"Sodding McDonald, jinxing the match like that," someone groaned, voices following Albus and Rose the charcoal passage to the Entrance Hall. "Bloody Gryffindors... Only won on a technicality... And Ravenclaw were rubbish today. What the hell happened to the Quidditch Captain, acting like - that?"
Outraged and resentful chatter resumed, musing about McDonald's apparent affair and swift end to the match. Rose's arms were folded across her chest and she looked glumly at Albus, who was still rattled over the fire creature's appearance. He'd never seen anything that'd grown out of control so quickly, or even heard of something like that before. Not even Uncle Ron's depiction of FiendFyre had fitted that description. And he was determined to understand what the hell had happened before his parents found out.
"Well, that was a thrilling match," his cousin said, bracingly. "Albus, what happened? I know you've already told me, but please can you tell me again?" So he did, still as confused as before, with Rose's expression matching his. "Did Kav really make you out to be a psychopath?" She shook her head disdainfully. "Al, I thought he was alright! I was even gonna ask for his help on the Potions work Professor Ellis set..."
Albus had no choice but to laugh. Trust Rose to comment on feeling self-conscious about who to be mates with after the stories they'd grown up with. She really was her father's daughter. "I dunno, I'm surprised it hasn't gone around the school like wildfire yet, I'm sure that James would love the angle that I'm the next Dark Lord."
It was her turn to chuckle. "I reckon we should check out the library again, see if there's a written explanation for what happened? Mum always said the library helped."
"That's because Aunt Hermione was an absolute geek and needed to know the answer to everything-"
Rose punched his arm. "Hey! Don't knock it 'til you try it," she grinned as they emerged into the grey light in the Great Hall. The Gryffindor banners were draped over every surface and the maroon-clad table was full of exuberant Gryffindors stocking up on food to take back to their common room. "Hey, do you reckon Scorps was being serious when he said he could get us some firewhiskey? I fancy a bit of trouble-making before we tackle the library..."
"One second, it's like having your dad around, and then the next, it's like Aunt Hermione's lecturing me on acing exams - Rose, I don't know if I'm coming or going with you, mate. Now that you mention Scorps though, where the bloody hell is he?" They quickly found a quiet spot on the Ravenclaw table, as far away from the cheering Gryffindors as possible. Sky was tucking into a thick-set sandwich opposite, with Christine glaring at him. Orville had adopted his usual position halfway down the table. Albus frowned. He'd missed the match... What'd he been up to? He'd been raving about seeing the Ravenclaw team play for weeks on end.
"Hey, Chris, what's wrong?" Rose brightly asked.
"Sky bet money on Gryffindor catching the Snitch and there being a fight," she scowled, hitting the dark-haired boy over the head with her essay. "He - bet - money - on - Gryffindor!" She emphasised each word with a further thwack! making Albus and Rose laugh. Sky savagely stuck his tongue out at the pair of them.
"How much d'you win for your treachery?" Al asked, deadpan.
Christine opened her mouth at him, but let it go. "Don't encourage him!"
"Thirty Galleons and one Knut," Sky grinned. "James - yes, James, chucked in the Knut as fair play. I only bet a fiver on Gryffindor winning - the fight was just the icing on the cake really. And - that is going towards the butterbeers we're getting later." He nodded, before adding quietly, almost embarrassed. "And a trip I want to do in a few years."
"Ooh, a trip? Whereabouts?" Rose immediately picked up on his barely audible comment. They all leant in, intrigued.
Sky rolled his eyes. "Y'know, the pre-rest of your life trip everyone does after Hogwarts? Visit the States, an' all that?" Albus and Rose looked at each other, his cousin's eyebrows raised quizzically. They'd both heard the tales of Ron and Bill's travels across the Middle East, from Egypt, starting in Alexandria, to the furthest corners of the Arabian Sea. A trip like that though... Sky had some serious ambitions.
Christine's eyes brightened. "Are you serious? Like a proper around-the-world one?" The pair carried on chatting away over lunch, Sky's face animated as he described the countries he'd presumably read about in his grandfather's book shop.
Orville had realised they were back and took his place next to them. "How was it?"
"Rubbish, Gryffindor won in about five minutes, one-hundred and seventy to one. Honestly, Ravenclaw shouldn't have bothered turning up, like, at all. What a horrific embarrassment. I'm telling you now Ville, Gryffindor won so quickly they didn't even need to take the two penalties they won, but I reckon they'll lose the House Cup by about twenty points. Oh - and our captain fought with one of her own players. A fight! On the pitch-" She cringed.
"Was it McDonald she fought with?" Orville grimaced. "Because Cordelia said she'd get me some training time with the team next year if I jinxed Eva for her." Sensing Rose's indignation over the lack of sportsmanship, he chipped in. "McCarthy and Arofan caught me aiming my wand at her on the way out and made me mark the fourth-year essays with them. So I did get my comeuppance. I don't think that spell worked anyway, the way Cordelia was raving about it, it seemed like a dud..." Professor Arofan was their Head of House and acted as a joint-History of Magic teacher from time to time. Albus could only imagine too well his wrath for trying to put one of their Beaters out of commission.
Rose pointed towards Sky and whispered. "He - he won thirty Galleons betting that there was gonna be a fight... Do you think that was all... Arranged? Beforehand? It's not exactly ethical, is it...? Wait, Orville, were you really that desperate to play Quidditch next year? You can always play the occasional five-a-side games the second and third years have, Cordelia's leaving anyway so she can't promise you anything."
"Well, the plot thickens! I did wonder," Ville shrugged. "I saw the look on her face when she came in. Absolutely fuming. Apparently, McGonagall took the Captaincy and her place on the team over it. And McDonald's too. But - Albus, she said you set her on fire or something? I'd watch out if I were you, mate. She's blaming you for it."
Albus was about to protest when Rose jumped in. "That's because he did set her on fire. Or at least it looked like he did. It was some sort of FiendFyre but it disappeared before the professors could get a good look at it. It looked like a person at one point and Al said it started saying stuff in Latin. Mullard looked seriously freaked out when we left."
"Was McGonagall really that strict?" Christine chirped in, horrified. "Sorry!"
Orville sharply drew breath. "That sounds like a demon type of thing. They're not supposed to get through the Hogwarts boundaries, according to Hogwarts: A History! Only really powerful wizards can summon them-"
"Great, guys, I'm the Dark Lord reincarnate. Seriously, though, I shouted Tersus - it was the only spell I could think of! - and then told myself off for being such a genius," Albus rolled his eyes sarcastically. "It was horned like the devil and hissed at me. Shocker!"
"I'm actually surprised that Orville here has managed to pick up a book in the two months we've been here, Al," Rose gulped. "An actual book, for actual reading."
"Hogwarts could be seriously in danger - and you're more worried over Orville - reading?"
"Oh, Albus, don't be so dramatic, mate, McGonagall's on the case. Unless you start hissing and charming things in your sleep, I think you're fine. Anyway, Dad says Lily's more likely to be the next Dark Lord." The tension in his shoulders eased as they shared a mutual laugh. "Oh, Chris, Sky, Ville, our resident Gryffindor has invited us to a party later, with butterbeers if you want to join?" Nobody dared refuse.
Eagerly traipsing back to Ravenclaw Tower to get changed, Albus and Christine promised to meet the others at about five. To promote house unity after the Wizarding War, houses had been informally allowed in each other's common rooms so the majority of the castle's inhabitants knew where to go. The professors tended to turn a blind eye to celebrations such as this until midnight, after which the afterparties began for the older years. Albus doubted he'd have cause to go to one of these yet and he gravely hoped he wasn't about to start tonight.
Curled up next to the fireplace, hurriedly scrabbling away an essay on wand properties and their key movements, which Aunt Hermione had already taught him, Albus listened to the rain tapping against the windows amongst natural breaks in people's conversations. Chris was sat opposite, fiddling with the common room's radio, looking at its multi-coloured wires with huge interest. Balanced open on her lap was a Muggle manual for operating the radio.
"How d'you think this works?" she asked. Albus looked up. "I had a cousin who had a spell for everything eleck-trical, I think that's how the Muggles say it, but I've got a feeling it's due to these things inside. Would it be a good idea to take it apart?"
"BUTTERBEERS! Who wants a butterbeer?" one of the older Ravenclaws yelled. Over Chris' shoulder, he saw Sky and Orville eagerly handing over their Galleons for several cans. Oh dear God. Uncle George had joked to enjoy himself, but not to stupidity. Actually, bugger that, that'd been Aunt Hermione's advice.
"Er... I wouldn't know the answer to that, sorry Chris," he frowned. "Um... maybe I could point you towards the third-year girl who would probably be best at that sort of stuff? I think her Mum's an electrician or something?" To be fair, if Chris was curious, it was probably best to help her figure out something before things got too rowdy.
"ICKLE FIRSTIES! DOWN THEM!" somebody roared. "DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!"
"Can you point me her way?" Christine asked, shutting her manual. "Actually, it's nearly four and we said we'd meet Rose and Scorps in the Gryffindor common room." He nodded, tucking his nearly-finished essay away in his bag.
"Where're the other nutters?"
She looked around and stopped, horrified, drawing his eyes to where she'd seen them, drinking butterbeers like their lives depended on it, a crowd of cheering Ravenclaws around them. "Bloody hell, they've started celebrating early. Oh, Al, we've got to rescue them, we can't just leave them like this."
"Hey, guys!" Sky shouted at Albus and Christine cheerfully, pointing his wand at his pockets. "Magnum - er, totalum!" He grinned haphazardly, putting butterbeer cans in them. "Look, a third-year gave me that one. It's supposed to - ORVILLE! Look at my pockets! I've got FIVE butterbeers in there! Impressed, much?"
As they hurriedly marched him and Orville out of the common room, linking arms to stop Sky from wandering off, Chris muttered to Albus. "He's a bit over-excited."
"Only a little bit!" 'Ville added thoughtfully. "I know this is, like, never gonna happen, but if the Ravenclaw team redo trials for a Beater and Seeker, Professor Dupont said he can recommend first-years to play if he thinks they're good enough. I could do trials!" The pair were hyper, but this?
Al sighed inwardly. "Yup, yup, yup, keep talking 'til we get there." Raucous noise and music met their ears as they turned down another corridor, the portraits shielding their ears from what they shrieked was too ghastly to bear.
"It's only a bit of Queen!" Sky protested, "The Kings of rock and roll. Surely you've heard of them?!" The painted figures only clamped their hands tighter over their ears, inordinately disgruntled.
The Fat Lady, which Albus had only ever heard James describe, swung open and a gleeful Scorps ran to hug them. Half-laughing, Rose stood behind him, shaking her head. "Mr Malfoy insisted on playing We Will Rock You for when you came. Talk about a grand entrance!"
"It could be worse, we saw a Slytherin puking on the way up," Chris exaggerated. "Guts all over the corridor..." Her voice faded away as she and Rose disappeared off into the thronging masses, leaving Albus with Sky, Orville and Scorps, who were hyper. Ville spotted Jonesey in the crowd and bounced off to ask him about the game.
"Do you want to try Exploding Snap?" Scorp softly asked. "It's either that or poker with real money and I lost my last Knut to Rose." Stepping through the hole, Albus was confronted with a writhing mass of people, dancing, playing games, singing, drinking, and so forth. James had been right.
Their common room was decked with every shade of red possible, with moving colour photographs of Jonesey's epic capture of the Snitch from earlier dotting the walls and bright banners with figures on broomsticks moving through a Quidditch stadium. "Oh, he's applying for an apprenticeship with the Pontypridd Peregrines, better than the Chudley Cannons this year, so James' commentary might've helped. But like, the Peregrines!" a male voice yelled into Albus' ear.
With that, James jumped down the Gryffindor stairs, whooping to shouts of "POTTER!" So his commentary had earned him a following in Gryffindor Tower. A small following, perhaps? A buoyant series of "Potter! Potter! When's your next commentary!"s disagreed with his assessment of his brother's popularity.
"Two words for that one," Sky said under his breath to Albus. "Drama. Queen."
"Yup, sounds about right for my brother."
"No offence, Al," he quickly said.
He chuckled. "Absolutely none taken."
Rose bellowed at them, taking them by the hands into the crush of people. "Come on boys! Let's enjoy our night! Forget all about the rubbish match where you got slaughtered and have fun - we're only young once!" The throbbing of the loud rock music pulsated through the floor as he jumped in time to the beat.
He didn't mind that sweaty arms bumped into him or that taller people occasionally stepped on his toes; he felt freer than he'd done in ages, from the lofty expectations of being Harry Potter's son. Leave it to James to embrace it, he mused, as the rhythm flowed through the room. Hogwarts no longer felt as threatening as it'd done on his first day here. Walking past Jonesey passionately snogging McDonald - he'd had to do a double-take when he realised who it was - he went to sit outside in the corridor, seeking some fresher air.
"Had enough, have you?" a ghost asked, clad in unusually modern clothes. The majority of the Hogwarts ghosts favoured old-fashioned attire, but this one looked vaguely familiar. How much butterbeer had he drunk? One or two? Why was it having such a dizzying effect on him? He concentrated on the face of the ghost, searching for his sad young face in his memory. Hadn't he grown up with a ghostly version of Uncle George keeping an eye on him when he'd been a child at Hogwarts?
"Uncle Fred?" he inquisitively asked, narrowing his eyes in recognition. "Sorry, it's been a while."
"Only a few months," Fred laughed sadly, his hair an odd mixture between silvery-grey and bright, flaming red. George used his few weeks of annual leave at the shop to come on a pilgrimage to the spot where Fred had died, to ask his brother how he was doing on the other side. The Weasleys visited for a few days at a time, allowing George his time and space to grieve. "How've your first few months been? Have you been converted into trouble-making mischief yet?"
"Mostly been keeping myself out of trouble really," he admitted. "Orville's going mad on the butterbeer and he reckons he'll make it on the Ravenclaw team before long, Rose's a madwoman to have around and James ignores me. Couldn't be happier, Fred. Honestly. I don't want the limelight."
His uncle smiled wistfully. "I think the reverse is true on that, mate. But you're in the right place for you right now. You're safe, your teachers like you, your dad's not going mad… It could be worse. You could be Beater for Ravenclaw."
"Have you seen Dad?" The thought of his father being somewhere in the castle without having said hello was unbearable.
Fred shook his head, shifting uneasily. Could ghosts move awkwardly? "No. I heard from the lovely Valerie on the seventh floor that Harry and Ginny regularly use the Floo network to speak to Minny."
Instantaneously, his shoulders relaxed. His family wasn't ignoring him. "Oh… Boring 'saving the world stuff'?"
"Last I heard it was what happened at the match. Minny wasn't best pleased," he beamed. "You'll give me and George a run for our money soon. Oh, Valerie!?"
Startled by the appearance of a giggling witch who smirked at Fred from a portrait opposite them, he shuffled his feet. Valerie scowled at Albus. "Minny's on her way. Best go tell them to pipe down, Freddie."
Al recoiled, cringing. "Freddie?"
"Pet name, dear nephew," he answered shyly. "Time to bugger off to Ravenclaw, d'you reckon?"
Lightheaded at the thought of action, he nodded appreciatively to his uncle and bounded down the corridor into Gryffindor Tower. Rose and Christine were enveloped in a hug, sprawled across a cosy sofa, Chris nestled into Rose's side. They stared at him, bewildered by his rapid reappearance. In the hazy background, he could see Scorps screaming Dancing Queen, horribly off-key to a gaggle of cheering Gryffindors, with Sky providing a terrible backing chorus.
Taking all of this in, he battled to catch his breath. "McGonagall!" His cousin's eyes widened in fear. McGonagall, despite her advanced age, wasn't a woman to cross. Briskly jumping to their feet, Rose tugged Chris out of the portrait hole. "Come on!"
"Hang on, where's Ville?" This received a series of blank looks from the older students.
"We'll have to leave him!" Sky yelled, following his friends into the cold corridors outside. Guilt festered inside Albus' stomach. Who knew what trouble he was going to be in? As they sprinted down multiple staircases, ducking their heads down to avoid being seen by professors, escaping bands of students yelped, shouting where they'd seen McGonagall or Mullard. The sounds of their thundering footsteps ricocheted off the walls. Any minute now, they were going to be caught.
A loud voice broke through the din. "Hey!" It was Mullard! Panting, they glanced around, aghast.
Sky jammed his wand into a mirror, its surface rippling ever-so-softly. "Not a real mirror," he gasped through short, sharp intakes of breath, stepping in. It absorbed his body, clawed fingers of silvery light pulling him deeper into it. Without thinking and determined to escape from Mullard, they pursued him. "Ville fell in the other day-"
"Shh!" Christine hissed. "They can't see us?"
Whoever 'they' turned out to be was revealed as McGonagall, Ellis and Mullard raced through the corridors, following the quaking of the stone floors from the heavy bass to the Gryffindor common room. They seemed to be discussing something under hushed voices.
Words filtered through the waxy surface of the mirror. So it was porous to sound? Albus nudged his inquisitive nature aside, endeavouring to hear as much as he could. "A powerful magical energy penetrated the North Tower defences this evening, Mullard…"
"Jesus, they're waning. Something's draining power from it-"
Professor Ellis' voice cut across Mullard's, his tone blunt. "Yes, you've never had to keep redoing the exosphere layer of enchantments like this before, I heard you pacing last night. You kept me up."
A group of students whooped loudly in the distance. "Minerva, you need to call a general council tomorrow morning; it's too important to let go- These bloody Gryffindors!"
The four of them, stuck inside the mirror, froze. Had they been caught? But the professors were looking down the corridor, away from them. What was- Then Albus saw him. Orville. On a broomstick. Speeding through the corridors, trailed by the cheering students.
Rose buried her head in her hands, whispering a pained "Oh - my - bloody - God."
The professors shrieked and ducked, much to the amusement of the Gryffindors cheering Orville on. He braked, grinning at McGonagall, who was cowering below a highly-annoyed Mullard. "I won't lie to you, these corners are tighter than some of my jeans, Professor."
"Orville Williams-" Ellis began, his eyes blazing with fury.
Mullard interjected, his wand tracing complex calculations behind him. "Gryffindors, go back to your dormitories. Twenty points from each of you - and consider yourselves lucky!"
"I've seen stupid things from first-years over the years - but - but-" The Headmistress stuttered into silence, too appalled to speak. Orville's confident demeanour had vanished when she'd recovered. "An eleven-year-old riding a broomstick down the corridors, after midnight… It's somewhere up there."
Her silent indignation was no match for Ellis', who as Head of Ravenclaw now had to decide on a punishment for him. "I'm confiscating that broom, Williams. Just know that I'm highly disappointed in you - I really thought you were better than the sort of reckless behaviour you've exhibited throughout today." He held out his hand expectantly, the broom's elegant handle glinting in the light as Ville demurely handed it over. "A hundred points should suffice; I expect your essay on the Sleeping Draught to clinch some of it back on Monday. Plus a detention with me tomorrow evening."
Albus winced at the shame of having witnessed a huge docking of points from Ravenclaw. He gritted his teeth; surely Orville felt resigned to this? How would he explain it to their classmates tomorrow morning?
"In all fairness, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, Professor. Is it true that Ravenclaw will be holding retrials for a Beater and a Keeper next weekend?"
Taken aback by Orville's outright cheekiness, McGonagall and Mullard both stared at him.
"Why - yes. As far as I know from Professor Arofan," Ellis replied. "Are you thinking of trying?"
"Well, I look forward to playing Gryffindor in the future, if I succeed, to clinch these house points back" he tapped his nose. "Professor."
"He's mad, isn't he?" Rose muttered to the other three. "Absolutely barking mad."