The weather on the first day of the new school year at Hogwarts made absolutely certain that every student understood exactly what they were in for over the coming months.
Harry had grown comfortably, perhaps a little too comfortably, accustomed to sleeping in at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place across the summer. He yawned, dragged himself out from beneath his blankets, and peered out through the dormitory window with bleary, reluctant eyes.
The sky beyond the glass was a wash of grey misery stretching from one horizon to the other in a thin drizzle veiling the distant mountains and valleys in a soft, colourless haze.
Seamus and Dean had already gotten up and gone, their beds were left in rumpled disarray.
In the bathroom, the sound of running water and the occasional muttered complaint told Neville was working his way through his own morning routine. Ron, meanwhile, remained entirely cocooned in his own blankets sleeping soundly.
The night before, sprawled comfortably in the common room well past the hour they should have gone up to bed, they had talked through everything currently pressing on their minds: where exactly the Slytherins stood now, in the aftermath of everything; what Draco was really after; the Sentient Magical Beings Exchange delegation due to arrive at Hogwarts this coming Friday; and the mysterious new Meditation class.
Every single one of those topics on its own could easily have filled hours of further conversation if they'd let it.
But Professor Binns, who had first and second period scheduled for today was hardly likely to excuse anyone's tardiness on the grounds of a stimulating late-night discussion the last evening.
Harry peeled himself away from the warm, slightly stuffy nest of his blankets and swayed up, his balance was taking a moment to properly assert itself.
A vine of damp, cool air curled in through the partially open window, and Harry shivered at the contact.
Only then did he notice, with mild surprise, that he was thoroughly soaked in sweat beneath his nightclothes—the uncomfortable signature of a night that had been just cool enough to fall asleep in, but not quite cool enough to actually sleep well through.
That dream had clung to him again. He could still feel its edges, somewhere at the back of his mind, even now that he was fully awake.
He had already decided, though, not to make any particular point of mentioning it to anyone.
Enough people already knew about the dream as things stood, and none of them, not even Professor Watson himself seemed inclined to take it very seriously.
"I'm heading down for breakfast, Harry!"
Neville burst out of the bathroom, towel still draped half over one shoulder, snatched his school bag from the foot of his bed in passing, called out a quick, breathless farewell, and was gone through the dormitory door before Harry had fully processed the sentence.
Harry realised, watching the door swing shut behind him, that he couldn't really afford to dawdle either. He turned to shake Ron awake but found that Ron had already managed it himself, rubbing at his bleary eyes with the back of one hand and yawned hugely.
"Is it breakfast time already, Harry?"
"If we can make it down to the Great Hall in the next fifteen minutes, we might still catch a sandwich before everything's cleared away, Ron."
Harry said this over his shoulder, already half-sprinting toward the bathroom Neville had just freed.
In under five minutes, both boys were fully dressed and ready to go.
Harry buckled Professor Watson's gifted watch onto his wrist as he thundered down the steps of the boys' dormitory staircase. One final, flying leap—Harry and Ron dashed down the last few steps together and landed in the middle of the common room below.
A cluster of first-year girls scrambled past them in panic, racing across the entire length of the common room and hurled themselves through the portrait hole in a tangle of robes.
Harry watched them go with a small, sympathetic wince. Those poor things probably wouldn't realise until they'd actually reached their classroom that they'd forgotten to put their robes on over their uniforms.
"Hey, Neville—what are you looking at?"
Ron, who had nearly bolted clean across the room at the sight of a cluster of students gathered near Hermione's usual corner, stopped himself short instead.
Neville, who had left the dormitory well before either of them, was standing at the common room's noticeboard, his nose was practically pressed against a fresh notice that appeared to have gone up sometime that very morning.
"Oh, brilliant—Hermione's had a new idea, has she?"
Neville turned at the sound of Ron's voice, his eyes were bright with enthusiasm.
"Count me in! Harry, Ron—two Galleons a month, and it's barely any time commitment at all once you read the details properly. Completely worth it for the cause, I'd say, even without the money."
Once Harry got a proper, close look at the notice himself, he understood exactly what Neville was going on about.
"Blimey, the efficiency of it—"
He couldn't help marvelling aloud at the sheer speed of the thing.
After the conversation had wrapped up late the last night, Hermione had apparently gone straight back to the common room and sat down to write out the entire recruitment notice Professor Watson had asked her to produce—all of it, fully formatted and ready to post, before she'd even went to sleep.
Ron grumbled the entire way down toward the Great Hall, reading bits of the notice back from memory as they walked the stairs.
"—If interested, please contact—oh, she's put our names down on it, Harry. She didn't even think to ask either of us first!"
But it wasn't until they actually reached the entrance hall that he discovered what real, large-scale trouble actually looked like.
The school-wide noticeboard in the entrance hall bore the exact same notice they'd just seen upstairs in Gryffindor Tower meaning it had gone up, simultaneously, in every House common room across the entire school.
And when they finally looked properly toward the Gryffindor table for breakfast, they found students from every other House had already settled in around Hermione's usual spot: Hannah Abbott and Ernie Macmillan's whole group from Hufflepuff were leaning in with interest; Cedric Diggory alongside Cho Chang and Marietta Edgecombe and several others from Ravenclaw, all of them with the same curious attentive posture.
They had all joined on Hermione in chorus, peppering her with rapid-fire questions from every direction.
Hermione, for her part, looked anything but harassed by the attention—her eyes were bright with genuine pleasure, and she was thoroughly, happily absorbed in answering every single question put to her, however repetitive some of them clearly were.
Ron had already begun sizing up the nearest available exit from the Hall with real seriousness. Then, from somewhere within the crowd still gathering around the noticeboard area, a voice called out across the noise:
"Hey, Harry!"
Harry stopped mid-steps.
A tall, dark-skinned girl with long, neatly arranged braids was making her way confidently toward them through the press of students.
"Oh—Angelina. Hi—"
Harry said recognizing her.
"Hi. And Ron—"
Angelina said brightly.
"How was your summer? Must've been eventful, from everything I've heard. I gather you both got through the Ministry hearing all right, in the end—"
She didn't wait for either of them to actually answer, moving straight on to the point of her approach.
"Did you know I've been made Gryffindor Quidditch captain this year?"
"Have you? That's brilliant, Angelina—"
Harry grinned at her, the expression was totally genuine.
Oliver Wood had been a fine captain, no question about it—utterly committed to the team's success, even if that commitment had occasionally tipped over.
Harry also realised that he hadn't actually played a single proper Quidditch match in an entire full year now. The thought struck him as nearly unthinkable, given how vital flying had been to every other year of his life at Hogwarts.
"Right, so—" Angelina continued, all business now.
"Oliver's graduated, obviously, which means we're short a Keeper this season. Trials are this Sunday, five o'clock in the afternoon, out on the pitch. I'd like all the current returning players there for it, so we can properly see how whoever we pick fits in with the rest of the team under real conditions. All right?"
"Absolutely. I'll be there."
Harry agreed without a moment's hesitation. Angelina gave him a quick, satisfied smile and a nod toward Ron before turning and walking off back toward the Gryffindor table,.
"New Keeper."
Ron stared after her retreating figure, his expression was hovering somewhere uncertainly between wistfulness and uncertainty.
"Wonder who it'll be?"
"Hard to say right now, honestly. Though I've heard a few of the lower years are promising—Vicky Frobisher and Geoffrey Hooper are both supposed to be decent flyers, from what people were saying last year."
Harry shrugged, his attention was only partly on the conversation. "Who knows, though, in the end. It really comes down to how you actually perform on the day itself, under pressure, in front of everyone. Some people have all the right fundamentals and then completely fall apart the moment they're out on an actual pitch."
He didn't notice, caught up in his own thoughts about the trials, that Ron's face had gone steadily, increasingly red throughout this entire assessment.
At breakfast proper, the matter of Hermione having listed them both as contact names without so much as a word of advance warning prompted another small, simmering argument with Ron which only deepened the gloom already settling over the table thanks to the grim weather outside and a sleep schedule that hadn't quite finished readjusting itself back to term-time hours.
There was, however, Harry thought as they finally made their way toward their first classroom of the day, one silver lining to having History of Magic scheduled as the first two periods of the morning.
You could, with a perfectly clear conscience, fall asleep in that particular class without feeling the slightest guilt about it.
Harry was drowsy within roughly five minutes of the lesson beginning. He had genuinely, sincerely intended to apply himself properly this year as he was an O.W.L. student now, after all, with actual examinations looming somewhere in the not-impossibly-distant future but Professor Binns' droning, monotone recitation of the various Giant Wars proved, as it had every single year before this one, simply too powerful a soporific force to resist.
Harry had escaped Voldemort's clutches more times than he could easily count across his short life. He was, obviously, no match for Binns' particular, narcoleptic delivery of historical facts.
Most people, it had to be said, weren't entirely at their best on the first morning back regardless of the subject.
Ron, at least unbothered by recurring nightmares of his own, was somewhat better positioned than Harry though for the better part of the full hour and a half, he and Neville had instead been quietly playing Hangman in the corner of Ron's spare parchment.
Hermione remained the sole student in the entire classroom paying full, genuine attention throughout the lesson, occasionally firing a withering sidelong glare in Ron's direction in a silent reminder that he was now a Prefect and might consider behaving accordingly.
The glare, however many times it was deployed, never once seemed to actually register with its intended target.
"What would happen, exactly, if I simply refused to lend you my notes for this entire year?"
Hermione asked it coldly as the three of them walked out together during the morning break.
"Your conscience would haunt you forever, Hermione—"
Ron replied cheerfully, entirely unbothered by the threat, already moving on to whatever came next in his own thinking.
They were crossing the damp, puddle-scattered courtyard when a small group of first-year Ravenclaws clearly nervous, and clustered close together for courage timidly approached Hermione, asking, in halting, overlapping voices, whether they might be eligible to join her Society for the Welfare of Sentient Magical Beings.
Hermione's whole face lit up immediately at the question.
She produced several sheets of fresh parchment from her bag in a single motion and began taking down their names on the spot, alongside a thorough, careful briefing on the various duties expected of all members.
"When will you finally accept that they're only signing up for the pocket money, Hermione?"
Ron asked it to the drizzling grey, rolling his eyes dramatically at Hermione as she happily tucked the freshly completed sign-up sheets back into her bag.
Hermione paid his sarcasm no attention at all and strode confidently ahead of them toward the back entrance of the Great Hall.
"Come on, Ron—"
Harry said, steering him along after her with a kind of anticipation he hadn't felt toward a class in all of his four-plus years at Hogwarts so far.
"We've got Professor Slughorn's first Potions lesson."
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