25th January 1996, the Great Hall, morning
The news had gone through the castle faster than the fireworks would, days later — by the time the school came down to breakfast, everyone knew.
Educational Decree Number Twenty-Eight hung on the board in its fresh frame, the ink barely dry: Dolores Jane Umbridge is appointed to the position of Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Below it, in smaller print, the suspension of Albus Dumbledore pending investigation.
At the Gryffindor table, six people sat around their breakfasts and mostly didn't eat them.
Even Ron.
That was the measure of the morning — Ron Weasley sat before a full plate of sausages and pushed one slowly around with his fork, appetite flattened under the general grey.
Neville stared at the staff table's empty centre chair.
Draco read the Prophet's jubilant coverage with a face like carved chalk.
Hermione let out a long, heavy sigh — her third and leaned sideways into Viktor, who said nothing and patted her back with slow, steady patience, which was the only useful thing anyone had found to do all morning.
Harry had told them everything the night before, in the common room, in a flat quiet voice: Marietta, the hexes, the stolen parchment, Kingsley's whispered mercy, Percy's flash of spine, Fudge's triumph, and the old man rising from his own desk to hand over the password with perfect courtesy.
"He just... let them," Ron said now, for perhaps the fifth time, still unable to digest it. "Dumbledore. He could've — I dunno, he's Dumbledore and he just handed her the office and told her about the windows."
"That's what frightens Fudge most, I expect," Draco said quietly, not looking up from the paper.
"Men fight when they're losing. Dumbledore didn't fight." He turned a page. "Which means he doesn't think he's losing."
It should have been comforting.
The empty chair made it hard.
Then the doors opened on reinforcements: Astoria, Luna, and Lavender, arriving together — and the table's temperature rose a few degrees by the simple mechanics of their three natures.
Lavender came in already talking, aggressively bright, refusing the mood on principle "—and I said to Parvati, well, she can be Headmistress of the building, can't she, she can't be Headmistress of us—"; Astoria slid in beside Draco and surveyed the room's gloom with elegant disdain "Merlin, it's like a funeral where nobody liked the deceased. Sit up, all of you, you're giving her the satisfaction by proxy—"; and Luna simply drifted to her usual place beside Harry, set down a book on runic bridge-patterns, and observed, serenely, that the ceiling was doing a very good job of matching everyone's insides today, which meant the castle was paying attention, which was rather nice of it.
It worked, a little. It always worked a little.
But Harry, smiling at Luna's ceiling observation — genuinely; there was no armour proof against Luna on the subject of sympathetic architecture — still sat that careful, correct, two-inch distance along the bench.
And Luna, who had been noticing the two inches for weeks in her own unhurried way, set down her spoon, tilted her head at him, and opened her mouth on what was recognisably the beginning of a question—
— and Daphne Greengrass arrived with a face like a closing door.
The table read her expression and braced.
"Fresh from the noticeboard," Daphne said without preamble, sliding in.
"Filch was putting it up as I passed — I've just walked the length of the dungeons hearing Theodore's lot celebrate it. Another Decree. Number Twenty-Nine, they're minting them daily now."
Her voice was flat with disgust. "The Inquisitorial Squad is granted 'expanded disciplinary authority.' Powers of search. Powers of confiscation. The power to dock points from prefects. Corridor enforcement, curfew enforcement, 'behavioural correction'—" she pronounced the phrase like something scraped off a shoe "—all of it delegated, from Headmistress to Squad, effective this morning. She's deputised them. Twenty schoolchildren with badges, answerable to no one but her."
The mood, so recently and laboriously lifted, sat back down.
"There is one consolation," Daphne added, dry as sand. "I passed Filch on the stairs after. He looked furious. Genuinely — muttering into his moustache, slamming the frame about. Forty years that man's been confiscating Dungbombs and policing corridors, and along comes a squad of fifteen-year-olds handed his entire job with badges on."
Her mouth curved a fraction. "The Squad is taking up the caretaker's duties, and the caretaker is sulking about it. Umbridge has managed the impossible. She's driven Filch into opposition."
It got what it was angling for — a wry chuckle round the table, the first of the day.
Harry, laughing with the rest, privately filed one more small weight onto a scale he'd been watching all term: Filch, and Dad, and the wand for locked coils. She has no idea what she's already lost.
It was Hermione and Lavender, exchanging a glance, who asked the thing nobody had wanted to ask.
"Harry," Hermione said carefully. "After last night — the parchment, the names, all of it in her hands. Does that mean... is the M.S.S.G...."
"Gone?" Lavender finished, small.
Harry set down his cup, and nodded, heavy. "Disbanded. It has to be." He let that land, then went on: "She has every name. Every member's now one 'regular meeting' away from expulsion, and the Squad has search powers as of this morning. We can't meet. We can't even look like meeting."
He held their crestfallen faces a moment and then added, quietly, "At least for the time being."
The last six words did their work. Hermione and Lavender breathed out together — for the time being — a door left ajar rather than sealed, and both of them visibly decided that was enough to live on.
"And your father?" Viktor asked. "Vhat does he say? He vill have a view — he alvays has a view."
Harry's face did something complicated. "That's the worst part. I went straight there last night — the moment the Squad let me go, I ran to the west wing."
He shook his head. "Gone. Rooms sealed, papers cleared. He left the school yesterday — before any of it happened. There was a note for me with the house-elves."
He'd read it forty times; he recited its substance flatly. "Atid Stella business that won't keep — weeks of it, maybe — and he's looking in on Jasper and Osian while he's south. He'll write... He probably doesn't even know yet. About her. About any of it."
Nobody said what several of them thought — that Ethan Esther leaving Hogwarts the very day before the roof fell in was either the worst luck of the term, or not luck at all — because there was no way to know which, and the doors of the Great Hall banged open.
Dolores Umbridge made an entrance.
She came up the centre aisle at a stately parade pace, click, click, click, a new and enormous pink bow erected in her curls, and every eye in the Hall tracked her — which was, transparently, the point — all the way to the staff table, where she paused, savoured, and then settled herself into the Headmaster's tall centre chair, arranged her cardigan, and began, with dainty relish, to butter a piece of toast.
The silence in the Hall had a taste.
"Look at her," Ron breathed.
"Sitting in his chair. Like a — like a toad that's et the heron." And then, because he was Ron, and because the table needed it, he began — very quietly, behind the cover of the milk jug — to impersonate her: the pursed lips, the dainty invisible toast, the little wriggle of settlement, the hem-hem mimed in perfect miniature — until Lavender was giggling helplessly into his shoulder and even Daphne's composure had developed a crack and something almost like the group's normal warmth crept back over the breakfast.
"All right." Draco set down the paper at last, and his voice, low, gathered them.
"Enjoy the pantomime, and then hear me. Nothing changes what June is. O.W.L.s. Career consultations. Our actual futures — which she does not get to eat."
Viktor nodded beside him, solid.
"So: heads down. Study. We keep clear of the Squad — routes, timings, we know how; we've been dodging them all year, now we simply do it without a destination. We give her nothing."
His grey eyes went round the table. "She's the Headmistress of a building. Let's see how she likes governing thirty empty corridors and a school full of model students."
...
Over the days that followed, the castle turned grey.
There was no other word for it.
The Decrees came back almost daily now — music banned in corridors; students forbidden to stand within eight inches of one another, the enforcement of which occupied the Squad's rulers and imaginations for one deeply stupid week; teachers prohibited from speaking to students on any matter outside their subject.
The portraits took to falling silent when pink came round a corner.
Even the ghosts dimmed.
Umbridge patrolled her new kingdom in a glow of proprietary delight, and the only warmth she spent went, as ever, on the exchange students — sweet-talked and shepherded and shielded from every unpleasantness, walking advertisements for the Minister's international standing — and on Viktor, whom she now made regular, syrupy attempts to cultivate with words such as"such a distinguished young man, such a credit to international cooperation..." and who received her courtesies with a wooden Bulgarian correctness that yielded her precisely nothing.
To everyone else, the mask was simply off.
The school had seen her true colours, and the school wore grey.
And then, on the fifth morning, the school fought back.
It began, as the best things that year began, with the Weasley twins.
Harry never learned exactly what the final straw had been — a first-year in tears over docked points, the story went, or possibly just Tuesday — but at half past ten, in the middle of a silent, sullen morning break, the entire east wing of the castle erupted.
Weasleys' Wildfire Whiz-bangs.
The full catalogue, deployed at once, from at least nine launch points.
Dragons made of green-and-gold sparks the size of carthorses went roaring down the corridors, gobbling Decree-frames off the walls.
Catherine wheels five feet across screamed through the stairwells trailing rainbows.
Shocking-pink rockets — the colour was not a coincidence — burst against the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall into fizzing letters too fast to censor.
Sparklers wrote rude words in mid-air, erased themselves, and wrote ruder ones.
And through it all marched Fred and George Weasley, one last open act of authorship before the Squad closed in — at which point they bowed, in unison, to a corridor full of cheering students, threw down two final crackers that bloomed into a thicket of spark-swans, and legged it, laughing, into the secret dark of the castle they knew better than any Squad ever would.
That was the beginning.
It was very far from the end.
Because the fireworks would not die.
That was the twins' genius, aged and perfected through a year of Atid Stella-checked development: every attempt to Vanish a Whiz-bang caused it to multiply by ten; Stunning them doubled their size; a Squad member who seized one bare-handed found it went off in his fist, harmlessly, but memorably.
The only safe method was to let each one burn itself out on its own schedule — a schedule ranging from hours to, in the case of the great spark-dragons, entire days and Umbridge would not hear of waiting.
So began the funniest week of the year.
Umbridge and Filch ran the castle from crisis to crisis, singed and shrieking, while the staff — to the school's open delight — pointedly, professionally, did not help.
Professor Flitwick, cornered by a spark-dragon outside his own classroom, sent for the Headmistress to deal with it, explaining sweetly that he could have managed it himself, "but I wasn't sure whether I had the authority."
McGonagall was observed holding a door open for a Catherine wheel.
Grubbly-Plank asked, in the staffroom, in Umbridge's hearing, whether the fireworks might be adopted as a Care of Magical Creatures unit, "seeing as they appear to be breeding."
By Thursday, Umbridge was visibly fraying — soot-streaked, hoarse, her bow askew — running to extinguish her hundredth pink rocket while a castle full of children watched with shining eyes, and somewhere in the walls, Fred and George Weasley's legend compounded daily like interest.
The grey castle laughed for a week.
It helped. It helped everyone.
Almost everyone.
Because through all of it — the Decrees, the fireworks, the laughing — Harry Potter was quietly, systematically, taking himself apart.
He was distancing from Luna.
Properly now; deliberately; a policy, not a mood.
He still sat at meals with the group — but arranged, somehow, always, to be a body or two away from her.
He still answered her — warmly, kindly, correctly — but the answers had grown shorter, and the wry smile that closed each exchange had the precise weight of a door being gently shut.
He had stopped walking her to Ravenclaw. He had stopped, almost entirely, seeking her out at all.
He had not stopped looking. That was the part he couldn't engineer away.
In the corridors, in the courtyard, across the Great Hall — his eyes found her without permission, a dozen times a day.
And found, more often than not, Rolf beside her: the two of them coming out of Charms with their heads bent over some journal; Rolf sketching something in the air with both hands while Luna laughed her soft unguarded laugh; the pair of them on the frosty grounds, hunting some invisible creature along the treeline, entirely absorbed, entirely easy.
And every time, the same sequence ran in Harry like a machine: the cold jealous surge — then Rolf's voice, the blast radius, the boy Voldemort wants dead more than anything alive — then the surge turned inward and strangled, converted by main force into a flat grey conclusion: 'Good. Look how safe she is. Look how happy. That's the point. That's the whole point.'
And then he would turn away, and go study.
He studied like a man bailing a boat. O.W.L. revision at dawn; homework done twice; whole evenings buried in the library behind ramparts of books; extra practice drills alone in empty classrooms; and — this above all told the tale, had anyone known him well enough to read it — he had begun looking forward to Occlumency with Snape.
An hour of the finest Legilimens in Britain besieging his skull had become the most restful hour of Harry's week, because it was the one hour in which thinking about Luna Lovegood was operationally impossible.
His walls, in those lessons, were as good as ever. Better.
Snape battered the moonlit ocean from every angle and found it seamless — and sneered, weekly, at the visible cost: "You look dreadful, Potter. Whatever ails you, I suggest you resolve it; exhaustion is a door, and doors get used."
But the walls held, and that was all the walls were asked.
What no one could see — what the walls existed precisely to prevent anyone seeing — was the state of the country behind them.
The blue moon still hung serene over the black water.
But the water, these weeks, was cold, and the halls of the palace below it had gone dim and echoing, and the boy who walked them at night walked them alone, past a door he refused to open, in a stillness that was no longer calm but only quiet — and there is a difference, and it was widening.
His friends saw the outworks of it: the greyness, the shrinking sleep, the meals half-eaten, the two-inch policy hardening week by week.
Hermione watched him with her jaw tight; Astoria with narrowed eyes; Ron and Neville with the helpless worry of boys whose best mate kept saying I'm fine, honestly in a voice engineered to end conversations.
The committee compared notes and found no opening. Because to every approach, every ambush, every gently-laid trap, Harry presented the same flawless surface: the pleasant deflection, the changed subject, the business smile.
Ethan's smile. He wore it all day now. He had got very, very good at it.
...
It was in the last Occlumency lesson of that grey stretch that something finally broke — though not, in the event, anything of Harry's.
The lesson had run long and hard. Snape was in a vicious mood — the fireworks, the pink administration, some fresh indignity of the Squad's — and he came at Harry's walls that evening with real weight behind the craft, probe after probe after probe, hunting the seam that exhaustion should have opened.
And Harry — hollow, sleepless, running on technique and spite — did the thing Ethan had taught him for exactly such sieges: when the pressure is all one way, kiddo, the door swings both directions.
Snape's probe drove in; Harry's counter rode the recoil of it back up the connection — faster than he'd ever managed, deeper than the corridor-glimpse of weeks before and for three unguarded seconds, Harry Potter stood inside the mind of Severus Snape.
It was not a palace. It was a house with the lights off — locked rooms and covered furniture and one door standing ajar with old light spilling through it, and before Harry could choose anything, the light took him:
—a scrawny boy hanging upside-down in mid-air by a lake, robes fallen over his face, grey underpants bared to a laughing crowd, and the wand that held him there belonged to a tall, careless, glorious boy with untidy black hair and Harry's own face, James, it was James, laughing, playing to the audience, "who wants to see me take off Snivelly's trousers?"—
—and the scene tore sideways into another: a corridor, a portrait-hole, the same scrawny boy years older and desperate now, pleading with a red-haired girl whose green eyes — Mum's eyes, those are Mum's eyes — had gone cold as winter, "I'm sorry—" "Save your breath. You call everyone of my birth Mudblood, Severus. Why should I be any different?" — and the portrait-hole closing, and the boy standing alone in the dark with everything in his face dying at once—
The expulsion, when it came, was not a spell.
It was a convulsion — the whole dark house heaving him out bodily, and Harry came back into his own skull with a crack of separation that dropped him to one knee on the dungeon floor, and Severus Snape was standing over him white as bone, wand shaking — actually shaking — in his hand, his face stripped for one terrible second of every layer of armour it owned, down to something raw and forty years old and never once healed.
"Get out."
"Professor, I didn't — it wasn't on purp—"
"GET. OUT."
Harry got out. The door boomed behind him hard enough to shed dust from the lintel.
He walked back up through the sleeping castle slowly, his mind a churn.
James. His blood father — the laughing, cruel, magnificent boy by the lake. Harry had grown up on the other stories: Sirius's Marauder legends, Lupin's fond exasperation, the photograph of the first Order, your father would be proud. Nobody had shown him that one. Nobody had shown him his mother's eyes going cold, either, or told him that Snape — Snape — had once stood outside Gryffindor Tower begging her forgiveness, or that the word he'd begged forgiveness for was the one Kreacher muttered at Hermione.
'He loved her.' The thought arrived whole and undeniable, with the weight of the dying light in that memory behind it. 'Snape loved my mum. And my dad tormented him, and he called her the word, and he lost her — lost her twice, in the end — and then every September for four years, I walk into his dungeon wearing James's face with Lily's eyes in it.'
It reordered everything and resolved nothing.
The bullying didn't excuse the man Snape had become; the man Snape had become didn't unmake the boy by the lake; James was still his father and still, in that one unbearable frame, a swaggering tormentor; and Harry was too tired, too hollowed, too alone with all of it to make the pieces sit.
He stopped at a dark window on the seventh floor and leaned his forehead on the cold glass.
The grounds lay black and silver under a slice of moon.
Somewhere out there, past the gates, past the dark country, his father was buried in Atid Stella's affairs, checking on a Snidget and a Re'em, weeks away and not even knowing what the castle had become.
And Harry stood alone with a stranger's oldest grief lodged in his chest beside his own newest one and let out a long breath that fogged the glass.
'I wish you were here, Dad,' he thought, simply, like a much younger boy. 'I've got so much to ask you. I don't even know where I'd start.'
Then he straightened, and rebuilt the business smile out of habit for nobody at all, and walked on up to bed.