The Deku Scrubs were among the first concepts I had before writing this story, long before I had any idea of what I planned to do. I'm a bit of a fashion history nerd, so the idea of a tribe of Deku Scrubs that took cues from European fashion-in this case 17th century German-was incredibly appealing to me. If you want a visual for these NPCs (which won't all be appearing just yet), I've got an illustration up on the garden-eel-draws tumblr (just check the personal fanart tag on the handy navigation post)! Also, I've posted the top half of my map for the Hogwarts grounds, so maybe take a look-see!

Content warning for a mention of food restriction in this chapter.

Red fought the urge to return Snape's sneer as the man loomed over him. He knew his potion was purple instead of cyan. He knew it was supposed to be calmly simmering instead of sending up froth. If the bloody wanker would shut up for five seconds, Red would have admitted this. Instead, he kept his lips buttoned and his twitching sword-hand firmly at his side while he tuned out whatever the Greasy Bat was going on about.

"Potter!" Snape said sharply.

Startled into listening, Red looked up from his cauldron.

"Are you so consumed by your own ego that you can't listen when you're being directly addressed?" Snape asked. "Why have you not turned this to a medium heat, added the Doxy eggs, and stirred it thrice counterclockwise?"

Red inhaled slowly through his nose instead of throwing something at Snape's stupid face. "I'm sorry, sir. I'll get right on it," he mumbled. He already had detention with McGonagall that evening; he wasn't in the mood to earn another quite so soon. On top of that, Blue was angry at him for getting all of them shocked, then shot the day before. If Red earned the Harrys a detention from Snape, he shuddered to think what Blue's payback would be.

"Five points from Gryffindor for your tone, Potter," Snape declared. Red's expression briefly turned murderous before he changed it into a pained grimace. "If you don't follow my instructions within the next minute, I'll see you in detention," the Potions Master continued. "Why is your cauldron still at a full boil, Mister Potter?"

Red silently turned the flames under his cauldron down and started counting out pickled Doxy eggs. As he did this, Snape continued to stand over him. 'I will not kick my cauldron over. I will not kick my cauldron over,' Red mentally chanted. He dropped the tiny eggs in one by one, his skin prickling under Snape's unrelenting stare. With forced care, he picked up his stirring rod and gave his potion three stirs widdershins. The potion slowly lost its purplish tint, inching closer to royal blue.

Snape still didn't leave.

"Thank you, Professor," Red bit out. He didn't trust himself to say any more.

"If you had followed the steps written clearly on the blackboard, I wouldn't have had to waste time repeating them to you," Snape sniffed. "Five points for taking instruction time from your classmates." The man swept away.

Red made a frustrated strangling motion with outstretched hands once the man's back was turned. This was the third test of patience he'd had to endure in the past forty minutes, and probably not the last he'd have to suffer for that class period. So far, he and the other Harrys had lost Gryffindor thirty-five points for their "tone", "expression", or "ineptitude".

"Ohhh my God," he breathed into the cool smoke drifting up from his cauldron. "Just make it end." Snape had cranked up the level of horribleness in torturing his least favorite student since the bombing incident, and it was absolutely maddening. Red didn't think he'd ever been so close to smashing something before—not even when Dudley was having one of his more obnoxious birthday tantrums.

He took a deep breath and rubbed at his eyes. The night before, he'd had an awful dream that he'd gotten attacked by Moblins whose weapons had done real damage. An arrow had pinned his leg to the floor, a spear had gone through his gut, and a single squeeze of one monster's meaty hand had broken his arm. He'd woken up when a sword-wielding Moblin had cut his head off and lain awake in bed after that. Then he'd had to troop off to Potions while half-asleep, because the evil mastermind behind the scheduling system had assigned him Potions first on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

"I said chop your frost root, not dice," he heard Snape hiss. The Great Bat was hovering over Green now. "Must I assign you detention to show you the difference?"

Green's left eye twitched. "No, Professor," he said dully. He swept aside his incorrectly cut roots and then began chopping a new set.

"And you!" Snape swooped upon Yellow, whose arms jumped up to protect his face. "Five points from Gryffindor for your dramatics," the man pronounced. "Stop trembling while stirring, or your potion might chill the whole classroom."

'He's trembling because you're a bullying dirtbag who's twice his size,' Red mentally growled. 'Gee, I wonder if the kid who flinches like he expects to be hit…expects to be hit? "Dramatics," my bony arse.'

He tended to his potion like a robot, internally screaming but not wanting to drag his brothers down with him by causing a scene. After adding his frost root, he flexed his right hand, wondering what harm could come of him heading out to the Forbidden Forest at lunch to work out his anger on the trees. They were just trees, right? They could grow back.

"Potter, this is a very bad idea."

"No, a bad idea is picking on four people who can all talk to snakes."

"You can't just set a bunch of snakes on a professor!"

Blue stopped and turned around. "Why not? You set a snake on me last year!"

"I'm a pureblood, a Slytherin, and a Malfoy, Potter. Of course I can do it." Draco crossed his arms. "You're a Gryffindor half-blood with barely any influence beyond your fame. If you get caught, you'll be expelled."

"Malfoy." Blue stepped toward him with an expression of disturbing calm. Draco edged backward. "I have had it up to here—" Blue indicated this level as being at Draco's height. "—with thick-headed nonsense today. Snape already filled that quota for you."

"What? I'm not being thick—"

"Hermione Granger has the highest grades in every class but Potions, yet you look down on her because her 'blood is impure'." The end of that sentence was spoken with such sarcastic derision that it didn't sound right coming from a Potter's mouth. "If you insist on being a blood-supremacist moron, please keep your foul ideas downwind." He stalked away, toward the Forbidden Forest.

'What is wrong with him? Why does he keep calling me an idiot?' Draco thought with annoyance. Everyone with an ounce of brains knew that purebloods had the strongest magic. Breeding with Muggles and Mudbloods only diluted that magic; it was common enough knowledge that even Potter should have known that.

He followed after the Muggle-loving cretin anyway. With his usual bodyguards displeased with him, sticking close to a Potter was the safest way to travel. Moblins and Wizzrobes were too big and magic-resistant for even teachers to fight without help, let alone a younger student like Draco.

"Are you going to bring it up again?" Blue growled once Draco had caught up.

Draco sighed. "I'll stop trying to make you see reason for now."

"Ha! 'Reason.' Right," Blue said wryly. "You only think it's sensible because you've never seen how ninety-nine percent of humanity lives, but whatever." He squinted into the Forbidden Forest as they neared the tree-line.

"What do you mean, 'ninety-nine percent'?" Draco demanded. "There are at least five-hundred million witches and wizards in the world! How many Muggles can there be?"

Blue laughed. "A whole five-hundred million, you say? Oh, you're precious."

Draco scowled. First that Granger girl told him that magical people didn't question things enough, and now Blue was laughing at him for not knowing how many magicless wastes of space there were in the world! "Stop giggling, then, and tell me!" he snapped. Malfoys were not to be kept out of the loop.

"There are five and a half billion Muggles and counting," Blue said with a delighted smile. He looked like Draco had just made his day. "Billions, and people are having babies all over the place. There are over fifty million Muggles in Britain alone!"

Draco stopped in his tracks. There were that many Muggles? He couldn't fathom so many people existing at once. How had the Dark Lord intended to cleanse the world when such a ridiculous number of Muggles populated it? He'd known magical people were a minority—that was what made them, especially purebloods, so special—but he hadn't been aware of just how vastly outnumbered they were. There were three thousand magical citizens of Britain, with four hundred being pureblood and even fewer coming from families that had been pure for more than a century. How were they to defeat fifty million Muggles, even if the vermin had no magic?

"Muggles have mastered electricity. They've gone to the moon! They're exploring space and the deepest reaches of the oceans without any magic at all, just maths and machinery. They have devices that can calculate the most wildly complicated mathematical problems in minutes," Blue sang. "They've invented weapons that can wipe entire cities off the map. Tens of thousands of people gone, just like that." He snapped his fingers. "In fact, there was a big stand-off about it for decades after World War Two. There were all sorts of nuclear tests to make those bombs as big and scary as possible. One atomic bomb could probably wipe out half of Scotland, by now."

"No, that can't be!" Draco shook his head fervently. "It's impossible to make a Muggle explosive that powerful. You can't pack that much gunpowder into something. It'd collapse under its own weight before you could do anything with it!" Potter was surely pulling this story out of his arse, just to mess with him. Father would have said something if Muggles were capable of such fantastic feats. There was no way that non-magical beings, even if there were as many of them as Potter claimed, could come up with a weapon more devastating than Fiendfyre!

Blue's look of spiteful joy only brightened. "I can explain the basics of how it works, if you like," he declared. The boy launched into a lecture on things Draco had never heard of—atoms and protons and "nuclear force", and other things that demonstrated there was a scarily vast field of knowledge that no one had ever mentioned to him before.

"So Muggles can…they can break the rules of magic?" he asked dazedly. His brain was struggling to come up with mental pictures for all the things Blue had told him and failing miserably. Such concepts were simply inconceivable; how on earth had Muggles managed to come up with them? "They can shatter something at its most basic level, and create an explosion large enough to destroy a small country?"

"If that's the only way you can understand it, yeah," Blue confirmed. "Maybe, if you haven't reverted to being a total arse next year, I can bring some Muggle science and history books to school for you to read. If your dad thinks he and his friends can just take over the world, wait till he hears what kind of casualties everyone suffered during World War Two. Russia alone lost over a million soldiers, and that's from the pea-shooters they were using back then!"

Draco shook his head. He couldn't believe this, coming from a Potter's mouth—especially this Potter. He'd have to confirm with someone else who'd been Muggle-raised.

'The Granger girl is a good choice. She never misses a chance to give a lecture and she's practically a Muggle herself,' he thought. She also didn't seem like much of a liar, either, though that didn't mean he'd take everything she said as fact. He was still dubious about Blue's far-fetched claims, even if it was depressingly possible that they weren't as exaggerated as they sounded.

"I'll consider your story," he said decisively. "It sounds ridiculous, and I'm sure you were making those things about 'protons' and 'electrical charges' up, but I won't immediately toss it out because you spoke with such certainty that I suspect there may have been some truth mixed in."

Blue grinned, the expression showing just a little too much of his teeth, "Good luck finding someone who can disprove it, with your oh-so-pureblood network of informants." He strode into the forest and started checking under rocks.

"You're going to get bitten, Parseltongue or not," Draco warned. "A snake could leap out at you before you get the chance to talk to it."

Blue rolled his eyes. "I won't get bitten."

"Yes you will!"

"No I won't!"

"Father had me read a book about the snakes Salazar Slytherin kept, so I'm quite sure I know better than you!"

"Well, I've been tending my aunt's garden since I was old enough to plant the flower bulbs right, and I've run into plenty of snakes. Some of them were venomous and I dealt with them just fine despite not knowing I could talk to them," Blue countered. "I might not have as much book-knowledge as you yet, but I sure have a lot more real-world experience."

"You garden?" Draco asked in surprise. He wouldn't have taken his Quidditch rival for a horticulturist. "I didn't think you had the patience."

Blue shrugged before peering under the next rock. "I didn't at first, but I like having lunch and dinner, so I learned."

What did having lunch have to do with gardening? Draco spent a minute trying to make connections, but none came to mind. It was like asking what the price of turnips had to do with dragons. "I don't understand your meaning, Potter," he said. "Was that some sort of Muggle riddle?"

The Gryffindor peered at him over the rock with an expression that clearly questioned his intelligence. "A riddle? Who do you think I am, Trelawney? I don't speak in riddles."

"Of course it was a riddle." Draco rolled his eyes. Even the smart Potter lacked intelligence, it seemed. "Why would gardening have anything to do with having meals? Surely you aren't so destitute that you have to grow your own crops."

Blue stopped in front of the next cluster of rocks and then stood straight. "Haven't you ever heard of doing chores?" he asked, now appearing as puzzled as Draco. "I know you're too spoiled to have done any yourself, but surely you at least know of them."

"I've learned about how lesser families live, yes," Draco said impatiently. "I'm still waiting for an answer, Potter."

"If you don't do your chores, you don't get to eat," Blue stated with confused slowness. "Aren't chores what you do to earn your keep? Why are you looking at me like that?"

Draco stared at Blue like he'd never seen him before. "Even the Weasels get food, and they've hardly got two Galleons to rub together," he said. "Doing chores to eat? That's utterly preposterous. Is this another Muggle thing you're making up?"

Blue wore a disturbed frown. "I'm not making it up at all, but…is it really that unusual?" he asked. "I mean, I get breakfast by default, since I'd pass out at some point if I didn't eat anything at all, so I'm not going completely hungry. Still, though, nobody does chores to get all three meals?"

"Potter, if you're playing a joke, it's time to stop," Draco scolded. "It isn't funny."

Blue blinked and shook his head slightly. "Right, just a joke." He flashed Draco a stiff smile. "I have an odder sense of humor than I thought, I guess." The boy ran off in search of more rocks.

A sense of disquiet nested in Draco's gut as he watched the Potter flee. "'Earn your keep'?" he repeated to himself. That sounded like something Father would say to an incompetent house-elf. Potter wouldn't have made that phrase up; it didn't sound natural to him. "Blue, who told you that—?"

A startled grunt from Blue cut him off. "Oof! What the hell?" Blue staggered back from the space between two trees, a hand clapped to his nose. "There's an invisible wall here!" he said indignantly. "The barrier stretches all the way to Hogsmeade, and there's a wall here!" The boy kicked the air in front of him, causing a visible ripple to radiate through the unseen barrier. "Bloody rude, if you ask me!"

"Just because the wards reach all the way to Hogsmeade, that doesn't mean they've expanded in a perfect circle," Draco pointed out. He stepped up to the wall and ran his fingers across it. Strangely, it felt like sliding his hand over tough, ropy vines.

"Why wouldn't they have?" Blue knocked on the barrier. "Vaati wouldn't consider Hogsmeade anything special. If his spell were weakened, don't you think it would weaken in all directions?"

"Not necessarily; he might have anchored it to places where people live, rather than the landscape in general," Draco said. "If it did expand in all directions, that doesn't explain why we can't move past this point."

"Maybe it's a ward within the wards?" Blue switched his normal glasses out with his magical set. "Whoa," he gasped. "That definitely isn't the same barrier."

Draco put on his own Hylian spectacles. The empty space in front of him abruptly became a towering blockade of vines that stuck straight out of the ground like crooked spears. They writhed gently with a quiet, slimy sound that sent a wave of goosebumps over his skin.

"It's as if the forest put up a wall," Blue mused. He rapped his knuckles on the nearest vine, causing it and its neighbors to wiggle synchronously for a moment. "I would bet something Hylian is going on in there. Like the cave, or the temple. How do we get in, though? Do you think Professor Sprout would have any ideas?"

Draco grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him away from the strange barrier. "I haven't even started working off the detentions Professor Snape assigned me! We can't go treasure-hunting now!"

"I have a detention tonight because of the death temple," Blue admitted. "We can still check things out, though. Maybe—" He flinched violently, as though something had collided with him. "Ow! Which one of me is getting hit?" His head jerked to the side. "OW! Damn it, why do we keep knocked over the head?"

Draco observed the boy's twitching and swearing for a few seconds, unable to get accustomed to the idea that all of the Potters felt pain at the same time. It was such an unsettling, unnatural phenomenon to watch in action. Father had told him of Dark curses that did such things, though he was forbidden to learn them until he turned seventeen. "Has Red gone to bother the Deku Scrubs again?" he asked tentatively.

Blue cursed as an imaginary projectile hit him in the shoulder and then snarled, "He'd better not have, or the first adder I find is going to his bed." The boy took off toward the site of their last Care of Magical Creatures lesson at a full sprint.

'I'm going to become an athlete if I keep company with Lions, aren't I?' Malfoy mentally groaned before taking off after him. Though he wasn't fit, his legs were long enough that he managed to close the distance between him and the shorter boy.

"Shielding spells won't defend you from Octoroks, let alone these things!" he shouted at Blue. "What do you plan to do, get shot yourself?"

"I don't know any defensive spells, anyway!" Blue called back. "I'll just use my sword!"

"You really should have asked to borrow Ron's shield before you—eep!" Yellow ducked a nut aimed at his head.

"I was trying to keep all of you from getting involved," Harry huffed. A Deku seed bounced off of his raised blade and returned to sender. The Deku Scrub hopped out of its burrow and began running off.

"No you don't!" Red smacked the Scrub silly with his sword and tossed it onto the heap. They'd taken out six of the buggers so far. "Why wouldn't we want to get involved?" he asked Harry. "This is fun!"

"No, this is stupid, but I wanted to check it out because I was curious," Harry said dryly. He blocked another Deku seed, but it ricocheted at the wrong angle. "Yellow said something about 'funny-looking flowers' showing up in his vision—" He dodged a nut he couldn't block and then ducked another shot meant for his head. "—and I'm pretty sure Deku Scrubs don't usually gather around one spot like this, so I figured there was something weird going on."

"Blue's going to be maaad," Red said in sing-song. When Yellow knocked a Scrub from its burrow, Red brought the flat of his sword down on its leafy head. "I'm glad it's you and not me!"

As he spoke, Blue came charging out of nowhere with Malfoy in tow. "Red, if you decided to have another go at these things—"

"My fault! It's my fault, so don't strangle him," Harry cried. He hopped over a seed from the lead Deku Scrub, identifiable by its blue petals and the crown of leaves sticking up from its forehead. That one had the most vicious shots. He'd caught one in the shoulder some minutes before and the joint was still numb. "I was being an idiot first, and then everyone else showed up. Don't tell Hermione!"

"If you snuck off from lunch, I'm sure she already knows you were off being an idiot," Blue quipped. "It's harder to disappear from the Gryffindor dining room than the Great Hall." He stepped into the Deku Scrubs' range with his sword at the ready, while Malfoy hung back.

"You can all just run away and you'll stop getting hit, you know," the Slytherin called out. "Why do you insist on collecting bruises?"

"Because we only have two left to take out!" Harry reflected another nut successfully and Red took care of the running Scrub. "One left!"

"Got it!" Blue held up his sword to block the seed arcing toward him. It bounced off the blade with a clang and then followed its previous path back to the crowned Deku Scrub.

"Wait! Please don't hurt me!" the creature squealed in a high-pitched, ululating voice. It raised its long, thin arms defensively as Red approached it with his sword at the ready.

"Wait a second, Red." Harry held out his hand to his brother and looked down at the Deku Scrub. "I think it wants to talk."

The wooden creature's yellow eyes narrowed and it hopped fully out of its bud to put its hands on its hips. "I am not an 'it'! I'm a 'she'! Can't you tell?"

Harry blushed. The light blue petals and pale leaves forming clothing around the scrub's body did resemble a dress. In his defense, he hadn't been able to see the skirt while she'd been half-tucked in her burrow. "Er, sorry. You're the first Deku Scrub I've ever spoken to." She was, at least, the first one he had met on his own terms instead of seeing in some foggy, sword-related memory. Either Deku Scrubs were more humanoid and flowery than he thought, or she was of a very different court than the one he remembered. "Why are all of you sitting here? Do you live nearby?"

"I don't know! We were just taken away one day and nothing around here looks like Hyrule!" the Deku Scrub wailed. "The shadow told us we had to guard the forest for him if we ever wanted to get back!"

"How can you guard a whole forest?" Harry looked at all the empty space on either side of the Scrubs' buds. "You're good shots, but there are only ten of you."

There was a tap on his shoulder. Harry glanced over to see Blue wearing his magic glasses—or would those be Lenses of Truth? "What is it?"

"I'm not sure what you two have been talking about, since it's all been in Hylian, but if you put your glasses on it'll probably make more sense," Blue whispered in his ear. "Just saying."

"Okay, then." Harry summoned up his own magic spectacles and switched them with his normal ones. When a great wall of wiggling vines suddenly appeared around the lead Deku Scrub, with a gap where the creatures had been sitting, realization dawned on him. "Ohhh, now I get it." He shot a glare at Red. "Why didn't you tell me there was a great big wall there? You've been able to see it this whole time!"

"You couldn't see that?" Red asked in surprise. "Why'd you come out here, then? To test your dodgeball skills?"

Harry sighed and returned his attention to the Deku Scrub girl. "So you've been defending this spot because Shadow-me told you to?" he asked. At her nod, he inquired, "Why? What are you guarding?"

"There's a strange temple hidden beyond this fence. It looks like it was taken from another place than we were," she said. "It's a hiding place for something, but we were never told what, only that our people would suffer if we left this place undefended." She sank halfway into her burrow. "I just want to go home," she said miserably. "I don't know what happened to Mother and Father and everyone else. There was just a tornado, and then I was in this forest full of strange Lynels and furry Skulltulas with only a few of my guards for company." She regarded the pile of dazed Deku Scrubs (who had mostly come to by now) and ducked farther into her bud. "I think my people might be lost in the forest or trapped inside that ancient building, but I can't go and I can't send my guards because we'll be punished if we leave."

Harry looked past the girl, into the shadowy darkness of the forest beyond the vine barrier. With McGonagall on watch for suspicious behavior and Snape feeling especially vindictive toward him, diving right into the next dungeon wasn't such a great idea. Still, though…His gaze fell to the Deku Scrub quivering in front of him and he winced guiltily. How terrible would it be of him not to help someone who so clearly needed it? He had a magic sword, he had (kind of) the memories of past Heroes, and he knew what to do because he'd already done it twice before. He couldn't not help!

"Don't do it, Potter." Malfoy's nasal voice interrupted his ruminations. The blond was giving him an exasperated scowl. "I can tell from your expression that you plan on doing something ill-conceived. You'll get yourself kicked out of Hogwarts if you don't stop to let the teachers calm down first."

"But we can help her now," Harry protested. "You'd rather we sat around and waited while she and her guards are stuck out here, homeless? They got kidnapped from their own time!"

Malfoy was unmoved. "If they've been here this long, they can wait another few weeks. You won't be able to help anyone if you're expelled, and I don't fancy being trapped at Hogwarts for the rest of my life because the Golden Boy can't save the day."

"Listen to your inner Hermione, Green," Blue said. "When the fate of the world is on the line, nothing is worse than being expelled."

Red sauntered up. "Who cares about getting kicked out? It's not like they can send us home with the castle still locked up in Vaati's barrier," he declared. "I say we should help 'em."

"We can still get booted out after we fix the curse, though, and I want to learn magic," Yellow argued. In a quieter voice, he added, "I don't want to live with the Dursleys year-round again, Green."

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. After taking a deep breath, he told the crowned Deku Scrub, "We're in a lot of trouble with the people back at the castle right now, so it'll be a while before we can help. We will do our best, though, once we can."

The girl, who'd been watching the boys' discussion with confusion, perked up. "You'll help?" she asked hopefully.

"Once we're sure it won't get us kicked out of the castle, yes," he said. "We have to go back there now, since our break is almost over. Could you tell me your name, though, before we leave?"

"Oh, of course!" The Deku Scrub leapt to her feet and gave a curtsy. "I am Princess Belle of the Kokiri Isle Deku Court." She flicked one of the strands of bluebell flowers that poked out from under her coif of large petals and leaves. "And who are you, kind Hylian?"

"I'm Harry, and so are all the others who look like me. Our sword split us into four," he said, gesturing toward his brothers. "The blond one is Malfoy. He's kind of an arse, but he's helpful sometimes."

"Well, thank you, Harrys and Malfoy, for agreeing to help us." The princess stepped into her bud and then paused. "We're sorry for shooting you earlier. The shadow told us to fire extra hard at anyone who looked like him, but more colorful."

Harry smiled at the girl, who he suspected was probably about his age or younger. "It's okay. My brothers and I bounced those shots back, so I'd say we're even."

She returned his smile with her tubular mouth and then dropped into her burrow. Her guards sidled up, having recovered from Red's smacks, and then became a protective line of green flowers on either side of their princess.

For anyone curious, Kokiri Isle is the same lake island the Korok forest is on in Breath of the Wild, but imagine the island being a lot bigger with a broader "moat" that one needs to sail across. I'll mostly be using the Breath of the Wild map for Hyrule in this story, but making modifications here and there.