"Did you know about this?" Harry was so angry that he could barely speak.
It was bad enough that his friends were keeping secrets from him even though he could understand their reasoning. With Voldemort having a direct line into his mind, anything he knew could be used against them all.
But something like this...they'd both actively been trying to keep him out of detention with Umbridge all year. They had to have known what that meant, or they wouldn't have bothered.
Steven only looked confused, but Hermione looked like a deer in the headlights.
"She did this intentionally?" Steven asked Neville. "It wasn't just an accident?"
Neville shook his head. "She makes us do it over and over."
"How many?" Steven asked.
His voice had a different sound to it than Harry had ever heard before. He'd heard Steven when he was happy and when he was sad, and even when he was scared, as infrequent as that was. He'd never heard Steven sound dangerous before.
"Nobody talks about it," Neville said. "At least three others in Gryffindor that I know of, but I don't know how many others it's happening to."
Steven nodded, quietly. "I know it took a lot of courage to tell us about this. Thank you."
Neville nodded. He looked a little frightened, and his eyes never left Steven's face.
"We'll think of something," he said. "Just give us a little time."
Neville nodded again. Oddly, he looked relieved, as though Harry and Steven had some kind of actual power over a maniacal woman backed by the full power of a despotic government.
Steven gestured, and Neville left, trailed by Luna. The Weasley twins had been waiting to escort them to safer ground.
The moment the door closed, Steven turned. "You knew about this?"
Hermione looked miserable. "Everything you and Harry try, it's just going to make things worse."
"You don't know that," Steven said. "There's got to be a thousand things we can try; there's no way you can look through them all."
"You think I haven't been trying?" Hermione said. "If you and Harry attack her, you'll end up in Azkaban. If you defy her, you'll be in detention with everyone else. The Daily Prophet is a tool of the Ministry, and nobody believes the Quibbler. She censors all the outgoing mail."
Hermione looked down at her hands. "If you kill her, the Ministry just sends someone worse. It all comes crashing down no matter what happens."
"I don't believe that," Steven said. "There's got to be something we can do."
Harry stared at the two of them, wondering when the conversation had gotten away from him. He'd been the one who was angry, but now he was an afterthought. The other two seemed to know things he didn't and it frustrated him more all the time.
"Tell everybody," Harry said. "Show them if we have to. Everybody agree to be as sickly sweet and nice to her face as she is to us."
Hermione was silent for a moment. "If everybody knows what it means to have detention, maybe they'll be more careful."
"There's probably going to be people who try to get on her good side by telling her what we're doing," Harry said. "So it's important that nobody knows where the rumors start."
"We can't exactly shame her," Hermione said. "The woman has no shame."
"She hasn't tried to put me in detention," Steven said. "I think she's a little afraid of me."
Considering that he'd beaten a troll with a door and a basilisk in front of the entire school, and his watermelon minions had actually killed a teacher, Harry wasn't surprised. She probably considered him as some kind of inhuman savage.
"She doesn't acknowledge that I'm there at all," Steven continued. "It's like I'm invisible or something."
"Consider yourself lucky," Harry muttered. "If it hadn't been for the two of you, I'd probably have been in detention every day."
He probably wouldn't have told anyone either. Prior experience had told him that no adult cared about abuse, and kids either didn't care of didn't have the power to change anything. He wouldn't have had the courage Neville had; telling anyone would have embarrassed him.
"I'll have to check if operation sickly sweet is going to work," Hermione said. "But it's better than anything else I've come up with."
It wasn't as easy as they'd hoped to convince the woman that everybody loved her. She had to have seen the hatred on everyone's faces, and she had an unerring sense for when she was being mocked. She became increasingly picky and no matter how good everyone tried to act around her, she always found some way to assign a detention.
It was the Weasley twins who came up with a solution in the end. They stole into her office and replaced her blood quill with a fake. It made marks on skin just as the blood quill did, but there was no pain and no lasting damage.
The word was soon spread; fake pain when using the quill, or she would return to using the real one. Even the Slytherins didn't betray them on this. With the news that Voldemort was out and recruiting, Umbridge assumed that every one of them was dark.
It turned out that the majority of the detentions had been going to the Slytherins and Griffyndors. The Hufflepuffs were too quiet and the Ravenclaws were smart enough to pretend. The Griffindors were too likely to say things that got them in trouble. The Slytherins were in trouble simply by virtue of what house they were in.
There was an unspoken agreement among the houses that no one would say anything.
For the first time, Harry noticed looks of respect from some of the Slytherins. He didn't know why; it was the Weasleys who had come up with the idea. He'd just lent them his invisibility cloak.
Somehow, by virtue of being leader the successes of the group were being attributed to him.
Slytherin membership in Dumbledore's army grew; after a month there were now fourteen Slytherins. They were still dwarfed in number by the other houses, but Harry liked to think that their efforts were part of what was slowly winning the Slytherins to his side.
Harry didn't understand why Steven had brought his guitar to the Defense meeting.
His fingers danced across the strings for a moment, and he started singing. "I can teach you how to be strong, in the real way, and I know that we can be strong, in the real way."
"I want to inspire you. I want to be you rock and when I talk it lights a fire in you."
The song went on for several verses. It should have been stupid, but as Harry looked around at the faces of the people in the group he could see something in their expressions, something he'd never seen before.
This is what Fudge was afraid of, Harry thought. People who could think for themselves and were brave enough to pick up their wands and try to make a difference.
He didn't know if the song inspired him, but it did make him proud of the people around him.
The worst thing about it was that it stuck in his head for days afterwards. Sometimes he would hear classmates in the halls humming it absently under their breath.
It drove Umbridge crazy; she asked student after student where the song came from, but no one claimed to know.
After a week, Harry even began to notice students who weren't in Dumbledore's army humming the song. They'd heard it from classmates often enough that they were humming it themselves.
The funny thing was that in a way it really did seem to light a fire in his classmates. They were working harder than ever at their spells, and Harry didn't see much goofing off if any. A new seriousness seemed to settle on everyone's faces.
Hermione had the idea to use fake galleons to summon everyone to meetings with, and the times were changed randomly. The last thing they needed was for Umbridge or even a teacher to notice what they were doing.
Keeping Filch occupied turned out to be the hardest part. He and Mrs. Norris were growing convinced that there was a conspiracy at the school. The Weasley twins delighted in keeping him in the dark.
There had been a time when they would have pranked him even if they'd known it would get everyone in trouble. Now though they contented themselves with the knowledge that they were fooling him. The sniggers they made in his direction probably contributed to his growing paranoia and anger.
Still, the very fact that they were toning down their pranks was making some of the teachers suspicious. Snape in particular kept making sharp glances in their direction.
Detentions in classes actually went down; everyone was afraid to be the one student whose acting was so poor that they revealed the fake blood quill. The wrath of the entire student body would be worse than what Umbridge could do to them.
The horrible thing as far as Harry was concerned was that the decreased number of detentions would make it look like Umbridge was a good administrator on paper. She walked around the grounds with a pleased, supercilious smile.
Still, she managed to appear behind students with a "hem, hem" often enough that Steven and Hermione were sometimes being run ragged keeping people from talking about things where she could hear.
Their defense group was better at it than everyone else, but it was still an effort.
Still, the knowledge that they were doing something forbidden right under her nose was deeply satisfying. Harry had to force himself not to smirk every time he saw her.
Cedric Diggory proved to be one of their most valuable assets. He was in seventh year, and the number of spells he knew astonished Harry. He had access to parts of the library that Hermione couldn't get to also.
The twins were also in seventh year, and they were diabolically good at creating new spells and new ways of using old spells.
Harry didn't understand how they did it. They were attending school themselves and practically teaching classes. Of course, he found that as he helped younger classmates with their spells, his own understanding of magic grew stronger.
Everyone was getting more and more serious about the classes as news from the outside slowly trickled in. The Ministry was raiding more and more people's homes, and some corrupt Ministry officials were taking things, claiming they were contraband when they were really innocent items.
Imprisonment to Azkaban was getting more frequent, and there were reports of ordinary wizards clashing with Aurors in the streets. No one saw the wizards afterwards, and noone knew what had happened to them.
People were getting scared, and the Death Eaters were changing their message. A new group had started dropped pamphlets all over Diagon Alley. They claimed to be a new political party dedicated to standing up against the Ministry.
They used coded language to speak against not just against the Ministry, but against other groups. They claimed to be for "traditional values." They said they'd restore justice to the Wizarding public and they'd make times good again.
The pamplets had prompted another round of purges by the Ministry, which had only made the new party more popular.
If the Ministry continued what they were doing, they might as well hand the country over to Voldemort on a silver platter.
Whatever happened, Harry meant to have his people as ready as he could.