Harry followed after them at a marginally slower pace, dragging his heels on the way to Umbridge's class and the inevitable period of inescapable boredom.
'Books out and wands away,' she instructed. The girlish voice she usually adopted was gone, the pleasure she seemed to take at their suffering in silence did not spread across her wide face. Indeed she seemed uninterested in it.
rather
indifferent
and
'We will be recapping the chapters on defensive theory from now until your exams,' she announced. 'Study hard and you will succeed.'
Harry opened his pristine copy of Wilbert Slinkhard's worst and only publication, pushing his hand along the spine to try and keep the book from closing itself.
There were so many better things he could be doing with the time, even Hermione, who normally found a clever way to make use of this lesson seemed to have run out of ideas and was writing in the margins of the book every few minutes. Ron's eyes had glazed over, and Neville had fallen asleep with his nose in the pages.
Fortunately Umbridge had not seemed to notice anything. If he did not know that he was able to use his time-turner to reclaim at least some of these wasted lessons, then Harry had little doubt he would not be here. As it was he could easily slip off to the chamber the moment lessons ended for the day and make better use of the extra hours his time-turner allowed.
There was a muffled thump as Neville fell of his stool, and a light titter ran around the room. Umbridge looked balefully, surveying the room, but seeing nothing amiss returned to whatever she was writing at the front.
'Are you alright, Nev?' Harry whispered, as his friend slid back onto his stool.
'Fell asleep,' Neville rubbed his shoulder ruefully, then suddenly burst into a wild grin. 'What is that mark on your neck?' 'Mark?' Harry turned to look at him innocently, shielding the fading, purple blotch on his neck from Neville's view. It was only the size of his smallest fingernail now, and quite faint, so he'd abandoned his scarf. Evidently he'd made that decision a little too early to be safe.
'Nice try,' his friend grinned, 'but after all those remarks about Hannah I'm not going to show any mercy, especially when I'm this bored.'
'Shall I liven up the lesson?' Harry offered, steering the conversation away from the almost faded love bite under his jawline.
'What will you do?' Neville took the bait.
'Watch,' Harry smirked, flicking his wand into his palm under the desk and pointing it towards Parvati's textbook further along their desk.
Concentrating very hard he carefully transfigured it into a large iguana, chuckling under his breath when the girl shrieked loudly and threw herself backwards of her stool away from the lizard.
'What is going standing up.
on?'
Umbridge
demanded,
'There's an iguana, professor,' Harry announced loudly. Drawing his wand he approached the conjured lizard slowly, watched by the entire class. 'I'll take care of it.'
Carefully and deliberately he raised his wand, then paused and frowned as if in thought before placing his wand on the desk in front of the iguana and stepping back.
'What are you doing, Mr Potter?' Umbridge asked incredulously.
'Avoiding conflict with a dark creature, professor,' he answered, somehow keeping a straight face. 'Should I flee now?'
The rest of the class, with exception of Parvati, broke out into laughter. The iguana stoically ignored the noise, choosing to drag itself slowly over towards Neville, who immediately surrendered his wand as well to further chuckling.
'That's furiously.
quite
enough,'
Umbridge
ordered
She dug angrily around in her handbag for her wand, pulling the short, stubby looking piece of wood out in a flash of silver and sapphire.
'Evanesco,' she proclaimed with disturbing delight, vanishing the lizard that had once been Parvati's textbook. Harry caught her eye innocently as she stowed her wand away and, unable to resist, wordlessly and wandlessly cast the legilimency spell. Umbridge was beyond angry. Her thoughts were an incoherent tangle of rage, and flickering, flashing images. He pulled out only a few impressions, a clear, odourless tasteless liquid, veritaserum, himself, and a strong desire to use the Cruciatus Curse.
She's growing more malignant, he realised.
The blood quill had been a disgusting, amoral thing to use. Torturing children with such a thing had been a clear message about her character, but the psychological ramifications of forcing a child to hurt themselves over and over was far from the cruelty required to cast the Cruciatus Curse.
I have to act as soon as I have the polyjuice, Harry decided.
'What's veritaserum?' He whispered to Neville, leaning across to reclaim the wand he had surrendered to the iguana.
'A very powerful truth potion,' his friend replied, mystified. Harry felt he rather should have guessed that from its name. 'It's very tightly controlled by the Ministry and very hard to brew. Gran told me that it can't be used for trials in the Wizengamot because it can be resisted.'
'How can you resist it?' Harry asked quietly. Judging by Umbridge's expression it might be something he needed to be able to do.
'I'm not sure,' Neville answered apologetically, 'she said it produces a powerful compulsion to speak honestly, so maybe if you're strong-willed. There's an antidote you can take too, and like the serum itself it's undetectable so nobody would know if you took it before the trial.'
'Thanks,' Harry murmured gratefully. He'd wager quite a lot that knowing the mind arts would enable him to resist and what better way to convince Umbridge to follow his treasure trail to Aragog than to spill its supposed secrets under the influence of the truth serum.
She would never even dream of suspecting.
He just needed a way to provoke her into drugging students, the former DA members would be at the top of her list of suspects, so he could simply impersonate one of his least favourite members with the polyjuice.
Quietly he thanked Fleur for agreeing to get it for him, and whatever had given him the inspiration to ask for the potion in the first place.
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