Kind of a set-up chapter, cementing in Harry's shaky agreement with Draco. Warning for Harry's sucky childhood being mentioned.

A long-fingered hand caught Harry's wrist as he went to drop cubes of crystallized Bubotuber pus into his cauldron. "Learn to read, Potter," hissed the owner of the hand, a sneering Professor Snape. "Stir counter-clockwise, bring the cauldron to a medium heat, and then add the crystallized Bubotuber pus. Five points from Gryffindor." He released Harry and then glided across the classroom to lecture Hermione on the difference between dicing and chopping.

Harry made a face at the teacher's back and then stirred and heated up his simmering potion. He hated it when Snape gave him legitimate criticism because it reminded him that the awful man was an actual teacher who knew what he was doing. It was so much easier to simplify the man to a bullying git, rather than think of him as a knowledgeable bullying git.

Unfortunately for Harry's worldview, Snape had been more instructive during this Potions session than he'd ever been. Having his classroom blown up must have taught him a lesson of some sort, because the man was twice as paranoid as usual. He had been correcting everyone, not just the Gryffindors, though he hadn't taken any points from his precious Slytherins. One unforeseen benefit of Hogwarts going mad was a sudden uptick in the quality of that year's Potions classes. Who would have guessed?

The Draught of Distraction that Harry turned in that day was probably E-quality. He was sure it would be graded as a P or an A at best, but it was probably the best-brewed potion he'd produced in his years at Hogwarts. He stepped out of the classroom with a warm sense of pride in his chest and a slight skip in his step.

A tug on his sleeve drew his attention. Harry looked around. He noticed Malfoy standing still in the moving crowd, fiddling with his tie in a finicky fashion. His eyes flicked up at Harry. "Trophy room," the boy mouthed. He then departed with Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy Parkinson in tow.

He turned, intending to give the Harry next to him a prompting nudge, and was surprised to see Hermione standing there instead. Hadn't he walked out with Blue? They'd been working next to each other in class he could have sworn they'd left together, too.

"Er, hi, Hermione," he said awkwardly. Internally, he scrambled to find a topic. "So, how'd your potion go?"

"Well enough. Professor Snape showed me how to cut the catfish whiskers to the right fineness, but my potion turned out a little too blue to be considered celadon," she said. "What was that with Malfoy? I noticed he didn't start any drama in class today, even though the professor was in a Gryffindor-punishing mood."

Harry froze up. Lie! He needed a lie! He needed one right now!

"Erm, I…We, er, have a truce?" he choked out. The boy then mentally kicked himself. That hadn't been a lie, darn it!

Yellow popped out of nowhere with Blue in tow and hooked his arm around Harry's. "Green and I were going to take a Floormaster up to the first floor and find a bathroom not guarded by monsters," he told Hermione. "Blue wanted to talk to you, though!" He gave the aforementioned Harry a push toward Hermione, who wore an expression of suspicion and confusion, and then dragged the green-eyed Harry away from the conversation. "Were we or were we not telling the truth?" he whispered to Harry as they walked away. "Because we were following your example, and I can't tell whether you're setting a terrible one."

Harry sighed. "I messed up," he admitted. "Lying to the Dursleys is easy. Lying to my friends isn't."

"Probably because we've only had friends to lie to since we came to Hogwarts," Yellow said in understanding. "I'm sure you already know this, but I'm all for telling the truth. As much as I like hanging out with myself, I like having Ron and Hermione around, too. It feels like we're pushing them away, when we keep things from them."

"Some things have to be kept from them." Harry certainly wasn't going to tell his friends about his old cupboard or how he'd been cooking breakfast since the age of four. That was just pointless whining of the most humiliating sort. He wouldn't have put it past someone like Dudley or Malfoy, but Harry Potter didn't whinge unless it was productive or others shared his complaints. Only brats whined about things no one cared about or could fix.

"Don't you think they deserve to know that we've convinced Malfoy to stop targeting them?" Yellow asked. "Hermione would be glad to know we got him to stop calling her that awful slur."

"He was a total arse to them last time they spoke," Harry pointed out.

"Ron called him rat-faced, Green. Have you seen Malfoy? He's like Lockhart, but actually pretty. Of course he was furious."

Harry snickered. "You think he's pretty?"

"Well, he is!"

From there, the boys segued into a discussion of glamour spells versus Muggle cosmetics and whether a sheltered pureblood like Malfoy even knew what lipstick was. Harry had learned quite a bit about make-up from his aunt, who made him organize her collection from time to time. Their conversation was put on hold while they let themselves be snatched up by giant, shadowy hands and spat out in the Entrance Hall, then continued all the way up to the trophy room.

"Malfoy, do you know what lipstick is?" Yellow said in lieu of a greeting.

The blond jolted upright from where he'd been leaning lazily against the wall. "What? Lipstick? Er, yes, I know of it," he stammered. "Lip rouge is more common, though, since it's easier to mix colors and enchant to stay in place. Why?"

Harry sighed and handed Yellow an I.O.U. note for five Sickles, since the other boy had won the bet. "No reason," he said nonchalantly. "Anyway, what's your report? Did anything interesting happen yesterday?"

"Yes, definitely." Malfoy gave a little bounce of excitement and then began to pace. "Yesterday afternoon, a Slytherin second-year and some of her year-mates decided to go on an expedition. I've heard from my connections that a lot of new areas appeared after our unintentional quest on Saturday; Amanda Bulstrode's group was the first to do any real exploring," he said. "They were attacked by a tricolor group of Wizzrobes, which they dispatched in the usual manner. What's interesting, though, is that they got a reward for it." He stopped pacing and looked at Harry, his gray eyes sparkling. "At least five students have gone to the Hospital Wing after getting locked in a monster-room or mobbed in the hall, and no one's ever gotten a treasure chest out of it." He cleared his throat and schooled his expression into something more aloof. "So, as I was saying, they opened this chest and what do they find? A scroll. A magical scroll that cracked their minds open and shoved a spell inside." The boy waved his hand and pulled a red lamp out of thin air, then vanished it with a flourish. "Sound familiar?"

Harry gasped. "We must have changed something by getting through that cave!"

"Exactly. Not only did we expand the barrier around Hogwarts, but we unlocked new sections within the castle and a new element to this curse," Malfoy declared. "We can get rewards now, at least in certain areas of Hogwarts. I'll have to ask around to see what regions follow this new rule. The point is, with these scrolls in play, we now have a very good reason to venture into Hogwarts's monster-infested wilds."

A wide grin spread across Harry's and Yellow's faces. Now they could practice using their swords and gain awesome new magical skills at the same time! Harry couldn't wait to tell…well, everyone. This was awesome!

"…should come up with teams and back-up teams, just in case," Malfoy was saying.

"What was that?" Harry asked. He'd been too caught up in his excitement to pay attention.

"In case we wind up wandering into another cave, we should come up with teams and secondary groups," Malfoy reiterated. "For instance, my servants and I could be on a team with you and Pansy or with the blue and yellow Potters, but not with the muggleborn or the Weasley."

Harry cringed. "Hermione would probably take a book to your face before ten minutes were up." The girl was a very compassionate person, but Harry didn't know how long she could put up with Malfoy's disrespectful attitude. She reminded Harry of a miniature Professor McGonagall at times.

"I don't doubt it. Being raised by Muggles is little better than being brought up by wolves." Malfoy shuddered delicately.

"An interesting thing to say when your father's a viper," Yellow retorted. He then squeaked and clapped his hands over his mouth. "Whoops, was that out loud?"

Harry squashed down a snicker at Malfoy's unguarded look of astonishment and said, "Right, we'll get on that. Hermione would know how to draw up a proper team roster."

Malfoy cleared his throat and swept a hand over his slicked-back hair. "If you feel she's capable," he sniffed. From the slight sneer curling his lips, he didn't think she was. "I'll have Millicent do the same, and we can compare and compromise later." He turned to leave, then paused.

Fixing Yellow and Harry with a stern frown, he said, "You'd better not go blabbing to everyone about those magic scrolls. I know you're too disgustingly Gryffindor to understand the concept of keeping treasures to oneself, but imagine the slaughter if a bunch of first-years got it into their heads that they could go off on magical quests and return with new knowledge to show off to their friends. Especially muggleborn firsties who don't know the first thing about magic. You don't want to be responsible for filling up the Hospital Wing, do you?"

'We've only been working together for a week! Since when did he understand me so well?' Harry thought. He hadn't taken the blond for an observant person. Arrogance, selfishness, and a liking for getting others in trouble had seemed to Harry the only personality traits of Draco Malfoy. He had a small fit of panic as he imagined the tow-headed prat acting with real intelligence in addition to his sadistic cunning.

"Wow, you're actually rather smart, aren't you?" Yellow remarked to Malfoy. "You've already figured out how to guilt-trip me. That's impressive; my family hasn't even learned how to do that yet."

Though he appeared uncertain for a moment at Yellow's somewhat backhanded compliment, Malfoy proudly drew himself up. "I've always been good at reading people, just like Mother," he boasted. "The only reason I introduced myself to you the wrong way back in first year was because I had assumed you'd grown up as a proper Potter; we are cousins, you know, through the House of Black. Now I know better." He flashed Harry a sly, knowing smirk and then strode out of the room.

Stunned silence reigned for several seconds. Harry and Yellow exchanged horrified looks. "He's my cousin?!"

"You've gone mad, Harry! Allying with a Malfoy?! You do know where they got their family name from, don't you?" Ron paced agitatedly across the dorm room. In the background, Neville and Seamus watched him go, their heads turning with his strides. "Malfoys can't be trusted! It's in their name and in their history!"

"Yeah, he's a spoiled brat, but that doesn't mean you can go calling him a backstabber just because of the family he was born into!" Red shot right back.

"Harry, they were exiled from France for treason!"

"Yeah, and? How many centuries ago was that?"

Ron pursed his lips. "Five."

"Listen to yourself, mate! You're on about something that happened half a millennium ago!"

Ron didn't back down. He planted his feet, crossed his arms, and fired back with, "They're blood-purity nuts, they're as Dark as they come, and Malfoy's own father fought for You-Know-Who in the same war that got your parents killed! The whole lot of them are a bunch of rotten snakes, and this Malfoy's no different from the others."

Red deflated a bit, surprise dulling his anger. "You should have started with that," he said. "I think I'd forgotten."

"Not sure how something like that slips your mind," Ron huffed. "He called Hermione the M-word only last year."

"True. He can be a nasty little bugger," Red agreed. "Still, though, I'm keeping him on as an ally." The boy stood up straight and put his hands on his hips. "He's got good info and we've got him on his best behavior around Hermione. Did you notice he didn't call her that word even once when we were stuck in that cave?"

A startled blink was Ron's answer. "…I didn't notice at all. Huh."

"If we hadn't called a truce with him last Tuesday, we'd probably have been trapped down there for ages, especially since Malfoy found the big key."

"I guess so." Ron wore a frustrated frown as he admitted this. "But he still isn't trustworthy, Harry. He's going to throw you under the hippogriff the moment he gets the chance."

"Then he can have fun wandering forever in whatever dungeon we've fallen into, since I'm pretty sure using a magic sword is the only way to break those electrified eyes guarding the exit." Red patted the leather strap hooked over his left shoulder. "Being a kind-of Hero of Hyrule feels weird, but it has its upsides. Even being split in four isn't so bad." With the conflict concluded he looked over at Blue, who had been observing the argument from around the edge of the Gryffindor copy of the Hylian Bestiary. "You know, you could have backed me up at any time during that argument."

"It was so much more entertaining watching you two hotheads go at it, though." Blue let the large book fall flat on his bed. "Now that you've blown off your respective heads of steam, we can talk about what's important. I had Green read through this half-translated mess of a reference book, and—"

The door opened and two Harrys tumbled in, breathing hard. Neville and Seamus perked up at this new intrigue. "Ron," the green-eyed one wheezed. "Did you know that—"

"—Malfoy's my cousin?" his yellow-eyed twin shrilled.

Red and Blue reeled back.

"How many Dudleys are in my bloody family?" Red groaned.

"We're related to someone who lives in a manor?" Blue asked, a wide grin forming on his face. Oh, he could just imagine the possibilities…

The other three Harrys and Ron goggled at him like he'd just proclaimed his undying love for kazoos.

"That's the first thing that comes to mind? Really?" Green said incredulously.

Blue wasn't at all ashamed. "Consider our first bedroom, why don't you?" He could imagine it easily, given how much time Harry Potter had spent unwillingly locked there in his earlier youth. Dark, small, frighteningly inescapable yet comfortingly familiar, dank from years of fear-sweat and tears, spider-infested, and swimming in plaster-dust due to Dudley's habit of jumping on the stairs above it—yes, Blue knew that terrible little cubby-hole intimately well.

As Harry Potter was rarely of a mind to argue with himself, the other Harrys were soon nodding in understanding. "Coming to Hogwarts kind of made me forget about that one dream," Yellow said with a note of wistfulness.

He meant the dream about someone whisking him away from the dreadful Dursleys to live in a fantastic mansion where he could eat all the ice cream he wanted and not have to worry about his freakishness ruining everything. It had been one of Harry's favorite recurring fantasies as a small child. "Malfoy isn't what I imagined, but he'd do in a pinch, don't you think?" Blue mused.

"What on earth are you talking about?" Ron asked. He resembled a befuddled puppy, his head cocked to one side and a confused frown on his face.

"Childhood silliness," Blue said shortly. It was best to nip Ron's curiosity in the bud, before it got him asking any piercing questions. Sometimes he could be even more perceptive than Hermione. Blue regarded him warily before turning to the green-eyed Harry Potter. "Did Malfoy elaborate at all when he said we were relatives of his?" he inquired. "I figure this is as good an excuse as any to dive into the library's records of family trees."

"Er, he said it was through the House of…" Green trailed off, the color draining from his face. Beside him, Yellow breathed a quiet "oh my" of realization. "The House of Black! As in Sirius Black!"

Neville and Seamus gasped. "That bloke who's trying to kill you is your cousin?" the latter boy burst out.

A chorus of surprised yelps and curses rang out as everyone else collectively realized their discussion hadn't been as private as they'd assumed.

"We'd have escaped before you got too far, but you were yelling at each other and we didn't want to get caught in the middle," Neville said apologetically. "We promise not to tell anyone, though."

"We don't have to. Malfoy's probably done it already, the mouthy git." Seamus made a prompting gesture. "Keep on going! Things were getting interesting."

Blue shrugged. The school was bound to turn on him sometime this year anyway; he doubted his classmates had completely forgotten the "Heir of Slytherin" scandal of the year before. If Seamus decided to talk (because he doubted Malfoy would, if he hadn't already done so by now), then it would only get the inevitable over with more quickly. "I'll go with Hermione to the library after Herbology tomorrow," he said. "We'll look up family trees and see what Malfoy was on about. Who knows; maybe we'll find something related to the Four Sword and Hyrule."

"When did Hyrule even exist, though?" Red asked. "The kid with the Four Sword we saw in that musty old book looked medieval-ish, but Hyrule was long gone before the Founders turned this castle into Hogwarts back in…er, when was it?"

"Approximately the year one thousand A.D.," Blue told him. "Which was during the Medieval Era."

"This conversation took a way different direction than I thought it would," Ron sighed. He decided to join in with, "How could that other Four Sword bloke be dressed like a Medieval Muggle if Hyrule is supposedly super ancient? Also, what was a Muggle doing with a sword like that?"

Blue thumped a hand on the Hogwarts Bestiary spread out in front of him. "He was a Muggle!" he exclaimed. "I never considered that!" Flipping through the pages, he found the illustration of the last boy to use the Four Sword, then kept going until he found the first Four Sword Hero's vaguer, older portrait. The artist had clearly been working off of a description, not the person in question, but Blue could see that the style of clothing both Heroes wore was remarkably similar, even with centuries between them. Assuming both boys were Muggles from a technologically advanced kingdom that didn't show on any historical maps…It was like Hyrule was another Atlantis.

"Green, during lunch tomorrow, we're going to Professor Dumbledore," the boy spoke into the pages of the splayed-open book. "We need help on this."

"Why me?" Green whined. "You and Hermione can do research just fine."

"I may be you, but I can't read Hylian. Hermione, for all her brains, can't read a language that dead without a translation key, and not even the translation spell could figure out everything," Blue pointed out. "If Professor Dumbledore has gotten ahold of any other Hylian books, I'm going to need you to read them. Therefore, we are both going to the professor's office tomorrow."

Green sagged in defeat, while Red snickered at his misfortune.

"Red, you and Yellow can come along, too. Professor Dumbledore said he'd Sort us properly once we'd settled in, after all, and he keeps the Hat in his office."

The other Harrys looked intensely worried. "Sort us?" peeped Yellow. His voice quivered anxiously. "I don't want to get Sorted to another House."

"What if I wind up in Slytherin this time?" Green fretted. "I may be Malfoy's cousin, but I think I'd go mad if I had to share a dorm with him."

"What if I turn out to be the only one left in Gryffindor?" Red asked. "I don't want to be alone!" He glanced at Ron. "No offense, mate."

"There's a difference between having friends and keeping yourself together." Ron shrugged. "I get it."

To be honest, Blue didn't want to be separated from his other selves, either. He also didn't want to lose contact with Ron and Hermione, whom he wouldn't see nearly as often if he were Sorted into Slytherin or Ravenclaw. Then there was the fact that the Slytherins in his year hated him and he couldn't even remember the name of a single Ravenclaw. Staying in the wrong House wasn't that bad, all things considered.

"Fine, we'll tell Professor Dumbledore to let us all stay here for the sake of our mental health," he declared. "If any of you see Malfoy out and about, ask him what the password to the gargoyle is so we don't have to stand there rapping off sweets."