Hey y'all! As always, I apologize for how frickin long it takes me to tap these things out. (If you read any of my other stories, you know the struggle). That said, I have no intention of giving up on this story; I have large, overarching plot goals for it, so that, at least, is good. I also want to apologize if I've misrepresented the British higher learning system; I'm only really familiar with the one we've got here in the U.S. and so H.U.M.M. is modeled after the American way (meaning broken up into departments with core and major requirements and courses divided into the 100, 200 and 300 levels). If anyone would like to enlighten me as to how the British or international system (if there is one) works, I'd appreciate it a lot (I'm always curious about that type of thing), but I'm going to stick with my native structure for this story.

If you spot typos or inconsistencies, let me know so I can fix them please :)

Finally, thank you so much if you've followed, favorited or reviewed! Y'all are awesome, and I hope you like the chapter.

CHAPTER 3: DRUGS, POTIONS, PLANTS AND FOOD

Harry arrived at the edge of the Forbidden Forest at 5:48 the next morning, glamour firmly in place, the same ratty cloak nestled close around his limbs. Dew soaked through the thin mesh of his sneakers, and, despite the darkness, the thick, white ropes of Harry's breath were still visible as they steamed out into the greater body of mist, which carried the sweet and meaty scent of the wood stoves in the castle kitchens.

With three layers of clothing and his hands stuffed deep into robe pockets, only his face came into direct contact with the frigid air, but it still made his lungs hitch. So bloody fucking cold. A damp hope swirled in his mind that it would be warmer in the forest with the trees to act as a windshield. It wasn't, though. If anything, it was colder, what with the condensation slumping off the branches every few seconds to land on his head in heavy, brain-freezing drops. Harry spared a moment to glare upwards at the canopy as he dodged around the trunks; he couldn't actually see it given how all but the lowest boughs were shrouded in mist and darkness, but he knew it was there, and it knew he was there. They had a tenuous relationship at best, but, in spite of this frosty welcome, on Harry marched, until he was buried half-a-mile deep in the forest's ancient, sprawling vein-work.

Then he stopped, the same place he'd been yesterday, he was pretty sure, but he still tapped his wand against the thick trunk of the nearest tree to check. Sure enough, the moment the holly tip contacted the bark, a symbol flared up hot and red beneath it — two overlapping X's seemingly engraved in fire.

Harry's face tightened, not from cold this time or even from the wet, but from a simmering revulsion that'd been stewing away beneath his skull for the past two years. Everything about this job reeked. It reeked worse than the old cage of Hedwig's that he kept tucked away in a closet back at his London flat (because he couldn't quite bring himself to throw it out), and every day that passed, the smell only got worse.

"You're early," came a woman's voice, powdered with amusement as its owner slipped out between a pair of trees, roughly four meters from Harry's station. The woman, Mary, was constructed like a brick, middle-aged and graying, but clearly still in shape — ox shape, not hourglass shape.

"I walk fast," Harry said coolly before moving on to matters of business. "Is Jared satisfied?"

"Mmh," said Mary. She took her sweet time about responding as she strolled around and examined the various trees, a thick hand laid on a trunk here, a brush of fingers there. Harry highly doubted she was actually finding anything of interest; she just enjoyed testing her power over him. How long could little Harry stay still and silent? Let's put him in a jar and find out — after all, he's only saved the world seven bloody times! Shouldn't that have won him some small, sad piece of respect? Even with these people? But evidently it didn't.

"He is," Mary continued as if she were oblivious to the angry froth slamming against the back of Harry's throat, "but his cousin's not. Paranoid." She shrugged and then turned her light-brown eyes back on Harry. "It'll do, though. Jared will convince him."

"Good," Harry said, wondering when he'd started considering this kind of news anything less than awful. "So am I done here?"

The woman turned from where she'd been picking at an offending patch of moss on one of the trunks. Her eyebrows slanted high. "No. No, definitely not." She seemed genuinely surprised that he'd ever have even considered that. "You're going to be our fence."

"What?!"

"Well... it seems you have a place to stay here, and I have to admit that your glamour is an impressive piece of work. Good job there, Harry. So Jared decided it would be unnecessarily risky to put another man in place when he's already got one so well situated. I agree. It makes perfect sense for you to be the fence."

Harry could feel his jawbone turning to iron. "No."

Mary smiled at him in a vaguely sad way, which Harry found extremely condescending. "Dear, we've been through this before."

"It's my old school. You can't ask me to do that."

"You're only selling to willing participants," Mary pointed out.

Harry scoffed. "Yeah. But how willing were they the first time?"

"That's not your problem, Harry," she said, empathetic smile still in place. "By the time you come into the picture, they're asking for it; you're just meeting the demand."

"It must be nice to be able to think about it all so bloody clinically," he spat back at her, rejecting her sympathy, "I'm afraid I can't when we're the ones who created the damn demand. It's fucked up, and you know it."

"And it doesn't matter!" Mary snapped. Her smile was gone, replaced by the frustration she'd been hiding underneath. Everyone in this business was always frustrated. "You have your reasons for being involved; I have mine; Jared and Frank have theirs. We're all doing it, moral or not, so get on board, stop throwing a bloody hissy fit every time you get a new assignment, or eat the bloody consequences!"

Harry stared at her without unlocking his jaw. There was no witty retort to launch at her, no righteous sermon to jump into, because, much as he loathed it, she was right. He'd thought up a hundred ways to get out over the past two years, possibly a thousand, but when it came right down to it, they were nothing more than so many useless pipe dreams. Jared and Frank and the whole bloody lot of them had him right where they wanted, and he was stuck there, bloody fucking stuck like a dog on a leash, and he could whine as much as he liked, but everyone in the ring already knew that what they were doing was wrong; they just didn't care, or else, if they cared, they'd packed those thoughts tightly away in the least accessible pockets of their brains. Maybe a few of them were even like Harry. The whole lot, though, could put up with life in the gray zone as long as the Galleons kept coming. The money, undeniably, was good… or it would've been if each Knut didn't reek of the lint-coated addict's pocket that it came from.

Mary correctly interpreted Harry's silence as the reluctant acceptance that it was. "Alright then," she said, for the most part regaining her calm, a fainter version of the motherly smile returning to her lips, "The first shipment should be in this evening. Show up here roughly a half hour after sundown to pick it up, and for god sake, Harry, don't do anything righteously stupid; remember why you're involved in this."

Harry felt his mouth twitch, but he said nothing, acknowledging her statement only with a curt nod as he twisted back around to stomp out of this trunk-made prison. On his march back towards the castle, he could no longer smell the wood smoke, just the ever-present odor of dead leaves piled too deep, slowly decaying in their mass graves.

…

Hermione might've been overworked and vaguely dreading every class she'd have to teach that day, but she couldn't help the happy sigh that slipped from her lungs as she stepped into the dungeon. Her long-term potions projects were warm in comparison to the frosty morning air and tendrils of steam licked off of their smooth, lumpy, or multicolored surfaces to twine up the walls like exotic, sentient vines. She couldn't say it smelled good — it smelled like dog shit and breakfast cereal mostly — but to Hermione that was the smell of potential, of the infinite possibilities that hid in the pewter depths of an empty cauldron or the roiling mists of a half-cooked death draught. She loved it.

Allowing herself several minutes to wander among her works-in-progress, Hermione admired and sniffed and let the steam open her pores, the stench clear her head, before she settled behind her podium to review her notes for the upcoming lecture.

Thank the lord this was one of her 300-level classes; she couldn't handle the rote boredom of an intro course today.

When her first student arrived, the thin and milky skinned Mr. Harvey Turnville, Hermione dragged herself back into go-mode. He was the one with the atrocious grammar (his essays were like stomach ulcers to read), but his lab work was another story altogether.

"Morning, Professor G," he mumbled with an acknowledging nod as he settled his leather satchel carefully onto the tabletop. Most of her students settled things carefully onto the tabletops here; there were often stray salamander tongues lying about that they were keen to avoid... not to mention suspicious stains and burn marks. If the Ministry ever decided to come in and test the work surfaces for toxicity, Hermione highly doubted they'd pass. That was okay; she had a mean Confundus Charm, and if that didn't work she was sure her students had a few good hexes up their sleeves. It was with this line of thought that Hermione smiled vaguely back at her pupil, wishing she'd had stronger coffee, and returned to scanning her notes. A second bag and a third settled softly into place as the minutes ticked by, and neither time did she bother to look up, but when the fourth bag hit the floor with a decided whump, she figured it couldn't be a class regular. They all knew better.

Eyes sighing upwards, she prepared to tell off the freeloader. She allowed the occasional sit-in during her intro course, but never in either of the 300-levels that she taught, and she was sure this was explained in the course catalog. Inexperience was dangerous when messing with fire and hot metal and the temperamental gastric juices of a potion-in-the-works. It was a liability she couldn't risk when some of the more complicated draughts literally took years to prepare.

"Excuse me," she said, still halfway living in her brain and unable to focus on the student or judge much of anything about him aside from the fact that he was tall (very tall) and wearing plaid. "I don't permit visitors this period. You can come back on Tuesday for my other class, if you'd like, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"Oh, sorry," the student (an American) said in a voice that drawled a bit too much for her liking. She'd never been particularly fond of the American accent; it was naturally so dry that she always felt like they were being a bit insolent when they spoke to her, though she knew logically this wasn't true. From a series of lectures she'd done along the eastern seaboard, she'd become slightly familiarized with American dialects and so such, but she didn't recognize this student's, meaning he most likely wasn't from the east. She catalogued all this in her ever-spinning brain (simply because she couldn't turn off the synapses), and then dismissed it, while the plaid smudge of a student, unaware of any of Hermione's silent musings, continued, "I'm not visiting, though. I transferred from the American Academy of Witchcraft, and they put me in this class."

"Who put you in this class?" Hermione tried to focus her eyes. Where was his face? "Did you fulfill all the prerequisites at your previous school or did you test in?"

"Um…" the plaid smudge said, "I've fulfilled about half the pre-reqs, but officially I guess I tested in."

Apparently Hermione's neurons had better things to do than identify this guy because the image forming on her retinas was still that of a tall, blurry, red-and-brown-checkered popsicle stick. She squinted, aware that she was probably sending off less-than-welcoming, spinster vibes; Ron had always teased her about looking like a sourpuss when she squinted. Then again, who cared what Ron said; he looked like a sourpuss a lot of the time, too. "Come up here, please," Hermione said without missing a beat, all her thoughts easily contained, "I'd like to add you to my list."

Boots clopped on the flagstones as he scooted around the tables to her podium, and finally she managed to fight her lenses to shape properly for sight… which turned out to be a mistake. Agh.

Hermione was a thirty-two-year-old, highly intelligent, and fiercely independent woman, and she had never in her life considered herself "boy crazy," but the student who now stood only feet away from her podium was exactly her type. Until that very moment, she hadn't known she had a type… but she knew now.

He was a good several inches over six feet, and the rest of his body hadn't let that outdo it. It had noticed, and it had compensated accordingly. Hermione had always liked tall. She hadn't known she'd had a thing for shoulders, though, and big hands (he had very nice hands), but that was something else to add to her recently created list of self-discoveries. While he had the stereotypical movie star jawline, the rest of his face was less conventional in its draw: eyes shaped more like those of little kids than adults, high cheekbones, tiny mouth.

Not that any of that mattered.

"I'm Professor Granger," Hermione told him, voice straight and trimmed. She glanced up matter-of-factly, a silent prompt for him to provide his own name.

"Hi," the student said with a one-sided smile. He had a dimple... because, of course, he had to have a dimple. "I'm Sam."

"We use last names here," she reminded him, smiling slightly to make up for the overly cool tone she'd used before. Anyhow, in American culture people were expected to smile more as a simple matter of common courtesy.

"Oh, right. Sorry." If she'd been looking at him, she would've noticed the embarrassed fidgeting of his hands, the apologetic quirk of his itsy-bitsy lips. "Sam Campbell."

"Mr. Campbell," she muttered, waving her wand in a lazy arc towards her bag. A quill popped out along with a tied scroll of parchment, which unwound itself and submitted to the quill's scribbling. "What year are you in?"

"I'm a sophomore."

Hermione nodded. "And do you have the textbook?" she pressed, as business-minded as ever as she flicked her gaze back up at him.

"Not yet," he said (and this time she did note the sheepishness). "I ordered it, but there've been a few... hold ups, I think."

"That's fine. Let me know if it doesn't arrive within the next week. As is, you'll just have to make friends quickly so that you can complete reading assignments." She doubted that would be a large problem. "The rest of the materials, lucky us, are supplied by the school this year. We received a rather generous donation from Mr. Draco Malfoy."

Sam Campbell's eyes hazed for a minute before brightening to a light hazel, and his mouth opened in awe. "You're not Hermione Granger, are you?" he asked, "From the whole thing with Voldemort?"

"Um… yes," Hermione said. She always blushed when people recognized her (it had nothing to do with Sam being exceptionally attractive), and she hated it. "I am that... Yes." Dying to move on to topics where she could properly articulate herself, Hermione cut it off there and said in a rush, "More importantly, though, I'm your potion's professor. I'm glad to have you in my class, Mr. Campbell; now please return to your seat so I can start today's lecture."

Still blushing, loathing both herself and Sam Campbell for it, she watched as he nodded and retraced his steps to the chemically compromised table he'd come from. Then she zeroed her eyes onto her notes, erased any and all students from her mind, and let her frontal lobe inundate itself instead with the subtle, dark, and twisted ways of potion-brewing.

Lost in her love of the art as she dove deeper into the lecture (and never having been particularly self-conscious), Hermione didn't notice that with every line she spoke, every word she wrote, every connection she drew and technique she demonstrated, a new spark lit in the irises of her most recently acquired student, until there weren't individual sparks at all but just a single, steady glow of admiration.

Hermione had some inkling of her own brilliance, but she'd never really understood how it affected other people. Maybe if she had, she would've been able to avoid the pit she was about to fall into.

…

Dean didn't get nervous; what he was, as he paced back and forth in the tiny tower room, was concerned. After all, what if his roommate was one of those dumbass bastards who thought all muggles were like little yappy dogs to stroke and coddle? Or what if he was all rah-rah purebloods? 'Cause that'd suck. In fact, Dean wasn't a big fan of the whole roommate thing in general; he preferred to think of himself as a lone wolf, and an extra dude made it a lot harder to get some alone time with the ladies… of which Dean planned to have many.

Then again, the room itself wasn't so bad. Much nicer than a lotta the motels he'd grown up in. There was one austere window cut into the stone slabs of the castle wall, and the light was more grayish than yellow, but a fat, rag rug hugged the floor like an old friend, and the mattresses were thick and stuffed so full of down that Dean thought they might be about to puke, so, yeah… definitely still homier than a lotta places Dean had called home. He'd make it work. Unless, he thought, wrinkling his nose at the sudden realization, what if his roommate had a pet? Or, maybe worse, what if he was a herbology freak and insisted on keeping five fucking Venomous Tentaculas under his bed?

"It's Tentaculae."

Dean crimped his neck as he snapped it towards the doorway, and so the first expression he made at the guy he'd be sharing his sleeping quarters with for the next eight months was an unhappy scowl. It didn't matter, though, because as it turned out, Dean already knew the guy. He rubbed at his neck and continued to scowl.

The tall American who was slouched in the doorway shrugged with a vaguely amused smile. "Just basic Latin. You know."

"Yeah. Thanks for the lesson," Dean growled, "I thought you weren't gonna go mining in my head? Not that there's not gold up there, but…"

"Well," Sam smirked, slumping into the room and dropping onto his bed, "Look at my side of it here. I was walking up the stairs, minding my own business just like any day, and then I sense this thought cloud floating about in my room. Now, I know I don't have a roommate, and H.U.M.M. doesn't exactly employ dorm cleaners, so naturally, my suspicions were provoked and I had to do some mental snooping to work out whether or not I was gonna have to kick somebody's ass." He tugged his shoes off and glanced up at Dean. "So… what are you doing here?"

"Going through your sock drawer," Dean snorted.

Sam's eyes widened in surprise. "Really? I mean... I guess I have socks to spare, but—"

"No, dumbass! I'm your new roommate."

"Huh," said Sam, eyes slipping shut, "Well, I'm tired."

"Gotta say, you really know how to make a guy feel welcome."

"Welcome," Sam hummed as he lay back to stretch out on the bed and stare up at the ceiling.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Oh, I bet people love you at parties."

"Mmm… I don't go to parties."

"What?" Dean gaped, sinking onto his own mattress. (He'd been right; goose down was the shit). "Man, that is gonna have to change now that you're my roommate. That'd be sad even if you weren't twenty-one."

The guy snorted a laugh at that. "Dude, I got here, like, the same time you did; I haven't exactly had a chance to take names. Plus, college is hard if you haven't noticed. And I'm not twenty-one. This is England, though; is that even the drinking age?"

"Does anyone care?" Dean shrugged, wrinkling his nose, "Anyway, how old are you? You take, like, growth hormones or something? 'Cause, dude, you know that shit messes with your body chemistry, right?"

Sam didn't laugh, but the corners of his mouth stretched in a way that made Dean think he'd come close. "I'm nineteen," the giant said, "and, no—" He gestured down his body. "—this is all pure, Kansas-grown goodness."

"Freak." Dean kicked off his own boots and unzipped his bag in one, rough tug before clawing through it and tossing things onto the floor (step one of moving in). As he tossed, he talked. "I'm making you go to parties anyway," he warned, "I can't have people saying, 'Wow, there goes the kick-ass Dean Winchester guy who I'd totally wanna go talk to except, oh look, he's with that lame roommate of his who we can't risk associating with for fear of losing all social status ever.'"

Sam let his head fall lazily to the side so that his nose was pointing towards Dean. One eyebrow and one corner of his mouth were crooked upwards. "H.U.M.M. has a pretty selective admissions process," he said, "'Cool' doesn't equal 'party animal' here."

"Right. 'Cause obviously the guy who's been here for two days has total authority to say that."

"Says the other guy who's been here two days," Sam mumbled, bringing his hands to cover his face. "Can't we both just be losers for a month or two until you work out the social structure and drag my reluctant ass to the top during your disgusting grab for power?"

"Better, how 'bout I leave your reluctant ass here in this dump."

"Mmh," Sam smiled. Evidently, the hands hadn't blocked out enough of the world because he flipped over to press his face into the pillow as he said, "Sounds good. Hey. Why'd you transfer anyway?" voice now muffled by the pounds of feathers it had to work through.

"What?"

"It's, like, two weeks into the semester. Why'd you transfer?"

"I didn't," Dean grunted, "I wasn't going to college back in the states."

"Working?"

"Yeah. Business that my dad and I run. We get rid of dangerous magical artifacts and monsters and whatnot for all the idiots out there who wouldn't know what magic was if it up and bit 'em in the ass."

"Cool."

"Cool until you're twenty-three and realize you're still living with your damn dad! Yeah. Other than that, totally cool, but the old man and I decided it was time for a little family intervention."

"So you came here?"

"So I got shipped here. Nobody told me 'apart time' meant another fucking continent."

Sam snorted out a down-muted laugh. Dean liked making people laugh in general, but for some reason Sam's laugh made him feel like he'd said something extra witty (which wasn't really true), but he couldn't pretend he was opposed to the feeling. It was dumb, but whatever. He was a funny guy.

"Family drama," Sam nodded, still muffling his words with the damn pillow, "That's kinda why I'm here, too."

"Oh yeah? What happened?"

"Uh… my mom had cancer," he said, "I mean, she'd had it for a while, so it wasn't really a surprise when she died, but… you know. Anyway, family was really important to her, and she wanted me to come over here to be with the remaining relatives. My great aunt lives in England, and my cousin's a T.A. in the Herbology Department here." As if realizing that this was still too heavy for Dean to comfortably comment on, he added, "He's named Neville, and he probably does have five Venomous Tentaculae under his bed, just to put you on your guard."

"Pervert," Dean grumbled.

"What? Me or Neville?"

"You. I keep forgetting that you can creep around in my brain." Dean shuddered as he plucked a particularly foul sock from the bowels of his duffel. "That's some freaky crap, man."

"You're freaky crap," Sam mumbled, "I'm tired."

Dean snorted. "Can't even come up with a decent comeback? Score one for Dean; score zero for the pervert." He held up his hand in a perfect O.

"I'm tired," Sam mumbled again, as if this was a passable excuse for all his flaws.

"Fine," Dean said, flinging the last offending article of clothing onto the heap he'd constructed on the ground. "I'm gonna go hunt down that Percy Weasley dude to switch me out of goddamn Divination, and then I'm gonna find me some pie. You can get your beauty sleep."

He grunted to a standing position and headed for the door. The last thing he heard as he tromped over the threshold was a blurry, "Mmm… pie."

An uninvited smile quirked the corner of Dean's mouth. Mmm… pie indeed. Maybe he wouldn't transfer out of Divination after all.

…

Ron slouched in an armchair with the hollow core of uselessness drilling through his limbs. He supposed he'd been more or less useless for a while now, but back in his one-bed, no-bath flat, that had been the status quo; he'd learned to ignore it. His return to H.U.M.M. had somehow re-awoken those old pains, probably because he wasn't surrounded by other losers anymore. Much as he'd loved Joan, his drunken landlady, and Benjamin, the other unemployed slacker who rented the room across the hall, they couldn't compare to the purposeful activity of one of the world's most prestigious research universities. Back when he'd attended, everybody had always seemed to be doing something exciting and urgent, and as far as Ron could see that hadn't changed.

Hermione spent all day teaching, grading, eating, meeting people, walking from one place to another, answering mail — she even slept with a bloody purpose! — and Harry seemed busy, too, though Merlin only knew what with. He'd been in and out all yesterday, and when he was in, he'd torn into heavy books of some sort while his wand and his quill wrote feverishly, churning out page after page of illegible rubbish (at least, from Ron's distant vantage point it appeared to be illegible rubbish; no doubt in reality it was yet another matter of life or death in which Ron had no part).

Even when the two of them had been gone and it was just Ron slumping around Hermione's cozy, soundproofed chambers, he still felt like the only bum in the castle. He didn't dare to set foot outside in the hallways, but he imagined he could hear the distant buzz and rumble of thousands of walking, talking, breathing, bumbling and busy university students. For the first time in his life, Ron wished he were busy. Well, somewhat busy. He still wasn't keen on getting off his bum and going out into the real, ball-crushing world of the job market, but he bloody well needed to do something!

And then, like flashfloods in the desert, enlightenment struck. He thought he'd considered all housework possibilities yesterday, but, even in the heart of a prestigious university, the possibility that he could learn to be helpful hadn't occurred to him. It did now. He could get busy, lower the dial on everybody's stress meter, and maybe take a step forward in the grand Hermione Plan with a single, wand-stopping blow!

He would learn to cook.

All he needed was to go dig up a house elf and get it to show him the basic moves. If he could work up the guts to mail his mum, maybe he could beg a few cookbooks off her… But, then again, maybe not yet. A house elf was better.

Of course, Hermione could never find out or she'd give him her stern, professor look (the one that they taught all professors in Fine-Points-of-Disapproval School) and start in on the age-worn lecture about exploitation of ignorance. But Ron didn't buy that drivel. The little buggers knew full well what they were doing, and, with the odd exception or two, they loved it with all the fire in their tiny hearts. Not something Ron could relate to. As far as he was concerned, they were all a little off in the head, but if picking lint off blankets and scouring the grout was the highlight of their week, who was he to argue?

As long as Hermione didn't go interrogating the kitchen staff, it would all go down as smoothly as Felix Felicis.

The only real hitch in the plan was that Ron somehow had to get to the kitchens and back without being seen. He wasn't on the "Top 40 Under 40" list like Harry, but he still got recognized a fair bit, and the last thing he needed right now was a rumor going around the castle that Ron Weasley was back at Hogwarts; the trail of crumbs would lead straight back to Hermione, and he'd promised not to jeopardize her job.

Harry, lucky bastard, could pull off a glamour — a pretty bloody good one if Ron was anyone to judge (though he wasn't really) — but Ron had never gotten around to taking those 300-level DADA and TRA courses. The most he could do was turn his eyebrows blue; and that was about as useful as nipples on a Skrewt. However, magically impaired as he might be, his memory worked just fine, and he clearly remembered many a fantastic night spent loafing around the grounds under a certain invisibility cloak. Ron couldn't be certain Harry'd brought it with him, but there was no reason not to look (except, of course, that it was snooping, and Harry probably wouldn't like it), but Harry could shove it. Not like he needed the thing when he had a glamour. So, with a few guilty glances at the armchairs and bookshelves (which frowned back at him and threatened to tattle), he padded over to Harry's rucksack and flipped the lid.

He located the cloak easily enough, bunched up small and shoved into a woolen winter hat that Ron couldn't imagine Harry had ever actually worn given how hideous the thing was. He shook it out and dropped the hat back into Harry's trunk, knocking over an old glasses case in the process. With a sigh, Ron tossed the cloak onto the nearest chair and crouched down to put everything back where he'd found it. He snatched up the glasses case, the faux leather smooth and cool against his hot palm, and was surprised to hear papers rustling. He frowned down into the trunk, but there was no parchment stacked where the case had been, just clothes and Harry's archaic toiletry bag. Frown burrowing deeper into the lines around his mouth, Ron gave the case a little shake, and, sure enough, there was the bloody paper noise again.

There was no excuse for what he did next — it was snooping no matter how you looked at it — but Harry was his friend, and Ron was curious, and so, sweeping the room one final time with guilt-bright eyes, he snapped the case open and looked inside.