CABIN FEVER

~Snippets from an event in Hogwarts's history known as The Great Pox.

Written for the International Wizarding Schools Competition.

Beauxbatons, Magical Bugs

Main prompt: [illness] dragon pox

Additional prompts: [emotion] fear, [character] Charlie Weasley

Year: 7

Word count: 1988 (including A/N)

Details: During Charlie Weasley's time at Hogwarts, the school is quarantined due to a dragon pox outbreak.

.

A leaf, at the edge of the forest, curled in on itself as it spiralled to the ground. It landed among its predecessors that lay in a carpet of red ringing the forest.

Minerva stood on the front steps, breathing shakily, hands clasped behind her back. The breeze nudged at her hair, but not a strand came free of its place under her hat.

For a few minutes, she just stood and breathed, finding a moment of peace in the whirlwind she had found herself spinning into for the past week. The castle behind her fell away, and she let herself relax until she was alone with the water skimming off the lake in the wind, the last of today's sunlight crowning the trees in a halo, and the blustery air nipping at her exposed throat and wrists.

A call from behind her broke the peace of the moment. With a sigh, she turned back towards the castle.

Hogwarts, for once, was still. Every fragment of sentient life had left the bricks, seeping into the ground and leaving every room void and hollow. For once she missed the antics of Charlie Weasley and his ilk, and wondered whether they were still causing their usual havoc up in the quarantined Gryffindor Tower.

The Hospital Wing seemed the only place still alive as it thronged with groaning students and teachers. The beds had multiplied to fill the space so there was enough room for all of the inflicted. The air was awash with the odour of the sick: the lingering stench of vomit, the fetid thickness of sweat, and the odd tang of blood from the very worst of patients. Madam Pomfrey bustled to and fro, administering potions and filling up glasses of water left and right.

Minerva laid a hand on Poppy's shoulder as she passed her. "Get some rest, Poppy. I can cover this part."

The matron stood from where she was leaning over to check a boy's temperature. "Minerva, the students…"

"I will wake you if anything happens."

"I still need to…" She trailed off, wiping a shaking hand across her forehead. "There's so much to do."

"I'll get it done, Poppy. They can afford to have you rest for a couple of hours. Now, go."

With a reluctant glance back at the patients on the beds, Poppy untied her apron with unsteady fingers and hung it on the coat rack as she left.

Minerva straightened her hat, adjusted her glasses, and retreated to the dungeons to fetch another crate of potions from Slughorn.

"Is everything alright up there, Minerva?" he asked as she approached. "Flack isn't dead, is he? I knew his father—great man, and…" He swallowed uncomfortably. "Sorry, Minerva."

Her voice was stony. "No-one is dead, Horace, and even if they were, it certainly doesn't matter who their fathers were."

She returned to the Hospital Wing. Fear made her temper quicker and her voice sharper. At times like this, it shot through her veins every now and again in ephemeral flashes of terror that left her on edge for hours after. Minerva straightened her glasses again before getting back to work.

.

In Gryffindor Tower, nine floors above the Hospital Wing, currently inaccessible due to the stationary staircases, Charlie Weasley paced. The other boys around him were passing time in their own ways, idly reading books or staring into space.

"Charlie, will you sit down?" Thomas moaned from where he leant against the leg of Duncan's bed. "You've been pacing for hours, and it's doing my head in."

"Well, I wouldn't be so restless if they'd just let us out already. It's clear us lot aren't infected—look at us! We've been in the Tower for a week, and not so much as a single cough from the whole house. We're perfectly fine!"

Duncan lifted his head from a transfiguration textbook, running his fingers through his trailing dreadlocks. "There must be a reason for all this, else—"

"It's the Slytherins!" Charlie exclaimed. "All of Gryffindor are healthy, and Tonks says everyone in Hufflepuff seems fine, so it must be the snakes!"

"What about the Ravenclaws?"

"They'll have some poncy spell to stop it spreading or something. It has to be the Slytherins."

Duncan looked sceptical. "But—"

A quiet voice interrupted from the other side of the room. "They can't keep us locked here forever, can they?" Stuart, from his position under the covers, had not emerged from his bed all day and had often been heard muttering to himself nearly every night since first year. The entire room turned to look at him as his wide eyes peeked above the lip of the duvet.

"Nah," Charlie said. "As soon as the 'pox has run its course and the students are healed, it'll all be back to normal. Just you wait."

"Gemma says dragon pox takes years to heal. What if we're stuck in the Gryffindor Tower for—"

"Don't be stupid, Stu!" Tom snapped, getting to his feet and reaching his full height, which stood far above anyone else in the room. "Just … go back to your mindless muttering, will you?"

Stuart sat up against the pillows. "Just because you're scared doesn't mean—"

"I am not scared."

"Yes, you are! I heard you last night, you were crying!"

"I AM NOT SCARED." The dormitory fell into silence again, residual energy from accidental magic arching through the air in front of Tom, who stood, shaking, by the foot of Duncan's bed. "I am not scared."

He let the door slam behind him when he left.

"Where's he think he's going? The portrait hole is locked anyway, so—"

Charlie sighed. "Just … let him be, alright? Just leave it for once, Stu."

.

According to current Hogwarts gossip, which was dependent on Floo calls to other common rooms, dragon pox had arrived at Hogwarts through a box of potion supplies that Slughorn had ordered after Slug and Jigger's lacewing flies had gone out of stock.

From there, a student had used the knotgrass in their potion, the fumes of which had entered her airway, making her cough violently for the next four days. The teachers had thought nothing of it, and she had not thought to go to Madam Pomfrey.

The student had coughed into her hand, and opened a door with that hand, and written an essay with a borrowed quill and then had held hands with a boy from the year above.

That boy from the year above had started coughing a week later and had a fit while wrestling with his mates. They had complained that he'd coughed all over them, but when he'd recovered, they'd gotten right back to their fighting.

One of those mates had spent hours snogging his girlfriend behind the greenhouses.

Another one had marked first years' essays and coughed onto the pages.

Each of those first years had their own friends to pass it on to. And on and on and on until a quarter of the school had found themselves in the infirmary before the first girl had even started going green.

It was a stroke of luck that Madam Pomfrey had been infected and cured of dragon pox as a child, along with McGonagall and Slughorn. One or two other students found themselves immune due to experience with the ailment previously and had flaunted their advantage for days before the teachers became sick of it and quarantined them with the rest of the school.

Now, the students lay in wait in their dormitories and common rooms, waiting for news on their sick peers.

.

Tom sat on a sofa in the empty common room. Despite arrogance within all of Gryffindor about the lion's house being safe from the pox, communal areas remained soulless, and meetings across different dormitory groups consisted of wary glances and were over in minutes. So Tom was alone, staring into the dim flames in the grate.

He breathed deeply, trying to stifle a sob. His shoulders shook. The space around his eyes ached with repressed tears.

There were footsteps behind him, but he didn't turn around, too ashamed of the red patches on his cheeks, the glimmer in his eyes, the tremor in his shoulders. Instead, he continued to let his gaze bore into the flames.

"Tom," said a gentle voice. Charlie sat beside him, sinking into the cushions with a small sigh. He hesitated before speaking, and when he did, his voice was soft. "Are you … are you gonna be alright?"

Tom didn't answer, wincing and holding his hands to his face, hoping to shield his obvious vulnerability from his redheaded friend.

"I know you're scared. And don't say you aren't, because I've seen you when you're scared, remember, and I've seen you when you aren't, so I know the difference. You're terrified." Charlie paused. "But it's okay to be scared sometimes, you know? And—"

Here, Charlie reached across and tugged Tom's hands away from his cheeks.

"It's okay to cry. Because we're stuck here, and we've been stuck here for a week, and it'll be another couple weeks until they let us out. But it's only us, you know? It's only us who're gonna see you like this, and I certainly don't care if you cry, and you know Duncan can't bear but say the nicest things when people are scared or sad. Stu … Stu might be a berk about it, but in truth, he's clearly terrified himself, so he has no right to say anything to you about it, and I'll talk to him myself if he starts being an idiot."

Thomas's face fell into a slight frown. "It's not … I'm not just scared for no reason. I'm not … I'm not a pansy, you know?"

"I know."

"My mum died of it, I think. Dragon pox."

"Oh."

"Yeah. It was … it was a long time ago, but all this … all this stresses me out. Because what if … what if you die, or Duncan dies? Even Stuart. I'd … I dunno what I'd do. This disease, it scares me, Charlie. It scares me so much, and when Stu went at me for it, I just couldn't cope. Because it feels like it's personal. It's stupid, but I feel like it's coming for me. I dream about it sometimes. Don't laugh."

"I'm not. Really, I'm not."

Tom looked up from the fire. "And I don't know how to get over this stupid fear. I'm supposed to be a Gryffindor, for Merlin's sake."

"You are brave, Tom. And d'you know what you need? You need a distraction."

He raised an eyebrow, recognising the eager gleam in Charlie's eyes. "Oh yeah?"

"Well, if you dig into my trunk, I happen to have a decent supply of Ogden's."

He laughed, and to Charlie, it was heaven's bells. A smile finally crept onto Tom's face. "As always, Charlie. Lead the way!"

.

Minerva seated herself primly at Dumbledore's desk and started addressing the immediate concerns. "Hogwarts has been knocked to its knees, Dumbledore. The parents are demanding their children back. Some have declared they will not be letting them return next term!"

He took a moment to consider, frowning out of the window at the dying light of the sun. "Perhaps we have been knocked down, Minerva, but the important thing is getting back up after all of this is over."

Across the castle, through rooms of coughing students on makeshift cots, four Gryffindor boys laughed off the fear and faced the rest of the dreaded quarantine period with stolen alcohol fuelling their courage.