"This is such a bad idea" Pansy mumbled
"You don't have to come, you know" Draco said, holding his wand over her head
"Of course I do" she huffed "Just get it over with"
Draco tapped her head and she shivered while the spell travelled down her body, making her invisible.
"I don't think making her of all people invisible was a great idea, Draco" Harry yelped as Pansy pinched him
"You've been able to sneak around the castle since your first year, I think everyone should be given the same right" Pansy said somewhere to Harry's left
Draco rolled his eyes at the pair, he had envisioned going on his own to examine the restricted section of the library but that clearly wasn't possible.
The two of them were like limpets ever since he revealed that he wasn't who they really thought he was. They hadn't let a single aspect of his plan go unchecked.
Draco was still refusing to tell them what he knew of the future, much to their annoyance, it would cause too much grief. They argued that they'd forget eventually but Draco knew that that level of anxiety, even for a short amount of time, wouldn't be worth it.
Harry threw the invisibility cloak over the two of them and with Pansy they left the common room to creep around the dungeons.
At the library doors they spotted a floating ball of yarn that was twitching as if the person holding it was trembling slightly.
"Hermione, it's us" Harry whispered
She let out a soft gasp and dropped the ball of twine, which she vanished in seconds before it rolled down the stairs and to Mrs. Norris.
"Don't DO that!" She squeaked and reversed her invisibility spell "Come on and let's get this over with"
The other three did the same and followed her in. The Library was incredibly dark and they all dimly lit their wants to keep themselves from crashing into chairs or each other.
Hermione unlocked the way to the restricted section with practiced ease; unsurprisingly this was not her first time sneaking into this area.
They followed her to the back of the library where the most dusty and evil looking books were chained into their shelves.
Pansy made an unsure sound and gingerly sat down while Hermione set out to search the rows, pulling out a book every so often and adding it to a pile.
As the pile grew to five books high Hermione gave a satisfied huff and joined them at the slightly stained table.
"Are you expecting us to stay here all night?" Harry looked around them incredulously "It's the weekend tomorrow. Hogsmeade!"
"You've stayed up much longer than this before a Hogsmeade weekend" Hermione snipped "And this is a lot more important"
Harry mumbled something under his breath and heaved the first book off its pile and began to scan the index, making disgusted faces while he read some of the topics.
Draco pulled the next one off, "Pulling Truth"; the front cover had a nasty illustration of a wizard pulling something out of another's mouth, much like a muggle tooth extraction gone wrong. He really hated these books.
The subjects of each chapter sounded promising at least, "Knowing Your Killer" and "Asking Your Assassin" especially.
A half hour passed slowly, only the rustling of pages and sounds of disgust after a really gruesome chapter or illustration breaking the silence. Unluckily, Pansy had picked a book that seemed to be mostly about torturing information out of people.
"This is pointless!" Harry cried after an hour of fruitless searching "There's nothing in here that we would be able to get past Moody, I mean Crouch"
"He's right" Draco agreed " Everything in my book just wants me to sneak up on him and either insert something into him or splash a potion on him"
Pansy stuck her tongue out at the visual image
"Well, I found something a few minutes ago that we can probably use" Hermione said, business like "We'll have to be so careful though"
"You could have said something earlier!" Pansy threw her arms up and slammed her book shut "Thank Merlin"
"I wanted to make sure that there wasn't something easier. What we'd have to do could go so wrong so easily" she flicked back a few pages and showed them a very complicated potion "If Crouch has some of this in his food the polyjuice potion will be reversed right away"
"And are we meant to give him a box of chocolates or something?" Draco asked "He doesn't eat anything that wasn't prepared by the elves"
"Exactly!" Hermione said happily "What he doesn't know is that we have contacts in the kitchen. All we have to do is convince Dobby, this is where you'd come in Harry, to slip some of this potion into his breakfast"
"Great!" Pansy clapped her hands together "Can we do it on Monday morning?"
"Well… no" Hermione looked edgily at them "It would have to brew for three days at least"
"Hermione!" Draco yelled and was hurriedly hushed "I don't have that long"
The three of them looked puzzled at Draco
"This… thing only lets me stay for two weeks" he gestured at his chest "I can't leave before or stay after that deadline"
"Three days out of your two weeks is nothing, Draco" Harry said
"What if something goes badly wrong and I need a lot longer to fix it?" Draco asked, slightly hysterically "You said yourself Hermione, it's a risky potion"
The girl's face hardened and she looked between them all "Then I better get it absolutely right"
~*~
The next day they all met in an abandoned girl's bathroom on the first floor. Draco realised with a little pang of dread that it was the same bathroom that Harry had attacked him in.
Harry, Pansy and Hermione however, were treating it all as a bit of a joke. They were actually disappointed to see Myrtle missing from her usual toilet.
Draco had grown to become very fond of the ghost after having found a therapist in her in his last year at Hogwarts.
Pansy had magically enlarged the cubicle to fit all four of them inside and was now rummaging in her bag of potion ingredients.
Pansy's mother was well known to be one the best potion masters of her time but was apparently pretty dim when it came to suspecting her diabolical daughter. Pansy had written home that evening with a list of potion ingredients, which arrived promptly that morning.
These potion ingredients were extremely hard to come by, even when raiding Snape's stock he kept in his office, which was quickly shot down by the Slytherin's.
They needed the shell of 3 occamy eggs, fifteen griffin claws and a jobberknoll feather, all of which were nearly impossible to find in such a quantity this last minute.
Hermione lit a flame under the cauldron and cast an extra silencing spell on the whole bathroom "So I think that's everything, we need to let the water simmer for ten minutes before adding lake and sea water"
She checked the book every other second, even with nothing to add to the potion, they couldn't afford to make mistake brewing this.
"So what's our plan after this is done?" Harry asked
"Well, first we need to go to the kitchens and convince Dobby to help us. I was thinking that we could inject all of the food that's sent up to him with this. It's meant to be tasteless anyway but I can't risk him having any suspicions about the look of his food if we soak it." Hermione looked at Harry
"Draco and I can do that, he knows both of us and he always said he liked having you as a master" Harry grinned at him "We'll make a S.P.E.W member out of you yet"
Draco's stomach did a weird little flip at Harry's smile being directed at him.
"Aren't the Hogwarts elves bound to protect the staff though" Draco considered "I can't see Dobby wanting to slip something in one of their breakfasts"
"We just need to show him proof that this potion would be harmless if Moody is really Moody. After all, if he does turn out to be Crouch he'll still be protecting everyone" Pansy said while fiddling with one of the egg shells
"That's true. Anyway, I don't think he'll need convincing if Harry's the one to ask" Hermione said "Pansy if you dare take any of that shell I'll put your head in this cauldron"
Pansy froze and put a tiny shard she was sneaking into her pocket back into its bag "We don't need all of it" she said sulkily
"Yes we do!" Hermione placed the bag of silver eggshells next to her for protection "We need these measurements to be exact and I bet your mother sent the specific weights and not a bit extra"
Pansy mumbled something that sounded very similar to witch
"Look!" Draco distracted them from their bickering to point at the water, which was emitting a golden hued gass
Hermione gasped and grabbed the two bottles of water next to her "Okay Pansy, stir the water clock wise, swapping hands every three stirs, like we practiced"
Pansy nodded seriously, she was biting her lip hard in concentration. Draco knew she had been making potions since she was a young child, thanks to her mother, and they were in safe hands.
Bit by bit the sea and lake water was added, turning the bubbling potion a murky green colour. Once this was done Hermione, all the while staring at the book, added a single griffin claw, which made the water go a deep blue.
"Okay" she breathed heavily "We don't have to touch this until tonight. I'll sneak away from dinner and stay here until the morning. It only needs to be me here now"
Pansy snorted loudly "Like I'm going to let you do this on your own. I know how everything should look at each step a lot better than you do"
Hermione looked half hurt and half glad that she wasn't going to be alone for the whole night. Harry caught Draco's eye and smirked, sending Draco's heart into his throat.
Monday went without much of a bother, apart from pissing Harry off with how advanced his knowledge of every lesson was. He was awarded fifty points in Herbology for easily identifying plants that he had studied in his O.W.L.S and another fifty in Transfiguration for effortlessly vanishing a puppy.
At lunch Hermione came careering down the tables to tell them that the potion had started smelling strongly of seaweed, which she promised would fade in a few hours. He noticed that both herself and Pansy had numerous cuts on their hands.
"The occamy eggs" she said grimly, noticing them looking at her hands "They're razor sharp"
Harry nodded distractedly, looking over at the staff room table, frowning slightly as he watched the imposter Moody pick at his food.
"What's wrong?" Draco asked
"I was just thinking, what if he walks by the toilets one day and his eye sees the cauldron. He'll no doubt flush it, even if he doesn't know what it is" Harry said
Hermione smiled at him ruefully "He'll see an empty cubical. I did a bit of extra research behind that eye of his and I found a spell that repels its power"
They all looked at her with respect. They really would be quite screwed without her.
Just before their curfew Harry and Draco dropped in on the girls while they were adding the last few touches, then being left to simmer over night.
Following Harry nearly nocking the whole thing over they were banished from the first floor entirely.
"Might as well go back" Harry huffed
"I guess were no use here" Draco shrugged and followed him downwards
Draco noticed, as Harry was walking slightly in front of him, that he walked with a little more of a sashay than before. The slight swing of his hips made Draco's mouth suddenly very dry.
Draco bumped into him abruptly when he stopped outside the hidden wall to the Slytherin common room. Harry stood there for a beat without saying anything, looking Draco up and down.
"Say, Draco, how similar are you to the version of you that I know?" Harry did a once over of Draco again, making the other boy blush
"I think we'd share similar personality traits still" he couldn't make direct eye contact "I mean, with certain key events not happening, we'd still be pretty much the same. Why?"
"Oh, I was just wondering if alternative reality Draco was as gay as this one" Harry nodded to him, a small smirk playing on his lips
Draco spluttered while Harry looked at him satisfied
"I've never put too much thought into it, I never had time" Draco looked away from Harry's piercing gaze.
It was true, he knew he never liked girls the same way most of his house did, spending house preening before sharing a class with Ravenclaw girls.
He never had a "gay panic" or anything, he rather thought he wouldn't live long enough to actually explore that side of him properly, so what was the point in worrying?
One thing he was sure about is that he never saw the annoying bastard in front of him like that.
"I guess so" Draco tried to shrug casually
Harry looked at him approvingly "Well, at least you're a lot more open about it than the Draco I know"
Draco's mouth dropped open "So you didn't actually know if I was for sure"
"Of course not!" Harry laughed and ruffled Draco's neat hair "Just trying to figure out where I stand."
He scowled and followed Harry into their dorm room. He couldn't believe someone who was as dim-witted as Harry had tricked him like that.
He was still watching Harry shrewdly from his bed when he came back form brushing his teeth, which drew another loud laugh from the boy. He heard his other dorm mates grumble at this regular noisy occurrence.
Harry walked over to Draco's bed and sat down next to him and smiled faintly, hand twitching on the frayed part of his pyjamas.
Slowly, he leaned forward until his lips were next to Draco's ear and his hands were either side of his hips.
"Sleep well" He said simply, getting into his bed and drawing the hangings shut.
Fat chance.