"No," Drucy said, facing Prefect Brian in the Headmistress's office, surrounded by people whom she thought might quickly become her enemies, save perhaps two. "I won't do it."

"Why not?" Brian asked.

"Because it's wrong," Drucy told him simply. "It's like a shape in my mind, I can't explain it. I just know it's wrong, and I won't do it."

Brian took a deep breath. "I was hoping that wouldn't happen," he told her, and she began to feel afraid. "It's all come down to this night, Drucy. I don't think we'll get another chance. I have to get this done. I have to make it happen."

Drucy shook her head. "You saw what this wand did to Matt. You've seen me struggle to control it. Do you think that you can make it do anything I won't make it do?"

"No," Brian admitted, drawing his own wand. "I think I may have to make you change your mind. Wizard's duel. I'm not going to hurt you, Drucy."

Drucy's voice trembled, even though she wanted to be brave. "I don't agree with your terms. I won't do it just because I'm beaten in a fight."

Brian shrugged slightly. "I have to try."

Drucy fired off the first spell.

Brian blocked it easily, and cast one in return. Snape was right; Brian had learned how to cast nonverbally. Panicking, barely thinking about what she was doing, Drucy hissed out a quick response and sent a Stunning Spell back at him. The two spells met in the middle. Neither was stronger than the other, and they disappeared in a brief flash of light.

Having proven the ability to both cast and deflect, the two took a longer moment to feel out each other's capabilities. Moments of silence were interspersed with flurries of action. Drucy learned to pick the shorter incantations. Brian could apparently think more quickly than she could speak. They traded a few more blows. Usually, her duels with her friends had ended by now. Did wizards get tired when they dueled for a while? All she knew was that her wand was still quite eager and ready. But Brian decided to up his game. He sent two spells in quick succession. Drucy blocked the first one with a Babbling Curse. The second one was just too close. She forced her wand up in a Shield Charm. The spell hit her shield hard, and she staggered back a step. Too weak… like always, just too weak! She looked up and was startled to see that Brian, too, had staggered back a step. Her wand had delivered its curse with considerable power. Much as she hated it, much as she wished she didn't have to hurt him, she had to confess that the curses were still stronger than the charms.

Now both combatants became serious and grim. Drucy gave up on trying to pick spells based on whether she meant them to hit. Brian was just too good for her to hold back. She began to tire. She tried to offensively block one attack with Levicorpus, and the spell was just too weak. She didn't know what the attack was meant to do, but she stumbled back, winded. She thought she heard her sister shout her name in alarm, and it spurred her to lift her head just in time to shoot a Stunning Spell and block Brian's next attack. Frustrated, she aimed a Blasting Curse at his next attempt, staggering him with the backlash. He responded quickly, though, with a flurry of spells, forcing her to offensively block what she could and raise her shield for the rest. Brian had figured out her weak point. Each shield hit forced her back another step, until she dropped to one knee, spent. He raised his wand again, and she lowered her head. She didn't even know what to do next.

"Protego!"

The voice wasn't hers. Drucy looked up, startled, and realized that Matt had stepped to her side and slightly in front of her. The bright orangey light of Brian's spell splashed harmlessly across a Shield Charm so strong that it became slightly visible. Matt didn't seem to take any backlash at all.

"Hey, that's cheating!" one of the other students protested. Drucy vaguely recognized a third-year Gryffindor.

"Oh, come on!" Matt protested. "You're going to call a duel fair, when it's between a first-year and a fifth-year prefect? Don't you think he can take on two first-years?"

One of the older Ravenclaws spoke up wryly. "She seemed to be doing pretty well against him."

"No…" Drucy realized that this was Esme's voice. "He's right. This wasn't a fair duel, and it wasn't meant to be, was it, Brian?" Her tone turned challenging. "You were wearing her down. Weren't you? She never actually stood a chance at winning. And you said you weren't going to hurt her, but she's down."

Her tone apparently stung. Brian nodded slowly. "It's fair. I can take both of you. After all… I am the good guy."

"What does that make me?" Drucy asked sarcastically. She wanted to pull herself to her feet, but all of her joints ached, and she wasn't sure why. "The villain?"

"Misguided," Brian offered. "And about to be educated."

But he couldn't hit her. Matt blocked every blow, even multiple blows in rapid succession. Drucy knew that he couldn't keep it up forever, and he couldn't strike back. She was going to have to re-enter the fight. She formulated a plan in her mind. Then she looked at Brian for a moment, and remembered to see him as a human being. She adjusted her plan. "Matt," she gasped out, lining up the spells in her head. "Cover me!"

"Got it!"

Drucy started with Brian's next volley. She shot off her spells in rapid succession, staggered, avoiding the offensive blocking that had marked her style during the rest of the duel. Each one hit. The first three seemed to have no effect on Brian at all. He didn't stumble, he didn't grow hair, he didn't sprout warts, he wasn't raised up by the ankle - nothing. Then the last group hit, and he suddenly collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath. Matt stood ready, cautious, but no more spells came. Brian curled up, dropping his wand, wheezing. It was clear that the fight was over.

Esme left the group lined up around the room and stepped over to Brian's side, raising her own wand. She looked at him for a moment, perplexed, and back at her sister. "Drucy, what did you do to him?"

"Three Cheering Charms," Drucy explained, "one serious itch, and two Tickling Charms right on top of each other. Pretty sure you can undo them in sequence."

Esme looked back at Brian for a moment. "You know what, I think I'll give him a moment to think about it," she offered. She strode over to Drucy and reached out, pulling her to her feet. "Are you okay? What did he do to you?"

"I don't know," Drucy admitted. "Everything aches, but I don't think there's anything really wrong with me."

The other students started stepping further into the room, turning from background into people again. The Ravenclaw who had praised Drucy's efforts waved her wand over Drucy in a circular motion several times. "She's actually ok. Nothing hit. The soreness should go away in a couple of days."

Drucy looked around at the assembled students and suddenly realized something. "Hey. You're not grouped by House. You're all standing together, all mixed up." In that moment, she realized that she suddenly knew the words to describe her feelings. "I know why it's wrong. I know why the Sorting Hat needs to stay."

"Why?" Esme asked. There was no challenge in her voice now. She was curious.

Drucy looked back at Brian and had pity on him. "Go ahead, let him up," she told her sister. "He's suffered enough…"

Esme sniffed slightly. "Are you sure?"

"I want him to hear it, too," Drucy told her. Esme nodded and squatted down beside the stricken Slytherin prefect. After a moment of her wandwork, he began to relax. Esme picked his wand up off the floor, but she didn't hand it back to him. Drucy waited patiently until he sat up on the floor before she spoke again. "Look at all you guys. You were Sorted into Houses, but you're all mixed up together. You all made friends… or, at least, allies, to go and do the thing that you thought you needed to do."

"Isn't that why the Sorting Hat needs to go?" Esme asked. Brian held his peace.

"No, that's why it needs to stay." Drucy could hear her own voice gaining strength as she became more and more sure of her realization. "Because to be friends, you all had to get past that. You had to get past the fake differences between you. But you know what, in real life, outside of school, there are a lot of very real differences between us. Before I ever went to Hogwarts, my mom taught me to never speak Parseltongue in public, because people fear Parselmouths. But you know what, the last person at Hogwarts to be a Parselmouth and face hatred for it? He was a Gryffindor. So that's something that doesn't have anything to do with the Sorting Hat. And nobody would help my friend Roenna, not even Slytherins, because of her father. The Houses didn't divide people against him. I realized, talking to Matt a month or two ago, that there were things that would've divided me from all of my friends no matter what House I was in. The Sorting Hat doesn't cause us to be divided." She thought about how that sounded for a moment. "I mean, yes, it does, but that's my point, we were already divided. So we end the Hat. None of the tables have colors on them anymore. But I betcha the rich kids will sit at one of them, and the Half-bloods at another… Right? You know I'm right. Aren't I right?"

Drucy glanced around the room. Some of the students were nodding, while others glanced away from her. Few faced her head-on in silence. Nobody was murmuring a negative. "So the Sorting Hat divides us, but this time, it mixes us all up. Daniel Jacobs and Matt Briar, a poor person and a rich person, share a House. Roenna and I, a Half-blood and Pure-blood, share a House. But now we've got loyalties to something that doesn't matter. So we learn, don't we? I learned how much bravery it took to cross to another table, when there was nothing between us but color. And when someone earns ten points for Ravenclaw, I learn how to congratulate him. Because it's just color. It's a fake division, but it teaches us…"

One of the other students spoke up. "Training wheels. It's like training wheels." Everyone turned to look at him, and most of them looked puzzled, so he explained. "Muggles ride bicycles. It takes a while to get your balance on one of those. So they start by putting two little wheels on either side of the back wheel, to make it steadier. It doesn't ride as well, but you're less likely to fall over. But when you've learned how to ride, the training wheels get taken off."

"Okay," Drucy allowed. "Okay, that's a fair way of putting it. So we learn how to look past our other differences because we're in the same House. And then, we're supposed to learn how to look past our House. So it's kind of like playing Quidditch with your friends. You try your hardest to win, but you're still friends after. That's why we need the Hat. It doesn't divide us so that we'll stay divided. It divides us so that we can get over it. And we still 'play the game', 'cause it's fun. But not so that it'll cause us to hate each other when we're adults, over a color and a token animal."

Brian pulled himself to his feet. He strode over to Drucy and reached out his hand. She hesitated, but he was wandless, and her own wand was quite ready to offer him another punishing, so she switched her wand to her other hand and shook hands with him. "She's right," he told the assembled crowd. Then, he looked back at her. "You're right, and I'm sorry. Drucy, now we have to decide what happens next. A lot of us could get into a lot of trouble for this little stunt. Nobody's come in to interrupt us, so I think we could all sneak back to our beds. But if you decided that you were going to go to Madam Pomfrey to get those joint aches cleared up, you've got every right to do that. And if you decided to tell everyone about this, nobody could blame you."

But Drucy had not revealed Matt Briar's weak side, and she wasn't about to get everyone in trouble here if she could help it. Plus, of course, she had gone to the trouble of changing her House just to look after her sister, who was clearly in this mess up to her neck. "I'm going back to bed," she announced, "where it's warm. I'm going to sleep in as late as I want, and then I am going to have a nice, leisurely bath and meal before I check to see which class I'm late for. Brian, you're the prefect. You're going to keep me from getting in trouble for it. I'll let you decide how."

Everyone else in the room seemed to relax just a little bit more, and Brian sounded downright deferential. "On our way back," he told her, "I'll give you the password for the prefects' bathroom and make sure your morning soak is a good one."

The room slowly emptied. As the two Bulstrode sisters left, Esme still had Brian's wand. "I'll give it back to him," she told Drucy quietly. "Just before he'd get in trouble for not having it. That sounds right." She was the one who waved her own wand and extinguished the lights that he'd lit, and then the Headmistress's Office was silent and dark again.

When silence had reigned for a couple of minutes, the Headmistress herself stepped fully into the room, becoming visible from a shadowed corner. She waved her wand and the lighting came back up in the room, further demonstrating her camouflage skill, as it was now clear that she wore her tartan nightrobe. First, she wrote up a series of short, simple excuse notes and sent them on their way to Drucilla Bulstrode's professors. "Best to not mention this incident at all," she mused, "but let's prevent them from even asking any of the students about her absence. We'll let them puzzle over that, shall we?" She lifted the Hat from the shelf, where it had been lower and more visible to the younger students, and set it back in its usual place. "You see," she admonished it, as she arranged it a little and made sure it seemed comfortable.

But it chose to not answer her.