While Bryan was away from Hogwarts on Ministry business, someone had made a attempt to break into his office—and that was, by any reasonable measure, no small matter to be quietly set aside.
Professor Dumbledore had been summoned at once, roused from his sleep.
He stood now in snow-white pyjamas beneath a purple dressing gown trimmed generously with gold thread, leaning forward with real, focused attention, one hand resting lightly against the frame of his half-moon spectacles while the fingers of his other hand lightly tested the cold door handle before him.
"I agree with the two of you, Minerva, Severus—"
After a careful examination of the frame and the handle both, Dumbledore straightened up fully and said calmly.
"Someone made an attempt to open Bryan's office tonight. Fortunately, whoever it was, they did not manage to actually break through the protective charms woven into this door."
"But who would attempt such a thing, Albus?"
Professor McGonagall stepped forward, pressing one worried hand flat against her own chest.
"What could that person possibly have wanted from inside Bryan's office?"
"That, I fear, we won't be able to say until we've properly looked into the whole matter."
The steady firelight from a nearby wall torch turned the half-moon lenses on Dumbledore's thin nose to a warm gold, and Harry, watching from where he stood, couldn't quite make out the usual glimmer in his deep blue eyes behind them.
All he could properly hear was the underlying gravity threaded through Dumbledore's otherwise calm voice.
"Perhaps whoever this was hoped to find something valuable inside Bryan's office."
It was, on its face, a perfectly reasonable guess to offer and yet something about it didn't quite sit right.
Everyone at Hogwarts who'd ever had reason to visit knew perfectly well that Professor Watson was, by a wide margin, the most modest of all the school's staff in terms of personal possessions kept on display.
If you went rifling through Filch's own cramped office, you might well turn up a few small things worth some genuine money among the confiscated odds and ends; but Professor Watson's office held little more, as far as anyone knew, than stacks upon stacks of ordinary administrative files.
"I would suggest a thorough investigation of the whole castle, Dumbledore. And as for certain suspicious individuals already present—"
Snape's own eyes remained fixed steadily on Harry as he said this, his voice pitched light and leisurely. "—perhaps a dose of Veritaserum might be in order, to clear things up properly."
"Thank you for the suggestion, Severus. There certainly is a need to search the castle thoroughly tonight—"
Dumbledore seemed, entirely, not to catch Snape's implication at all. He merely continued on.
"Bryan will certainly want to know, that someone attempted to get into his office tonight. Perhaps you could write and inform him directly, Severus."
Before Snape could formulate any response to that redirection, Dumbledore had already turned his own keen, assessing gaze fully toward Professor McGonagall instead.
"Minerva, I'd like you to wake the rest of the staff without further delay. We need to properly search the castle tonight, in case whoever did this remains hidden somewhere within its walls even now. And I'd also like you to fetch Argus—he knows this castle's various secret passages better than any other living person currently on staff."
Dumbledore let his own gaze drift then, seemingly without much particular intent behind it, toward Harry and the others standing off quietly to one side of the corridor.
"If the intruder came from somewhere outside the school, then apart from those specific passages, I doubt there's any other way they could have gotten in undetected."
Professor McGonagall nodded firmly at the instructions. She looked over at Harry and the others and said, in a tone that plainly tolerated no further argument or delay.
"Off to your beds, all three of you, quickly now. I'd like you to keep quiet about tonight's events for the time being, so as not to cause unnecessary alarm among the rest of the students before we understand what's actually happened."
Elune was heading off in a different direction entirely, and Snape, somewhat unexpectedly, saw her safely back to her own dormitory himself, while Professor McGonagall marched the remaining three of them—like a guard with prisoners in tow to the spiral staircase and stood watching until she'd seen them properly climb it.
"Hermione, do you think—"
The three of them hurried up the stairs together, and once they were reasonably certain Professor McGonagall was safely out of hearing distance below, Harry burst out at once urgently.
"I know exactly what you're going to say, Harry, but—"
Hermione had clearly already guessed what was sitting on his mind. Her clear brown eyes were shadowed with something sharp and glinting.
"It is suspicious. But… something about it doesn't add up, does it?"
"What doesn't add up?"
Harry frowned, genuinely puzzled by her hesitation.
"Malfoy wanted to buy some kind of alchemical device from Borgin—something specifically capable of breaking through powerful magical protections.
I could never work out exactly what he wanted it for. Now it's obvious, isn't it? He wanted it to break into Professor Watson's office. Voldemort must have ordered him to do exactly this. He wants to steal something from Professor Watson's office!"
"You suspect Malfoy, Harry?"
Ron said, sounding startled, as though the specific accusation had come entirely out of nowhere for him.
"That's not actually what you told us before, Harry—"
Hermione shot him a sharp, careful sidelong look.
"What you said before was that Malfoy went to Borgin and Burkes because Voldemort had ordered him to open that particular door you keep seeing in your dream. Not to break into a Hogwarts professor's office."
Harry's breath caught sharply at that, and he fell into uncomfortable silence.
That was, precisely, the exact part of the whole theory he genuinely couldn't make sense of himself and exactly why he'd found himself keeping quiet a moment ago rather than immediately voicing the full connection.
All along, he had stubbornly, consistently believed that Malfoy had been specifically ordered to open the door at the end of that unknown, recurring corridor from his dream. But instead, tonight, it was Professor Watson's ordinary office that had actually been targeted and broken into first.
They had all, the three of them, been inside Professor Watson's office plenty of times. It was nothing more than an entirely ordinary classroom space—there was no mysterious black corridor anywhere inside it at all.
"Regardless of that, Malfoy's still very much a suspect in my mind. If we could search his dormitory right now—he's injured, isn't he?"
Harry said stubbornly, unwilling to completely let go.
Hermione stopped in front of the Fat Lady's portrait, waiting to give the password. She pressed her lips together, hesitating for a moment longer, then her gaze steadied into something more considered.
"You don't actually have any solid proof yet, Harry. I'm quite sure Professor Snape wouldn't back you up on any of this either, given how he was looking at you tonight. Actually—"
She paused, choosing her next words with care. "—him turning up there tonight, that quickly, from all the way down in the dungeons, felt like rather too much of a coincidence to me, if you want my honest opinion."
"You suspect Snape?"
Ron jumped up in astonishment at that, the sudden movement startled the Fat Lady awake from what had clearly been a pleasant dream, her eyebrows shooting up in the frame.
"I just—I just—"
Hermione's brow furrowed, working through her own half-formed suspicion aloud.
"I think it's genuinely strange that he was there at all, that quickly. Harry,"
She turned to look at him directly, her expression was carrying a little visible uncertainty now.
"Based purely on what we actually know right now, tonight, Malfoy remains a real suspect. But the key problem is that we genuinely need actual evidence before accusing anyone properly. Maybe you could write to Sirius tonight and have him look into Borgin and Burkes—he might be able to turn up some useful clues through official channels."
"Oh, good idea!"
Harry said, excitement flooding back into his voice, striking his right fist decisively into his open left palm.
"Borgin runs his shop as a business, same as Fletcher does with his own dealings, so he must keep some kind of ledger somewhere for his transactions. I could have Sirius go and check directly whether Borgin's actually sold anything to Malfoy recently!"
The three of them marched one after another through the portrait hole behind the now thoroughly awake and faintly grumbling Fat Lady and into the warmth of the Gryffindor common room.
The common room itself was long since empty at this hour.
A dim, reddish glow from the last few dying embers in the fireplace hung low over the whole quiet space, the furniture was arranged in its usual comfortable disorder.
Harry hurried eagerly toward the boys' dormitory staircase—but it was only once he'd actually set foot on the first step that he noticed Ron hadn't followed him at all. He was still standing exactly where he'd been, looking hesitant about something.
Hermione hadn't moved from her own spot either. She glanced sideways at Ron, as though she'd already guessed, that he had something to say.
"What's going on?"
Harry stopped in his tracks on the stairs, puzzled by the scene.
"You go on ahead, Harry—"
Ron's eyes wouldn't quite meet his.
"I need to talk to Hermione about something."
Harry blinked at that. A great many thoughts flickered rapidly through his mind in that single instant but in the end, he only nodded once and turned to continue walking on up toward the dormitory.
The others in the dormitory were all already properly asleep by the time Harry reached it. Dean and Seamus had both pulled their blankets up over their heads in a clearly experienced, defensive manoeuvre, shutting out the volume of Neville's snoring from the neighbouring bed.
Harry went quickly and quietly to the small writing desk tucked against one wall, pulled out the chair, lit a single candle with a murmured word, drew out a fresh sheet of parchment from the drawer, and picked up the elegant quill the goblin delegation had given.
Dear Sirius
Harry's own sharp, slanting handwriting fell onto the page in a confident opening line and then, after just that single line, stopped.
'What did Ron actually want to talk to Hermione about?'
Gazing out through the dormitory window at the surging, wind-tossed darkness beyond, Harry found himself drifting.
If this had happened before the Triwizard Tournament, he might have had some fairly clear idea of what such a private conversation could be about. But after that particular year, specifically after last year's Christmas ball, that particular possibility no longer existed.
Not to mention, of course, that Ron and Lavender were practically inseparable these days, every bit as devoted to each other as—as devoted, as Cedric and Cho had been.
'Cho.'
Thinking of that beautiful, familiar face, Harry felt a fresh wave of distraction, the candle flame was wavering slightly as his attention drifted from the parchment.
He couldn't say precisely when it had actually started to change, but somewhere along the way, thinking of her no longer brought with it that same sharp, gnawing ache of regret it once had—though a faint, lingering trace of fondness and wistfulness still remained somewhere underneath the surface.
In the candlelit darkness of the dormitory, Harry turned his head to look toward Ron's still-empty bed across the room, and another face rose up in his mind.
She wasn't gentle in quite the way Cho had always been. But she was, more beautiful, more vividly and immediately alive—bright, sparkling eyes that seemed to catch every available light, lovely, easily tousled hair, skin like something fine and delicate that he'd only ever glimpsed properly in passing.
And what drew him in most powerfully, more than any of that, was the faint, lovely scent of flowers he caught every single time he happened to be close enough to her.
The expensive goblin quill slipped from Harry's suddenly loosened grip and fell against the desk. Fresh black ink bled out across the waiting parchment in an uneven, spreading stain, ruining the single line he'd already written beyond any hope of salvaging it.
Thinking of that girl, even the urgent matter of exposing Malfoy's secret and properly protecting Hogwarts from whatever threat tonight represented suddenly didn't seem to matter quite so pressingly, for just a moment, as it had only minutes before.
Harry leaned back heavily against his chair, a heavy, lingering dejection began settling slowly over him in the quiet room.
Ron was his best friend—had been since the very day he'd first arrived at Hogwarts as an eleven-year-old with no idea what he was walking into, and he was Ron's best friend too.
Harry knew that, whatever else might shift or change around them both, their friendship itself remained solid. But Ron had always dreamed of surpassing Harry at something.
And now, in this one particular respect, he genuinely had. And because of that—because it was specifically Ron, of all people in the world, who stood on the other side of this—Harry found he simply couldn't bring himself to even try to catch back up.
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