Fun times with leadership models!

Summary: In the trio's fifth year, they come across a little band of Slytherins who want to make their own stand against Voldemort. Their leader - the sharp and unconventional Gold - has something Harry wants. And Hermione... well, she'd like to call it a mind-crush. An exploration of culture, class structure and exclusion in the wizarding world with shades of Hermione/OC tossed in.

"Idiot boy."

Gold had a black eye, a broken nose and a good-sized second-degree burn, and his shoulder was leaking blood. He was fairly sure one of his ribs was cracked. The only thing keeping him upright was a strengthening charm his father had passed down to him. Three against one did not good odds make.

"Sit." Snape was glaring at him. "Our house, Mr. Gold, prides itself on its sense of decorum and self-preservation."

Gold sat. "I have plenty of that, sir. It's just that I value my identity far more than my skin."

"Keep your attitude for those fools as are impressed by it. Do you not realize what is coming?"

Snape had always seemed to like him, in a strange way. He put him through more detentions than almost any other Slytherin, which meant that in Gold's formative years they had spent a lot of time together. Sometimes while Gold sorted beetle eyes or scrubbed cauldrons Snape would talk to him - long, informal yet eloquent lectures about the origins of spells, the fluid nature of magical energies, the social history of the wizarding world.

"A war."

Snape said nothing. It was as good as a yes.

"I've chosen my side already, sir. I wouldn't want to live in the world if we lose."

"And those who answer to you?"

Gold hesitated.

"Believe me, it would cause me no pain whatsoever to see you repeatedly beaten bloody over your own bullheadedness." Snape took a seat at his desk, gaze falling to his paperwork. "But. You serve a useful function within Slytherin house. Others follow where you lead."

It was the nearest thing he had ever gotten to a compliment from Snape, but he couldn't help but feel sour towards it. He resented the implications.

"Episky." Snape flicked his wand and Gold felt his nose repairing itself. A very familiar feeling. It had been broken more times than he could remember. "A month's detention. Be glad you are not serving it with Umbridge." Another flick of his wand, and the door opened, a clear signal for Gold to get out. "Selfishness may be an inherently Slytherin trait, but I hope you will divest yourself of it. Now go. I have an appointment to keep."

Gold got to his feet, his defiance fizzling.

"And Mr. Gold?"

"Yes sir."

"When you are released from the hospital wing it is probably for the best that you do not return to your dormitory."

Harry nearly leapt out of his skin. Gold was already no particular thing of beauty, but now his face was a mess of blood and bruises. Sitting in the shadows by the Gryffindor common room entrance with his knees tucked into his chest, he looked like a gargoyle.

"Hello Potter."

"What- what are you doing here?"

"I may have destroyed my dormitory a bit."

"A bit?"

"I cursed Malfoy. Things... progressed."

It reminded Harry oddly of the summer before his third year, when he'd accidentally blown up his Aunt Marge. The residual anger, the trace of fear, and underneath that that tiny part of you that found the whole thing hilarious... Gold's face was more angry and amused than scared, but Harry knew enough to know people who weren't scared didn't usually crouch in the shadows outside other people's common rooms on the off chance someone would come along. "Have you been to the hospital wing?"

Gold ignored him. "Is Her- Is Granger awake?"

Word travelled quickly in Slytherin house.

It was almost two in the morning. Didon Pettyfer and Thomas Tasker barricaded the common room, warding the doors with Hebrew incantations. Inside, the snakes were pale and fidgety, robes thrown over their pyjamas. Tasker lit candles, one-by-one, murmuring the wards over them in melodic tones. The sound should have been soothing. Instead, it was eerie.

"-Have to do something."

"If I'd been there-"

Pettyfer stood on a chair - effectively raising herself to everyone else's head height - and fired off a stream of sparks from her wand. "Everybody shut up!"

The snakes slowly fell silent. Pettyfer was small, but her voice filled the room. "This," she said, "is tantamount to a declaration of war."

Murmurs riffled through the room at the word 'war'.

"We've always said we were Slytherins. But over the years we have been here we have seen something take root in our house, and I, for one, will not live and work side-by-side with future Death Eaters." Someone was banging at the common room door. She glanced upward, worried, but the wards were holding, for the moment. "Gold attacked Malfoy tonight. And I say it's about bloody time someone did."

"Why, though?" asked a tentative voice, from the back of the room.

"I heard he was provoked," answered another snake.

"Of course he was provoked," said Tasker, "It's Malfoy. He's a walking provocation. All he has to do is exist."

"This house's corruption extends into the teachers, too. How many of us have been branded by Umbridge?" That got an angry murmur. "Malfoy got off scott free - Crabbe and Goyle got their wrists slapped for ganging up three to one and seriously hurting him - and where's our Gold? What have they done with him?" Pettyfer's voice was furious. There was a reason she was up here. Who could have predicted she would be speaking in front of a crowd, leading in the absence of a leader? Certainly not her. The youngest of five children, all purebloods, all steeped in Dark Magic. The social rules of the pureblood circles could have been her bible. And she lived in fear. Until David Gold turned up, all piss and vinegar and pride, breaking every rule in the book, telling all the ugly truths, refusing to be what Slytherin wanted him to be, and called her to a higher sense of morality. They followed him because he was the antithesis of everything they had known, and everything they had known was misery. To some extent Pettyfer had always thought of him as invulnerable... but he wasn't in the hospital wing, he wasn't in his destroyed dorm, and he wasn't in the room of requirement. And she'd begun to worry.

Above all, she was scared Umbridge had him. Pettyfer had no doubt that toad would kill him if she thought she could get away with it.

"I say we follow his example," said Pettyfer, when the room had fallen silent again. "We show our defiance. There's a cancer growing in Slytherin house and it's time to cut it away or be cut away ourselves."

The banging on the door grew louder. Her hand clenched in a fist around her wand.

Outside, Filch hammered ineffectually at the door with the butt end of a broom, cursing incomprehensibly, while Umbridge aimed reductor curses and ward-breaking spells on it. Strands were beginning to fly loose from her girlish poof of hair.

"Can't you break it?" asked Malfoy, looking on flanked by Crabbe and Goyle.

Umbridge clearly did not want to say no, but there was little else she could say.

Malfoy glanced up at him. "You try, Professor Snape."

Snape did not want to try. The snakes were fools - rebellious children - but they wanted what was right and they were willing to fight for it. They were proof that Slytherin house was not inherently bad. And if he opened the door now, they would all be expelled.

But with Malfoy and Umbridge watching, he could not easily refuse. Snape stepped forward. "Aperio maxima." A bolt of white energy struck the common room door, but it did not yield.

Good. So Gold and the rest of the snakes were resourceful enough to call themselves true Slytherins. He fought the urge to smile. "I am very sorry, High Inquisitor, but I fear this ward is unfamiliar to me."

Umbridge stared at him as though her gaze could make him burst into flame. Then she turned back to the door, attacking it with a vigour that bordered on insanity.

"You-" Thud. "Bloody-" Thud. "Idiot!" Thud.

"Ow."

Hermione dropped the book - the nearest thing on-hand, for hitting him with - and stuffed her hand into her pocket, pulling out a golden galleon. It was still hot. "Thirty-six messages I've gotten in the past half-hour, thirty-six!" Gold looked perplexed, but she steamrolled on. "Your snakes barricaded themselves in the common room. And according to the bugging devices, they're about to rebel."

Gold stared at her dubiously through his one good eye. "It was just a scuffle."

"No it wasn't! Look at you! Don't think I didn't notice how funny you're breathing just because you cheated with a strengthening charm - You're going to be in the hospital wing for a week and if you're not I might just put you there myself."

At least Gold had the decency to look ashamed. "I hate hospitals," he mumbled. "I've wasted so much of my life in hospitals."

"So you came here?" demanded Hermione. "The snakes have no idea where you are. They're scared witless."

"Why would they be-"

Because, Hermione wanted to bark, when you do stupid, self-destructive things you hurt other people besides yourself. But Gold would have argued, and right now she needed him to listen. "Because they'd do anything you told them. If you were trying to raise an army of little Golds, you've gotten your wish."

"That's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do," objected Gold. "They're supposed to challenge the status quo. They're supposed to think for themselves." For the first time since Hermione had met him, he looked confused.

It took all the heat out of Hermione's anger. She sank into the armchair across from his. They were in the Gryffindor common room. It was empty at this hour, apart from Harry and Ron, who stood a short was away as if to give them space to talk. "You taught them to question everyone else but you never taught them to question you, did you?"

His silence was an answer in itself. Gold was no good at admitting to being wrong.

"Remember what you told me about House-Elves? You can't teach someone to think independently just by telling them to. You can't model true autonomy. They have to learn it for themselves." Hermione sighed, taking the golden galleon from her pocket to pass it back and forth between her fingers. Around the rim, words crawled like ants, everything from declarations of rebellion and solidarity to frantic searches. "You're very good at looking like you don't care what anybody else thinks of you or does to you."

"Because I don't," growled Gold, "I don't need a pat on the head for doing the right thing. I'm not afraid of them."

"Then why did you attack Malfoy?"

"I told you I was a problem, Granger."

"That's an excuse, not an answer."

"He called me -" Gold suddenly seemed to understand. He closed his mouth.

If you really didn't care, David, then it wouldn't have bothered you. The word wouldn't hurt, whatever word it was. "You've set an example for them, whether you like it or not."

Ron cleared his throat. "We're supposed to be the good guys. We don't just attack people. Not even Malfoy." There was a hint of uncertainty in his tone. She knew it took courage for him to speak, when so much of what they said was obscure to him. And he was right. Ron didn't need abstract language or dialectic to understand morality, and sometimes Hermione loved him for it.

"Cathari. Papaloi." Hermione flicked her wand, and the blood scrubbed itself from Gold's face. He winced as threads picked themselves through the worst cuts, sealing them tight. "There. Now here's what you're going to do, you're going to go down to your common room and deal with this before anyone else gets themselves killed, because it's your responsibility as their so-called leader and because you might be the only one who can."

Gold looked as though he were about to argue, but the argument never came. He got to his feet, giving them a last fierce look, and limped to the portrait hole.

"...Hermione?" asked Harry, when he had gone.

"Yeah Harry?"

"Was that... Greek?"

Hermione hadn't thought about it before. "Most healing spells are in Greek - Hippocrates was supposed to be a Warlock, I've read."

"I need to go to the library," said Harry distractedly, making for the door.

"Harry, it's two in the morning. You're turning into me."

More to come! R&R, please and thanks!