Chapter 13: How to Break Four School Rules in One Sentence

Thursday, October 10, 1944

7:32 P.M.

"You boys have a good practice?" Ginny asked cheekily, grinning at Draco and Harry as the blond and dark-haired Slytherins trudged into the Room of Requirement. Their hair, still dripping from the rain-soaked Quidditch practice, splattered across their faces. "Finally managed to become one with the clubs?"

"Shut up, West-lette", Draco grumbled moodily, scowling at her. He collapsed heavily in his usual spot beside Hermione. Leaning back and sprawling across her lap, he uttered dramatically, "Hold me."

Rather than abiding by his request, Hermione rolled her eyes, pushed his arm out of her face, and made sure his wet blond hair was safely away from her clothing and bag. "Oh, do grow up, Draco. Personally, I think you and Harry are going to make fabulous Beaters. You both look like naturals to me."

"Both naturals my bloody arse, Nefertari. You're in no position to make that assessment; I don't see you whacking balls in your leisure time."

Harry rubbed vigorously his head with a towel, picked up Ginny's stretched out legs, and plopped down on the Slytherin couch beside her, letting Ginny rest her feet back on top of his legs. "You have to admit, du Lac, we do make quite a pair", he quipped with a grin, pointing down at his girlfriend. "And you're doing a much better job at Seeker than I ever would have, Gin; your Wronski feint today was unbelievable."

Draco snorted. "Yeah, you have to say that because she's your girlfriend." "That's exactly my point, du Lac, you don't see me acting sore because I lost my position my girlfriend—"

"Harry, shut up. Hey, ferretboy!" Ginny sat up mutinously, wand aimed at Draco's dripping head. "Do you want to be known as batman again?"

"Hey!" Hermione exclaimed sharply, hauling Draco to an upright position by a wet collar and holding a palm out to Ginny in a stop! gesture. "Everyone, cut it out! We have much more important things going on than just Quidditch, and the last thing we need are two of us in the hospital wing at our own hand!"

As Draco sat back, shooting Ginny a pointedly dirty look, Hermione sighed and glanced over at the empty Gryffindor-Hufflepuff couch. "We're lucky that Lavender and Ron both have Quidditch practice right now, or I'm sure a full-out war would have already broken out."

Harry's eyes, now deadly serious, nodded in agreement. He reached out, placed his hand on Ginny's tense shoulder, and pulled her back toward him. "She's right, Gin, du Lac. We need to focus now."

"Sorry", Ginny muttered sullenly, leaning her back against Harry's side. She glanced at Hermione apologetically. "Being here just makes you want to try and forget, you know? I mean, if Riddle wasn't here, it'd almost be like life had gone back to normal... before... before everything..." Her voice cracked, and she gestured helplessly.

Harry rested his chin on top of Ginny' ginger head comfortingly, wrapped his arms around her, and whispered, "Ssssh, Gin, I know; I've been a bit too carefree about it, too."

Hermione could honestly say that she knew exactly what Ginny was feeling. Being in a time where the War no longer existed, where Houses were friendlier to each other, and where nothing existed to remind them of their hard-won previous life - except Riddle, of course, and the occasional Dumbledore and McGonagall and other relations... The temptation to pretend like their past lives hadn't happened was always present. But those eighteen years before now had happened; they couldn't keep on acting as if they hadn't.

As Ginny nodded and leaned back into Harry, closing her eyes, he glanced at Hermione. "Hermione, what do you have on Riddle?"

Hermione was surprised to see how quickly 'Everyone, what do we have on Riddle?' had changed to 'Hermione, what do you have on Riddle?' As if, when she had taken on the Head Girl job, she had also taken on all responsibility for the Tom Riddle situation. "I have a question," she said simply, choosing to put aside a comment on the one-sided effort for the time being. "And my question is, exactly how deeply involved is he?" She glanced around the room at her friends' faces, looking for a response.

Ginny sniffed and cocked her head at her, quickly swiping at her wet eyes. "What do you mean?" "I mean, Dumbledore had originally said that, as time went on, only Riddle's closest friends knew him as Lord Voldemort." Hermione paused, raising her eyebrows at Ginny and Harry. " 'His closest friends.' Tell me, when have you ever seen Riddle with anyone you could call a close friend?"

Harry frowned, mulling over Hermione's question. "It's probably covert; he wouldn't want to be obvious about that sort of thing," he said broodingly, then stared at Hermione, his expression curious. "How do you propose we find out about them?"

Hermione smiled mysteriously, bent down, ruffled through her knapsack, and pulled out a small gold key. "Remember how, during the D.A., we gave all the members galleons to tell them about the meetings? Well, keeping that idea in mind, I've taken this key, and I've made a few... small adjustments to it". She held up the key and pointed to a small, hardly noticeable carved letter on its side. "This is Key A. When I say a trigger phrase, the key replicates itself. Here, I'll show you."

Closing her hand around the little key, she turned to Draco, lounging beside her, and whispered, "Draco, there's going to be a party tomorrow night in the Room of Requirement. It's on the fifth floor. Eight o'clock to ten. You need a key in order to get in". With that, she opened her fingers. One key had multiplied into two.

"Wow", Ginny murmured while Hermione handed a suspicious looking Draco the second key. He held it up in front of his nose, studying it from every angle. "Hermione, that is truly advanced magic."

Hermione shrugged modestly. "The spells didn't turn out to be as difficult to perform as I had originally thought they would be, actually." Now that Ginny had mentioned it, Hermione had found the activating charm and replicating spell in instruction books of the highest difficultly, and yet, to her delight and pleasure, she had managed to successfully charm the key on her first try. Strange.

She absently fingered the Amulet of Eras under her shirt, shook her head and continued, "Anyway, see here? The code on Draco's key is A1. That means he's the first person to receive the invitation from my key, Key A. If Draco turns around and invites someone else, like Ginny, for example, she will have Key A11, and if Ginny invites Lavender and Ron, they'll have Keys A111 and A112, respectively. No one can invite more than nine people. So, like a chain, the keys can always be traced back to the source."

She paused, breathless from the nervous anticipation of the possibility of putting her slightly devil-may-care plan in action. "Do you follow me so far?" "All but the part about a party at eight o'clock in the Room of Requirement", Draco said, dangling his key from his fingers and occasionally swinging it in an arc.

"Okay, that's the event. We've got to have something, something that isn't illegal, which most any student — Slytherin, Hufflepuff, whoever — will want to attend. We won't hand Riddle one of the master keys, Keys A through Z. We'll scatter those throughout the fifth, sixth, and seventh years in every house."

Hermione hesitated, and her lips twisted upward wryly. "Granted, it would be better if the teachers never found out about it, so I'm going to have a sign-up roster for everyone who takes one step into the Room of Requirement." Despite its definite risk, she couldn't help but glow at how well the plan fit together, even though she had come up with the generalities of it in all of two days. "The roster would require each student to give their name and their key code, so they could get in again, but it would also bind them to secrecy unless they're handing out more keys. And the party itself would be finished before the 10:30 Friday curfew, so, technically, what we're doing isn't completely out of bounds..."

"Only the whole 'not alerting the administration part,' right?" Ginny asked with a small grin. She shook her head. "Hermione, sometimes I ask myself why you aren't here in Slytherin with the rest of us."

Hermione laughed. "Well, you can keep on asking yourself that, Gin... Anyway, the event is a dance party. We can smuggle food— sweets, butterbeer and the like —over from Hogsmeade... Harry, you know the way through the tunnels... I could charm the magical music player's sound to augment up to the proper loudness level for music, and we'd have to ask the Room of Requirement to turn into a dance hall of sorts—"

"Whoa, whoa, hang on!" Draco exclaimed, grinning fiendishly and rubbing his hands together in delight. "Nef, you are the Head Girl, you have just suggested we throw a party, and you have just broken about four school rules in one sentence!"

Hermione threw her hands in the air and elbowed Draco next to her, glancing sidelong at him. "That doesn't mean I'm dancing in the aisles about it, D", she retorted exasperatedly. "I don't like wild, out-of-control upperclassmen anymore than the next scholar you meet. This is going to be a controlled party. Accent on the controlled. Laid-back. And do you have any better ideas that could get us the information we want without arousing Riddle's suspicions?"

"Wait", Harry interrupted, a dawning realisation crossing his face. "Hermione, you're saying this would guarantee us knowledge of whoever invited Riddle? So, when he writes his name and key code down, we could trace it back to the person who invited him, therefore seeing who he's on relatively friendly terms with?"

Hermione nodded, a small smile breaking out across her face. "That's exactly what I'm saying."

"So, what if Riddle or one of Riddle's 'close friends' doesn't hear about it the first time around? Or what if Riddle just decides he'd rather hang in the library and doesn't go?" Ginny asked, a hint of opposition still in her voice, although her brown eyes had begun to gleam eagerly with the silent message, 'If this'll get us one step closer to taking him down, I'm voting for it.'

Hermione grinned again, trying to overcome that jumpy feeling in her stomach, that constant knowledge that she would be breaking so many rules... "Then it'll become a regularity. And trust me, he'll go. I've only known him for, what, two weeks, and I can already see that he strongly dislikes not knowing about any goings-on at Hogwarts." Raising her voice, she called, "Hey, Harry, Ginny, did you hear there's going to be a party tomorrow night!"

Tossing her key straight up into the air, she caught it and opened her hand, revealing her key plus two more. Slyly, she glanced toward Harry and Ginny and lobbed the two keys across the coffee table to their waiting hands. "Spread the word."

And so began what came to be known as Friday Night Dance. The arrival-of-the-weekend hangout's popularity and attendance within the upper classes would grow each week it continued. Whether Hermione, Draco, Harry, and Ginny's primary target ever even received a key, however, was a completely different matter altogether.