The atmosphere at Hogwarts was different — it was subtle, but even so early in the year Dorea could already feel it.
For one thing, the castle felt noticeably less empty now. Magical Britain had been hit hard in the century running up to Secrecy and through the transition, the social unrest continuing for the next century or so afterward, throughout the period the magical population of the Isles dropping substantially. They'd only begun to properly recover by the late 19th, early 20th Centuries...only to slip into decline again when war broke out in the 70s. The nobility had died disproportionately in the conflict with the Death Eaters, as they were whom the Dark Lord mostly pulled recruits from, but an even larger percentage of the population had emigrated to the Continent to escape the chaos, and many of them had never returned. British mages were numerically fewer than once they'd been just in general, but the segments of the population that sent their children to Hogwarts had been especially hard hit, the incoming classes in the late 80s and early 90s literally the smallest they had documentation of.
The castle itself, naturally, predated that decline. The foundation of the structure had been laid in the late 9th Century, but most of the construction had been done later, additions made over the centuries stacked up on top of each other. The last major additions, including the upper floors of the north wing and most of the east wing, had been completed right around the turn of the 17th Century, just under a century before Secrecy — when the average incoming class had been around four hundred, ten times Dorea's class. (Though, the nobility hadn't sent their kids overseas nearly as often back then, so the magical population wasn't literally one-tenth of what it'd been, it was more complicated than that.) And much of the staff at the time had lived at the castle with their families, including the domestic staff — Hogwarts hadn't had elves yet — which had ballooned the resident population up even further. The massive expansion of the castle done then had been absolutely necessary to fit everyone living there, Dorea had read complaints in old documents of the uncomfortably cramped accommodations leading up to the construction.
Hogwarts often seemed eerily empty, in some areas even half-abandoned — because it was.
The increasing class sizes and the additional staff didn't entirely fill up the empty space, of course, but the difference was noticeable. Before, it wouldn't be difficult to walk through the halls in some out-of-the-way corner and not see any signs of life at all, but now you could always hear distant noises, at least, the low rhythm of footsteps coming from somewhere or an indistinct murmur of voices carried through the halls. In the more inhabited areas — in the lower floors or near Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, in patches all along the Grand Staircase, the little sitting rooms scattered around for inter-house groups to socialise in — there were more people around just in general, lingering chatting between classes, card and board games set up here and there, noticeably denser than in previous years. All the younger students around made it seem even noisier than it really was — especially since they tended to move in packs, the dorm supervisors keeping them together for the first couple weeks.
It was hard to put her finger on how it felt different, exactly. Just more...alive, she guessed, a subtle sense of energy running through the whole place, excitement. She was sure she would get used to it eventually, but in the first couple weeks it was almost intoxicating, she couldn't help getting drawn into it a little.
They got their timetables at breakfast on Sunday — this time handed around by the prefects, Snape busy with the first- and second-years on the opposite end of the Slytherin tables. (They'd sat at the back of the room again, Liz didn't like feeling surrounded.) Dorea noticed that her schedule was very regular this time. It'd been pretty common in previous years for classes to jump around, often occurring at different times on different days, as necessary to pack every class session for all seven years into the space of a week, but there was very little of that going on here. Most classes were in double sessions, at the same time twice a week — the exception was Arithmancy and Runes, for which they had single-hour sessions in the afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. (And also Cambrian, for the people who were still taking that.) The only weird classes were Divination and Astronomy. It wasn't unusual for electives to be split up, to fit them in around the core classes, so it wasn't really a surprise that they had a double session of Divination on Monday afternoon, and then a single session Thursday evening. Curiously, they had a double session of Astronomy on Friday afternoon, the expected nighttime period marked for Tuesday — but the room number for the afternoon session was somewhere near Transfiguration, and there was a note on their timetables telling them not to show up at the Astronomy Tower Tuesday night unless explicitly told to in their ordinary class time. She didn't know what was up with that, but okay then, she was hardly going to complain about her sleep not being messed up once a week.
There were room numbers on their time-tables, as per usual, but they'd always been rather superfluous, since they only ever went a few places anyway — now that they had multiple classrooms for each subject, though, they were actually relevant. Since she'd never had to use them before, Dorea had never really noticed how nonsensical the numbering system was. The different wings and towers were all numbered separately, which could get especially confusing around the borders, rooms on opposite sides of the same hallway sometimes marked with different floor numbers. Since the geography of the castle didn't properly fit in three-dimensional space — hallways looping in on themselves, what should be the same physical space somehow holding multiple rooms, places where you might jump from the third floor to the fifth despite staying on level ground the whole time — even numbering things within a single structure could get very complicated. This time several of the room numbers were highlighted different colours, for some reason, she hadn't seen that before.
She figured out what the colour-coding meant after she unrolled the parchment that'd come with her timetable, and discovered it was a map of the castle. Dorea had been under the impression that, due to the confusing multidimensional architecture of the castle, mapping Hogwarts was impossible. The map Sirius and his friends had made when they were students cheated, querying the wards directly and re-drawing the castle precisely as it was every time the map was activated — and even reading that could be very confusing, things sometimes drawn overtop each other, or the same sections depicted in more than one place, the connection between them uncertain. Looking over the map for a moment, Dorea realised that whoever had drawn this also cheated, but in their own way: they'd gotten around the confusing architecture of the castle through simplification, depicting the layout of the areas the students need concern themselves with to get to their classes or the professors' offices and ignoring everything else. It was still confusing in places, some levels needing multiple floor plans to fit everything, arrows on the staircases or sometimes in the middle of hallways marked with a reference to the correct arrow on a different floor plan, requiring the reader to search around for the matching label. There were notes for some of the weirder things, like hallways that led to different places depending on which way you were going — that is, backtracking the same direction you'd come wouldn't necessarily bring you back to where you'd started — or one example of a door leading into one of the new Charms professors' office if you opened it with your right hand, but an unused alchemy lab if you opened it with your left. As much of a mess as Hogwarts was, all the little annotations they'd needed here and there, it wasn't that confusing, whoever'd drawn this hadn't done a bad job.
The colour-coding was in some of the more confusing levels, especially where they'd needed multiple floor plans to fit everything, different sections of the level shaded in different colours. For organisational purposes, Dorea guessed, and to make it easier to give directions — so people could ask, say, how to get to east-three-green, and someone could tell them where to go much more specifically. Not a bad idea even just to make reading the map easier, though Dorea wasn't certain how helpful it would be.
That had been her initial impression anyway — it turned out it was rather more useful than she'd guessed. After breakfast their first Sunday in the castle, they gathered up a good fraction of the study group, and set out to track down their classrooms, so they'd know where the hell they were supposed to be going the next day. As soon as they turned off the Grand Staircase on the first floor, Dorea immediately noticed that the rooms were actually visibly numbered now. Of course, rooms had been numbered before, most of them just didn't have any signs or anything — they hadn't needed to, since the rooms in regular use had been pretty few anyway. The signs were rather nice-looking, carved in wood, the numbers done in fancy-looking (but perfectly legible) calligraphy, complex knotwork along the border, the lines traced over with black paint to improve visibility. Nice, though rather less fine than Dorea might have expected of Hogwarts. Maybe they were only meant to be temporary, until they could finish a more permanent, fancier solution? Whatever, now that the rooms were visibly numbered, it was much easier to find the rooms they were looking for, knocking down the list without too much confusion.
Dorea hadn't noticed that the sections were marked too until Sophie pointed it out: a stripe of blue tile had been set into the middle of the floor, matching the colour this section was shaded on the map. Well then, the number signs and the coloured sections made it much easier to figure out where the hell they were — why hadn't they done this earlier?
The morning of their first day of classes was unexpectedly rainy, the sky over the Great Hall overcast with little flickering distortions where drops hit the roof. Dorea had slept in a little later than she might ordinarily — she didn't really have anything to do before first period, so there was no reason why she shouldn't — so by the time she got up here the Hall was very full, the air thick and heavy with the noise of people chatting, the clinking and clanking of cutlery and tableware. The Hit Wizard team hadn't yet set out for the morning, gathered at the guest table. Sitting with them were a few people wearing plain linen trousers and jackets, standing out against the dramatic black armour and deep blue cloaks of the Hit Wizards — wardcrafters to help contain the acromantulae, maybe? They didn't really have anything better to do, so even after they were done eating they lingered in the Great Hall for a while. Normally they got out of here pretty quickly once they were done, mostly due to how hard all the people around could be on Liz, but apparently the wards on the tables made a big difference, she didn't seem strained at all.
(Liz hardly even reacted to Dorea's presence. She would talk to her when directly addressed like nothing was wrong, but otherwise completely ignored her, like she wasn't even here. It was very weird.)
Their first class was History, held in a new classroom on the first floor, a short walk off the Grand Staircase — which actually required going down a set of stairs after getting off the Grand Staircase at the first landing, because most of the ground floor had double-high ceilings, but it wasn't hard to find. (Dorea was pretty sure this room should overlap with the Great Hall, but Hogwarts was strange like that.) Their new History Professor was Maximilian Ollivander, a scrawny, blond, middle-aged man who'd seem perfectly ordinary where it not for the silvery Seer's eyes common in his family. After quick introductions, Ollivander explained that they'd have to work hard to catch them up before OWLs next year, since Binns had been so bloody useless for so long. There'd be an assigned reading before every class, where they would discuss what they'd just read, and then for the last half-hour of every class they would write a brief essay on the material.
This was explicitly intended as practice for OWLs: in the long answer section of the exam, they'd have a little more time than that to finish, but experience doing that kind of writing without references and under a time constraint would get them better at formulating an argument quickly, which should greatly improve their odds of scoring well. (And not just on the History exam, but the others too.) They'd also be required to use quills for these writing assignments, since they'd have to use the provided quill on the exam, so they might as well get used to it. He claimed his year would probably be harder than fifth-year, the reading assignments requiring more of their time outside class hours — the work load tended to increase on exam years, so he was consciously cramming as much catching up as he could in this year, so as to not eat into their studies in other subjects next year. Also, aware of how much of a burden the reading was going to be, he wouldn't be assigning any homework whatsoever, the only writing they would do in the class itself. Just try to keep up with the reading, and you'll be fine.
He then passed a copy of a book out to each of them with a flick of his wand. These were school copies, he would need them back when they were done — there were multiple books they'd be reading he hadn't included on the booklist, since asking them to each buy a copy and bring them all to Hogwarts to use for just a month or even less would have been ridiculous. And then he immediately started in on a lecture, drawing a picture of what Britain had been like before the Founding of the Wizengamot.
Dorea didn't know a whole lot about the period, honestly. She had been told about it as a little kid, since the Blacks were one of the Seventeen Founders, but those stories had focussed more on old legends about Melisende the Black, a locally famous sorceress the family had sent to represent them. (They hadn't been called the Blacks yet then, Melisende's epithet was a reference to her hair.) She knew the islands had been a patchwork of tiny little Celtic kingdoms, some Romanised to various degrees and others not. About a century after the end of Roman rule, the Angles and Saxons began concerted invasions of the southeast, the various old Celtic groups on the islands gathering on Anglesey to attempt some kind of united response — that assembly, after a millennium and a half of historical development, became the Wizengamot that existed today.
Given that England existed, she would go out on a limb and assume the effort to plan a coordinated response to the invasions hadn't worked out the way they'd hoped. But she really didn't know much about it.
According to Ollivander, her impression of scattered Celtic petty kingdoms was at least partly correct, but not the whole picture. That was definitely the case in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but England — the more thoroughly Romanised areas of it, anyway, the south excluding Cornwall and Devon, and the east coast through Yorkshire — had in some respects remained Roman after the Empire had officially pulled out of the island. The Empire had been very unstable then, due to constant civil wars and conflicts with Germanic tribes, and had no longer had the manpower to spend holding Britain against northern Cambrian (a.k.a. Pictish) and Gaelic raiders — so they'd picked up their troops on the island and reassigned them elsewhere on the Continent, leaving the Wall unmanned and abandoning Britain to its fate. But just because those soldiers were gone didn't mean the provincial administration had simply collapsed overnight: the domestic Roman leadership (often themselves transplanted from elsewhere in the Empire) still had their own resources, their own loyal soldiers, and the allegiance of the more Romanised native tribes, who had their own warriors to help prop up Roman institutions. Almost immediately, they lost the west and the north to the Cambrians, and Cornwall and Devon to the Gaels, but they managed to cling on in the rest of what was now England.
Despite the story that was often told — including in Binns's History class, in fact — Roman Britain hadn't collapsed solely due to external assault, but in large part from internal rebellion. The semi-Romanised tribes allied with the provincial government sometimes had more sympathy with the rest of the Celtic people on the islands, especially among the less thoroughly-converted common people, and the loss of support from Rome had reduced the attractiveness of the alliance anyway, so their allegiance could get shaky at times. And, something that was often overlooked when talking about Rome was that it had been a brutal slave society — large parts of Britain had basically been plantations, owned by culturally Roman aristocrats but worked by slaves, a mix of local Celts and other peoples transported to Britain from all over the Empire. Naturally, people didn't like being slaves, and they were also susceptible to being radicalised by certain anti-authority, apocalyptic strains of Christianity that had been going around at the time.
So, a few decades after the Empire pulled out, the Roman authorities left behind had been faced with slave revolts cropping up here and there all but constantly, even as raids from the north and the west continued domestic unrest eating away from within. The time came when the provincials called on their Celtic tributaries to help put down the revolts, but they refused, some even carving their own little kingdoms out of Roman territory instead, executing Roman landlords and freeing their slaves. Desperate, they begged the Empire to send assistance, but they were too concerned with their own problems, and the call went ignored — and so Roman Britain slowly dissolved, rent by revolts from slaves and radical Christians and absorbed by various Celtic clans. But most of the more thoroughly Romanised areas, the Celts didn't bother trying to reconquer them, leaving a power vacuum in which Roman warlords and communities of former slaves fought for dominance, a chaotic mess that got so bloody and miserable some of the cities were practically depopulated, even London itself little more than a half-ruined charnel house littered with rotting corpses. The region was so weak they could hardly present any resistance at all to the invading Germanic tribes, allowing them to gain a foothold on the island before the Celts could do anything about it. By the time they finally realised what was happening and met to discuss a unified response, it'd already been too late.
Yeah, that was...rather more complicated than Dorea had realised. But then, she really shouldn't be surprised — the world was endlessly complicated now, there was really no reason to assume it hadn't always been.
After what had to be the single most interesting History class they'd ever had — though Binns's classes didn't present much competition, to be fair — they went down to lunch, after eating heading right back up to the library. Not that they really had much to do here, it just happened to be on the way to Divination, and the Great Hall was noisy, so why not. The quiet conversation was mostly about their first History class, the Gryffindor and Ravenclaws' first impression of Potions. (Apparently they didn't have Potions with Gryffindor this year, for once.) Liz and Hermione hardly participated at all, of course, Liz starting in on their first History reading and Hermione pouring over handouts they'd been given in Potions.
Divination was in a perfectly ordinary classroom now, with some paraphernalia on the bookshelves but otherwise unremarkable — Lavender and Parvati were amusingly disappointed by the change in atmosphere. The new professor was a delicate-looking woman with long, curly dark hair, wearing a plain linen dress, colourful beaded jewellery here and there, and oddly wasn't wearing any shoes, bare toes poking out from under the cloth of her dress, sitting cross-legged in her chair in front of the class. (The professor, at least, looked somewhat more like some would expect, Seers tended to be odd people.) The new professor was called Evangeline of Stensey — which wasn't a proper surname, but the name of a place on the Dunbars' lands, where her family lived — though she insisted they just call her "Eva", since the full name was a pain to say every time. That might seem weirdly informal, but Dorea wasn't really surprised: the Dunbars' lands were one of those odd religious communes, similar to but distinct from the Mistwalkers, those types didn't tend to stand on formality.
Professor Eva was actually a Seer, it turned out, and a relatively sensitive one — for example, she didn't wear normal shoes at all ever, because those were made from leather, and every time she touched leather she felt the death of the animal it came from, so. At the beginning of the class session, she did a brief talk about that, how some Seers could find it very difficult to participate in normal society, all the things they picked up even in daily life too overwhelming. It could get bad enough that some Seers would self-medicate with whatever intoxicants they could get their hands on, trying to muffle their Sight enough to muddle through the day-to-day — she didn't explicitly mention Trelawney's name, but there was a stress on her voice that made the implication obvious (Liz had always said Trelawney was a real Seer, but was somehow still a charlatan) — and it wasn't unusual for Seers to remove themselves from society entirely, retreating into self-imposed isolation. Some were so sensitive to the emanations carried on most food that they simply couldn't tolerate eating, and starved to death — tragically, the most powerful Seers often didn't make it to adulthood for this reason.
Professor Eva didn't have it that bad, of course, she could mostly manage if she took care to avoid the things that set her off. So, she would prefer they didn't use real parchment for written assignments, please — that stuff was just as bad as leather, having to handle parchment long enough to mark a single essay would be exhausting, and definitely give her nightmares. The fake plant-based stuff was fine, and really, you shouldn't be using real parchment for routine assignments anyway...
And then Professor Eva moved into the actual lecture part, explaining far more about how Divination was supposed to work than Trelawney had ever bothered with. Basically, emanations carried through ambient magic, like how a sound might carry through the air, resonating with a person (or sometimes an object) like how a glass might ring if exposed to the right pitch. Seers were receptive to these echoes naturally, the same way a mind mage, said with a nod to Liz, might pick up people's thoughts and feelings without even trying — but, also like with mind magic, there were ways for people without the gift to imitate the effects. The point of, say, tasseomancy, or cartomancy, or various other seemingly random methods, was to create a ritual which would shape the magic in the environment such that it could 'catch' these echoes, the magic of the ritual altering the random outcome of whatever thing into a language the user could interpret. By which Professor Eva meant, of course there was nothing intrinsic about a particular arrangement of tea leaves or a drawing on a card or whatever else that inherently suggested one thing or another, but the caster's understanding of these symbols was included in the ritual, so the echoes received were communicated through them.
Honestly, Dorea was a little blindsided that this shite supposedly worked, if you did it properly — even Liz, an actual Seer, would have said it was mostly nonsense.
Of course, that "if you did it properly" part was important: Trelawney hadn't been teaching them to do it properly. Professor Eva said this was understandable, since Trelawney was a Seer herself, so didn't really need these methods — since she expected these methods to work, it was very possible she was unconsciously doing accidental magic to create a similar effect to the proper rituals, so fully expected them to work just as easily for the students. Which was, just, a bloody wild suggestion, but Professor Eva was the expert, so. Also, since these symbols were based on the user's understanding, looking up what you saw in a book afterward was pointless, since that would only tell you other people's understanding. Studying established schema could help develop a language you could use to more easily interpret things, but you needed to do that study before attempting to divine anything. Which did make sense, when Dorea thought about it — it was the same idea in Runes, about how the symbols they used only had the meaning the user gave them, she got it.
And then there was the detail that your prediction of the future might actually be happening in an alternate timeline, and there was really no way to tell whether it would really happen or not. When asked later, Liz would say that was why she thought this stuff was mostly nonsense. Okay, then.
So, at least for the first few months, they'd be studying the symbolism used in mainstream Divination, so they could more effectively attempt those rituals later, while also practising far-seeing — that is, scrying something somewhere else as it currently existed. Since you could only scry things you'd personally seen before, Professor Eva was talking to the Board about arranging excursions out of the castle, so they'd all be able to practise with the same thing. It'd probably end up being that only people who had permission to go to Hogsmeade could go, so, if you didn't already have the form for that signed, go ahead and see if you could fix that. They were dismissed not long after that, her classmates chattering about ritual magic and going on field trips for Divination, which was admittedly a weird idea...
After lingering in the library for another half hour, they went off to Defence. The new professor was a perfectly ordinary-looking middle-aged man named Blake Ollerton, a retired Hit Wizard who'd spent the last decade or so training prospective professional duellists and tutoring noble kids. (So, a Defence Professor who was actually qualified for the position, for the second year in a row, would wonders never cease.) The curriculum for fourth year was supposed to be an academic treatment of the Dark Arts — explaining the classification of restricted magics in Britain, and an overview of the broad categories of the very illegal ones — as well as more thorough practice with duelling and self-defence, talk about curses and how they work, etc. Since their first two years in this class had been so lacking, Ollerton would also be going back over what they should have learned so far, to make sure they were caught up in time for the exams next year — "Professor Lupin" had done a decent job reviewing the material, so he didn't expect they'd be too far behind, but they should still go over the important subjects just in case.
The rest of the period was taken up with an overview of the Ministry classification system for the practice of magic, which Dorea was passingly familiar with. (She didn't study Dark Arts herself, so it'd never been important enough to look up in any detail.) First there was Category One, which were magics permitted to qualified mages — that is, people who've passed at least three OWL exams — then Category Two, restricted to qualified professionals in the relevant field — sometimes this just required a NEWT, but others were limited to people studying for or already holding a Mastery — then Category Three, those that required a licence from the Ministry to practise; then Category Four, dangerous magics that could only be done with explicit Ministry sanction on a case-by-case basis; and finally Category Five, magics that were absolutely forbidden, under any circumstance, and often carried a life sentence for using against another person. People sometimes spoke of a "Category Zero", referring to basic magic that wasn't in any of the categories (including almost everything taught at Hogwarts), and also new magics that hadn't been formally categorised yet, but that wasn't an official term. All of the categories had different punishments for illicit use — below Category Four, it was normally just a fine — sometimes varying depending on what kind of magic you're talking about, it was complicated.
After an explanation of the planned curriculum, how to know when they'd be meeting in the classroom or the duelling hall, passing out a booklet with more information about the classification system and assigning the first chapter of the textbook to be read by next Thursday (an overview of the history of the Dark Arts as a concept separate from the rest of magic), they were dismissed. So, that hadn't been so bad. Kind of dry, but Dorea thought this year's Defence class should be fine.
The next morning they had their first Transfiguration class which, despite the new professor — Henry Carpenter, apparently a student of McGonagall's from the 70s — would be pretty much the same as before. Apparently, Carpenter would just be using McGonagall's syllabus, so. The Transfiguration programme at Hogwarts had already been fine anyway, so it not having changed at all wasn't a big deal. After lunch, they went to their first Potions class — they were in a different classroom now, but it was virtually identical to the old one, the counters and cabinets and such just looked newer, likely retouched over the summer. Curiously, the door into the storeroom here led into the same storeroom the old classroom did (the contents moved around, their new door where a rack of scales had been), despite being across the hall and several doors down, but Hogwarts could be weird like that.
Professor Curinna Vitale definitely wasn't British, skin a warm bronze-ish sort of colour — judging by her features, Dorea would guess she had Arab ancestry — wearing an airy, colourful sort of dress Dorea was aware was popular in the hotter parts of the Mediterranean, a thin cardigan pulled on against the relative British chill. She had a light, bouncing accent, sounded Italian to Dorea's ears — her English was excellent, perfectly understandable, just obviously foreign. Introducing herself, she said she was from Sicily — she'd been born on the mainland, but the whole country was called Sicily — attended a local school before finishing her Mastery (Potions and Alchemy) at the University of Syracuse. She'd been familiar with Snape through their academic work, had bumped into each other at a conference now and then, but she'd mostly applied on a lark — she had been looking for a permanent position somewhere, but she hadn't expected to get the job. She'd spent some weeks over the summer studying the academic jargon used in Britain, but she still might slip here and there, if she said something that didn't quite make sense please speak up about it.
Vitale had never taken the British exams, of course, but don't worry about that, she'd be sticking to Snape's curriculum for at least the first few years. She'd glanced over Snape's lesson plans and the topics covered in the exams, and Snape's curriculum was actually more advanced than the exams — the British OWL and ICW Competency standards were more or less interchangeable, but Vitale thought that, with a little bit of self-study, they could pass the Competency exams by winter, no problem. While they might not get an excellent score, since a few topics were left out of the NEWT standard, they could probably take the Proficiency exams at the end of sixth year and do fine. Vitale couldn't say she'd been surprised when she'd noticed that — she'd read some of the reviews Snape had published of their peers' work, that man had zero tolerance for incompetence.
And it wasn't a surprise to any of her classmates either, really. Snape was hardly a very pleasant teacher, but everyone knew the standards he set in his class were ridiculously high. In his marking, yes, definitely — if you managed even an occasional E in Snape's class, you had a pretty good shot of getting an O in the OWL — but also just in the material they covered. It wasn't exactly a secret outside of Hogwarts that their students were more advanced in Potions than those from Caoimhe's or Oxford. Despite having a much smaller student population, especially in the NEWT class, Hogwarts graduates tended to be disproportionately represented among potions and healing Mastery students, the level of competence Snape had beaten into them making them more appealing candidates. Given how harsh of a teacher Snape could be at times, it was debatable whether the results were worth it, but the results themselves were undeniable.
(Snape's classes also had a very low frequency of serious accidents, but mind magic, helping him catch mistakes before they got that far, and how strictly he filtered the NEWT students likely helped there.)
Like last year, fourth year would be rather theory-heavy, building up to the point they could attempt to formulate potions from first principles. There would be very little brewing for the first couple months, besides occasional practice now and then, instead breaking down how a potion actually worked, and then figuring out how to invert it, isolating elements that would cancel it out — so they could then design a potion that would counter the first one. They'd talked some about this last year, going over the theory of how antidotes worked, but they would actually do it themselves this year. For the final exam, they would be given a sample of a potion, and they would break it down, analyse it, formulate a counter-potion, and then brew it, the achievement a culmination of everything they would have studied for the first four years of Potions class. And that was by design, obviously — coming up with an antidote for a poison or an ineptly-brewed potion was a basic life skill, could easily save them a trip to the hospital or even their lives at some point.
They might be interested to know, Vitale added at the end, that this task was literally the same as the practical section of the OWL exam. The potion they'd be given for that would likely be more complex than the one they'd be given in June, but it was the exact same format testing the exact same skills — if they did well on the final exam this year, they would almost certainly do well on the OWL too.
Snape might be a demeaning arse a lot of the time, seemed to delight in making everyone around him feel stupid, but he did know what he was doing.
The rest of Tuesday afternoon was taken up with Arithmancy and Runes, which weren't hugely changed. They had a new professor for Arithmancy — Dáithí Ó Caoimhe, which was thankfully easier to pronounce than it was to spell — but he'd mostly be following Vector's lesson plan until he settled in at Hogwarts anyway, and he was very plain and professional, nothing much notable happened in that class. And in Runes they still had Babbling, so. Those classes would be interesting, since they would be working up to designing their own spells and enchantments — not until late in spring in Arithmancy, though they'd start playing with basic things in Runes in a couple months. They'd be studying Egyptian 'runes' this year, which would be somewhat more intensive than Norse from last year, since they actually needed to learn a fair bit of vocabulary and grammar and stuff — the Norse system followed the same formulae enchantments were built with, so was easier to learn, which was why they started with that one — playing around with their own enchantments both for practice and to break up the dry linguistic study with something more entertaining.
Of course, half of the magic-raised kids in the class could already do some very basic enchanting, though most of them had never written any original scripts — the only exceptions were Liz, and possibly Susan or Daphne. Still, should be interesting.
Wednesday morning started early with Charms, which was new — every previous year, Slytherin had had Charms in the afternoon, straight after lunch. As in the other core classes, Flitwick was only teaching fifth year and above, so they had a new professor: a young man nearly as cheerful and enthusiastic as Flitwick himself, named Dylan Morris. Morris had been a Ravenclaw prefect some years ago, had finished his Charms Mastery just last autumn. He'd landed the apprenticeship in the first place in large part thanks to Flitwick's recommendation — craft apprenticeships weren't so bad, but academic apprenticeships could be quite difficult to get into, especially for muggleborns — and had been looking for a job when Flitwick had mentioned the opening to him. Apparently they'd kept in touch since his graduation — while they weren't being taught by Flitwick himself this year, they had gotten one of his favourite students, and he wouldn't be changing the lesson plans much at all, so it hardly made a difference.
That afternoon they had Herbology, with another new professor. Glesni Yaxley was perhaps the eldest of the new professors — hardly ancient, but deep enough into middle age that her dark blonde hair had started to frost in streaks — and was a very soft, warm, grandmotherly type. Sort of like Sprout herself, Dorea guessed, but Yaxley was less energetic about it, more calm and quiet...and almost serene? It was hard to put her finger on what gave her the feeling, just... She was a very witchy sort of person, maybe — you know, so directly enmeshed in the magical environment, the rhythm of the natural world around her, that the artificial ephemera of modern society didn't quite stick on her properly, a note just slightly out of tune. It was slightly uncanny, but not really in an offensive way, an instinctive sense that there was something different about her, even if no one could say what it was, exactly. She seemed perfectly nice, though, so Dorea guessed it didn't really matter.
Sprout dropped in for a couple minutes toward the end of the period, seemingly just to say hello to the students she wouldn't be teaching anymore — she'd be checking in occasionally, lending a hand with the more complicated projects, but it wouldn't be an everyday thing. Unlike Snape, Flitwick, and McGonagall, Sprout wouldn't be teaching at all anymore, instead focussed on managing Hufflepuff and expanding the greenhouses to better keep the Hospital Wing supplied, which which wasn't really a surprise. Dorea had never gotten the impression that Sprout liked teaching — she liked children, certainly, but not the teaching part so much — and her change in duties reflected a very Hufflepuff sense of priorities, so.
Another afternoon of Arithmancy and Runes, and after dinner they went straight up to the library for their first proper study group meeting. Most of them had hung out at some point since their return to Hogwarts, but never to get any actual work done — obviously, there simply hadn't been work to do yet. Though, while most of the group had went straight up to the library, they were short a few people. Morag and Terry had joined them increasingly infrequently over the course of last year, and Dorea didn't really expected them to show up anymore. The fourth-years' second session of Cambrian was right after dinner, the people who were still taking it despite it not being required after second year — Hermione, Liz, Michael, Sophie, Padma, and Lily — would turn up once they were out. Even with some missing, they still had thirteen people, which was no small number to cram together in a corner of the library, they had to move a few tables around to make room for everyone.
(Pince mostly let people get away with that sort of thing, so long as they didn't make too much noise and put everything back when they were done — but god help you if you accidentally bumped the bookshelves.)
Though, while they did have some homework to do, there really wasn't very much — there usually wasn't, in the first week of classes. They had reading for History, Defence, Transfiguration, Charms, and Runes, but most of it was review or introductory stuff, so nothing really worth discussing. (Though the Runes reading was interesting, about the development of Egyptian writing and how it was directly linked with the invention of enchanting, the first couple weeks of class would be on that sort of thing.) They'd gotten a few handouts in Potions, all the same kind of incomprehensibly esoteric diagrammes Snape had given them the first day last year, Vitale had suggested they look over them and little else. In Arithmancy his afternoon they'd gotten a couple pages of basic problems to solve (confirming they hadn't forgotten algebra over the summer), but they didn't need to have them finished until Tuesday. And that was really it. Most of them had books out, poking slowly at their readings, but they didn't actually get much done.
For the most part, they just talked, catching up after an eventful summer (to put it mildly), and also just gossip. A fair bit of it ended up being over the World Cup, or explaining recent political developments to the muggleborns — most of them got the Prophet at home, but that didn't necessarily mean they had the background context to understand what the Prophet was talking about. Lisa came right out and said that there was going to be a civil war over the national question, which wasn't something any of the papers were saying, or really anyone in public, she must have heard that from one of her relatives. Dorea, Tracey, and Tony all tried to reassure the muggleborns that, while a civil war was possible, it definitely wasn't guaranteed to happen. The Gaels knew better than to start outright conflict themselves — no matter how competent Saoirse Ghaelach might be, they were still well outnumbered by the Hit Wizards, and had far less access to supplies and gold, they would lose in a straight war and they must know that — and while there might be a few individuals on either side who were zealous enough in their convictions to resort to violence unprovoked, they were definitely a minority. There might be the occasional outbreak of violence in the form of brawls in pubs and feuds between Gaelic and British families in mixed areas, and Glasgow was going to be pretty tense for a while, but it wasn't going to be anything more than that.
Dorea hoped not, at least.
And there was some new personal and family drama that came up too. Several of them were expecting new baby siblings in the next couple weeks, thanks to their stay at the Greenwood, but that was old news. There was something going on with Wayne's parents, which really wasn't their business, and of course things with Tracey's more racist relatives were still a mess — she and her mother had stayed with Daphne's family for the last few weeks of summer, she didn't say why. (Like Wayne's parents' issues, it wasn't their business.) As the conversation went on, it became increasingly obvious that something was going on with Susan and Tony. It wasn't glaring, really, they were just being noticeably more awkward and cool with each other than Dorea remembered — honestly, it was subtle enough that she hadn't payed it much mind until Sally-Anne asked if something was going on with them.
It turned out something was going on with them: their families had been in the process of negotiating a betrothal. Dorea had had no idea — they were friends, of course, but nobody had said anything about that...but then, it would have been inappropriate to talk about it publicly, at least before they both turned fifteen. Also, she was pretty sure Susan was gay? She even looked like a lesbian these days, with the haircut and everything. Not that that really mattered for the nobility, love was love but marriage was just business, just saying, that was another reason she wouldn't have noticed anything going on between them. (Because nothing had been going on.) And Dorea was using the past tense for a reason: the political developments of the summer had blown the whole thing up, it wasn't happening anymore.
That Amelia had been considering the match in the first place was kind of odd...though not so much, when Dorea thought about it. They had both been Common Fate families, of course, but the Boneses were one of the more extreme members, like the Greengrasses or Smethwycks, and the Goldsteins one of the most conservative ones. But that wasn't unusual for the Boneses — Susan's mother had been a Prewett, another of the more conservative families and close allies of the Goldsteins. If Dorea had to guess, the Boneses had a long term strategy of creating closer ties between the radical religious membership and the more elitist families of their alliance, in an effort to draw their politics further to the 'left' (so to speak) over the long term. The nobility in general did do that sort of thing, sometimes. It was hard to tell how much this was due to other factors, but it was possible they'd even had some success — Dorea knew off-hand that the Ollivanders, Bletchleys, and Peakeses had all intermarried with the Boneses multiple times in the past, and all three were far more progressive than they used to be.
Because marriage was just part of how politics worked in magical Britain, both in forming short-term alliances and in trying to alter the cultural climate toward one's advantage in the long term. Politics in this country could be bloody weird like that.
But then the political realignment over the summer happened, and the Boneses defected to Ars Publica. Now, this did make more sense, in some ways — the Boneses might have founded Common Fate, more or less, but in the modern day their politics were far more in line with the radical membership of Ars Publica, they would have to fight their own allies far less often over there. But since they had basically founded Common Fate, they were deeply integrated with the affairs of the rest of the long-established members, socially and economically. The Boneses had brought several families with them, but for those that stayed behind, things had gotten very complicated, especially with how fraught politics could be at the moment.
Susan and Tony knew there'd been a big argument between Amelia and whoever had been negotiating for the Goldsteins, but neither were certain which of them had called the whole thing off. (Dorea privately suspected the Goldsteins, but it didn't really matter.) This had blown up into an even bigger argument as it went public, if indirectly — they didn't tell people what started it, instead just adding more kindling onto the feud between Common Fate and their former members in Ars Publica. Dorea had actually heard about this, now that she thought about it, some of their more conservative members and Bones's allies sniping at each other. The dispute had escalated far enough that the Goldsteins and their allies — Urquhart, Fawley, and Gamp, plus Prince, Prewett, Smith, and Carpenter in Ars Brittania, and a slew of middle-class Common Houses (including most of the Jewish families Dorea was familiar with) — and the Boneses and their allies — particularly the families who'd gone with them to Ars Publica, but also Tugwood and Bellchant, and even Bletchley and Yaxley in Common Fate — were scrambling to decouple their various contracts and investments from each other.
Which was actually a big deal — it wasn't very often that enmity between formerly allied families grew bad enough that they felt it necessary to cut people off, especially involving this many families at once. But Britain was in a weird place at the moment, this wasn't the only mess like this going on, it'd take years for all the changes sparked off over the summer to finally settle.
Of course, the economic rearrangement going on was only making everyone more angry with each other. For one thing, Bletchley and Yaxley siding against people in their own faction was a quite insulting thing to do — but then, some other people in Common Fate weren't happy with the Goldsteins for roping in families from Ars Brittania either. (Some of their people really hated most of the new Ars Brittania, it was a whole thing.) And then there were the financial consequences to think about. The Boneses would be fine, for the most part. They were too deeply integrated into the foundation of the country to ever too badly damaged by a feud like this. The Wizengamot Hall was on their land, their people maintained the gardens and everything — hell, the most famous member of their family was literally Merlin, who'd been semi-deified in the millennium and a half since his death, it'd take a catastrophic shift in the culture for people to not want to deal with the Boneses anymore. (They hadn't technically been a family in Merlin's time, still a priesthood then, but the two institutions ran right into each other, so the distinction hardly mattered.) Most of the families on their side were old religious communes, and pretty much self-sufficient, they weren't going anywhere. Dorea thought the Bletchleys were likely to be hit the hardest, but if they were careful, shored up losses with new arrangements with new allies, they should be mostly fine.
Several of the families on the Goldsteins' side were going to have problems, though — the Greengrasses, Glanwvyls, and Tugwoods were where they got their food. There were other issues that would come up, shared investment in one business concern or another, but agriculture was the big one, including for things like potions supplies. And even smaller, more personal things were being hit by it. Dorea had heard of a Prewett's healing apprenticeship under a Smethwyck being cancelled, things like that. It was a whole mess, basically.
Considering how contentious and vicious the whole thing had been so far, that Susan and Tony were only being a little awkward around each other was kind of impressive, really. Of course, they had been friends to start with, and it wasn't like any of this was either of their faults, but still.
(While they talked about the marriage arrangements falling through, it was obvious to Dorea that Hannah was trying not to look smug, and completely failing. Not that there was really anything to be smug about. It wasn't as though this had happened due to Susan choosing her over Tony or anything like that — most likely, she'd had nothing to do with the decision, and had only been informed of what happened afterward — and Susan would still have to marry someday. She was the last Bones, after all. Dorea guessed they could theoretically have children with blood alchemy, so long as Susan carried them British law would recognise them as legitimate members of the House, but refusing to play by the rules would present political complications, to put it mildly.)
(Of course, Hannah probably wasn't thinking that long term, Dorea was just saying.)
That conversation had ballooned long and wide enough that Dorea had barely gotten any reading done before the people who'd been in Cambrian showed up. Something had definitely happened while they'd been gone. They were huddled up muttering to each other as they walked through the library, Padma and Michael both almost giggly, Hermione and Sophie trying to cover a smile — by the expression, Dorea guessed they thought they probably shouldn't find whatever it was funny, but couldn't help themselves — and Lily just looked mildly disturbed. Even Liz, a couple steps separated from the rest of them, seemed faintly amused, though it could be hard to tell with her sometimes.
"What happened?" Sally-Anne asked as they neared the table. "Something funny?"
Most of the group hesitated, glancing between each other — even while still suppressing giggles, Padma visibly biting her lip — while Liz casually flopped into an empty chair near Daphne and Tracey. "Moody turned Draco into a ferret."
"WHAT?!" Justin and Lisa immediately turned to shush Wayne, but the rest of them weren't much quieter, their little corner erupting into questions, too jumbled up for Dorea to really tell what anyone was saying. Waiting for everyone to calm down so they could actually get the story, Dorea sighed — she couldn't say she was surprised, honestly. Dora was doing her apprenticeship in the Aurors under Moody...or most of it, anyway, she hadn't finished yet when Moody 'retired' to take the job here. The point was, Dorea had heard plenty of stories about the man, most of them in the form of Dora complaining about him being a hardarse bastard.
Which was fair, when Dorea thought about it. Aurors didn't tend to last much longer than twenty years, it could be a hard job, and he'd been recruited out of the Breton Hit Wizards back in the late 20s — he'd been the most senior Auror in Britain since Aunt Cassiopeia retired back in '73, having already been on the job for nearly fifty years, and that had been the average Auror's entire career ago. And there had been two entire wars in that time. Early in the French Revolution — the Communalist one just fifty years ago, that is — he'd sort-of-not-really quit, volunteering to help secure the border, where he'd gotten into multiple brief skirmishes with people from various factions in France, and even domestic insurgents in Brittany, it'd been a mess. When Britain finally joined the war and invaded France, he'd been on the front lines — the fighting in France had been brutal, and he'd continued on into the liberation of central Europe, which hadn't been any less brutal. He'd been seriously injured in one of the final battles of the war, at more or less the same time as Dumbledore's famous duel with Grindelwald and only a couple miles away, he'd been in hospital for months afterward.
People who'd known him said he'd already been different after the war, but then add a couple decades of hunting dark wizards on top of that, and then the Death Eaters, hell. The story went that Sirius, who'd been his apprentice and later junior partner, being chucked into Azkaban as a 'traitor' and then shortly afterward Deputy Director Selwyn being revealed as an actual traitor had finally made him crack, descending into paranoia and alcoholism. Moody had always been a loose cannon, but since then he'd really become more trouble than he was worth — but he had seniority and friends in high places covering for him, and he repeatedly refused to retire, so there was little anyone could do about it.
So, the broken old man wasn't just visually a mess of scars layered on top of each other, but psychologically as well. If he'd snapped and decided that randomly transfiguring a student into a ferret was a good idea, well, Dorea wasn't surprised — if something inappropriate hadn't happened with Moody and a student with Death Eater parents in the first week of classes, that would have been surprising.
Things finally quieted enough for people to actually listen to the answers to their questions, Hermione starting the story. "Well, it was after Cambrian, and Ronald was— Honestly, I don't know why he's even in that class, as much as he hates studying anything at all you'd think he'd take the opportunity to not have to go..."
"It's an easy class, to keep his marks up," Neville said. "Have at least one good class, so his parents don't yell at him too much about it, you know? He's not fluent, but his mother's a Prewett, so it's easy to—"
Susan interrupted with, "The Prewetts speak Cambrian internally, it should be his mother's first language."
"Right, sorry, forgot." That there were muggleborns around who didn't know that sort of thing about the various noble families, he meant. Though he was probably overestimating how likely even other pureblood kids were to know that — Neville and Susan's mothers were sisters, and they happened to be Prewetts, so obviously they both knew, but that sort of thing wasn't necessarily common knowledge. "Anyway, yeah, he says they mostly speak English at home — the Weasleys in general are English-speakers — but his mother uses Cambrian enough that he picked up some. Not nearly enough to be excluded from the class as a native speaker, but enough that the subject is really easy for him — you might have noticed his accent is pretty much perfect. That's why he's taking that class."
Dorea couldn't say she'd noticed his accent, but then she didn't go around talking at people in Cambrian. Not that she could even if she wanted to, of course, she was terrible with foreign languages...
"That's an awful reason, but whatever." Hermione sounded rather exasperated, as though she couldn't comprehend why someone would ever take a class because it was easy — naturally, Dorea wouldn't expect anything else. "Anyway, we were on our way out of class, and Ronald decided to be his usual charming self."
Tracey let out a harsh scoff, leaned around Daphne to look at Liz. "Is he still on about you killing his sister?"
"Yes," Liz groaned, glaring down at her Arithmancy worksheet. "Bloody annoying. It doesn't make any sense, either — oh, let's go annoy the evil black witch who totally likes to kill people, that's a great idea and definitely not going to backfire in any way! It's like it doesn't even occur to him that I could compel him to jump off the Astronomy Tower just to get him to stop bothering me. Fucking idiot..."
There were a few dark chuckles at Ronald Weasley being a thoughtless boor — which he was, obviously — but Dorea wasn't the only one who gave Liz an uncomfortable glance. From someone else, that might come off as a perfectly innocent joke, but Liz's tone had been so cold and level, it hadn't sounded like a joke. Dorea didn't think it was a joke, she thought Liz was being completely serious. Though, Liz had admitted that she'd contemplated that very thing, forcing him to jump off the Astronomy Tower, while they'd been bringing Pettigrew to Snape, so maybe it wasn't really that unnervingly sincere, it just seemed like it to Dorea because she already knew it was. Still, very creepy.
Hermione had also been there for that conversation, but she just rolled her eyes. "Yes, well, I suspect Ronald is immune to cognitive dissonance. We were trying to ignore him, but he kept following us, until we bumped into Malfoy, who immediately picked a fight with him."
"He keeps doing that." Padma turned to Liz, smirking. "I'd almost think he likes you or something."
There was some scandalised giggling from some of the other girls, but Liz just scoffed, and didn't respond.
"Anyway," Hermione said, raising her voice a little over the peanut gallery, "Ronald said something very rude. Draco dared him to say it again to his face. Ronald told him to piss off, and turned around to keep following us. Draco hexed him in the back."
Most of the purebloods winced — that was very bad form. Sounding a little shocked, Susan asked, "What did he say?"
"Um..." Hermione glanced at Liz.
"He made a crude comment about Draco's mother's sex life," Sophie said. "Is she really a lesbian?"
The conversation went off track for a couple minutes, as mostly Susan and Neville explained to the muggleborns — and also Michael and Lily, who'd somehow missed the rumours — that yes, Lady Malfoy was a lesbian. (Kind of infamously promiscuous about it too, but that wasn't Dorea's business.) Which also required explaining how marriage in the nobility tended to work, because, yes, Lady Malfoy had female lovers, didn't even really try to hide it, and yes, her husband was absolutely fine with that. The way mages did things could be a bit of a culture shock sometimes for people who'd grown up in the muggle world.
Though, she did have to wonder what that glance at Liz had been about. Maybe whatever Weasley had said had been flagrantly homophobic, and Hermione just didn't want to repeat it in front of her? Whatever, not important.
Once that was out of the way, Hermione finished up the story. "So yeah, Draco hexed him in the back — some kind of pain hex, I think — but unfortunately for him, Professor Moody happened to be not far away, and he didn't take kindly to that. And, apparently, he felt the thing to do about it was to transfigure Draco into a ferret and levitate him around, bouncing off the walls." Hermione was trying to sound disapproving, but she didn't quite manage it, her voice shaking with badly-suppressed laughter.
"It was very funny," Liz said.
Over a couple more giggles going around the table, Sophie asked, "I thought you and Draco were friends now?"
Liz shrugged. "He looks like a ferret."
Fair enough. In fact, Dorea felt a smile twitching at her own lips. Now that it'd been pointed out to her, she couldn't unsee it — he did look like a ferret, with the pointy nose and everything...
They wasted a fair bit of time talking about Draco's time as a ferret — no, Justin, transfiguration was not a generally accepted punishment at magical schools, he really shouldn't have done that — and then complaining about Draco and Ron Weasley in general. All of them disliked Draco, for one reason or another. He tended to be an arse to the muggleborns (and people from poorer families in general) — though he hadn't been so bad about it since he and Liz had their truce, at least out loud, his decision to lay off Hermione seemingly unconsciously extended to muggleborns in general — and the nobles at the table were all from families who happened to be political opponents of the Malfoys. Or, that wasn't actually true anymore, since the Malfoys had joined Ars Publica, but they had still grown up with each other — most of them had first met Draco back when they were maybe seven, and had disliked each other for about as long. Tracey in particular had been terribly bullied by Draco and some of his friends when they'd been small children, and of course Daphne took her side, and Susan had some long-standing conflict with him Dorea didn't know anything about, so. (Liz actually offered to show all three of them the memory in her pensieve later.) It wasn't really a surprise that most of their group were tickled by the idea of Draco being humiliated like that, even if they knew Moody had crossed a line and they probably shouldn't be pleased about it.
And Ronald, well, all of the people here were academic types — to varying degrees, but this was a study group. Ronald and his friends were very much the opposite, tended to take their education here not at all seriously, and most of Dorea's friends didn't exactly have a very high opinion of them because of it. Him so often being a noisy, inconsiderate boor really didn't help, and his relentless campaign to somehow prove that Liz was evil and had definitely murdered his sister had only made her friends dislike him more — he'd backed off some, after Pettigrew, but the last month or two at school had made it obvious he hadn't really dropped it, the first week back and here he was at it again.
Dorea did kind of understand where he was coming from, in a certain light. As unnervingly powerful as Liz was, as cold and creepy as she could be when she wasn't moderating herself (like when casually admitting that she'd considered compelling him to jump off the Astronomy Tower), and the fact that the Aurors had talked to her that day, his suspicions didn't come completely out of nowhere. But the conspiracy theories he came up with to explain why she hadn't been held responsible were absolutely ridiculous — surely he couldn't really believe Dumbledore, the Aurors, the entire bloody Ministry would cover up Liz sacrificing other children in black magic rituals, come on now, that was absurd. She did sympathise, his sister had been murdered, but at some point you had to let reality back in.
And she did have to wonder whether Ronald believed it himself. After all, Liz had a good point: if Ronald really thought she was some evil murderous crazy person, wouldn't she just kill him to make him shut up? She had no idea what he might be trying to accomplish if he didn't believe it, but, it just didn't make any sense, that was all.
Not that it really mattered if they wasted time talking about Malfoy and Weasley, because they didn't have a whole lot of homework to get to anyway. Over time the conversation gradually trailed off, people turning to their homework one by one, their corner instead taken up with the crackle of a page turning or the scritch of a pen or quill, occasional muttering as people discussed whatever they were working on. Dorea was picking over the history reading herself, jotting down a note now and then — but it was slow going, half-listening to the conversations that came up. But that was fine, it wasn't like she was in any rush.
It was in one of these breaks, when Michael asked Liz a question — something to do with their homework for Cambrian — they talked about that for a little bit. Watching them, there was something niggling at the edge of her attention, something that... She didn't know, a creeping sense of something. Liz finished answering Michael's question, then went straight back to her own work, and it finally clicked.
Dorea wouldn't say Liz and Michael were friends. They tolerated each other's company, of course, they'd both been in the same study group together for three years by this point, but they didn't really have anything to do with each other outside of it. When they did interact they got on well, for the most part. In fact, Dorea was pretty sure there'd been a brief period of time last spring when Michael had been sounding out whether she might agree to go out with him — she was positive Liz hadn't even noticed, had seemed to find the increased attention irritating more than anything, which Michael had clearly taken as a no and gone back to normal like nothing had happened. (Michael was one of the few boys Dorea knew who'd already been thinking about dating and stuff last year, she didn't know what was up with that. At least he mostly wasn't an arse about it, that incident with Sophie just a misunderstanding blown out of proportion.) Liz wasn't an easy person to get close to, so she didn't have very many friends, a larger circle of acquaintances who were more friends of friends. People she tolerated for social reasons, so as to not be a complete bitch and start pointless drama.
The way she'd just talked to Michael — the tone, the directness, how she'd gone right back to ignoring him once the diversion was over with, polite but clearly uninvested... It was how Liz talked to Dorea, lately.
Like they weren't friends anymore, like Dorea just existed nearby but was someone Liz had nothing else to do with.
Dorea didn't get much more reading done that evening.
It did hurt, yes, but it wasn't just— Dorea was kind of annoyed, too. She meant, sure, her reaction to Liz coming out to her hadn't been great, but she hadn't done anything — she hadn't even said anything, Liz had just gotten up and left! She still didn't know what she'd done to offend her so badly. And, honestly, if Liz could just cut her off like this, maybe it was for the best — especially since Dorea still wasn't comfortable with her being a mind mage and, well, being friends with Liz could be sort of exhausting, honestly — but it still bothered her. Like, a lot, she couldn't stop thinking about it, just—
This whole thing with Liz was just extremely frustrating, that was all.
Over the rest of their time in the library, she tried to get back to her reading, but she couldn't concentrate on it very well at all. Her thoughts kept coming back to Liz, and the realisation she'd just had, frustration crawling hot and thick in her throat, and she didn't— This wasn't working, not at all. Luckily they were pretty close to the end of the evening anyway, because this just wasn't going anywhere.
Eventually they started packing up, discussing when they'd be meeting up again — the evenings were best, and they all had half of Saturday free, and of course Sunday. Clubs and stuff starting up again over the next couple weeks would complicate things, though at least there wasn't quidditch to plan around this year, they'd figure it out. Distracted by a question from Sophie about how her mother was (she was fine, thankfully no complications had come up in the final couple months), by the time Dorea had her things packed away Hermione was already stepping away from the table, muttering with Lily and Neville about something.
"Hermione, wait!' She grimaced — that had probably been too loud for the library, oops. "Um, can I talk to you for a minute?"
After a couple seconds just fixing Dorea with a confused look back over her shoulder — with a sceptically-raised eyebrow she'd definitely copied from Snape (perhaps via Liz, who also used it) — Hermione gave a crooked shrug, one shoulder weighed down by her bookbag. "Sure. I'll need to stop by the loo, though."
Their group left more or less all at the same time, Dorea and Hermione immediately splitting off toward the toilets, the rest continuing on toward the Grand Staircase. Dorea hesitated for a breath before following Hermione inside — she always felt kind of vaguely weird about public toilets, especially when she was in one despite not needing to use it herself. But, just hanging around in the hall waiting would have been kind of awkward, so...
"Anyone in here?" Hermione called, dropping her bag on the floor near the sinks. It made an audible thud against the tile — honestly, the school year had hardly even started, carrying that many books around all the time was just completely ridiculous. She waited a couple seconds for a response, before asking, "Alright, what's up?" She didn't wait for Dorea to answer, heading for one of the stalls instead.
So, they were just going to talk while— Okay, then. "Um... How's Emma doing?" That wasn't what she'd wanted to talk to Hermione about tonight, of course, but she was curious — she'd heard Emma was having a hard time, but she hadn't gotten news in a while.
"Good. Relatively speaking, I mean. I'm glad she decided to accept the offer to go to the Greenwood — with how poor her health has been for a while now, having that many healers around is a good idea. Honestly, I was really worried before, but she should be fine now. And they're already planning the procedures for the baby, so, yeah, good."
"Procedures?"
"The baby has some birth defects — cleft palate, stub fingers, that sort of thing. But mages can fix that stuff pretty easily, so they're going to do that a few days after the birth, shouldn't be a problem."
"Oh, that's good." It probably wasn't worth pointing out that Hermione was talking about constructive blood alchemy, which almost always required neogenesis, which was absolutely illegal in Britain. Wealthy purebloods did it all the time, of course — birth defects and various genetic disorders passed among the nobility were almost always corrected soon after birth (which often didn't change the underlying genes, so they continued to be passed on) — and Dorea would assume many of the under-policed communities at the fringes of society, like the Mistwalkers, often did it as well. Of course, travelling to the Continent to have it done was perfectly legal, but it was better for the baby to get it out of the way as soon as possible, and it wasn't like anyone was going to find out, so. "Some of the things people can do with blood alchemy are incredible."
"Definitely, magical medicine is fascinating. I might go for a Healing Mastery, actually, I'm still thinking about it — that's one career path my parents can actually understand, at least."
"If you want to study constructive blood alchemy, you'll need to go to the Continent." Of course, Hermione could speak French, so that shouldn't be a problem...
"I know — Beauxbatons has a good healing programme, one of the things I've been looking at. Not super seriously yet, you know, just looking around. Liz was telling me about the University of Syracuse earlier, the location sounds wonderful, and the school's not so huge and busy as Beauxbatons, but I'm not sure whether their healing programme is as good." ...Why were Liz and Hermione talking about Syracuse? "Anyway, how about your mum? Gail didn't go to the Greenwood, did she?"
"No, she's at Ancient House right now. She did like the Greenwood when we stayed there, but she wanted more privacy. And, we don't have to worry about finding a healer — Andi took a couple weeks off to keep an eye on her." Andi wasn't specialised in that sort of care, obviously, but having her on hand in case of an emergency wasn't a bad idea. They had brought in an actual midwife, the same one who'd helped deliver Dora, and also Dorea herself — Sirius hadn't trusted non-magical doctors, so had asked Andi, who'd recommended her — so it shouldn't be a problem. "She's a little exasperated with the elves' hovering, but they can be like that. Ted has already worked up the paperwork to legitimise the baby as a Black if she turns out to be magical, so." Supposedly the chances she would be were pretty good, but it was impossible to say for certain yet.
Raising her voice over the flushing of the toilet, Hermione said, "You can do that? She won't have any Black blood."
"Technically, she will — I'm the Lady of the House, therefore anybody related to me counts. Though it's not really about blood when it comes down to it, especially in the older families, they used to adopt completely unrelated people into the family all the time. Henry Black was kind of infamous for adopting random muggleborns, dozens of them, I'm not sure if you know about that."
"Why haven't you done it with Sam and Ben, then?"
"They're muggles?" Honestly, the thought that she might do that had never occurred to her — the boys would spend all their lives in the muggle world, why would it matter?
Hermione opened the door — her robe left hung from a hook in the stall, showing the jeans and tee shirt she'd been wearing underneath — turning to give Dorea a look on the way to the sink. What kind of look, she really wasn't sure, but... "You don't need to be a mage to have magical citizenship. Unless Susan got something wrong when she was telling me about it, being a member of a House gives you far more legal rights, even if you're a muggle. Sure, it might not ever matter, but if they do get wrapped up in something magical, you definitely don't want them to be muggles. Legally speaking, I mean."
...Well. That was a good point, actually.
"Anyway." Done washing her hands, Hermione paused for a moment, her fingers dripping into the sink. Her hands flipped with a harsh flick from the wrist — and she scowled, glaring down at her still-wet hands. What was that about? After a couple more flicks, Hermione sighed, finally reached for a towel. "What did you want to talk about?"
"Oh, um." Want was a strong word. "You stayed with Liz for the last month or so of break, right?"
Hermione gave her another one of those weirdly Snape-ish raised eyebrows. "Yes? What about it?"
"How did that go?"
"...Fine?" she said, dragging the word out in a flat drawl, with a faint frown at Dorea. After a second she shrugged, went back to the stall to collect her robe. "It was pretty quiet, for the most part, we didn't really do much. Aside from the World Cup and Consualia at the Yaxleys', of course. We might walk down to the market a couple blocks from her house if we needed something, but most days we just hung out at home, reading or practising magic, or whatever. The food was excellent, honestly, Liz is a much better cook than I expected. I just mentioned the kind of bisque—" Hermione's pronunciation of the word was obviously French. "—I have in France sometimes, and a couple days later she'd made some with the prawns they sell at the market, just, out of the blue. She makes her own hummus now, honestly, it's a lot. Add in the biscuits that Nilanse's mum sends over, and I was getting spoiled, seriously. I might have to find an excuse to stay over for a while next summer, just for the food." Dorea thought that was a joke, but it was hard to tell.
And, that did sound like a lot, Dorea wouldn't have expected that herself — she knew that Liz could cook, it just sounded like she put way more effort into it on a regular basis than Dorea would think Liz would bother with. But then, she did like tinkering around, with potions and enchanting and the like, maybe it was the same principle.
"Oh, and Daphne came over once, and one day we had an interesting talk about politics with Liz's representative on the Wizengamot over lunch. And of course your father showed up every couple days, to hang out or drag us to see a film or something. That's really it, nothing much out of the ordinary happened. Liz is pretty easy-going, you know, and surprisingly domestic."
Easy-going wasn't the word Dorea would use, but okay then. "So Liz and Daphne are dating now." She'd assumed as much, but...
Hermione gave her another funny look, Dorea wasn't sure how to read that. Sceptical, maybe, worried she was going to be weird about it? "Yes, of course. I thought you knew?"
"I thought so, but— Well, you might have noticed Liz isn't really talking to me anymore."
"True." The acknowledgement was made flatly, absent of any tone at all, and Hermione just left it at that.
...Okay, then.
An awkward silence dragged on for a few seconds, the two of them waiting for...Dorea didn't know, exactly. She wanted to ask about Liz, just, abruptly treating her like a practical stranger now, if she'd said anything about that, but they'd gotten too close to an uncomfortable topic, and she didn't know how to— "You're not going to make an issue about that, are you? Liz is already having enough of a hard time dealing with the issues her awful relatives left her with, she doesn't need her friends stacking more on."
"No, it isn't—" Dorea sighed, glaring up at the ceiling for a second. "I'm working on that. I still think it's kind of weird, but..."
"I think they're adorable. Especially since Liz is so shy about it, she gets so red and stammering when she's talking about Daphne, or even just being near her sometimes, it's very sweet."
That just seemed...really out of character for Liz, but Dorea would take her word for it. And, besides being surprised at Liz acting un-Liz-like, if Dorea saw her act like that with a boy, she probably would think it was oddly adorable, perhaps even sweet, but as it was... "...Yeah, I'm working on that."
Dorea had spent a fair portion of the latter half of summer being very, very uncomfortable. Mum had fished out her old photo album from somewhere — well, more likely had asked Richard to go get it, Dorea was pretty sure it'd been in the attic. It had been on one of the bookshelves in their London flat, Dorea had seen most of them before, when she'd been a little kid, but the album had been packed away before Ben and never taken out again. (Worried the boys would damage them, she thought.) Some of the photos were still vaguely familiar, she knew...well, not all of the people in them, but a lot of them. Pointing to one person or another, in addition to reminding Dorea who they were or whatever Mum would include a lot of details about their personal lives that she hadn't known before — it turned out, a fair number of Mum's friends were some kind of queer (it was more complicated than just gay people). Not all of them, by any means, but more than Dorea thought would be expected in the general population. She even knew a couple people who'd completely changed sexes, which, Dorea had barely even known that was a real thing, mostly just because mages did that too...how did that even work on the muggle side...
Becca was in a disproportionate number of photos, which made sense — they'd put the album together while Becca had been living with them, so she still would have been Mum's girlfriend at the time. Which was still bloody weird to think about, honestly. None of the photos were super obvious — Dorea had been really young then, but she thought if they'd been obvious about it all the time she still would have figured out a long time ago — but there were some where they were kind of...snuggly. Not really much more touchy than straight girls could get with their friends sometimes, but now that she knew Mum and Becca had been together, yeah, she could see it.
(And it was still bloody weird to think about. Not, like, distressingly bad, or anything, she'd always loved Becca, just weird. But then, thinking about her mother having sex was always weird, so.)
They'd actually gone over the photo album with Ben and Sam, which had been kind of uncomfortable. Not because Ben and Sam had been weird about it — apparently Mum and Richard had previously had a talk with the boys about this stuff, so none of the personal stuff Mum brought up was really that much of a surprise to them, and... Well, they were little, she doubted they had any idea what sex was to begin with, so, being told gay people existed probably wasn't a big deal. They were very matter-of-fact about it, actually.
In fact, Sam had been all excited about having more brothers and sisters he hadn't known about — Becca's girlfriend had kids from a marriage, and Sam didn't quite get how that was different from Dorea and the boys just having different dads — before he'd been told Josephine's kids were all older than him, immediately very disappointed that he was still the baby. Because young children had such an odd sense of priorities sometimes.
The boys hardly even blinking at all the gay stuff, and Dorea still being all weird about it, had just made her feel like even more of an arse. She honestly didn't know why it bothered her so much, just...
She had ended up staying with Toby and Nathan for a few days, back at their flat in London, as Mum had suggested, which was...just kind of uncomfortable. Toby had been the same as always, really — he'd always been a cheerful, friendly, almost hyperactive sort of bloke, she could hardly remember seeing him even slightly down — but Nathan had been acting a little odd, all cool and standoff-ish. He was a quieter sort than Toby, so that wasn't new, exactly, but it was still enough of a difference to be noticeable. She'd never really spent much time at their flat before, so she'd never noticed that they shared a bedroom, they'd apparently been together for ten years now? When she thought about it, yeah, Nathan had been around for about that long — Dorea had been pretty young then, so she couldn't remember for sure. It was just a kind of surreal thought, and, she didn't know, she felt like she was being weirdly awkward the whole time. Toby didn't say anything about it, but...
The whole time she was there, Toby didn't directly say anything about the reason she was there at all — she knew Mum had talked to him about it, but he wasn't acting any different. If not for Nathan bringing it up when they went to catch a film without Toby — like going to football matches when she'd been younger, there just hadn't been a convenient one that weekend — she could have gone the whole time without any confirmation that they knew what was going on. It was why Nathan had been stiffer than usual, unsurprisingly.
Nathan claimed Toby was just pretending everything was fine — and he was an actor, professionally, so he was good at that — but that he'd actually taken it pretty hard. That had just made Dorea feel like even more of an arse, which was pretty much the point — Nathan had explicitly said that he was telling her so she would feel badly about it, because pretending it wasn't a big deal wasn't helping, but Toby was shite with confrontation, so Nathan hadn't been able to convince him to be more upfront about it. Which, um. Okay, then...
Thankfully, Mum had decided not to tell Becca — if Dorea being weird about this stuff made Becca cry or something, she'd feel, just, the worst. They hadn't really seen much of Becca since moving to Maidstone — Becca didn't have a car or anything, and Dorea being away at Hogwarts so much didn't make it any easier — though she would still come by now and then. Partially just to catch up, spoiling the boys with random gifts, but, when Dorea thought about it, maybe mostly to see Dorea herself. Which, that did make sense? Becca had sort of half-raised her, when she'd been little — even after she and Mum broke up, she'd been around kind of all the time. A lot of this was kind of fuzzy, since she'd been so young at the time and her condition getting really bad had messed up her memory even further, but...
It was kind of, she thought, how someone who'd gotten divorced might be about a kid they hadn't gotten custody of, you know? Which was a really weird thought. Not a bad one, just, she didn't know how she felt about it. She did love Becca back, of course, she wasn't, like, offended by the thought or anything, but she didn't know what to call it...
(Mum said Becca used to break down in tears every time Dorea didn't recognise her coming out of a seizure — that just happened, sometimes, her worn-out brain not matching faces to people correctly. Dorea didn't remember that at all.)
The whole family had gone up to visit once, the weekend before leaving for Hogwarts — which had been a bit of a trial, with how very pregnant Mum was, but they'd managed it. Jo lived somewhere suburban north of London — she'd gotten the house and the kids in the divorce — Becca had moved in some time ago, she didn't even have the flat in the city Dorea vaguely remembered anymore. (She knew she'd stayed with Becca some nights, probably when Mum was on dates or something, but Dorea had lost most of those years to the seizures, so she didn't really remember.) The place wasn't huge, by any means, between Dorea, Mum and Richard, the boys, Becca, Jo, and Jo's three kids, there definitely hadn't been room at their dining table for all of them. They'd gotten takeaway, a mix of Indian and basic fried food for the younger kids, and, just.
Jo was nice, she guessed? She was older than Becca — not be a lot or anything, but noticeably — and, just, kind of ordinary, Dorea wouldn't have given her a second glance passing her on the street. She did some kind of work with some charity or benefits programme or something, Dorea hadn't caught the details, sounded mostly like normal clerical stuff, just, you know. She seemed nice enough, and if Becca was happy with her, well, good, that was good. As weird as the gay stuff still was to her, Becca being happy with whatever relationship she was in was better than...not, so. Yeah.
(Though she was starting to wonder if Becca especially liked kids — she meant, Mum, and then Jo...)
At some point in the day she'd ended up relatively alone with Stefan, Jo's eldest, about a year older than Dorea. She couldn't help herself, had asked him how he felt about Becca and, you know, all this. If it was still weird. He'd admitted that it'd been very weird, at first, but a massive improvement over his father — Dorea got the impression Jo's ex was abusive, just left implied, nobody came out and said anything about it. (Which wasn't a surprise, not the sort of thing you talk about with people you'd just met.) It'd been obvious to him almost immediately that Jo really loved her, and Becca had been all patient and respectful with the kids, hadn't tried to force herself into a stepmum role or whatever — though his little sister Danny had latched onto her almost right away anyway — so, as odd as it'd been at first, and as much shite as some of his schoolmates had given him for his mum being a lesbian now, he'd gotten over it. To the point that they'd actually started going to, like...gay culture...stuff, in London, over the last year and change, so, okay then.
Stefan being so unbothered by it, even with the pretty negative reaction from his friends, had made Dorea feel like even more of an arse.
She knew, intellectually, that it was fine, that this sort of stuff wasn't really a big deal. Especially after a few talks with Mum and Nathan about...things, she knew that, rationally. But gay stuff still felt weird to her, and she couldn't put her finger on why. And not being able to explain what was weird about it, even to herself, made it rather difficult to talk herself out of it. She was working on it, it was just...a work in progress.
Of course, as much as the gay thing was still weird, it wasn't the worst of what made her uncomfortable around Liz — it was partially the gay thing, yes, but Dorea was self-aware enough to know that wasn't the whole of it. She'd never been fully comfortable with Liz being a mind mage, and as she'd started coming into her power it'd only made Dorea more nervous. Liz often being so cold and strange didn't help — it'd been clear from pretty early on that Liz didn't really give a damn what happened to people she didn't personally care about, and her behaviour could be kind of hard to predict, at times. Dorea didn't doubt that she really would hurt people if she wanted to, as the incident with the snakes attested — and between the mind magic and duelling practice, she could do a lot of damage to someone if she wanted to — and with how hard she was to read, as apathetic as she seemed to be to the consequences of her actions, who could say what might set her off?
Dorea had offended her so badly, without even meaning to, that Liz had decided to, just, completely cut her off, with no explanation. She couldn't help wondering whether she could provoke a violent response, just as unknowingly.
She knew she probably didn't need to worry. As unsettlingly unstable as Liz seemed at times, she'd never done anything particularly objectionable to her friends. But, just like with the gay stuff, just because she knew rationally that Liz wasn't a threat — or not to Dorea specifically, at least — she couldn't help the feeling that Liz was dangerous, and should be treated with caution. Because she was dangerous, that was just a fact, Dorea had no idea whether she'd ever be able to talk herself out of that.
Having to work around Liz's issues all the time could be, just, exhausting — which wasn't Liz's fault, of course, but that it wasn't something Liz had control over didn't change that fact — but on top of that, being constantly low-key scared of one of your friends was...probably not good. Mum had taken the gay part personally, but she was right about the mind mage part being the bigger deal, long term. Dorea was working on the former, but she honestly didn't know what to do about the latter, or even if she should bother.
(But that didn't mean Liz treating her like any random acquaintance didn't hurt.)
"Oh, that's good," Hermione said — to Dorea working on getting better about gay stuff, she meant, she obviously didn't know about her musing on mind magic. "I was... Well, that talk at the hotel in Romania made me very uncomfortable, I was worried that was going to be a problem. Not just Liz and Daphne, but there's Susan and Hannah, and people tend to be more open about this stuff on the magical side just in general..."
Yeah, in retrospect it was kind of obvious she'd been creeping Hermione out, she'd just been too distracted wondering about Liz and Daphne to notice. "Yeah, I know it's...not really rational, just, you know, feelings don't always make sense. I'm working on it. Was I really being that weird about it? Back in Romania, I mean."
"Depends what you mean by that weird. It was pretty subtle, just...bad vibes, I guess you could say." Dorea felt her lips twitch a little at the use of bad vibes, despite the subject matter. "Not flagrantly offensive or anything, just vaguely creepy. If you know what I mean."
Dorea didn't really, but. "Okay. That's not what I wanted to ask about, um. This is going to be a kind of weird question..."
That little tense moment done with, Hermione had crouched down, her folded-up robe set across the top of her bookbag, strung through the straps — apparently she didn't plan on putting that back on. She let out a little huff, by the tilt of her head probably rolling her eyes. "No."
She blinked. "What?"
"Nothing happened with me and Liz. Even if it ever came up — which it didn't — she's with Daphne, that'd be inappropriate."
"That isn't— I wasn't thinking about that." The possibility that Hermione and Liz might have done something like that while Hermione was staying at her house had honestly never even occurred to her, she had no idea why Hermione had jumped straight to that. Though, now she was sort of curious...
"Oh, sorry, I thought— Never mind." Her robe sorted, Hermione straightened with a sigh, turned to look at her, hands planted on her hips. "What'd you want to talk about then?"
"Um, that wasn't going to be my question, but, because Liz is with Daphne is the only reason...?" She couldn't help it, that Hermione's response hadn't been a flat refusal that something like that could ever happen had made her curious.
Hermione just shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't even had my first kiss yet, so...how am I supposed to tell how I'll feel about something if I don't try it first? If any of our friends asked me out, I'd think about it, at least. I'd probably turn down any random person I don't really know, but." Another careless shrug.
...Okay, then. That wasn't really a surprise, when Dorea thought about it — Hermione was almost pathologically curious about practically everything, she should have expected her to say something like that. She didn't really have anything to say to that, so she should just get to the point. "Um, over the summer, did Liz talk about me at all?"
Giving her a crooked sort of frown, Hermione said, "You're going to have to be more specific. We've been friends for years, and Sirius was around pretty often, you came up."
That was fair. "I don't know, it's just... She doesn't talk to me at all, and I noticed just now, when she does talk to me, it's the same as... You know, people who she just kind of tolerates, but doesn't really give a damn about. Like any other person she's not actually friends with. And just, I don't know what I did! I mean, I didn't react well to her telling me about Daphne, sure, but I honestly hardly reacted at all, I barely even said anything, she just got up and walked away without a word! It's just— It's very frustrating, that's all."
After Dorea's little rant — hadn't meant to get that worked up about it, oops, she took a couple long breaths to cool off — Hermione just stared at her. Face mostly blank, jaw shifting slightly as she worked at the inside of her lip, for long silent seconds. Finally, she said, "It's not what you said."
"She did tell you about it? So what did I do, then, why the hell is she so angry with me?"
"...I wouldn't say she's angry." Hermione hesitated for a second, her eyes tipping up at the ceiling, before her hands dropped from her hips with a sigh. "This is just me guessing, you know, it's not something she told me. I'm certain she wouldn't put it in these terms herself — she didn't, when we talked about it. But it's obvious that Liz is really terrible at dealing with her own feelings, just tends to push things down and ignore them until they go away. That's how she deals with most things that bother her, ignore them and hope they go away. Honestly, I wouldn't say I'm that much better with my own personal issues, I just have fewer of them so it's not as obvious, and I'm worse with confrontation — I mean, that whole thing last year with Lavender and Parvati's a pretty good example, isn't it? I'm just saying, I didn't notice it at first, but once I did it's pretty easy for me to tell when she's doing it, because I do a similar thing, you know."
That was news to Dorea, honestly. Hermione did have a couple hang-ups, particularly surrounding her experiences at school before Hogwarts — Dorea knew she'd never managed to make friends before, and had been bullied regularly, which might have something to do with her not knowing how to handle herself in interpersonal conflict within their study group now — but she seemed very well-adjusted in general. If Hermione was bottling up personal issues she was having, she was doing such a good job at it that Dorea hadn't even noticed.
"Anyway, what I'm getting at is, I don't think she's angry with you — or, maybe a little bit, but that's not the main reason. And she wouldn't say she's angry with you either, when we talked about it she was...very flat and matter-of-fact about it, you know. Rational. But, um. This is just me guessing, but I think she's hurt, and she doesn't know how to deal with that, so she just...doesn't."
It was honestly hard to imagine Liz taking anything that personally. She got hurt physically all the time, of course — Liz had a very unhealthy lack of concern for her own safety, as the living out of hotels on her own and the quidditch and the duelling and her complete apathy to the prospect of an escaped (supposed) mass-murderer trying to find her proved — but she didn't know if she'd ever seen someone successfully hurt her feelings. Get annoyed with Ronald being an arse, or general Girl Who Lived obsessives stalking her, or embarrassed by the papers printing scandalous stories about her, sure, but those weren't really the same thing. And people had tried to insult her, now and then, she just...never seemed to care. So, as much as Dorea thought Hermione was mostly right about the rest of it, that didn't make a whole lot of sense. Especially since, "But I didn't even say anything about it, she got up and left before I could."
"I know, it's not about what you said." Hermione hesitated a second, frowning just a little. "Liz told me that one of your first thoughts after finding out she's a lesbian was to worry about her using mind magic to rape our female friends."
...Oh. That was... Hmm. "I don't remember that at all."
"I wouldn't expect you to — it was probably just a passing thought, I'd be surprised if you're seriously worried about that. But you can maybe see why Liz might take it personally."
"I mean...not really? People say horrible things about Liz all the time, and she never takes any of it personally. And just because it's a random thought I had doesn't mean I really think it's going to happen, and I definitely haven't gone around making accusations or whatever. Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't really seem like a big deal."
For a handful of seconds, Hermione just flatly stared at her. (She'd definitely been spending more time around Liz and probably Professor Snape too, she was obviously copying their expressions.) The silence dragged for uncomfortably long, Dorea was about to ask what was wrong, or come up with something else to say, when Hermione finally spoke. "You don't think Liz seeing you thinking about her raping our friends is a big deal."
Well, Hermione was saying that like it obviously should be, but Dorea didn't get it. "Not really? It's not like I really think she is, or that I've told anyone. You can't control every little thought that goes through your head, and if Liz sees something she doesn't like while poking around in there when she's not supposed to, that doesn't really seem like my fault."
"Oh my god, Dorea." Hermione groaned, her head bowing a little, one hand coming up to rub at her cheek.
"What? What about what I just said is a problem?"
"I don't know, how about the part where you've been friends for three years, and you still don't trust Liz at all, and are apparently just as suspicious of her as any of the random idiots who think she's some kind of evil homicidal black witch or whatever nonsense?"
She wasn't sure where Hermione had gotten that from what she'd said... "What are you talking about, that's not true at all." If she thought of Liz that badly, obviously she wouldn't hang around her at all, or have even slept in the same room as her a couple summers ago — she hadn't been quite as scarily powerful yet then, but Dorea had known she was a mind mage, so it still counted. She probably wouldn't do that again, just because she knew Liz was a lesbian now and it would be awkward, but.
"Do you have those same thoughts about, say, Justin?"
"That's not the same thing." Justin simply wasn't intimidating the way Liz was.
"Isn't it? What if Justin were a mind mage, would you worry about him using it against our friends?"
...Well, honestly, probably not. Justin was just so...soft and harmless, it was hard to imagine him doing anything like that. Unless the mind magic came with a significant personality adjustment, which wasn't out of the question, but then he really wouldn't be the same person anymore, would he. "I don't know, I guess it depends. Justin is, you know, such a Hufflepuff, it's hard to imagine him so much as hurting a fly."
"Oh, honestly." Hermione let out a sharp scoff, her eyes darting up to the ceiling for a second. "Dorea, when has Liz ever done anything to hurt any of our friends? Or anyone, for that matter — quidditch and duelling don't count."
Trying to keep her voice flat and calm, forcing any of the irritation clawing at her throat out of her tone, Dorea said, "I don't know if you remember this, but she put snakes in four of our classmates' beds in our first year."
"I don't know if you remember this, Dorea, but you helped her do that." Well, true, but Liz hadn't exactly explained what they were doing... "Also, they'd been hexing the crap out of her constantly running up to that, even tripping her down the stairs for Christ's sake, that was a proportionate response — justifiable enough she didn't even get punished for it, as I recall. And Millie and Draco are friends with her now, so the people it happened to don't even think that was over the line. Try again."
Had they really tripped her down the stairs? It'd gotten pretty bad for a while there, but Dorea didn't remember that. Maybe they'd tried to trip her and Liz had managed to catch herself, which was really just as bad, she guessed... Personally, she thought what Liz had done to Lavender and Parvati last September had been way 'over the line' — she'd gotten the story from Lily later, Liz had used some kind of pain hex to literally torture where they'd hidden Hermione's things out of Lavender, it was seriously unnerving — but she suspected Hermione might interpret bringing that up as defending the girls who'd been bullying her pretty much constantly since she'd started at Hogwarts, and she wouldn't take that well. Of course, the big one was, "Nobody was physically hurt, and it wasn't even technically illegal, but you have to admit the way Liz just casually compelled all of Gryffindor is a bad sign."
"That was a little scary, yes. But it also made it clear that if Liz were compelling the people around her all the time, it'd be very, very obvious. And complaining about the way she went about it is kind of rich coming from you, honestly — she did that for you, Dorea."
"You mean she did it to get the dementors out of the Valley."
"And who among us was having serious — and worsening — medical difficulties because of them?" Okay, yes, Dorea herself had had it the worst, but they'd obviously been making Liz's emotional issues even worse — also, there was that incident where they'd appeared at a quidditch game and Liz had literally broken her spine, let's not forget about that. "There were other ways she could have done that, tipped off the Headmaster or whatever, but instead she recovered Pettigrew herself — important because if Pettigrew had heard one of the professors, especially Snape, was searching the dorms, he might have slipped away — and brought him directly to Snape, who she knew had contacts in the Ministry he could use to make sure Dumbledore or Fudge didn't try to bury it. Not only did she do any of this in the first place because you came to her to ask for help with a problem, but she did it in the way she thought most likely to take Pettigrew in alive — so he could be used to exonerate your father.
"And she did it at significant personal cost too!" Hermione said, her voice rising, clearly getting a little worked up. "Or did you forget that she was trying to keep the fact that she's a mind mage a secret? The people who insist on hating her have been even worse since then — or did you not notice that that was when she started having her post redirected, so the Potter elves could filter out all the hatemail? Maybe you just forgot about this, but they've even forwarded letters with lethal curses and poisons on to the Aurors, multiple times! And she knew that, with how stupid people can be about her, she knew it was going to make things more difficult for her for the rest of her life, she couldn't take it back once it was done, but she hardly even hesitated, she still did it — for you. She literally risked her life for you, Dorea! And she didn't expect a thing from you for it, she just did it! And you have the nerve to stand here and tell me that that's a reason to distrust her!"
Okay, Hermione was giving Liz far too much credit. Dorea seriously doubted she'd made that calculation consciously — Liz never thought these things through, she was a reckless idiot like that. She had forgotten about the lethal trapped letters, true, but she thought Hermione's claim that Liz would have known that was going to happen was...dubious. Honestly, Dorea hadn't seen that coming. She'd known the reaction would be bad, but that bad? No, crediting Liz for knowing that would happen ahead of time was too much.
...But she did maybe have a point about the rest. Honestly, at the time Dorea had been too freaked out by the mind magic, and Liz casually admitting she'd considered making Ronald kill himself just so he'd stop bothering her, that it hadn't really occurred to her that... Well, even if Liz shouldn't have been able to guess how bad it would have been, surely she would have known people learning she was a mind mage would make things more difficult for her — better or worse than the dementors staying, who could say, but surely enough she should have had to think about it. She'd been keeping that secret for years, but she'd given it up seemingly on a whim...just because Dorea had asked her for help.
Now that she was thinking about it, at the safe remove of several months, she did feel... Well. A little bit.
But that she'd done it for Dorea didn't change the fact that Liz would so casually do something like that, that she even could control that many people at once in the first place, any less unnerving. "Maybe all that is true, maybe it isn't, but that doesn't change the facts of what happened. And, I don't know, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be a little wary of someone who can do things like that — and seemingly on a whim, without taking the time to consider the consequences."
"Oh yes, Liz will do things for her friends without pausing to consider the cost to herself. Clearly she's an inherently bad person we must all be wary of."
She didn't have to be sarcastic about it. "Are you telling me it doesn't bother you at all? I don't believe that — you wouldn't have put so much effort into learning occlumency if you weren't at least a little threatened by her. And if she can do nice things for people on a whim, what's to stop her from doing whatever she likes to people just as thoughtlessly?"
"That's the difference, Dorea. I know she can hurt people if she wants to — hell, she could just whip out her wand and blow off any of our heads if she wanted to, Susan's probably the only one of us with a decent chance of stopping her if she tried." Yes, that was another reason Liz was scary, Dorea didn't understand how this didn't bother Hermione, even while explicitly acknowledging it she didn't seem to care at all! "She could do whatever she likes, mess with our heads, but I don't think she will. And I didn't study occlumency to protect myself from her, occlumency has all kinds of uses — there are other mind mages out there, and demons and mind-altering charms and potions, and there are benefits for your spell-casting, all kinds of reasons. Sure, I pay attention to it when I'm talking to Liz, and sometimes turn her away when I catch her, but that's not because I'm scared of her, that's just a basic privacy thing. I mean, when I was staying at her house it's not like I was walking around naked the whole time either, it's the same principle.
"And it's kind of funny, I can actually keep her out of my head, at least against casual snooping, last I heard your occlumency hadn't gotten to that point — which might imply that I'm more scared of Liz, to work so hard to protect myself. Liz said once, that she doesn't think you can really be friends if you don't trust each other, but she's still talking to me, same as always. Maybe learning occlumency was about that for you, maybe you never really trusted her, but it isn't like that for me. And Liz can obviously tell the difference.
"I don't want to talk about this anymore." Hermione stooped over, heaved up her overloaded bookbag with a groan. Slung over her shoulder, her robe draped over it dangled down like a cape, Hermione adjusted some of the ends so she wouldn't trip on anything. "I don't want this to be a big problem, you know. I still want to be friends with both of you, and I don't want to fight over it. Just, can we not blow up over all this, please?" There was an uncomfortable, wheedling tone on her voice, Hermione grimacing — which wasn't a surprise, really, Dorea was well aware Hermione didn't deal well with interpersonal conflict inside their friend group.
...Which probably had something to do with how impassioned her ranting had gotten. Her voice had noticeably risen there, words running into each other as she talked faster and faster — Dorea, better than the occasionally fiery Gryffindor at controlling her emotions, had stayed at normal speaking volume, and would hardly have been able to interrupt if she'd tried — suddenly deciding she didn't want to talk about this anymore was probably just as much about not wanting to argue with Dorea as anything. By that turn the conversation had taken a few minutes ago, she guessed Hermione had taken Dorea being uncomfortable with how intimidatingly powerful Liz was getting weirdly personally, she didn't know what was up with that. Honestly, she hadn't thought Liz and Hermione were that close.
She meant, Hermione was one of Liz's best friends, of course, alongside Dorea herself and more recently Tracey, but these things were relative — as private and defensive as Liz could be, actually getting close to her, personally, was very, very difficult. As far as Dorea could tell, Liz had shared more of herself with Dorea than anyone else, but she wouldn't say even they'd ever been that close. You had to take the little things with Liz, the smallest gestures, she was just like that.
(It could be very exhausting, honestly.)
But then, Hermione had stayed at her house, alone together almost constantly for nearly a month. And Dorea didn't spend that much time around Liz anymore, back to treating her like a practical stranger, and... It was possible that was different now, that Liz had gotten better about her relationships with other people, and Dorea just hadn't noticed. She did seem to be doing better in general these days, far less tense and uncomfortable-looking all the time than she used to be. Though that'd been a long, slow upward trend, perhaps dating back to when Professor Snape had started dealing with her home life situation — obviously Liz hadn't and didn't talk about that, so it was hard to say for sure — gradual enough that it was only noticeable in retrospect, remembering what Liz had been like back in first year. Though she was still a nervous wreck, and barely functional in social situations, but that was still an improvement, so...
Dorea didn't know what she was thinking. It was just...odd, how strongly Hermione was reacting, how very defensive she was at even the suggestion that Liz was a potential danger to the people around her — which she definitely, obviously was, whether you trusted her to restrain herself or not. It was just unexpected, something had changed while Dorea hadn't been paying attention, she didn't know how to feel about it.
But, as confusing and uncertain as all that was, the answer to the question Hermione had asked was an easy one. "No, I'm not going to make a big fight over it — I wanted to talk to you in private for a reason. I just...I don't know. I have some things to work through, I guess." She wasn't entirely certain she agreed with Hermione that Liz had done what she'd done to get Pettigrew for her, but the suggestion she might have was still niggling at her. It was still scary, Dorea did not like remembering that moment in the common room, momentarily frozen in place — both physically and mentally, control of her own mind wrested away from her with casual ease — all the staring eyes around them but the room eerily silent, and Liz just... She'd literally had nightmares because of it. But the suggestion that Liz had done it for her still made her...uncomfortable.
Hermione hesitated, biting her lip again, her feet shifting against the tile. "I don't want to... I don't know, if you can't get over Liz being the way she is, it's probably better for you two to...just not be friends. Better for both of you, you know."
"...Yeah, Mum said the same thing." Mum was also weirdly unbothered by Liz, but all mages were more or less equally dangerous to Mum, so Dorea guessed it made sense that Liz being especially powerful probably didn't make much of a difference. In fact, she was unbothered enough that Dorea had initially taken that comment as Mum taking Liz's side, before she'd clarified it was in Dorea's interests too...
"Gail's a smart woman," Hermione said, nodding. "It might make things a little awkward, you know, but. It's not like Liz is super-friendly with everyone in the study group anyway, and trying to force getting along again is just going to be more awkward than...not. I think. If this is going to stay a problem, I mean — obviously I'd prefer us all be friends like before, but if that's not going to work out, well."
"I get what you mean. We might have to go with that, for now, at least. I'm not ready to give up yet, but, yeah, you and Mum both have a point." To an extent, anyway. She still didn't understand why it didn't bother Hermione the way it did her, being a bit wary just seemed perfectly rational to Dorea, but she wasn't going to argue about it. "I wasn't even going to say anything about it, but earlier, when I noticed Liz was— I just hate this, that's all. I still wish Liz would have talked to me about it, instead of just storming off without a word."
Hermione frowned. "It's not Liz's responsibility to talk you out of being frightened of her."
"And it's not my responsibility to just get over it either."
"Oh, I didn't mean it like that! Did it sound like I'm taking a side? I'm not taking a side." Could have fooled her, with how defensive Hermione had gotten earlier... "I get that Liz is objectively intimidating sometimes, sure, and you can't really help how you feel about that. I think it's irrational, since Liz has never given any reason to think she's a danger to us — I mean, she's our friend, she's on our side, you know? But feelings are irrational sometimes, that's just the way people work, it's not really your fault. And if there's nothing to be done about it, well, then there's nothing to be done about it. But, at the same time, it's not fair to expect Liz to go out of her way to reassure you you don't have to worry about it, especially since I'm pretty sure she was very hurt by what she caught that day in the library, and not really equipped to deal with that, much less fix what's going on between you. So, neither of you are really wrong, and expecting you both to, just, get over it wouldn't be fair to either of you. You know what I mean? I'm not sure I'm making sense..."
"No, you are." Dorea didn't entirely agree with Hermione's characterisation of the conflict, but it was a perfectly reasonable position to come to, from her position in the middle. And at least Hermione wasn't taking sides, as much as this conversation might have felt like it at points — if she'd lost both of her best friends over this, she would have been very annoyed. "I'm not sure I... Well. I'm not going to fight about it, it might just be awkward for a while is all. Especially with how much time the three of us spent together, that's going to be..."
"Liz is busy — we'll be able to hang out while she's at duelling practice, at the very least. We'll figure it out."
Dorea snorted. "Straight to the point as usual, Hermione." She hadn't even meant to suggest she was worried Liz might get Hermione in the divorce, so to speak — despite how terribly oblivious she could be at times, Hermione had just as many moments of insightfulness, it could be hard to predict.
"I try," she said, smiling. "Are we good? Only, it's almost curfew..."
"Yeah, we're good. I'll see you tomorrow — we have Transfiguration in the morning, I think?"
They finally left that bloody bathroom, splitting in opposite directions at the stairs with a last chorus of good nights. It was late enough that the castle was almost eerily quiet, students mostly retreated to common rooms, an occasional distant shuffling or clanking, a muffled voice. The silence quite effectively left Dorea alone with her thoughts, glaring at the stone beneath her feet as she descended one staircase after another on her way to the dorms. Some of the things Hermione had said echoing in her ears, remembering the incident in the Gryffindor common room, how much better (if distant) Liz had seemed lately, she didn't know...
She'd rather none of this had happened in the first place, of course. But if it must, Dorea wished the conflict between her and Liz could be simple.
Oh my god why is this so long? I have a serious problem, for fuck's sake...
It's safe to assume that Dorea's impression that Narcissa is "infamously promiscuous" is due to her hearing homophobes and/or political opponents making up shit about her, and just not thinking to question it. And she does hear stuff like that, on occasion — when talking to Liz about it ages ago now, Narcissa perhaps over-estimated how widely-accepted she is by her peers.
I feel like there should be other things to say about this chapter, but I'm going to leave it at that. My adjusted outline has the other schools arriving on the seventh scene from now. We'll have Fourth Year XVIII - XX, Snake in the Grass IV, Fourth Year XXI and XXII — and then the guests arrive on Fourth Year XXIII, and the selection is Fourth Year XXIV. But as always, my plans are subject to change, so we'll have to see.
Right, bye then.