Chapter 58:
– The Totally "Innocent" Levia-tan –
Serafall Leviathan, one of the Four Great Satans of the Underworld, absolute ruler of a significant portion of Hell, Maou-class devil with power that could freeze continents, and the most beloved magical girl television personality the supernatural world had ever produced, sat very primly in the uncomfortable wooden chair across from Dumbledore's desk with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed like a naughty first-year caught hexing another student's bag.
The chair was absolutely the Naughty Chair. She could tell. It was narrower than the other chairs in the office, and it wobbled slightly on its back left leg, and the cushion was thin in a very pointed way. Dumbledore had a Naughty Chair, and she, Serafall Leviathan, was currently sitting in it.
"Uwu…" Serafall sobbed, lifting both hands to her face and rubbing at her eyes with her knuckles. Fake tears spilled down her cheeks in perfect, glittering droplets because she had been practicing for her show for years and her crying was television-grade. "It wasn't me. I have been framed and wronged. An innocent magical girl, persecuted by a cruel and unfeeling world!"
Her voice cracked on "unfeeling" for dramatic effect. She peeked between her fingers to see if it was working.
It was not working.
Professor McGonagall stood to the left of Dumbledore's desk. She was still a shade paler than usual, and Serafall noted with some professional sympathy that the older witch had probably never seen that much of a person splattered across that much of a hallway before.
The blood had been truly impressive. Generous, even. Serafall had genuinely admired the distribution before remembering she was supposed to look horrified.
"Ms. Leviathan," McGonagall said, and her Scottish burr had gone sharp around the edges. Normally she'd be calling Serafall 'Ms Sitri' in this castle, but there were no students around and no fake formalities. "Multiple students have now come forward to report seeing you running through the corridors shouting, and I quote, 'I am going to kill a pink toad.' End quote."
Serafall's cheeks went pink. Okay. Yes. Fair. That does look bad.
"Okay," Serafall said, dropping her hands into her lap and sitting up a little straighter. "Yeah. Okay. I will admit that on the surface level, from a certain angle, if you squint, that does make this look kind of bad."
"Ms. Leviathan!"
"But! But but but!" Serafall held up one finger. "In my defense, I said a lot of things today, and I didn't kill most of them. I threatened six members of my own council with defenestration this morning and not a single one of them is currently defenestrated. Ask Behe-tan. She'll tell you! Whenever she gets here…"
Dumbledore, who had been watching all of this from behind his desk with the deeply tired expression of a man who had not expected his typical afternoon to include a homicide investigation, folded his hands on the blotter in front of him and leaned forward slightly.
"Serafall," he said, and his voice was gentle despite everything. "You have my deepest gratitude, and the gratitude of this school and every soul within its walls, for what you did during Kokabiel's attack. That debt is not something I take lightly. It is not something any of us take lightly."
"Aw, Dumbles, thanks. You're such a cool old dude!"
McGonagall's left eye twitched.
"HOWEVER," Dumbledore continued, and Serafall could hear the However capitalizing itself as he said it, "being owed such a debt does not grant you the right to murder members of my faculty. Even faculty you personally disliked. Even faculty the rest of the school personally disliked. Even faculty whom, I will admit in the privacy of this office, I myself found rather difficult to warm to."
"But I didn't do it, Dumbles," Serafall whined, and she let her lower lip push out into a proper pout. "I didn't. I swear on my magical girl honor. I swear on my show's ratings. I swear on my son's very cute butt."
McGonagall made a sound somewhere between a cough and a choke.
"Ms. Leviathan, I would thank you not to refer to Mr. Sitri's, ah, his—ahem—in my presence."
"Sorry, Minnie…"
"Do not call me Minnie."
From his golden perch in the corner of the office, Fawkes the phoenix shifted his weight from one clawed foot to the other and let out a low, warbling trill. The sound was warm and resonant and carried through the air like a struck bell.
Serafall's head snapped toward the phoenix so fast her twin-tails smacked against her shoulders. "You hear that?" she demanded, pointing at Fawkes with both hands. "You hear that, Dumbles? The bird thinks I'm innocent! The bird! The bird has a direct line to the truth of the universe! Phoenixes cannot lie! It's a well-known fact! I read it on an ancient and dark forbidden scroll once!"
Dumbledore looked at Fawkes.
Fawkes looked at Dumbledore.
Something passed between them, some silent communication of the kind that only existed between a very old wizard and a very old bird that had been burning and rebirthing itself at his side for longer than most countries had existed.
Dumbledore returned his gaze to Serafall.
"As my familiar of many, many years," he said, and his blue eyes were twinkling now in the dangerous way that meant she was about to lose, "I am in fact able to understand Fawkes rather well. And I am afraid that he, too, believes you to be guilty…"
"NANI!?"
Fawkes trilled again, and this time there was a distinctly smug quality to it.
"Traitor," Serafall hissed at the bird. "Turncoat. I fed you a grape that one time and this is how you repay me. This is exactly why I am a cat person."
Wait, am I a cat person? I've never even had a cat…
"Ms. Leviathan," McGonagall said, pressing two fingers to her temples. "If we could please focus."
"I am focused. I am extremely focused. I am focused on the grievous miscarriage of justice currently being committed against me, an innocent woman, framed by mysterious forces, in what I can only assume is some kind of elaborate political plot designed to sully my good name and also possibly my ratings."
"Your, ah. Your ratings…?" McGonagall looked confused.
"Have you never seen my show, Minnie? I think you would like it a lot!?" Serafall perked up.
"I have not had the pleasure…" the witch replied flatly.
Such a thing could not stand!
"I'll have Behe-tan send you the box set. It's very educational. It covers friendship, perseverance, epic magical battles, and a whole lot of smut!"
"I beg your pardon, what was that last one?!" McGongall looked aghast.
"Nothing…"
Before McGonagall could formulate a response to that, the heavy oak door to Dumbledore's office swung open with a decisive creak, and Serafall's entire face lit up.
Behemoth strode into the office.
Serafall threw both hands up in the air. "YAY! My lawyer! I mean my Queen—I mean my lawyer—I mean—" She waved her hands frantically. " Now that she is here, I invoke my right to remain silent and sexy!"
Behemoth did not break stride. She walked to the chair beside Serafall and looked down at her King with an expression of such dry, long-suffering patience that entire deserts could have taken lessons from it.
"My King," Behemoth said flatly, "I have served you faithfully for hundreds of years. In that time, I have never once seen you remain silent. I have serious doubts regarding your ability to do so now."
"Behe-tan, you're supposed to be on my side!"
"I am on your side. I am on your side so thoroughly and so competently that I am, at this very moment, about to save you from yourself. As usual. Again."
Serafall sniffed and made a show of dabbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Fine. Fine. Save me. See if I care."
Behemoth turned her attention to Dumbledore and McGonagall, and her entire demeanor shifted in an instant from put-upon secretary to something that made the air in the office feel a little heavier. That's my Behe-tan, Serafall thought proudly. Scary and hot. The best combination.
"Headmaster. Professor." Behemoth inclined her head. "In the interest of expediting this matter and returning my King to her duties, allow me to present my findings."
Dumbledore gestured with one hand. "By all means."
"I proceeded immediately to the scene. I took the liberty of cleaning the hallway of all biological matter, as the students currently housed in the nearby corridors were, understandably, rather distressed by the sight, the smell, and in several cases the trajectory of the aforementioned matter onto the ceiling."
"Subsequent to sanitation," Behemoth continued, summoning a binder to her hand and opening her folio and removing a single sheet of parchment that was, Serafall happened to know, completely blank and purely for theatrical effect, "I conducted a thorough magical signature analysis of the scene. I examined residual energy traces, magical cast-off, and ambient thaumic impressions. My analysis is, I assure you, considerably more precise than any investigation any other magical being would be able to achieve."
"Behemoth is old as fuck! She knows her magic!" Serafall cheered, ignoring the glare Behemoth gave her behind her glasses. She didn't like being reminded that she was a beast older than the bible.
"I do not doubt it," Dumbledore murmured.
"My findings are as follows. At the time of Dolores Umbridge's death, precisely one other individual was present in that corridor with her. That individual was a student of this school." Behemoth paused, and her dark eyes swept from Dumbledore to McGonagall and back. "Draco Malfoy."
McGonagall's expression shifted to disbelief. "Mr. Malfoy?"
"Furthermore," Behemoth continued, "upon taking the additional liberty of briefly interviewing several Slytherin students in the lower corridors regarding recent activity in their house common room, I have learned that Mr. Malfoy returned to Slytherin House approximately fifteen minutes prior to the discovery of Professor Umbridge's remains. He was, by multiple independent accounts, covered head to toe in fresh blood. His robes were saturated. His hair was saturated. His face was, I am told, 'like something out of a horror film.' He was reportedly muttering to himself in a manner that several students described as, and I quote, 'absolutely bonkers,' 'completely off his rocker,' and 'kind of freaking me out, honestly.'"
A long silence settled over the office.
Dumbledore closed his eyes. He reached up and pressed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, beneath his half-moon spectacles, and he let out a breath that seemed to carry with it the weight of a great many years and a great many disappointments. "Another of my students," he said softly, and his voice had gone tired in a way that made Serafall feel, for one very brief and uncomfortable moment, a tiny bit bad for him. "Another of my students has turned down the dark path. I had hoped, truly I had hoped, that young Draco might turn out differently than his father. I had hoped… If only to try and win back his mother's love…"
Poor Dumbles. He really is trying his best. Even if his best involves putting a Magical Girl Maou in the Naughty Chair.
The moment of sympathy lasted approximately two seconds. Then Serafall shot to her feet with both arms thrown over her head in a victory pose that she had copyrighted in seventeen territories in the underworld.
"YAY! LOVE AND JUSTICE PREVAILS ONCE AGAIN!" she declared, spinning once on the ball of her foot so that her magical girl skirt flared out around her supple thighs. "The innocent magical girl is exonerated! The wicked are exposed! The ratings are saved! I am off the hook!"
"Ms. Leviathan, please sit down."
"I cannot sit down, Minnie, I am VIBRATING with the power of my own VINDICATION."
McGonagall closed her eyes briefly, opened them again, and Serafall was delighted to see that the older witch looked, for the first time since the meeting had started, something less than murderous. Something almost approaching sheepish, even. "I suppose," McGonagall said stiffly, straightening her tartan shawl, "that I owe you an apology, Ms. Leviathan. The circumstantial evidence was, you will admit, rather damning, but nonetheless I leapt to a conclusion without the benefit of Lady Behemoth's thorough analysis and I—"
"Do not," Behemoth said flatly, "apologize to my King."
McGonagall blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Do not apologize to my King," Behemoth repeated, her voice carrying the same clipped, patient cadence she used when reviewing Serafall's expense reports for her various shenanigans. And there were a lot of them. "If you apologize to her, she will absolutely let it get to her head. She will reference it at every official function for the next six months. She will have commemorative merchandise produced. There will be a musical number."
"HEY!" Serafall whirled on her Queen with both fists clenched at her sides and her cheeks puffed out indignantly. "Behe-tan, that's MEAN!"
"It is accurate, my King."
"It's BOTH! It can be BOTH!"
Behemoth turned to Dumbledore with the faintest, most imperceptible incline of her head, an expression that, on anyone else, might almost have qualified as a wink.
"Headmaster. If there is no further business, I will escort my King back to our office, where she has a great deal of paperwork awaiting her attention and a teaching lesson plan to finalize for classes tomorrow."
"By all means, Behemoth. Thank you. Truly…" the old man told Serafall's Queen.
"HEY! I'M RIGHT HERE! STOP PLANNING MY EVENING OVER MY HEAD! I WANT TO SPEND TIME WITH HARRY AND SO-TAN, I DON'T WANT TO DO ACTUAL WORK! THAT'S NOT WHY I MADE MYSELF A TEACHER!"
Everyone in the room stared at her flatly for those words…
Behemoth's hand closed gently but firmly around Serafall's elbow, and Serafall found herself being dragged towards the door. Behemoth was one of the physically strongest beings in existence and Serafall couldn't stop her even if she wanted to. She chose to accept her fate.
"BYE DUMBLES! BYE MINNIE! I FORGIVE YOU FOR THE NAUGHTY CHAIR!"
The door of the Headmaster's office closed behind them with a soft, final click, and in the silence that followed, Dumbledore leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his chest, and gazed up at the ceiling of his office for a long, long moment.
Fawkes trilled softly.
– Dumbledore –
Dumbledore turned his head towards McGonagall and asked her if "she would like a cup of tea" because unfortunately they were both in for a long night.
"I could use a cup of tea, thank you," McGonagall said and sat down on the chair next to Dumbledore as he pulled out the Elder Wand and waved it around.
A teapot floated over towards the desk along with two cups. He carefully poured the steaming liquid for both of them before picking up the teacup and bringing it to his lips. Ah, that's just what he needed.
"The DMLE will be here soon," he told McGonagall. "We will have to hand over Draco Malfoy to them. Unfortunately, I can't see him ending up at any place other than Azkaban after what he has done…"
She nodded at him. "I can't believe that Mr. Malfoy was capable of such a grisly murder, but then again, after what he tried to do to Miss Sona Sitri during the events of the Triwizard Tournament, maybe we all just had too much faith in some of our students after all. We're going to have to keep a much closer eye on the rest of the Slytherins, aren't we?" She finished, looking at Dumbledore in concern.
Dumbledore hated to agree, because he was a man that always wanted to see the best in his students. He set his teacup down for a moment and then nodded his head, saying, "Yes, I'll have Severus keep an eye on the rest of the Slytherins much more closely, at least for the next couple of months…"
Speaking of Severus, I think I can sense him coming towards my office now. Although, for some reason he's not alone.
Dumbledore and McGonagall both turned their heads towards the door Serafall was just dragged through. They could both hear multiple footsteps approaching from the other side. A couple of those footsteps were stomping and almost seemed angry.
The door to the office violently swung open and three people strolled inside.
Severus' voice carried through the wood. "...You both might be parents of students currently attending this school, but that doesn't give you the right to just storm into the castle without the Headmaster's express permission. I'm going to have to ask the two of you to leave."
"Oh, shut the fuck up, Snape, you filthy traitor. We all know you never believed in the cause after that slutty redheaded mudblood of yours got killed by the Dark Lord," a man said to Snape hatefully, making Dumbledore scowl because he believed that Snape had genuinely changed his ways for the good, and Snape was one of Dumbledore's closest friends.
"You have no right to interfere in this. This is about our daughters," a woman's voice added.
Dumbledore and McGonagall glanced at each other one last time before the doors to his office were violently thrown open and two people stormed inside, followed by Professor Snape and his billowing robes. Snape just threw Dumbledore a look of exasperation that basically said, I tried to stop them but they wouldn't listen. He also added another look that Dumbledore recognized: 'should I curse them in the back?'
Dumbledore shook his head, because that was the last thing they needed before the DMLE was going to be showing up soon enough. He turned his attention towards the two angry parents and recognized them as students that used to attend this fine institution a few decades ago: Mr. and Mrs. Greengrass, the parents of Daphne and Astoria, also currently in charge of Tracy Davis, who was their family's ward after her own father basically sold off custody of his half-blood daughter.
"What can I do for the two of you?" he asked the two Greengrass parents.
Both of them scowled at Dumbledore at the same time.
Mr. Greengrass looked like he wanted to reach for his wand, but then thought better of it and instead just pointed an angry, trembling finger in Dumbledore's direction. "Don't try playing games with us, Dumbledore. We know what you've done. You have stepped way out of line," Mr. Greengrass declared with a huff.
His wife next to him added, "Interfering with the marriages of the members of the Sacred 28 is a big crime!"
Dumbledore blinked.
Honestly, he had absolutely no idea what either of them were talking about right now…
McGonagall was giving him the exact same confused look as well. He even glanced over at Fawkes, and the Phoenix just shrugged at him, or whatever a bird's equivalent was.
"What is this about?" Dumbledore put on his perfectly calm Headmaster face.
Severus spoke up from behind the two angry parents. "The two of them first tried to get into the Slytherin dorms, Headmaster, but I wouldn't let them in," Snape explained, and then continued, "apparently they had Daphne, Astoria, and Tracy all under some old world marriage contracts, contracts that have somehow been broken today. The magical backlash when the contract was broken severely injured the men who were supposed to be wed to the three girls."
McGonagall gasped next to Dumbledore, and he understood her shock as well.
Old world magical contracts were barbaric, especially for women, stripping away their rights and freedoms worse than even any house elves could ever be treated. Personally, had he actually known that three of his students were under such barbaric contracts, then he would have done anything he could to have broken them, had any of those girls come to him for help. But it appears that someone else had already beat him to the punch. He smiled to himself. He had a feeling he knew who that someone was, considering Harry had managed to do the exact same thing for Narcissa Black, who was now happier than he had ever seen the woman when she was still a teenager attending this institution, and now she served as one of its premier and best Defense Against the Dark Arts professors that they had ever had.
Dumbledore had a hard time keeping the smile off his face, turning his attention back to the two fuming and angry parents, parents who were probably in a lot of trouble with whatever scum they had betrothed all three of those girls to, especially if the contracts had backfired, injuring those men.
"I am truly sorry," Dumbledore began to say, "but unfortunately I will have to ask you to leave during this time. There has been an incident in our walls recently, and the DMLE will be showing up here in a couple of minutes. Of course, if you wish to talk to them about your complaints, then feel free. However, I remember a law had recently been passed a couple of years ago making old world marriage contracts illegal in magical Britain…" Dumbledore finished with a small smirk, seeing McGonagall just as pleased next to him.
Mr. and Mrs. Greengrass both suddenly looked very nervous hearing that the DMLE was arriving soon. Part of him wished they would be stupid enough to try and take their complaints to the magical law enforcement, maybe they would also end up in prison, giving young Draco some company. But unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be.
"You old bastard, I bet you planned this out with this perfect timing didn't you!? Hmph! We will take our leave for now," Mr. Greengrass said, reaching out and grabbing his nervous but still angry-looking wife, "but don't think this is over, Dumbledore. We have friends in high places, and you won't get away with stealing our daughters from us! We invested so much into them, and we will be getting them back one way or another," he said, doing his best to sound ominous, but Dumbledore wasn't threatened in the least.
He remembered that this man had some of the worst grades in Hogwarts history, and his magical aptitude was nearly abysmal as well. Had he not been born a noble, then he would not have had even close to such an easy life.
Dumbledore made a mental note to check on Harry and those three girls tomorrow, but for now he could sense that his floo was about to activate, meaning Amelia Bones was arriving. It was time to tell her everything that happened and send one of his students to Azkaban prison. Even Voldemort, back when the evil young man had been attending this institution, had never committed such a blatant act of violence and malice.
– Harry –
The end of autumn had crept up.
Here at Hogwarts, you could actually feel winter coming. The air had a bite to it now, the kind that got under your collar and made your breath visible, and the leaves on the trees around the Black Lake had finished their slow turn from gold to rust to that final, crisp brown that signaled they would be on the ground by next week.
We were not cold, though. Magic was one hell of a thing, and the three of us had taken full advantage of it.
I sat on a thick woolen blanket spread out on the grassy bank at the edge of the Black Lake, with warming charms humming softly in a loose ring around us like a halo of invisible heat. A picnic basket the Hogwarts kitchens had pressed into my hands an hour ago, loaded down by house-elves who I was now pretty sure considered me some kind of minor personal celebrity, sat half-empty beside my leg. The last of the sun was going down beyond the mountains across the lake.
My beautiful fiancée Rias Gremory had her warm, voluptuous body pressed up against my right side, one of her legs tucked up under her, her chin resting lightly on my shoulder as she breathed against my neck. Her crimson hair spilled over her shoulder and down her back in that way that never quite made sense to me, where it seemed to catch every remaining bit of sunset light and hold it, and her fingers were drawing slow, idle patterns across my chest through my shirt. Her breasts, full and soft and completely unhindered by anything resembling a bra, were pressed against my side in a way that I was doing my very best to be a gentleman about.
On my left side, pressed up against me with equal enthusiasm and considerably less shame, was Akeno Himejima.
"Ara, ara," Akeno murmured, scooting herself even closer to me so that her substantial chest was mashed against my arm, her long black ponytail tickling my jaw. "It certainly is nice indeed. I have missed getting to go on dates like this with OUR Harry."
I watched Rias's blue eyes crack open just slightly, the pupils narrowing the way a cat's would when it spotted a rival. She did not lift her chin from my shoulder. She simply slid her gaze over to her Queen with the kind of long-suffering look that I was learning was reserved exclusively for moments like this one.
"Akeno," Rias said sweetly, and her voice was the sort of sweet that had teeth in it. "This is my date with Harry. You just invited yourself along."
"Guilty as charged," Akeno replied with a smirk, not moving an inch.
I found that I did not really mind. Akeno had grown on me in a way that was hard to put into words. She was sharp and funny and unrepentantly filthy in ways that made Rias blush and flounder, and she was absolutely loyal to Rias in a way that I respected deeply. If she wanted to crash our picnic by the lake, I was not going to be the one to kick her out of it.
I stroked my hand slowly up Rias's back, feeling the smooth line of her spine through the thin wool of her jumper, and she made a small, pleased humming noise against my shoulder that did absolutely nothing good for my composure.
"So," Rias said, her lips brushing the side of my neck as she spoke, "what happened with those new girls of yours, Harry? I thought for sure you'd be spending the rest of the night with them. Not that I am not very much enjoying myself currently." She paused, then added with audible amusement, "Though I suppose I would be a little bit jealous if that were the case."
Akeno's hand found my thigh and settled there, the warmth of her palm bleeding through my trousers. "A little bit?" she murmured.
I cleared my throat before Akeno could pursue that line of inquiry any further and bring the entire conversation crashing down around me.
"About that," I said. "There has been a development."
Both of them perked up slightly, the way that only devil women with a finely-tuned instinct for drama could perk up.
I explained, as efficiently as I could, what had actually happened in the abandoned fourth floor classroom that afternoon. I told them about putting Daphne and Tracey to sleep in the library, about retrieving Astoria with Sona's help, about opening my black case of Evil Pieces and preparing to offer all three of the Slytherin girls a place in my peerage. And then I told them about Sona's hand closing around my wrist, and about the quiet, steel-edged way she had informed me that no, actually, the girls would be joining her peerage instead, because peerage was about trust, and those three girls had not fully trusted me.
I finished talking. I shrugged, one-shouldered, not wanting to disturb Rias's chin where it still rested on the other one.
"Maybe in hindsight," I said, quieter than I had meant to, "it is better that way."
I meant it. Mostly. I did mean it.
Sona was right, and I knew she was right, and that was exactly the problem. I had genuinely thought Daphne and Tracey would have been excellent additions to what I was building. Daphne had that cold, sharp ambition I could actually work with, and Tracey had a loyalty under all of her snark that reminded me a little bit of Hermione in the early days. I had been looking forward to watching them grow. I had been looking forward to giving them something real to belong to, after what their families had tried to do to them.
But they had sat on their problem for two months. Two months of being slowly dismantled by a curse that would have hollowed them out from the inside, and they had tried to handle it alone instead of coming to me. Sona had read that correctly and I had not, and that was that.
Rias and Akeno had both gone very still on either side of me, and when I glanced between them, I saw that they were sharing a look over my shoulders that I could only describe as scandalized.
"Sona," Rias said slowly, "swooped in. On your peerage candidates."
"Yes."
"Sona Sitri. Your aunt. Your other fiancée. My rival. Swooped. In. On three girls you were about to reincarnate."
"Yes."
"Ara, ara, ara," Akeno purred, and I could hear the delight building in her voice. "Rias, dear, your future sister-in-law has game. I am going to have to revise my assessment of her entirely. I had her pegged as the stiff, by-the-book one."
"She is the stiff, by-the-book one," Rias huffed, finally lifting her chin from my shoulder to properly glare at the middle distance. "This is her being stiff and by-the-book. This is the stiff, by-the-book devil's way of saying that she thinks she can run a better peerage than I can. Oh, she thinks she is so clever."
"Ara. Indeed,"
"My rival is truly sneaky," Rias continued, her voice gaining that slightly theatrical edge I was coming to know very well. "And her peerage is going to be a lot stronger than it was back in Kuoh Town. Those human girls have nothing compared to Witches turned Devils." She paused for effect, narrowing her beautiful blue eyes at the darkening lake. "But that is fine. That is absolutely fine. Bring it on, Sona. Once we both fill out our peerages, and once we finally have our long-awaited epic Rating Game showdown, it is going to be I who stands victorious. Mwahahaha. Mwahahahahaha!"
She dissolved into giggles against my shoulder halfway through the evil laugh, one hand coming up to cover her mouth as her whole body shook against my side.
I could not help the smile that tugged at my mouth. There was something about Rias when she got like this, when she was consciously imitating some terrible anime antagonist or doing one of the overwrought monologues she had cribbed from her favorite visual novels, that I found unreasonably charming. It was such a specific kind of dork, and it was such a specific kind of hers, and the fact that she felt comfortable enough with me to just let it out, to be a giggling mess of a fake villain on a picnic blanket with me.
I turned my head and kissed her cheek.
She flushed an immediate, satisfying pink, her giggles dying down into a soft, pleased sound.
On my other side, Akeno let out a dramatic, wounded whine.
"My king gets a kiss and her loyal Queen gets nothing," she lamented. "Harry. Dearest Harry. Beloved Harry. I am wasting away over here."
Fine. Fine.
I rolled my eyes, turned my head to the left, and leaned in to press a chaste kiss against Akeno's cheek as well.
I saw it too late.
I caught the gleam in those violet eyes at the very last possible second, right before her head tilted at a different angle than the angle I was expecting, and her soft pink lips slid neatly into the trajectory where her cheek was supposed to be.
"Mmph."
Her lips were warm and soft and completely unrepentant, and the kiss lasted exactly half a second longer than it had any right to before she pulled back with the most satisfied little smile I had ever seen on a woman's face.
Heat rushed up my neck.
"Akeno!" Rias scolded, though her outraged tone was somewhat undermined by the fact that she was laughing. "You cannot just steal kisses from him! Those are my kisses! That is my fiancé!"
"You were not using that one," Akeno said serenely, settling back against my side. "It would have been a waste."
"Those kisses were earmarked. They were allocated. They were not up for grabs!"
"And yet…"
I decided, in the interests of my continued survival, to change the subject.
"What about your own peerage hunt?" I asked Rias, sliding my arm more firmly around her shoulders and pulling her a little closer against me. "Any candidates you are looking at? I feel like I have been hogging the recruitment drive lately. It is probably your turn."
Rias's expression brightened immediately, the scandal of Akeno's stolen kiss forgotten. She lifted one slender finger and pressed it thoughtfully to her lips, her brow furrowing in that adorable way it did when she was actually concentrating on something.
"I have been considering some people," she said. "A few of them, actually. Kiba's boyfriend would be an excellent addition. Blaise Zabini. He is clever, he comes from an interesting Italian magical line, and more to the point, having him in the peerage would make Kiba very, very happy. I have not seen Kiba this settled since he came to me."
"Blaise is a good pick," I said, nodding. "He is sharp. Slytherin, but the useful kind."
"Ara, there are also the two Hufflepuff girls," Akeno chimed in from my other side, her hand still resting on my thigh with what I was beginning to suspect was a deliberate, patient strategy of just waiting to see how long she could leave it there before anyone objected. "Hannah Abbott and Susan Bones. The two of them have been doing really very excellent work, dragging dear little Gasper out of his shell."
"Or more like just dragging Gasper all over the school with them every single time they leave the common room," Rias corrected, and both of them dissolved into laughter at exactly the same moment, the sound of it ringing clear across the surface of the lake.
If she did recruit Blaise, Hannah and Susan, Rias would be the first of us High Class Devils at Hogwarts to recruit a full peerage since she used all her pawns on Crom junior.
I found myself grinning. Good for her, and good for Gasper.
I had seen the three of them in the corridors more than once now, Gasper held firmly in the middle like a reluctant and extremely cute hostage, with Hannah on one arm and Susan on the other, chattering cheerfully over his head about whatever gossip was circulating through the school that week. Gasper always looked faintly stunned by the entire situation, as if he could not quite figure out how he had gotten there, but he had stopped protesting about a week in. I was pretty sure he secretly loved it.
"I wonder," Akeno mused, tapping one manicured fingernail against her chin, "just when our poor Gasper is going to realize that both of those sweet girls are interested in him romantically."
Rias snorted. "Knowing how shy Gasper is? Probably never. Not until one of them gets fed up, pins him down against a wall, and finally makes a proper move on him."
"I would pay good money to witness that."
"Akeno, you are a menace."
"Ara, a menace in service of true love, my king. Entirely different category of menace."
I was still laughing about that, still trying to picture Hannah Abbott of all people pinning anyone to a wall, when Rias suddenly reached up, cupped my jaw in her warm hand, and tilted my face down toward hers.
Her blue eyes flicked, very deliberately, past me to Akeno for one brief heartbeat, and I saw the smirk already forming on her lips before they pressed against mine.
The kiss started slow. Soft. Thorough in a way that Rias was not always thorough, her lips parting against mine and her tongue sliding in with unhurried, deliberate care. She tasted like the strawberries we had been eating out of the picnic basket, and her fingers slid up from my jaw into my hair, and she kissed me like she had all the time in the world to do it and fully intended to use every second of it.
On my left, Akeno made a small, slightly strangled sound.
Rias kissed me slower. Deeper. With considerably more tongue, just to drive the point the rest of the way home.
When she finally pulled back, her lips were pink and a little swollen, and the smug, satisfied look on her face should have been illegal in at least three countries.
"Being engaged to you," she said, and her voice had gone softer, warmer, shed of all the theatrical villainy from a few minutes earlier, "is the best thing that has ever happened to me. And to my peerage. All of us have been so much happier here. This school has been really good to us. To Kiba, especially. And to Gasper. Both of them have been so much lighter here."
I licked my lips, still tasting her, and I could feel Akeno quietly seething with jealousy on my other side, and I pulled myself together enough to ask the question that was nagging at me.
"What about Koneko?"
Rias's happy smile faltered. Not much. Just the smallest flicker at the corners of her mouth, a tiny softening around the edges of that bright, pleased expression she had been wearing a moment before.
But I saw it, and I knew her well enough now to know what it meant.
"Hogwarts has been really good for Koneko as well," she said carefully, and I could hear her choosing her words with the care of someone who loved the girl in question very much. "She has made some friends here. I know she has. I see her with Astoria Greengrass sometimes, and she has been eating meals with the Hufflepuff third-years, and she argues with Crom Junior every morning at breakfast in the way that means she actually likes him. It is good. It is really good. She is doing better..."
Rias paused. She smoothed the front of her jumper absently.
"She just has not quite made as much progress as Gasper and Kiba have yet. She is still holding something back. There is still a wall." She looked out across the lake, and the last sliver of the sunset caught in her eyes. "But I have hope. I think that will change too, soon enough. I just have to be patient with her."
I reached up and covered her hand with mine, lacing our fingers together over her knee. "She is lucky to have you as a king."
Rias did not answer, but she squeezed my hand hard enough that I felt it in the bones of my fingers, and she let her head drop back down onto my shoulder where it had started.
Akeno, for once, did not say anything clever. She just shifted a little closer against my other side and rested her cheek lightly against my arm.
"...My King. There has been a development."
The voice came from directly behind us, soft and cool and androgynous, and all three of us jumped. I actually flinched hard enough that I jostled Rias's head where it had been resting on my shoulder, and Akeno let out a little yelp against my other arm that, under any other circumstances, I would have been happy to tease her about.
I twisted around on the blanket and looked up.
Crom stood on the grass behind us with his hands folded neatly in front of him, his dark eyes with their vertical slitted pupils fixed calmly on the back of Rias's head. He was wearing his Hogwarts uniform. The sight of him in actual male robes was such a sharp contrast to Gasper, who to my knowledge had still refused to wear anything other than the girls' uniform since the day he had arrived at the castle, that I almost laughed out loud.
He looks like a very small, very polite little lord.
Akeno pressed both of her hands to her chest, over her breasts in a way that I was one hundred percent sure was for my benefit and not for her actual heart rate, and let out a breathy little sigh. "Ara, ara," she said, her violet eyes narrowing at Crom with a mixture of amusement and genuine, wary respect. "I did not even sense you approach. Our latest family member is as scary as he is adorable, Rias, dear."
Crom's chin tilted up slightly at that, and a small, proud smile touched the corners of his mouth.
"I am the protector of onee-chan," he announced. He directed it entirely at Rias.
Rias melted. "Awww, Crom," she cooed, pressing both hands to her own cheeks. "You are the sweetest little brother in the entire Underworld. Onee-chan loves you so much."
Crom's chest puffed up by about half an inch. Then his gaze slid a few degrees to the side and landed on the very deliberate way Akeno was still draped against my left arm, and the very similar way Rias was still curled against my right, and the temperature around him seemed to drop by a noticeable margin. His dark eyes narrowed. His little mouth thinned into a line.
He did not say anything.
But I could feel, very faintly, the ambient air around the picnic blanket picking up a very specific kind of pressure that I was pretty sure was the low-level background radiation of a dragon who was thinking about eating me.
We had certainly tried, of course, especially during our time in Japan. But I don't think the two of us were ever going to be close friends, especially since he loved Rias like a big sister and I must seem like the guy trying to take her away from him.
Crom, to his credit, forcibly pulled his attention back to the task at hand. He cleared his throat delicately. "As I was saying. There has been a development."
"What is wrong, sweetheart?" Rias asked, sitting up a little straighter against my side, her sunset-warm playfulness sliding cleanly into her big-sister-peerage-king mode in the space of a breath. "What has happened?"
"A teacher at the school has been murdered," Crom said. "By Draco Malfoy. Everyone is talking about it."
Rias sucked in a sharp breath.
Akeno's hand flew to her mouth.
I felt something cold and hot and complicated twist through my chest. It was a cold, sharp, annoyed realization.
Fuck. I should have put the rabid little ferret down myself when I had the chance. I have had so many chances. I have been too soft on him because of Cissa, and now a teacher is dead because of it.
"Who died?" I asked out loud, keeping my voice as level as I could manage.
"Umbridge."
The three of us froze on the blanket.
Rias and Akeno turned their heads in almost perfect unison and stared at Crom.
Crom stared back.
A cricket chirped somewhere out in the grass near the lake, did not get any response from anyone, and chirped again, tentatively, as if asking whether it should maybe leave.
"Oh," Rias said finally, blinking several times in rapid succession. "Okay, then..?"
"Ara," Akeno said, slowly lowering her hand from her mouth. "That is. Unexpected."
I opened my mouth to say something appropriately appalled about the moral weight of a student murdering a faculty member, regardless of how truly awful that faculty member was, because I was pretty sure I was supposed to. I was pretty sure, as a man who was dating a professor and who had a mother who was also a professor and whose aunt was on the road to eventually becoming a professor the way her magical career was accelerating, that I was supposed to have some kind of coherent position about this.
The thought that actually came out of my mouth, privately, in the safety of my own skull, was entirely different.
You know what? Never mind. Maybe there is some good in you after all, Draco. Just a little bit. Just a tiny little bit, buried somewhere deep down under all the cowardice and the greasy hair and the failed rapist energy. Good for you.
"Noted," I said out loud. "Thanks for telling us, Crom."
Rias gave Crom a warm, gentle smile. "Thank you, Crom," she said. "That is an important thing for us to know. Is there anything else?"
Crom nodded once, sharply. Flatly. The kind of nod that said, yes, and you are not going to enjoy this part. "Yes. My old boss is here."
Rias went still.
I watched the confusion flicker across her beautiful face first, and then the dawning recognition as the confusion resolved itself into something much less pleasant, and then the color drained out from under her cheekbones in a way that I had only seen twice before.
"Your old boss," Rias repeated, her voice gone very quiet. "Crom. Who and where are they!?"
Crom said nothing.
He simply raised one slender hand and pointed.
At me.
Or, more accurately, at something that was just behind me.
I became aware, in that moment, of a new weight settling in my lap. Slender, light, and decidedly present. A body folded itself across my thighs with the familiarity of someone who had been doing this for weeks instead of days, and a small, delicate hand came to rest flat against my stomach through my shirt.
I turned my head back around.
Ophis was curled up in my lap like a cat that had decided the cushion was hers, sideways, with her legs tucked up neatly and one elbow propped against my chest. Her dark, bottomless eyes looked up at me with an expression that was, as far as I could tell, completely unchanged from the last time I had seen her. Calm. Quiet. Faintly interested. No acknowledgment whatsoever of the fact that there were two devil women currently having simultaneous small heart attacks on either side of me.
"Hi, Ophis," I said, and then I mentally scrambled for anything else to add. "I, uh. I did not expect to see you again so soon."
Beside me, Rias made a sound. It was a very small sound. It was the sound of a very high-class, very well-bred noble devil princess who had been raised in the finest courts of the Underworld going from relaxed picnic mode to red alert in the space of half a heartbeat, and it came out of the back of her throat as a tiny, strangled little wheeze that I was pretty sure she did not mean to make.
On my other side, Akeno actually leaned forward far enough to get a clean look at who was in my lap, froze for one full second, and then pulled back with a slow, shaky exhale.
Rias was the one who finally spoke. I had to give her credit. She recovered faster than I did. "It is an honor to meet you, Lady Ophis," Rias said, and she had pulled on the clear, measured voice of a Gremory heiress addressing something that could end civilizations for sport. "I had not been aware that Crom used to work for you…"
Ophis turned her head a little, just enough to look at Rias. She tilted it slightly to the side.
"Who is Crom? Who are you?" she asked.
I watched an entire, complex sequence of emotions flicker across Rias Gremory's face in less than two seconds. There was a flash of offense, because Rias was the heiress to one of the most famous clans in the Underworld and she was not accustomed to people not knowing who she was. There was a flash of mild annoyance, because the flash of offense had been the sort of thing that she had been trained to consider petty. And then there was a flash of what I could only call cautious gratitude, because it had dawned on Rias, right about the same time that it had dawned on Akeno, that being beneath the notice of the Infinite Dragon God was probably the single safest place in the world to be.
Rias cleared her throat delicately. She glanced at me.
I gave her a slightly helpless, lopsided smile back, because what was I supposed to say to help her here? The second most powerful entity was sitting sideways in my lap, I had one hand stroking absently up and down her narrow back like she was a housecat, and I had run out of clever responses.
Rias cleared her throat again, a little more forcefully, and sat up straighter against my side. "I am Rias Gremory," she said, her voice steady and polite and only the faintest bit tight at the edges. "Heiress to the Gremory Clan of the Seventy-Two Pillars. And one of Harry's fiancées."
"Okay, then," Ophis said. Then, after a beat, she paused, looked back at Rias, and tilted her head a second time. "Does that mean you love Harry, too?"
Rias and Akeno sputtered. I heard them both do it at the same time, and I felt both of their heads whip around and stare at me at exactly the same moment with the exact same expression.
The expression was, more or less: What the fuck, Harry. Since when? Since when did any of this happen and why is this the first we are hearing about it?
I winced.
Yes. Yeah. Okay. Fair. I should have mentioned this earlier. I should have looped Rias and Sona and probably Akeno in on this.
The only people who actually knew about Ophis, so far, were the members of my own peerage, along with my mother and Behemoth. That had been deliberate. Serafall had been the one who had insisted, actually, that we keep this quiet until we had a better handle on what Ophis actually wanted from me and why.
I had agreed with the reasoning at the time. I still agreed with it.
I just realized, right that moment, with two sets of Gremory-peerage eyes boring holes into the side of my face, that I should have made an exception for my fiancée and her Queen.
Ophis, for her part, did not seem to notice or care about the communication crisis unfolding on my left and right. She shifted in my lap spinning herself around until she was straddling my thighs instead of sitting sideways across them, and then she settled her slender body against my chest until our faces were only a couple of inches apart.
My breath caught.
Up close, she was unfairly beautiful. Her face was a perfect, delicate heart shape, her skin so flawlessly pale that it looked almost like porcelain, her pink lips slightly parted as she regarded me. Her dark eyes were like polished black gemstones in the low light off the lake, and there were things moving in them, at the very back, that I had long since stopped trying to identify because every time I tried I got a headache.
"Hi, Ophis," I said, because I could not think of anything else.
"Hello, Harry," she replied, her voice just as soft and calm as always. "I had plenty of free time today. I wanted to visit you again."
"I can see that."
"I brought the cat with me," she continued, lifting one slim finger to trace a very small, very deliberate pattern across the collar of my shirt. "But unfortunately, the cat must have slipped away at some point to visit her younger sister while I was not looking. I will have to discipline that naughty kitty before we head back…"
"Visit her sister?" Akeno repeated slowly from my left. Her curiosity suddenly outweighing her nervousness. "What cat are you talking about, Lady Ophis?"
Crom cleared his throat. "I think," he said in his quiet, flat little voice, "that she is referring to Kuroka. I sensed her presence inside the castle when I came out here to find you. I did not consider her an immediate threat, so I did not bother reporting it."
Rias went rigid. "Kuroka," Rias said, very slowly, each syllable enunciated with the crystal clarity of a woman whose blood pressure had just spiked hard enough to threaten the warming charms. "Kuroka is here. Inside Hogwarts. And she is trying to see MY Koneko! After everything that BITCH did to her sister!"
All four of us turned our heads toward the castle in unison.
The timing could not have been more theatrical if someone had paid a director to stage it.
Somewhere in the upper reaches of the main keep, on one of the top floors well above the Great Hall, a window exploded outwards in a bright shower of glass that caught the last remnants of the sunset and sprayed them across the darkening sky in a thousand glittering splinters.
I heard the distant, sharp crack of it all the way across the grounds, followed a beat later by a much louder, much more familiar sound.
A vaguely recognizable shape was sailing through the air away from the castle on a high, arcing trajectory, the shape of a woman with long black hair and two long black tails that were flailing behind her.
Even from this distance, even with the wind whipping at her, the sound carried.
"NYAAAAAAA! I MISSED YOU TOO, SHIRONE-CHAN! ONEE-CHAN IS SO PROUD OF HOW STRONG YOU'VE BECOME! THAT WAS A REALLY SOLID PUNCH! NYAAAAAAA!"
CRASH.
She hit the ground…
But she was an Ultimate Class Nekoushou Stray devil, a fall from that height wouldn't actually hurt her at all.
A long, long silence settled over the picnic blanket.
The cricket chirped again.
In my lap, Ophis' eyes slid closed. And she let out a genuine sigh.
Something that surprised me, because that meant that she must have actually cared about Kuroka.
XXX