Disclaimer: see prologue
Guide: "Talk", Thoughts, ~letters and other written stuff~
Rating: M for sexual themes, language and slash in later chapters
Warning: Cliffhanger, but the next chapter is as good as finished, so you will only have to wait for 2-4 days for the next chapter to be updated
Betas: jointheclub, Makoto Sagara
Update of betaed version: 9th September
AN: Since my finals have started this week, I don't know when the next chapter will be finished. I hope that it won't take about a month again like last time. Btw, all the previous chapters are now betaed, thanks to jointheclub; the content is still the same. And sorry that not much is happening in this chapter.
Also, thank you for all the new author alerts, favourites and review :)
-~-~- Altair -~-~-
-~-~-by Still waters are deep-~-~-
-~-~- Chapter 12 – Curious visitors -~-~-
After the last lesson of the day, Charms, Harry together with Hermione and Ron went up to the Gryffindor tower. There still was tension between Ron and his friends after his verbal attack on them during the announcement of the room partners two days ago. Just like in fourth year, it would take some time before they would be able to speak freely to each other again and forget about the whole incident. For the time being, Hermione and Harry could do nothing more than try to not mention their new living arrangements in their talks with Ron. Therefore, they were talking about their new DADA teacher instead.
"I am curious how long our new professor will last," Harry mused. "Now that Voldemort is dead, the curse on the position should have vanished with him."
"It doesn't really concern us any more, does it?" Ron asked. "With this being our last year," he added as an afterthought.
"Maybe not us, but still I would not like to be in Headmaster Dumbledore's place. I mean, having to find a halfway competent DADA teacher every new school year must be hard. Even if our new teacher is not as good as Professor Lupin or the fake Moody, mind you, he still is a lot more competent than Umbridge or Lockhart were," Hermione answered, deliberately not bothering to use the honourable title of 'professor' for either of the last teachers, since their teaching surely wasn't worth this honour in Hermione's opinion.
"And I am sure that you don't want for Ginny to end up with being taught by Umbridge's cousin, do you?" Harry asked Ron.
"Of course not," was Ron's immediate answer when the trio had reached the portrait of the Fat Lady and entered their common room.
After greeting Ginny, they went up the stairs to their respective dorms so that they could put away their school things, which only ended in them meeting up in the Altair common room.
"I would love to stay up here in my room to do my assignments. It is much quieter here than in the common room," Hermione said wishfully when they went up the stairs which led to their private rooms.
"I can imagine, but you know that if you did, the whole tower would wonder why you suddenly aren't seen in the common room any longer, which we can't have happening," Harry said, having wanted to do the same thing too since he also would prefer the quite of his new living room; especially since with all the books there he would not need to go to the library to get his hands on the books he needed to complete the assignments.
"I know, Blaise already told me this on the first day," Hermione answered.
Ron left the two of them after they reached the top of the stairs, going right whereas Hermione and Harry went left to their rooms. Therefore, Hermione could continue speaking without fearing Ron freaking out. "Though, I am still contemplating to using my Head Girl as an excuse to have received my own room and thus a reason to spend my time up there to do my assignments. But I would need to ask Draco to go along with it first. It would be suspicious if I would have received my own room but not the Head Boy."
"Then it is a good thing that we will meet up at five," Harry said when they had reached the door with the number three on it, where Hermione and Blaise were staying.
"I can't wait to see your room," Hermione said excitedly, "but until then, we better start on the DADA assignment we got today."
"Yeah, see you in the common room," Harry answered before going towards his own room, the famous Room Zero. He did not really want to do the assignment right now, but knowing that he had to do it anyway, he decided it was better to have it out of the way before his homework started to pile up on him.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-Altair-a life changing event-~-~-~-~-~-~-
When Harry walked into his room to discard unnecessary school supplies, Draco asked him when he would like to discuss the solution to their current dilemma between staying virgins for Ritual magic and brewing the Lloj potion for their Sexual Potion class next week.
"How about after dinner?" Harry suggested. "Right now, I've promised Hermione that I would work with her on our DADA assignment in the Gryffindor common room before showing her our room."
"No problem," was Draco's easy answer. "It may be better if we have enough time to discuss everything without haste anyway."
"See you later then."
"And don't forget to wait in the common room. For them to be able to enter our rooms, they need to be invited by both of us directly," Draco called after Harry.
"Yeah, I know. And even if I had forgotten, I am sure that Hermione would have reminded me, since it probably was mentioned in Hogwarts: A History," Harry said with a laugh while leaving the room to start on his essay.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-Altair-a life changing event-~-~-~-~-~-~-
At two after five Harry entered the Altair common room through the male Gryffindor door.
"I see, you finally decided to join us," Blaise said from his comfortable position on one of the couches, imitating Professor Snape. He and Draco had already been waiting for Harry and Hermione for ten minutes now. "Let me guess, Hermione over there wanted to finish the DADA assignment first," Blaise went on, pointing at Hermione, who had just entered the Altair common room through the female Gryffindor door.
"Yep," was Harry's short answer. "Shall we go then?"
With this, both Draco and Blaise got up from their sofas and walked upstairs, following Hermione and Harry's lead. Hermione made a small detour to her room to discard her now completed DADA assignment.
When they all finally reached the door of Room Zero at the end of the left side of the balcony, Draco and Harry entered the room first before they started the process of inviting their two friends into their room. The reason for this procedure was that the rooms recognise their inhabitants; therefore a password was not needed. The drawback of this system was that only people who already knew before the room assignment that the couple living there were taking Altair electives were able to enter someone else's room. Even if this requirement was met, the persons still needed to be invited to the room by the inhabitants. Otherwise, the wards would throw them right out into the hallway again.
"Hermione, Zabini, please come in," Harry stated from inside, beginning the inviting process.
And Draco added more formally: "Granger, Blaise, I hereby invite you to enter Harry's and my room."
With that, the both of them had adjusted the wards of their room for their two friends to be able to enter Room Zero for this one time.
It is a good thing that the four of us already knew that we all take Altair electives before the rooms had been assigned, Hermione thought. Otherwise, I would not have been able to enter Room Zero because of the wards to secure the privacy of the cohabitants regarding their choice of taking Altair electives or not. Not that it would have made a difference for the two of them, with it being well known that only people we are taking Sexual magic lessons get assigned to Room Zero.
"It doesn't look any different than ours," Hermione stated after she had entered the hallway of Room Zero. "We also have a hallway and two rooms leading away from there," she continued.
Blaise hummed in agreement when he entered after her.
Draco led them towards his and Harry's bedroom first having decided to have the tour first before settling down in the living room to talk. While Blaise stayed on the left half of the bedroom, looking at the long table meant for brewing Sexual Potions, which was, unlike his own, situated in Harry and Draco's bedroom, Hermione walked towards the bed placed on the right side of the room.
When Harry saw Hermione sitting down on their bed he nearly had gotten a heart attack. He breathed out a sigh of relief when he noticed that Hermione was still clothed, since her feet were still touching the ground. But to Harry's dismay, Hermione started to lift up her feet to sit cross legged.
Harry could not bear to see his best friend naked, so he looked away and closed his eyes waiting for Hermione's shriek, which never came. Instead, someone was whispering into his right ear: "Calm down, Harry, nothing happened," Draco said in a calm voice, also having placed his left hand on Harry's shoulder. "If you haven't noticed, the room wants to protect most of its secrets. For example, the door to the Ritual magic room is missing."
Opening his eyes, Harry looked to the right, and indeed the door to the Ritual Magic room was missing. "Thank god," Harry muttered under his breath in relief before he was courageous enough to look at Hermione, who was still clothed even if she was sitting on their bed and was taking in their room.
"Where do the other two doors led to?" Hermione asked, having finished looking around.
"The one over there is the entrance to our walk-in closet," Harry answered her, pointing at the mentioned door, Draco still standing beside him with his hand still on Harry's shoulder. "And the other one leads to our bathroom"
"I am sure Draco takes up the whole thing, doesn't he?" Blaise asked in good humour, waving a hand in the direction of the walk-in closet.
"Nope, only about two-thirds of it," was Harry's joyful answer, giving Blaise a wink.
Not wanting the jokes about his large wardrobe to continue, Draco decided to change the topic. "Blaise, you really must have a look at our shower. It is perfect." For shower sex, Draco added in his thoughts.
"Really?" Blaise asked with a raised eyebrow. He knew that Draco was trying to avert from the topic of his immense wardrobe, but Blaise decided to humour Draco this time as he had made fun of it often enough already. "Then let's have a look"
-~-~-~-~-~-~-Altair-a life changing event-~-~-~-~-~-~-
"Oh, your bathroom is wonderful," Hermione exclaimed, a bit jealous when she saw the big tub as well as the spacious shower. "How I would have liked to have gotten one for myself. You two are really lucky to have been assigned to Room Zero."
"Or the two of you are taking Ritual Magic," Blaise commented with a wink, "since it is the only one of the Altair electives which includes cleaning rituals, which obviously can't be performed in the communal bathrooms."
"Maybe," was the only thing Draco offered as an answer to Blaise's statement. Harry looked away, so that Blaise would not notice his blush.
Unbeknownst to all of them, Blaise wasn't so far off with his comment. Draco and Harry had only gotten their own bathroom for this reason. Nevertheless, the bathroom was also a permanent part of Room Zero since only people compatible enough to take Ritual Magic were admitted into Room Zero and so far all of the previous inhabitants had applied for Ritual Magic. Therefore, no one could say for sure if the bathroom would also be there if the pair had decided to not take Ritual Magic, unlike all of their predecessors.
"Come on, let's go to the living room and have some tea before dinner," Harry suggested.
~-~-~-~-~-~-Altair-a life changing event-~-~-~-~-~-~-
"Maybe we really should have hidden the books in the Ritual Magic room as you had suggested," Harry said to Draco after Hermione and Blaise had left not a minute before to get ready for dinner. "With all the books safely hidden away in a room she didn't even know existed, we would not have needed to force Hermione out of our room like that."
Draco just laughed hard, with Harry joining in shortly. Both could still clearly remember Hermione's reaction when she had entered the room they were currently sitting in.
Flashback, about an hour before
As Harry had feared, Hermione had only taken one step into the living room before she promptly walked over to the left side, where all the books in their living room were situated. He and Blaise had to pry her away from the book shelves with Harry promising to lend her some of them to read and Blaise forcefully dragging her with him to the sofa.
Draco had amusedly been watching the whole scene play out from his safe place in the kitchen corner of the room, where he had prepared tea for all of them. It is unnecessary to say that the tea was ready long before Hermione had sat down on the sofa.
The good side of the visit had been that not only had the four of them agreed to start calling each other by their first names, along the lines of my Altair partner's friends are my friends, but also they found out that they could talk about their electives like Basic to a certain degree if they had correctly guessed that the others had been there too and when they were sure that their conclusion was correct.
To Hermione's great joy, Draco had also agreed to go along with her idea to pretend that the Head Boy and Girl received their own rooms, so that the both of them could spend more time in their Altair rooms.
Blaise was pouting like a little child at the end of this talk, since Harry had said that he would also spend more time up here in his private room under the pretence that he was wandering around the castle to find some peace from all the stares he got from being the Boy Who Lived. It was not like Harry had not been leaving the common room for hours on end last year, either with him stalking Draco or just wanting to be left alone to mourn the death of his godfather. Therefore, Blaise was the only one of the four who did not have an excuse to stay up in his Altair room for a lengthy period of time. And he would have liked to spend some more time up there as well.
End Flashback
When both of them had finished laughing, Draco said: "It is a good thing that Hermione so badly wants to do her homework in her Altair room. Otherwise my threat of taking back the agreement to say that the Head Boy gets his own room would not have gotten her out of here."
The reason why Draco had to threaten Hermione to leave the room was that when Hermione and Blaise had been leaving, Hermione had five books from Harry and Draco's room with her. But to her terror as soon as she took one step out of Room Zero, all five books vanished from her arms and reappeared on the living room shelves. None of the boys were surprised that Hermione promptly changed her mind and did not want to leave Room Zero any longer, with the fear, that she now would be unable to read all the interesting books she saw before. To Harry's relief, Draco came up with the idea of taking back the private Head room to make her leave.
Harry really loved his friend, but he still felt that his and Draco's room was decidedly their own and not a public library. In the end, he and Draco agreed that Hermione could read the books on Tuesday afternoons when Harry and Draco were in Ritual Magic and maybe sometimes during the weekends when it suited them.
"Oh, I don't know maybe you could have just tried to threaten her with adding blueberry lube to her drink every time she eats in the Great Hall, like you did with Blaise's tea earlier," Harry said, fondly remembering that after Blaise had made a bad joke about Draco's hair, the blond had in revenge inconspicuously casted the lubrication charm on Blaise's teacup, mixing a bit of lube into the tea and making Blaise wonder why his tea suddenly tasted like blueberries, since he did not remember that Draco's lube had a blueberry flavour.
"I don't know if that really would have been a threat, considering that Blaise rather enjoyed his spiked tea," Draco answered smirking at the memory. "Maybe I should try it out myself too. Who knows, it may be really as good as Blaise said it was," he added as an afterthought.
"As long as it is not my tea which ends up with it, help yourself," was all Harry said before getting up from his arm chair to go to dinner. With a "See you later", he left the room to meet Hermione in the Gryffindor common room.
~-~-~-~-~-~-Altair-a life changing event-~-~-~-~-~-~-
After dinner, Harry was the first one to arrive in Room Zero. He decided to wait in what had become his armchair for Draco's arrival. I really do hope that Draco has a solution to our problem, Harry thought. I wonder what is keeping him though, since he left the Great Hall shortly before me and he does not have to walk all the way up the school to reach the tower, he mused while he waited anxiously. Sometimes I wish that I had such a short time to reach the Entrance Hall, especially since most classes are taught at the lower levels, Harry thought longingly.
"Sorry for the wait," Draco said, apologizing when he arrived ten minutes later, "but some of the younger years were in a quarrel, which I needed to resolve before coming up here. Let me just get my ancestor's journal and we can begin discussing the problem at hand."
"Alright," Harry said, trying to calm down his anxiety. "I will get us something to drink. Is Coke okay?" he asked, having spotted some Coca-cola bottles on one of the kitchen shelves yesterday when he wanted something to drink before going to bed, without thinking that Draco may not even know what Coke was since it is a Muggle drink. Harry had been surprised to even find some Coke in Hogwarts.
"Yes" was Draco's answer from the doorway. He had had gotten to drink some of the dark Muggle drink during the times when he had gone shopping in the Muggle world and rather liked it.
When Draco re-entered the living room, Thothus' journal in hand, Harry had already placed their drinks on the table and now sat on the couch, since he believed it would be better to have their discussion if they were sitting next to each other, instead of opposing one another in their arm chairs.
"So, this is your ancestor's journal?" Harry asked. "Weren't you reading it yesterday?" he added when he recognised the cover.
"Yes, I was. I started reading it a while ago. It holds some interesting theories about Sexual Magic. I don't know how I could have forgotten about what it says this morning, especially since the solution to our problem is one of the Malfoy's family secrets."
"I remember Hermione saying something about your family being rather acquainted with Sexual magic," Harry interrupted Draco.
"Yeah, they are, even if I didn't know about it myself until my seventeenth birthday with Altair Black's spell being in place," Draco answered, remembering the talk he had with his father during the holidays.
"So, what is this family secret that will solve our current dilemma?" Harry, eager to finally know the solution, prompted Draco, who seemed to be lost in thought.
"It actually is really simple," Draco began.
...TBC
~-~-~-~-~-~-Altair-a life changing event-~-~-~-~-~-~-
AN2: Since Draco is wearing a Muggle suit in the films, I gather that he sometimes goes into the Muggle world to shop. Therefore, he knows what Coke is.
Next: Draco explains what's in the journal.