked behind it with Quildemort. Snape squealed like
a little girl and dived under the sofa to have flashbacks. Harry skidded on the
popcorn and after crashing to the floor, crawled under the sofa to hide beside
Snape. Dumbledore turned into a small red parrot and flew up to perch on the
light fitting beside Hedwig and Pigwidgeon.
"I didn't know Dumbledore was an animagus!"
said Hermione.
"No, neither did I," was the blithe response
from near the ceiling.
Ginny, meanwhile had opted not to hide anywhere, but was instead lying on the
floor in the middle of the room and fixing Lupin with her most terrifying and
hypnotic stare. The wolf was growling at her and had just readied himself to
pounce, when Sirius bounded out of the basement, transformed into his human
form and began to strangle Lupin into submission, with a strip of lacy black
fabric.
The others began to emerge from their hiding places, until Hermione took a
closer look and strode over to Sirius with a dangerous expression.
"Is that my bra? GIVE IT BACK!"
She snatched the wisp of material away, from Sirius with an aggrieved air and
stalked out of the room. Unfortunately this meant that Lupin, who had been
choked almost to the brink of unconsciousness, shook himself awake and leapt
for Snape. Since Snape had been frantically trying to squish himself back under
the sofa, it was a most unfortunate part of his anatomy that presented itself
to the hungry werewolf. It was only through the characteristically Gryffindor
efforts of Ron, that Snape was able to avoid a rather embarrassing bite.
Ron's actions were so characteristically Gryffindor, Draco explained
afterwards, because they combined unselfish bravery with complete and utter
stupidity. Upon seeing Lupin wake up, Ron had launched himself from the
windowsill and onto the werewolf's back. The next few moments were more chaotic
than usual as Ron held on for dear life and was jerked around the living room
by an increasingly furious werewolf. Sirius had transformed back into his dog
form, and was frantically attempting to control Lupin. Snape and Harry were
having a joint fit of hysterics under the sofa and Draco and Quildemort were sharing what was left of the popcorn, from
their makeshift fort, so it was only Dumbledore who saw Lupin run straight into
the dining room table at top speed, knocking himself out and propelling Ron
onwards through the window, with a fistful of fur clutched in each hand.
There was a loud "ZAP!" as Ron found his flight impeded by the
invisible force-field. Harry wrestled with his conscience for a moment, before
throwing the Firebolt out of the window and onto
Ron's head.
*****
Padding down the stairs, Harry fought down another wave of nausea and silently
cursed the throbbing in his head. He was going to have a bump for weeks where
the Firebolt had hit him. The nausea was the ironic,
and yet somehow predictable result of the cure for yesterday's nausea.
He wandered into the living room to see Draco sitting on the couch channel
surfing with a look of frustrated anguish. Evidently he had not yet been able
to find any coverage mentioning the name of the winning horse from yesterday's
race, despite not having slept at all that night. Dumbledore was grinning from
the hammock and desperately trying to piece together the plot of that week's Shortland Street from the split second glimpses that
flashed past every time Draco hit the right channel.
Ginny was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, scribbling in her notebook. She
seemed to be relatively stable today, so Harry went over and sat beside her,
sliding instinctively into his favourite inverted
position. He was just nodding of back to sleep, when he heard Draco ask Ginny
what all that business with the swimsuit had been about yesterday.
"None of your business, Malfoy," she told
him serenely and continued with her drawing.
"I just wondered if you were trying another of Lockhart's crackpot
therapies, that's all." Draco' voice slid sideways into a smug,
mid-Atlantic drawl. "To conquer your fears and become as all-around
wonderful as me, you must first be the snake."
"No," said Ginny, calmly. "I was just bored."
Draco stuck his tongue out at her and was rewarded with a flash of her
notebook, where she had apparently been drawing a snake eating a racehorse. The
stick figure is the background clutching his empty pockets and weeping, looked
rather familiar and Draco's reaction was predictable.
So predictable that Ginny managed to duck in plenty of time and the remote
control Draco had hurled went smashing straight into Harry's scar.
Draco would later be pleased with this shot, which would have been worth one
thousand points in a normal game of Peg Potter, at the time he was more
concerned with escaping the outraged boy who lived, who was chasing him around
the house wielding a broomstick.
Once the room had been vacated, Dumbledore pulled the morning paper from
beneath him on the hammock and began to chuckle, then to guffaw, then to giggle
megalomaniacally and wiggle his fingers.
Then he got down of the hammock and went to fix himself some toast for
breakfast.
