Chapter 276: Disposal of Dangerous Creatures
Hermione, who was not far away doing her Arithmancy homework, looked up at him.
Seeing him still lost in thought, holding his book, she shook her head and went back to her work.
Dylan was always like this lately; no one knew what he found so entertaining in a book of spells.
Dylan, however, paid no mind. His gaze had followed the two figures in his vision to the valley stream.
The young Dumbledore was bending to cup water in his hands, the sunlight filtering through his red hair and casting small golden specks on the surface.
Grindelwald stood behind him, suddenly reaching out to brush the tips of his hair, and whispered, "When we overthrow those fools, the entire wizarding world will remember our names."
Dumbledore straightened up, water droplets running down his jawline and dripping onto his collar.
He didn't reply, but just turned to look at Grindelwald, the light in his eyes even brighter than the stream.
"So the 'greater plan' was filled with so much personal stuff."
Dylan covered his face with his book, stifling a laugh.
Anyway, there was still some time until the Quidditch World Cup.
There was no use rushing the matter with the test subjects.
And it wasn't yet the time he had agreed upon with Aurelio.
He might as well take this chance to enjoy the show to the fullest.
Exploring ancient history.
Dylan was quite interested in it.
That afternoon, in the Gryffindor common room, the fire in the hearth continued to burn steadily.
The pine logs occasionally made a soft crackling sound.
The warm glow made the tapestries on the stone walls look especially bright.
Dylan was still curled up in the deepest armchair in the corner, his posture a little more languid than before.
His legs were crossed on the footstool, and the book in his hand was tucked behind his back as a makeshift cushion.
His scrying vision had not yet pulled away from the scenes in Godric's Hollow.
Right now, the scene before his "eyes" was of old Dumbledore and Grindelwald by a moonlit graveyard.
The two were discussing something in low voices, so close that Dylan could even see the light in their eyes.
This kind of secret, tense interaction made a faint smile curl at the corners of Dylan's mouth. He was almost completely immersed in his private "show."
Just then, a muffled sob broke the common room's tranquility.
The sound was soft, but it was like a fine needle, piercing the immersive atmosphere around Dylan.
He frowned, snapped out of his divination, and looked in the direction of the sound.
He saw Hermione sitting at a nearby desk, her shoulders shaking slightly, a handkerchief clutched in her hand, constantly wiping at the corners of her eyes.
A pile of homework was spread out in front of her, and the ink had blurred in a small spot from a tear.
Dylan was startled, then sighed resignedly. He sat up straighter in the armchair and asked loudly, "What happened, Hermione?"
His gaze fell on her open homework. "Did you have trouble with your homework and get a talking-to from a professor?"
Hearing the voice, Hermione looked up, her eyes red, tear drops still clinging to her eyelashes.
She quickly shook her head, wiping her face vigorously with the handkerchief, and said with a sob, "Oh...no...it's not that..."
She sniffled, her voice thick with emotion. "This has nothing to do with you...you just keep doing what you were doing. Don't let me ruin your good mood..."
After speaking, she lowered her head again, trying to hide her emotions, but the trembling of her shoulders betrayed her.
Just as she finished, the common room door was pushed open with a bang.
Harry and Ron walked in.
Both of their faces were grim.
Ron's eyebrows were knotted together.
Harry's lips were pressed into a tight line, his jaw clenched, as if they had just been through something terrible.
As soon as they entered, they saw Hermione crying, and their steps faltered.
They exchanged a glance, and both saw the surprise in the other's eyes.
"Hermione, why are you crying?"
Harry quickly walked over, his voice filled with concern.
Ron followed, scratching his head and looking at her a little helplessly.
Hermione took a deep breath, rubbed her red eyes, stood up, and pulled a folded letter from her pocket.
The edges of the parchment were a little worn and stained with a few dried tear marks.
She handed the letter to Harry and Ron, her voice still shaky. "Hagrid lost his case...This is what he...he just had someone send over."
Listening from the side, Dylan slowly recalled the situation. He quickly figured out what this was about.
It was Buckbeak's trial.
Hermione had been busy with this for a while, collecting a lot of evidence. Hagrid had won one of his own cases, but the one concerning Hagrid and Buckbeak was ultimately lost.
Dylan wasn't surprised by this.
Harry took the letter and carefully unfolded it. Ron also leaned in.
The handwriting on the parchment was blurred in some places because it had been soaked with tears, requiring close inspection to read.
After seeing the contents, Harry's eyes widened. He raised his voice in disbelief.
"They can't do this!"
His fingers crumpled the letter with his tight grip.
"Buckbeak is clearly not dangerous! Anyone with a brain can see that!"
"It's Malfoy's father's doing."
Hermione wiped the corners of her eyes again, her voice a mix of anger and injustice.
"You know what Lucius Malfoy is like. He must have threatened the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures into doing this."
She paused, and her tone became a little sad.
"The Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures is a bunch of craven old codgers. They're too scared to offend the Malfoy family. But we can still appealin theory, we always can."
"It's just...I just don't see any hope...It feels like we can't change anything."
"We can change things!"
Ron snatched the letter from Harry's hand, crumpled it into a ball, and stuffed it into his pocket, as if doing so could erase the bad news.
He looked at Hermione, his voice firm. "This time, you won't be doing it all by yourself, Hermione. I'll help, too! We'll figure something out together!"
"Oh! Ron! Buckbeak is so sweet!"
At these words, Hermione could no longer hold back. Her pent-up emotions burst forth.
She took a step forward, threw herself into Ron's arms, and began to cry loudly.
Ron was clearly startled by the sudden hug, freezing completely.
His face "swished" bright red, like a boiled shrimp.
His hands hovered in the air, not knowing where to put them.
After a while, he tentatively and clumsily patted the top of Hermione's head, his movements as stiff as a manipulated marionette.
Sitting in the corner, Dylan saw this scene clearly. The corners of his mouth unconsciously turned upward, revealing a happy smile.
The interaction between these two was even more interesting than the scene he had been watching.
A while later, Hermione's crying gradually subsided.
She pulled away from Ron's embrace, sniffled, and said a little awkwardly, "Ron...about Scabbers, I'm really, truly sorry..."
She knew that Crookshanks had been after Scabbers, and she knew what a cat would do to a rat.
Even though she now knew that Scabbers' disappearance had nothing to do with her or her cat, she had previously thought Scabbers was just Ron's beloved pet and had disliked the ugly rat. A part of her still felt guilty.
At the mention of Scabbers, Ron's body tensed. A complex expression overtook the flush on his face.
His entire face twisted slightly, as if he had remembered something awkward and hard to talk about.
He scratched his head and stammered, "Uh...actually...about...him...we haven't had a chance to tell you..."
In truth, he had been too embarrassed to tell Hermione what had really happened to Scabbers, only vaguely telling her that his cat hadn't eaten him.
Now that Hermione had brought it up and apologized, he felt it wasn't right to keep it a secret anymore.
Harry nodded from the side and added, "Actually, Scabbers wasn't just a regular rat. He was...Peter Pettigrew."
Hearing that name, Hermione's eyes widened in shock.
The tears that had just been cried still clung to her eyelashes, slowly sliding down her cheeks again.
She froze for a few seconds, then remembered what they had overheard in the Hog's Head Inn.
Without needing any more explanation from Ron or Harry, she immediately connected the dots, her eyes filled with shock and realization.
But after the shock, she quickly reacted to something else, her tone instantly becoming stern. "Why are you only telling me something this important now?"
She immediately let go of Ron's arm and smacked him on the back of his head.
Then she whirled around and glared at Harry.
"Ah..."
Harry felt a little guilty under her stare, and his eyes involuntarily darted away.
He couldn't exactly say that Ron's pride was the reason he had asked him to keep it a secret, could he? A good friend doesn't just sell out his brother!
So, he could only stand there awkwardly, mouth shut.
Seeing this, Ron quickly changed the subject. "Alright, alright, let's get back to business! The Buckbeak case, what should we be looking into now? We have to figure something out. We can't just give up."
This topic slightly diffused Hermione's anger, but she was still downcast.
She sat back in her chair, picked up the file from the table, and flipped through it, her voice sounding tired.
"Honestly, I don't know."
She sighed. "According to the previous files, the evidence and testimony I gathered should have been enough...Hagrid won his own case, after all. Now, I really don't know how to make those old guys on the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures change their minds."
The three of them huddled around the desk, discussing in low voices.
Although they weren't intentionally whispering, Dylan could hear them clearly from his corner.
But they never once looked in his direction.
It was probably just as Hermione had saidthey felt the matter had nothing to do with him and didn't want to drag him into it.
Dylan was satisfied with this. He leaned back into the armchair, adjusted into a comfortable position, closed his eyes, and intended to resume the "show" that had been interrupted.
The fire in the fireplace continued to dance, casting a long shadow of him.
In the common room, aside from the trio's discussion, the usual quietness gradually returned.
After that day, the Gryffindor common room was a little less noisy.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione dedicated almost all their free time to getting Buckbeak's case overturned.
Their weekly Care of Magical Creatures class became their regular time to comfort Hagrid.
The classes were now held in a paddock on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
Hagrid still wore his shiny mole-skin coat, but his usual booming laugh was now rare.
His voice when explaining creature habits was much softer, and his gaze would occasionally drift towards the depths of the Forbidden Forest.
That was where Buckbeak was temporarily living.
Harry would always find an opportunity to get close to Hagrid, pretending to ask about the care of a certain creature.
In reality, he would quietly mention the new leads the three of them had found.
Ron would intentionally bring up some embarrassing stories about his family, trying to make Hagrid laugh.
Hermione would meticulously help Hagrid organize his scattered lesson plans, slipping him a note filled with newly found legal clauses when he wasn't looking.
The three of them, in their own unspoken way, avoided talking directly about the trial's outcome, using this clumsy but sincere method to slowly share Hagrid's sadness.
And since the news of Sirius Black's second attempt to break into Hogwarts, the school had strengthened its nighttime security.
Every night, the castle's corridors were patrolled by several times the usual number of faculty members and portrait guards.
This meant that even with Hagrid coming to get them, Harry and the others were strictly forbidden from leaving the castle after dark.
This forced them to move their work on the case to the daytime.
The long table in the library, near the Restricted Section, had almost become their exclusive territory.
The thick stack of files Hermione had borrowed from an office was piled on the table, their edges worn and curled from being flipped through so many times.
The yellowed pages contained records of past rulings by the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures.
Hermione had already studied them word for word three times.
But Harry and Ron were not giving up. They went through them again from the beginning, their eyes scanning the dense, handwritten notes, trying to find a loophole they had missed.
Even a single vague clause would make their eyes light up, only to be disappointed after a closer inspection.
Time flowed slowly in this constant cycle of busyness and pauses.
The hawthorn trees outside the castle sprouted new leaves, and the suits of armor in the corridors occasionally clanked from the students' playful shoves.
Everything seemed to be proceeding as usual.
Only that stack of files and the somber expressions on the three young faces were a constant reminder of the unresolved matter weighing on their minds.
But it only weighed on the three of them.
Others might have worried, but they weren't truly invested.
One day, during Charms class in the morning, sunlight streamed through the glass windows above the classroom, casting bright patches on the floor.
Professor Flitwick stood at the front of the room, explaining the key to the Cheering Charm in his squeaky voice.
"Remember, children, the key to the Cheering Charm is the caster's own emotional influence. You must truly feel joy to make the other person feel immersed in it..."
Dylan and Neville were paired up to practice.
(End of Chapter)
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