5th October 1995, the High Inquisitor's office, night
The fire in Dolores Umbridge's office burned green.
She knelt before it on a pink cushion, her face thrust into the emerald flames, and her voice, for once, had lost every drop of its sweetness.
"...but Minister, I must be told why. That man walked into this school with your own signature on his credentials... yours, Cornelius... and no one so much as informed me. I am your High Inquisitor. If the Department of Mysteries has business at Hogwarts, I have a right to know what it..."
In the flames, Cornelius Fudge's face was grey and drawn, and he would not quite meet her eyes.
"Dolores." He said her name heavily, like a man setting down a weight. "You will cooperate with Mr Esther. Fully. Whatever he asks." A pause, and something almost frightened moved behind his eyes. "That is all I can say. That is all I will say. Cooperate with him... and Dolores... do not press this further. For your own..."
The office door opened without a knock.
"...good evening," Fudge finished, to nobody, and his head withdrew from the fire with unseemly speed, and the flames guttered back to orange.
Dolores Umbridge rose from her cushion, turned, and found Ethan Esther standing in the middle of her office, hat in hand, wearing his courteous smile.
The kitten plates watched from the walls. One of them mewed.
"Hem, hem." She gathered herself, smoothed her cardigan, reassembled the sweetness piece by piece. "Mr Esther. It is rather late for calls. And it is customary... at Hogwarts... to knock."
"Is it?" said Ethan pleasantly, and began, unhurried, to walk the room.
He moved along her shelves the way a man strolls a garden, hands loosely clasped behind him, pausing at her lace doilies, her ornamental plates, her framed proclamations, examining each with mild interest, and the silence stretched, and stretched, and Dolores Umbridge stood in the middle of her own office and felt, for the first time in years, like a visitor in it.
"You asked the Minister why I'm here," Ethan said at last, to a plate of gambolling kittens.
"I heard the tail of it. Poor Cornelius. I've put him in an awkward spot, I'm afraid... he knows exactly why I'm here, and he'd rather swallow his own bowler than say it aloud." He turned, and the lamplight caught the amber of his eyes.
"So allow me to spare him. My teaching post is a courtesy. My mission, Madam Umbridge, on behalf of the Department of Mysteries, is the investigation of a cursed artefact."
Something in the room changed. Umbridge's smile stayed exactly where it was, nailed in place, and beneath her collar a fine cold sweat had begun.
"A cursed artefact," she repeated. "How... alarming. At Hogwarts?"
"Mm." Ethan resumed his stroll. "A curious case. The Department received intelligence... from a source I shan't name... of a cursed object in circulation. Finely crafted... Genuinely fine; that was what caught our attention. Whoever made it was a true alchemist, and skilled alchemists are rare, and... registered."
He tilted his head. "We checked the registry, naturally. Every licensed alchemist in Britain. Not one of them had anything of its description on record."
"How strange," said Umbridge. Her voice had gone slightly high.
"Wasn't it. So we widened the search. The unlicensed sort... hedge-crafters, Dark practitioners, the wild men. And there we found nothing at all, because frankly, Madam, none of them could have made it. The work was beyond them."
He paused by her desk, gazing down at it thoughtfully. "Which left one very unpleasant possibility. That the thing had been crafted abroad, and brought across our borders unregistered. A foreign cursed artefact, loose in Britain, in a time like this."
His voice cooled a degree. "You can imagine how seriously the Department took that."
Umbridge's hands, folded before her, had begun, very slightly, to shake. She stilled them against her cardigan.
"But then," Ethan went on, brightening, "we had a stroke of luck. Further intelligence."
He lifted, idly, a small framed photograph from her desk... Dolores herself, beaming beside the Minister at some function... studied it a moment, and set it back down with perfect care, a half-inch from where it had stood. "Rather detailed intelligence, as it happens."
And he reached into his coat, and placed on the desk between them, with a soft click, a small disc of dark metal no larger than a button.
Umbridge looked at it. Her smile held by main force.
"And what," she managed, "is that?"
"This?" Ethan's eyes curved. "A camera. One of ours... Atid Stella's. We make them very small now. Remarkable little things. They see everything, and they forget nothing."
Her face went the colour of old parchment.
Ethan passed his hand over the button, a small wave of wandless magic, and above it the air opened into moving light.
And there, hanging in the middle of her own office, in perfect silent clarity, was Dolores Umbridge... handing a long black quill across a lace-covered desk to a fifteen-year-old boy.
Watching, avid, as he wrote. The image tilted; the parchment filled with lines of wet red; and then the view found the back of the boy's left hand, and held there, on the words carving themselves open in his skin, over and over. I must not tell lies. Her own face in the recording watched it happen, and smiled.
The light played on, evening after recorded evening, and Ethan watched her watch it, and said nothing at all.
Then he closed his hand, and the images died.
"When the Department reviewed this," he said, into the ringing silence, "one of our people recognised the craftsmanship. The pattern of the curse-work. Because, as it turned out, we had been searching the registries for nothing."
His voice had gone quiet and pleasant and utterly without warmth. "The alchemist was one of ours. An Unspeakable. He was brought in, and he told us everything... he's a record-keeping sort of man, thankfully. Called it a joint project."
The words sat in the air like frost.
"The Department was benevolent, all things considered. He has been dismissed, and placed under supervision, and his records... all of them... are in our keeping now."
Umbridge's composure, so long nailed in place, came apart. Her breath was coming short; her hands would no longer still.
"What..." She wet her lips. "What do you want."
Ethan chuckled. It was a soft sound, and it was the coldest thing that had ever been heard in that pink room.
"Want? Madam Umbridge, I want you to understand your situation, that's all." He came round the desk, unhurried, and the lamps seemed to dim as he moved.
"Do you know what is done to people who torture children with cursed artefacts? Azkaban, certainly. But for something crafted, something premeditated, something done to a child in one's care..." He made a small gesture, almost lazy.
And the temperature of the room plunged, and the shadows in the corners deepened and lengthened, and from somewhere beneath the floor came a long, dry, rattling breath, and the light drained grey, and for three heartbeats Dolores Umbridge felt, with total certainty, a hooded thing lean over her from behind, close enough that the despair came off it like cold off ice...
She made a small sound and grabbed the edge of her desk.
The room was warm again. The lamps burned merrily. The kittens gambolled on their plates. Ethan Esther stood exactly where he had been, hat in hand, watching her with mild amber eyes.
"...the Kiss, sometimes," he finished, as though nothing had happened.
"For the very worst of it. The Wizengamot can be sentimental about children." He settled his hat upon his head.
"The only reason you are standing in this office, Madam, rather than sitting in a cell awaiting that conversation, is that the Department extended the Minister the courtesy of seeing the evidence first. Cornelius is fond of you. Or... he was fond of not being embarrassed. The distinction has grown thin." He turned for the door, and paused, and looked back at her, and for one moment let her see, plainly and without theatre, exactly what was looking out of his eyes.
"The children of this school are not yours to carve, High Inquisitor.... Know your place.... Keep to it."
He opened the door.
"I bid you good night."
And he was gone, and Dolores Umbridge stood alone amid her doilies and her kittens, shaking, in an office that no longer felt like hers at all.
6th October 1995, Hogwarts, early morning
Harry came down to breakfast the next morning in his usual company: Ron shuffling beside him in a state of ambulatory sleep, Neville quiet and thoughtful, and Hermione fully operational, murmuring under her breath the entire contents of whatever she'd self-studied the night before, her eyes half-focused on an invisible textbook.
They found Draco standing in front of the noticeboard.
Or rather... in front of what had been the noticeboard. For weeks it had stood papered edge to edge in pink, Decree upon Decree upon Decree, a wall of proclamations.
Now great bare patches of cork showed through. A dozen of the framed Decrees were simply gone, and down the corridor Filch was shuffling back with a crate under one arm, plainly returning to take down more.
Ron woke up all at once, seized Draco by the front of his robes, and demanded answers with such fervour and at such close range that Draco planted a palm on his face and pushed him bodily to arm's length.
"Manners, Weasley, you're spitting..." He straightened his collar. "They came down last night. Late. And here's the strange part... rumour says she took them down herself. The Toad. Personally. Somewhere past midnight."
His eyebrows climbed. "The Grey Lady told a Ravenclaw prefect she passed Umbridge in the corridor at one in the morning, and that she looked so dreadful the ghosts gave her a wide berth. And this morning Filch is finishing the job." He gestured at the crate-bearing caretaker. "All the ridiculous ones are going... the dress-code amendments, the ban on Fanged Frisbees being discussed, the one about approved joke categories. The structural ones stay. But..."
"Sixty-Eight?" Harry said quickly, hope leaping. "Is Sixty-Eight down? The club ban..."
"Ah." Draco pointed. "No. Adjusted."
They crowded in. Educational Decree Number Sixty-Eight still hung in its frame... but the text had changed. The blanket disbandment was gone. Clubs, teams, and societies were permitted once more... provided they registered with the High Inquisitor's office. Only unregistered organisations remained forbidden, on pain of the old penalty.
"She's kept the one tooth that matters," Draco said quietly. "That's not a retreat, that's a... refinement. It exists now for exactly one purpose." He didn't say the four letters aloud in the corridor. He didn't need to.
There was a short silence.
And then Harry felt the grin arrive, and looked round, and found it arriving on every other face at the same moment... because they all knew, without a word, whose quiet hand had been at work in the small hours of the night, and what the surprise Ethan had promised them had turned out to be.
Not a rescue. A leash. The Toad still had her office and her title and her one aimed Decree... but somebody had walked into her tower at midnight and come out again, and the pink tide had visibly, publicly receded for the first time all term.
"Breakfast," said Ron happily, "is going to taste incredible."
It did.
And it improved further when Viktor arrived, dropped onto the bench beside Hermione, and greeted her with a brief, unselfconscious touch of his nose to hers... a small private custom of theirs that made Hermione go pink and made Ron, mid-demolition of his third helping, groan "get a room" through a full mouth, for which Draco elbowed him and delivered a short lecture on table manners while Hermione eyed Ron's already-spotless plates with open disdain.
"I say nothing," Viktor said, laughing, raising his hands. "A big appetite is good in a Seeker. Fast metabolism, fast reflexes. You fly like it, too... that second catch on Saturday, the blind-side line? Professional instincts, Ron. Truly."
Ron went scarlet to the ears and became briefly incapable of speech, which everyone agreed was worth the price of admission.
"I have also news," Viktor added. "From the staffroom. Professor Trelawney... she is reinstated. Divination is hers again, from Monday."
A small genuine gladness went round the table... and, close behind it, an equally genuine dismay.
"But that means..." Lavender had materialised at Ron's shoulder in time to hear, and her face fell. "Only two lessons? We only got two lessons with him?"
"He remains," Viktor assured her. "This is the other half of the news. Professor Esther stays at Hogwarts... as an honoured guest of the school, for so long as his Department business requires. He gives up only the timetable." A small dry smile. "I think the timetable vas never the point."
Around the table, six people who knew exactly what the point had been applied themselves to their breakfasts and said nothing at all, wearing the private smiles of the well-informed.
Early November 1995, the paddock by the Forbidden Forest
Hagrid returned to his classes with his bruises fading to yellow-green and his spirits defiantly high... and Umbridge returned to observing him, clipboard in hand.
Though it was noticed, and quietly savoured by every student on that frosty paddock, that the High Inquisitor was not quite the woman she had been.
She was haggard.
The pink was as pink as ever and the smile still hung on its hooks, but there were shadows under her eyes that powder hadn't hidden, and she flinched, minutely, whenever Hagrid's shadow fell across her, and her questions had lost their old relish. She looked like a woman who had recently been shown something she could not stop seeing.
Hagrid, sublimely oblivious, taught.
"Now... they're shy, so keep yer voices down... but they'll come fer the meat." He hurled half a carcass of raw beef toward the treeline. "Anyone see anythin'? Anyone at all?"
Most of the class stared at empty air, and then jumped as the meat began, apparently of its own accord, to lift, tear, and vanish in chunks into nothing.
But Harry saw them. Great gaunt black horses, skeletal under leathery hides, wings folded like a dragon's, white eyes patient... a whole small herd of them stepping delicately out of the trees. And beside him he heard Hermione's soft intake of breath, and Ron's "hang on...", and saw Draco go still... because Hagrid's description, as he gave it, was assembling itself in their memories into something they had heard before, on a dark carriage road in September.
"Thestrals," Hagrid said proudly. "Hogwarts has got a whole herd... only place in Britain that has. Beau'iful, they are... no, don' look like that, Parvati, they're gentle... an' the thing abou' Thestrals, the thing everyone gets wrong abou' 'em, is they're not bad luck, an' they're not omens. It's jus'... not everyone can see 'em." His voice gentled. "Yeh can only see a Thestral if yeh've seen death. Properly seen it, an' understood it. Tha's all it is."
Ron and Hermione turned, both at once, and looked at Harry... at Harry, who was already looking at the herd with quiet recognition, one hand half-raised as the nearest mare stretched her bony head toward him... and neither of them said anything at all, but Hermione's hand found his arm and pressed it, once, and let go.
Across the paddock, Umbridge wrote something on her clipboard. But even her cough, when it came, was thinner than it used to be.
Mid-December 1995, the seventh-floor corridor
The term ran down toward Christmas through frost and mounting homework, and on the afternoon before the last M.S.S.G. meeting of the year, Harry was making for Gryffindor Tower when a small cannonball of enthusiasm intercepted him at knee height.
"Harry Potter, sir! Dobby has been decorating, sir!"
Dobby, it transpired, had begun his Christmas break early, and had taken it upon himself... entirely upon himself, glowing with pride from beneath a teetering stack of festive hats... to prepare the M.S.S.G.'s room for the season.
Harry, with a prickle of foreboding, let himself be towed up to inspect the work.
The Room had been transformed. Garlands of holly and ivy wound the walls; frost-ferns of enchantment silvered the mirrors; and mistletoe... a frankly irresponsible quantity of mistletoe... hung from the ceiling at intervals of roughly four feet. And rotating gently among it all, catching the lamplight, hung one hundred golden baubles, each and every one bearing a beaming portrait of Harry's own face above the words:
HAVE A VERY HARRY CHRISTMAS!
Harry stood beneath a hundred slowly revolving copies of his own grin, and felt his soul make a genuine attempt to leave his body.
"Dobby," he said, with enormous care, "it's... the room is beautiful, Dobby. Truly. But the... these..." He plucked down the nearest bauble, from which his own face beamed encouragingly back at him. "These have to go. All of them.... Please."
Dobby's ears drooped a fraction. Harry cast about fast for a rescue.
"...Creatures," he said, inspired. "Do them with creatures instead. Magical ones... the strange ones, the ones nobody believes in. Moon Frogs. Snorkacks. That sort." 'The ones Luna likes,' he did not say aloud, and fooled nobody, least of all himself.
"And, Dobby... could you manage some food, for after? A little year-end party. Treats. And pudding... lots of pudding, there should definitely be a great deal of pudding..."
"Because Miss Lovey likes pudding!" Dobby beamed, ears re-erecting. "Dobby understands completely, sir. Dobby will make it perfect for Harry Potter and for Mrs Potter, sir!"
"She's not... Dobby..."
But the elf had vanished with a crack and a distinctly smug expression, leaving Harry cursing quietly at the empty air, the mistletoe, and the universe generally, before he walked briskly away with his ears burning.
...
The last meeting of the year was less a lesson than a harvest.
Draco and Astoria couldn't come... the Hospital Wing again, and Harry caught Hermione filing that fact away with the small crease back between her brows... but everyone else was there, and Harry ran them through a full review of the months behind them: the shield work, the Impediment Jinx, the Stunners, the disarming, pair by pair and spell by spell.
And standing at the front watching them... watching Susan Bones drop a moving target with a Stunner she couldn't have named in September, watching the Creevey brothers shield in tandem, watching Cedric and Cho duel each other to a laughing standstill...
Harry felt something settle warm in his chest. 'They've come miles. All of them. Whatever's out there... they'll meet it on their feet.'
"Right," he said, when the last pair had finished. "That's it. That's the term. And you should all know..." the old shyness tugged; he pushed through it "...you've done a huge amount. Truly. I mean it. Happy Christmas, all of you."
And then Dobby's handiwork did the rest.
The tables filled themselves with treats and steaming jugs and an armada of puddings; from somewhere in the Room's enchanted rafters, unbidden, a smooth slow waltz began to play; and above it all hung the golden baubles... now painted, each one, with a different impossible creature, Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, Moon Frogs and Blibbering Humdingers turning gently in the lamplight... and, everywhere, the mistletoe.
The tradition was embraced with scandalous enthusiasm.
Cedric and Cho began it, caught beneath a sprig by the punch and kissing to a storm of cheers and wolf-whistles. Hermione and Viktor, giggling, found their own with suspicious speed. Ron and Lavender required no mistletoe at all but used it as legal cover; Ginny and Michael Corner followed; and then... to a collective delighted gasp from half the room... the shyest couple present, Neville and Hannah Abbott, pink to their hairlines and holding hands like a lifeline, stepped beneath a sprig together and embraced the tradition with a brief, brave, glowing kiss, to the loudest cheer of the night. The waltz swelled. The air had gone entirely to romance.
Those without partners or mistletoe gathered instead round the pudding tables, trading Christmas plans, and the Room hummed with the warm, easy noise of a good year ending well.
Harry and Luna had claimed a quiet corner of it, side by side, watching it all with a calm delight.
"Look," Luna murmured, nodding across the room.
Daphne Greengrass sat with a glass of something delicious, mid-conversation with Susan Bones across the table... and directly above her head, slightly to the right, a sprig of Dobby's mistletoe had drifted into position. Daphne glanced up, registered it, and followed its line of jurisdiction sideways... to where Anthony Goldstein sat working through a bowl of pudding, who looked up at precisely the same moment, saw the same sprig, and froze mid-spoonful.
The two of them held a long, exquisitely awkward pause.
Then both broke, laughing... and Daphne, with the unbotherable elegance of her house, simply waved the sprig away through the air like a fly and leaned across to strike up a conversation with Anthony directly, which he set down his pudding to join.
Susan Bones, with the keen tactical awareness of a Bones, discovered urgent business with a friend two seats along and shifted smoothly away to leave them to it.
Harry and Luna giggled together in their corner like a pair of conspirators.
And Harry... Harry would admit this to no living soul... spent a not-inconsiderable portion of the evening glancing, casually, at the ceiling above their two heads.
Nothing. Bare rafters. Garlands, frost-ferns, one rotating Snorkack bauble. Of the several dozen sprigs of mistletoe Dobby had scattered with such reckless abandon over every other square yard of the room, not one... not one... had found its way to their corner.
Beside him, Luna worked serenely through a bowl of pudding, entirely absorbed, a small contented hum escaping her between spoonfuls... and Harry's gaze, drifting down from the treacherously empty ceiling, caught on the curve of her mouth, and stayed there rather longer than he had authorised it to, his thoughts sliding somewhere warm and unwise...
"...I think the Snorkack's antlers are wrong, though," Luna said thoughtfully, pointing her spoon at the nearest bauble. "They curl the other way. Widdershins. Everyone paints them sunwise and it's a terrible slander."
Harry surfaced with a small internal splash, cooled his face by main force, and gave the bauble his most scholarly attention. "Widdershins," he agreed, only slightly strangled. "Obviously."
No mistletoe came for him, in the end. The waltz played out; the puddings dwindled; the couples swayed and the friends laughed and the golden creatures turned overhead.
But he had a warm corner, and a good year behind him, and Luna Lovegood beside him eating pudding and slandering bauble-painters... and Harry found, watching her, that it was enough. It was more than enough.