The heavy oak door of the Hogwarts staff room creaked open at a few minutes past eight in the evening. The lounge was bathed in the warm, flickering glow of the hearth, smelling faintly of old parchment, toasted sparrows on skewers, and roasted chestnuts.
Around the room, several members of the faculty were unwinding after a long day of preparing for end-of-term examinations. Snape sat near the far corner window, idly swirling a glass of amber whiskey while doing his best to ignore Charity Burbage, who sat nearby with a glass of wine, wearing robes far too bright for his comfort.
Lupin sat comfortably in a plush armchair near the fireplace, sharing a pint with Thorne, who leaned against the mantel with his arms crossed. Nearby, McGonagall held a glass of her favorite gin in one hand while scanning a heavy ledger resting on her lap.
Albus Dumbledore stepped into the room, his midnight-blue robes embroidered with silver stars sweeping softly against the stone floor. He looked remarkably sprightly for a man who had spent the entire afternoon navigating the claustrophobic hallways of the Ministry of Magic.
"Good evening, everyone," Dumbledore said, making his way toward the hearth.
"Albus," Minerva said, glancing up from her book. "You are back late. I trust the Ministry has not completely imploded under its own administrative weight?"
"Not entirely, Minerva," Dumbledore chuckled, getting himself a measure of whiskey from the Intelligent Barkeep. "Though watching the Wizengamot Secretariat attempt to reconcile centuries of rigid bureaucracy with Amelia's new restructuring plan is a spectator sport unlike any other."
"Lord Nott must be beside himself," Remus remarked, a faint smirk touching his lips. "He has spent twenty years building a career on nepotism."
"Surprising as it may sound, Nott voted in favor of it," Dumbledore replied, taking a seat in the armchair opposite McGonagall. "As did Malfoy and Yaxley. Mandatory proficiency examinations for civil servants passed the preliminary committee without a single vote to spare."
Thorne let out a short, approving bark of laughter. "Either those men have gone senile, or someone has replaced them with imposters."
"A mystery for another day, perhaps," Dumbledore said smoothly. "Though the Wizengamot's restructuring was hardly the matter that kept me in London until eight o'clock. The Secretariat spent three hours attempting to handle an administrative anomaly. Or rather, three of them."
Snape's dark eyes flicked toward the Headmaster over the rim of his glass. "An anomaly?"
"Three separate, legally unassailable nominations for the Order of Merlin, First Class," Dumbledore explained. "All submitted this afternoon. And all involving current Hogwarts students."
A heavy silence fell over the room.
Minerva set her gin down with a soft, sharp clack. "I beg your pardon, Albus? Students?"
"Ten of them, to be precise," Dumbledore added pleasantly.
"Ten?" Madam Pomfrey nearly dropped her mug of calming tincture. "Albus, that is absurd! The First Class distinction is awarded to war heroes and lifetime scholars, not children sitting in a classroom!"
"The law specifies only that the achievement must fundamentally alter magical society or preserve human life on a national scale, Poppy," Dumbledore pointed out gently. "And I am afraid the Secretariat could not find a single loophole to reject them. Miss Granger and Young Weasley's Power Classification framework stripped away political bias so thoroughly that the Ministry is adopting it outright."
Snape gave a single, slow nod. "That paper was a masterpiece of applied Arithmency. Irrefutable, even for the purists."
"And the twins?" Minerva pressed, her brow furrowed in disbelief. "Don't tell me Fred and George Weasley are receiving the nation's highest honor?"
"For their tactical spell-storage rings," Dumbledore said. "Eight hundred units were procured by the Auror Office this morning. Every active agent in the field is currently equipped with one."
"Merlin help Hogwarts once those boys realize they hold diplomatic immunity," Burbage muttered from her corner.
"And the third nomination?" Thorne asked, leaning forward with genuine curiosity. "Who else?"
"A collective submission straight from the Head of St. Mungo's and endorsed unanimously by the International Confederation of Wizards in Geneva," Dumbledore said. "For Miss Parkinson, the Greengrass sisters, Miss Weasley, Miss Lovegood, and Miss Dursley. Co-creators of the Oculus-Restoration Potion."
"First years?" Pomfrey gasped, clutching her mug. "Four of them are eleven years old! Curing total biological blindness?"
"Ten students," Minerva murmured, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Ten children holding First Class distinctions in our Great Hall. The old bloodline families on the Wizengamot will lose their minds."
"Let them," Thorne grunted. "The law is clear. They cannot refute the merits, no matter how much it burns."
Snape set his glass down on the windowsill with a quiet clink. "An impressive list of names. Though I notice a rather glaring omission. If the Ministry is handing out First Class medals to second-years for rune work and potion brewing, where is Potter? Without him, none of those three breakthroughs would even exist."
Remus hid a small smile behind his pint, while Minerva looked up, suddenly attentive.
"Severus, I assure you, the Secretariat has not forgotten Harry," Dumbledore said, a sudden spark of humor dancing in his eyes. "In fact, they have tried to officially confer the Order of Merlin, First Class upon him ten separate times since the release of the Moonsbane Elixir."
Snape's eyebrows raised slightly. "Ten times?"
"Ten times," Dumbledore confirmed. "For foundational papers on spatial mechanics, curse neutralization, combat theory... and every single time the official notification parchment arrived, Harry threw it directly into his wastebasket."
"He rejected it?" Burbage asked, wide-eyed. "Ten times?"
"He did not even bother to send a formal refusal," Dumbledore said, his voice laced with quiet amusement. "When I asked him about it in private, he informed me that the administrative paperwork, public speeches, and formal galas were an unnecessary irritation that added no value to his life."
"He treats the highest honor in Europe like junk mail," Snape said dryly, a subtle twitch at the corner of his mouth hinting at deep approval. "The entire Wizengamot is having a collective crisis over ten pre-teens receiving medals, while the boy who made it all possible treats their awards like an unwanted merchant flyer."
"It is utterly ridiculous," Minerva sighed, though the small, proud smile pulling at her lips betrayed her stern tone. "Though I suppose it should not surprise us at this point."
"No, it should not," Remus agreed softly, leaning back into his armchair. "Hogwarts has not been the same since he walked through the front doors. We used to spend our evenings worrying about simple corridor pranks. Now we sit here discussing ten-year-olds rewriting Ministry law."
"It has certainly kept us on our toes," Madam Pomfrey admitted, a soft chuckle escaping her as she finally finished setting her medicine cabinet supplies in order. "Every single year since he arrived has brought the most extraordinary surprises. I don't think any of us can even predict what the next five years will look like."
"Whatever it looks like," Hooch said, standing up and stretching her arms over her head, "it certainly won't be boring."
"Indeed," Dumbledore said softly, setting his empty teacup back on the tray with a satisfied smile. "It is a rare privilege to sit in the front row and watch history being written by children."
Then came the tap.
It was not a thunderous bang or a magical pulse. It was a polite, crisp tap-tap-tap against the tall glass pane of the window overlooking the main courtyard.
Snape's dark eyes flicked toward the glass, his brow furrowing into a deep crease. McGonagall straightened her back, her sharp gaze instantly locking onto the window frame.
Floating just outside the glass was a small, perfectly folded square of heavy parchment. It hovered motionless against the night sky, completely unbothered by the fact that it was suspended four stories above the stone courtyard.
"Is that... a memo?" Remus asked quietly, his voice raspy from the long evening.
"It appears to be," Dumbledore said softly. He flicked his wrist toward the window and the heavy brass latch on the window clicked open.
The moment the window cracked open even an inch, the entire staff room vanished into absolute, chaotic hell.
A violent, roaring blast of arctic air slammed through the opening like a physical wall. Sitting directly in the blast zone, Madam Hooch was knocked clean off her feet, her newly polished flying goggles torn straight from her hand and sucked into the roaring abyss outside.
The pressure differential hit the room so hard that the heavy velvet drapes blew straight inward, snapping like whipcracks against the stone walls. Parchments, lesson plans, essay rolls, and delicate silver instruments were instantly sucked off the central table, swept into a wild, spinning vortex of air that raced around the room.
The temperature dropped from a cozy, fireside warmth to fifty degrees below freezing in less than half a second.
"What in the name of-!" McGonagall shrieked, her voice instantly swallowed by the roaring gale.
Dumbledore's half-moon spectacles were nearly blown off his face. He caught them with one swift hand, his silver beard whipping wildly over his shoulder like a banner in a hurricane. Snape's drink flew straight out of his glass, the amber liquid freezing into solid, jagged clump of ice in mid-air before shattering against the far wall.
Outside, the calm, balmy May night had vanished entirely.
A monstrous, screaming blizzard had devoured the Hogwarts castle. The wind howled through the stone battlements with the deafening roar of a jet engine, whipping vast, blinding sheets of snow across the darkness.
But it was not normal snow.
The storm was violently, obscenely colorful.
Massive, silver-dollar-sized flakes were screaming through the gale in brilliant, unnatural hues. Swirling currents of ruby red, deep emerald green, sapphire blue, and rich canary yellow tore through the air, clashing and merging in a blinding, neon chaos. Every single snowflake was the size of a Galleon, tumbling in violent, slow-motion spirals through the howling wind, completely ignoring the laws of physics as they drifted with bizarre, waltzing elegance straight through the tempest.
And then came the sound.
Faint, distant, and completely shredded by the screaming gale, a voice echoed from somewhere high up near the Astronomy Tower.
"...FU....CK...YOU.... MERLINNNNNNNN!"
The professors froze.
Madam Hooch scrambled up from the floor, leaning directly into the gale to peer through the open pane, her eyes wide with professional horror and disbelief.
High up in the swirling, neon-colored vortex, a small, dark silhouette flew past the window at roughly eighty miles an hour, spinning end over end like a ragdoll tossed into a tornado, completely swept away by his own atmospheric disaster.
"POTTEER!!!!!" Hooch yelled over the roaring gale, instinctively analyzing the disaster. "Dear Merlin... The boy is getting rag-dolled by the gale..."
A second later, the small square of parchment that had knocked on the window floated calmly into the center of the room. Completely immune to the hurricane forces tearing through the office, it drifted down and landed squarely in front of Dumbledore on the desk.
Dumbledore, his hair standing on end, his robes utterly soaked in powdered red and green snow, slowly lowered his hand from his glasses. He smoothed out his long silver beard, picked up the parchment, and held it up to his eyes.
The note was brief. Written in sharp, hasty black ink, it read:
Headmaster,
I was trying out a weather manipulation charm. I messed up. The weather will be chaotic for about a month.
Sorry, can't do anything about it.
— Harry
Silence fell over the room, broken only by the deafening, roaring tempest outside and the whistling gale blowing directly through the open window.
McGonagall stood frozen beside her chair. Her hat was crooked, pushed sideways by the initial blast of wind. A single, Galleon-sized snowflake made of brilliant crimson ice had landed squarely on the tip of her nose. She stared out the window, her eyes wide, her mouth opening and closing silently like a fish out of water.
"He... he..." Minerva choked out, her Scottish accent tightening until it sounded like a snapping wire. "He was... blown away."
"He was indeed, Minerva," Dumbledore said mildly, his eyes twinkling with a terrifying mixture of shock and sheer, unadulterated amusement.
"He is currently airborne!" McGonagall bellowed, her composure shattering into a thousand pieces as she pointed a trembling finger out into the roaring, red-and-green blizzard. "The boy is currently being carried across the Scottish Highlands by a self-induced arctic hurricane!"
"And without a broom!" Madam Hooch added in shock, clutching the edge of the stone window frame to keep from being pulled out herself. "His trajectory is completely uncontrolled! If he hits any wall at that speed..."
"I am sure he will manage," Dumbledore replied serenely. He flicked his hand towards the window shutting it again before turning back to look at others. "Or, more likely, he will simply cast a cushion charm before he hits the lake."
The deafening roar of the wind dropped to a muffled, howling hum against the thick glass, leaving the staff room in a shocked, freezing silence.
The room was completely ruined.
A thick, four-inch layer of multi-colored snow covered every single surface. The central mahogany table looked like a festive mountain range, piled high with glowing drifts of ruby, emerald, sapphire, and gold powder. The hearth fire was dead, replaced by a steaming pile of slush. Half the room's papers were plastered against the far wall, stuck there by a crust of bright green frost.
Snape leaned his head back against the stone wall and closed his eyes.
"May," Snape whispered, his voice dangerously low, dripping with a dark, bottomless exhaustion. "It is the middle of May."
"It is quite colorful, though," Charity Burbage offered weakly from the corner. She was ducked behind a high-backed armchair, pulling yellow and blue snowflakes out of her hair. "Look at the detail on the badgers. They're... they're actually smiling."
"I don't care if they are singing hymns!" McGonagall snapped, wheeling around to glare at the Muggle Studies professor. Her tartan robes were dusted in bright gold powder. "He has altered the local climate! He has created an atmospheric disaster inside the castle perimeter!"
"The sheer volume of snow in here alone is impressive," Remus said, brushing a mountain of red ice off his lapel and trying to hide a faint, wry smirk. "He certainly doesn't do things by halves."
"Remus John Lupin, do not encourage him!" McGonagall roared, her hands flying to her temples as if trying to hold her head together. "He broke the weather! He broke the sky! We have a thousand students waking up tomorrow to a four-color blizzard in the middle of spring!"
"Four-color?" Pomona Sprout chimed in, scooping up a handful of brilliant yellow snow off the table and sniffing it cautiously. She held it up to the candlelight, her eyes wide with professional curiosity. "Oh, my. Look at that. The yellow ones taste like lemon drop ice. Minerva, try one."
"I will not try one!" McGonagall shrieked. "I am the Deputy Headmistress of this school! I am not going to stand here eating accidental ice cream off the floor while Potter orbits the castle!"
Dumbledore chuckled softly, walking back over to his snow-covered desk and brushing off a space to lay the parchment down. He read it once more, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
"'Sorry, can't do anything about it,'" Dumbledore quoted gently, his voice practically purring with delight. "Ah, the honesty of youth. Most students would attempt to hide their mistakes behind complex excuses or blame a faulty cauldron. Harry simply informs us that he has ruined the local atmosphere for four weeks and suggests we make preparations."
Snape slowly opened his eyes. He stared at Dumbledore with a look of absolute, unadulterated venom.
"Headmaster," Snape said, his voice dropping into a deadly, quiet register that usually made first-years burst into tears. "The boy has turned the castle into a glorified snowglobe. He is currently screaming at medieval sorcerers while airborne. And your reaction is to praise his correspondence skills?"
"Severus, my dear boy," Dumbledore said, stepping back over to the window and peering out through the frost at the howling, colorful chaos. "When a twelve-year-old accidentally binds a localized arctic weather system to the ancient castle wards, produces galleon-sized house emblems out of solid ice, and fills our staff room with peppermint-scented drifts... one can only admire the sheer, exuberant scale of the failure."
"He called Merlin a bad word, Albus," Pomfrey whispered, her voice cracking slightly under the strain of fifty years of teaching. "He cursed the founder of modern magic at the top of his lungs while passing the Owlery."
"Merlin has been dead for a thousand years, Poppy. I doubt his feelings are hurt," Dumbledore said cheerfully.
"My hat is out there, Albus!" McGonagall yelled, pointing at the window where a dark shape could be vaguely seen spinning past the glass through the white-out. "My hat is in the vortex!"
"And my flying goggles!" Hooch added grimly, rubbing her wind-burned cheeks while looking outside. "They were pure dragon-hide! They're probably somewhere over Hogsmeade by now!"
"It looks quite stunning against the blue flakes, Minerva," Dumbledore noted gently. "And worry not Rolanda, I'm sure Harry will be more than happy to get you new ones if you are unable to find them."
Down on the floor, Remus was laughing so hard he had to grab the edge of the snow-covered table to keep himself upright. "I'm sorry," he wheezed, wiping a tear from his eye as he shook ice out of his sleeves. "I'm sorry, Minerva, but... the note. The note is what gets me. 'Weather will be chaotic for about a month. Sorry.'"
"It is not funny, Remus!" Thorne sighed, though his voice sounded like he was struggling to hold it together. "What are we supposed to tell the students? I believe there needs to be a sane enough answer to give them in the morning? Not to mention answer to the Ministry?"
"Tell them it's an advanced practical examination for the fifth-years," Snape muttered, pulling his black cloak tightly around his chest as a layer of green frost began to melt off his eyebrows. "Tell him the Slytherins won the house cup early and we are celebrating with seasonal decor."
"Severus," McGonagall gasped, looking at him in utter shock. "Was that a joke?"
"No," Snape deadpanned, staring blankly at the frozen lake of firewhisky on the rug. "It was an expression of my profound desire to drown myself in the lake. Which I assume is currently frozen solid."
"I am going to retire," McGonagall said, shaking her head as she looked around at the ruined, snow-drifted room. Her voice was completely flat, drained of all human emotion. "I am going to my quarters. I am going to draw the curtains. I am going to cast a deafening charm over my bed, and I am going to sleep until July."
"Nonsense, Minerva! The night is young!" Dumbledore declared. He turned away from the window, his bright blue eyes flashing with boundless energy, his robes completely covered in glowing, multi-colored ice dust. "Pomona, go fetch a batch of hot mulled wine from the kitchens. Charity, see if you can locate Minerva's hat before it reaches the mountain range. Everyone get a refill on your drinks. We have a month of winter to prepare for."
Burbage bent down, picked up a single green snowflake with her finger, and placed it on her tongue.
"It tastes like peppermint," Burbage whispered, her eyes wide with a horrific, terrifying realization. "The boy didn't just alter the weather. He flavored it."
Sprout paused mid-step, the yellow drift she'd been holding still cupped in her hands. She blinked, looking from Charity to the yellow ice, and then back again.
"Wait," she said, her brow furrowing in deep confusion. "Peppermint? But the flavor is lemon drops. I just tasted one. It's distinctly sour lemon."
"Lemon?" Dumbledore echoed, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes as he leaned against the table. He reached down to a bright red drift resting on his sleeve, picked up a Galleon-sized Gryffindor lion, and popped it into his mouth. He froze for a beat, his eyes widening. "Ah. No. The red ones are definitely raspberry fizz. It's... actually carbonated."
"It's what?" McGonagall snapped, wheeling around so fast her tartan robes kicked up a small cloud of blue and gold snow.
"It fizzes on your tongue, Minerva," Dumbledore said, looking equal parts impressed and deeply amused as he swallowed. "Like a sherbet sweet."
Thorne, who had been standing by the mantle trying to maintain his military composure, looked down at his arm, where a massive, sapphire-blue Ravenclaw eagle snowflake had landed. With a resigned sigh, he picked it off his sleeve and licked the edge.
"Blueberry sherbet," He declared deadpan, shaking his head in absolute disbelief. "He made four distinct confectionary profiles. Binds them to the house crests, matches the colors to the primary house hues, and infuses them straight into atmospheric precipitation."
"Peppermint Toads," Snape added, his voice trembling slightly as he tried to down the potent minty flavor of the green flakes. "It's not just plain mint. It's the exact flavor profile of Honeydukes' Peppermint Toads. The ones that hop around in your stomach."
"Well," Dumbledore said cheerfully, scooping up a handful of blue snow from his desk and eating it like a snow cone, "I must say, the blueberry is quite exquisite. A touch light on the sugar, perhaps, but remarkably refreshing."
"Albus!" McGonagall shouted, her voice echoing off the stone walls. "Stop eating the blizzard!"