"Chaos is a ladder." - Littlefinger, Game of Thrones.
Two weeks passed without incident, which was almost more unsettling than the alternative.
Harriet had settled back into her usual routine. Training when she could, watching when she couldn't. Draco's little conspiracies continued in the background, predictable and persistent. She had left him plenty of openings. He would find them eventually, and when he did, she would be ready. In the meantime she let the castle move around her the way weather moved around something too solid to be troubled by it.
Dumbledore had not summoned her. She had expected that. He was watching Draco through Snape, no doubt, and had probably concluded that this was another crucible, another formative trial for his supposed prophetic weapon. The thought made her want to roll her eyes hard enough to sprain something.
As for Snape, he had managed to be even more disagreeable this year than the last, which she would not have thought possible had she not been witnessing it in real time. She had spent some time thinking about it, trying to find a logic in the extra effort he was putting in, and had eventually arrived at a conclusion she found more irritating than satisfying.
He had loved Lily Potter. That much was well documented, in the way that obsession is always eventually documented. And she was Lily's daughter, which meant she was a living reminder of everything he had lost and everything he had destroyed. Not through grief. Through resentment. There was a difference, and Snape had never once shown signs of understanding it.
He had not protected Harry in the original timeline. He had not protected her now. He had guided, manipulated, and ultimately served a plan that required a child to walk willingly toward death. The doe Patronus was not love. It was sentiment weaponized. And sentiment in certain individuals, in Harriet's experience, made people feel righteous while they did genuinely terrible things.
She let the thought go. Snape was not her problem. He was Dumbledore's problem, which meant he was contained.
There was something almost restful about that. Having a problem that was genuinely not yours to solve. She had spent enough of her first life, and a good portion of this one, being handed other people's problems and told to consider them her moral responsibility. The war. The prophecy. The fate of the wizarding world, which had apparently been waiting for a fifteen-year-old girl to save it because no adult with actual resources and institutional power had managed to find the time.
She had decided, at some point between the graveyard and Gringotts, that she was done accepting that framing.
Snape was Dumbledore's problem. Voldemort was, in practical terms, the entire wizarding world's problem, and she would deal with him on her own schedule and for her own reasons. Everything else was noise.
The more immediately entertaining development was what had been happening to Umbridge.
Dolores was growing bolder by the day.
At first, she had tried to assert her authority while remaining within the visible limits of her role. The smiles had been sweet, the voice syrupy, the punishments disguised as procedure. Now the pretense was thinning. What remained was something uglier, authority exaggerated to the point of parody, made dangerous only because it was backed by the Ministry.
Her classes had little to do with education anymore. No discussion. No dissent. A teacher should not operate like that, cold and punitive, almost eager to catch students breathing the wrong way.
The problem was that this pink monstrosity had full political support.
Ridiculous as it looked, it was arguably one of Fudge's smarter moves. Dumbledore could not openly oppose her without escalating into direct conflict with the Ministry. And Umbridge framed everything as necessary discipline, correcting the unhealthy tendencies developing within certain houses.
If you treat children like future criminals long enough, and no one contradicts it, some of them will eventually grow into the role. It becomes expectation. Then inevitability.
The so-called white faction was paralyzed. Lack of means. Institutional hypocrisy. As long as the black faction did not formally protest, there would be no official issue. And the black faction had no reason to complain about a regime that mostly tightened the leash on others.
Under those conditions, Umbridge loosened her own restraint.
The blood-quill detentions had started, and Harriet had responded to her first summons with the kind of calm that she had learned unsettled people far more than anger. She told Umbridge that if there was an issue, she was welcome to bring it to Dumbledore. Until the Headmaster personally ordered her to attend, she would not be going.
And that was precisely the pressure point.
Dumbledore knew what the detentions entailed. If he personally forced Harriet to attend, he would be endorsing them. The image of the benevolent grandfather would crack. So instead, he sent Snape.
Snape delivered the message in his usual low, cutting tone. Harriet listened without expression and answered just as evenly: unless the order came directly from Dumbledore, she would not comply.
Snape had stared at her for a long moment before leaving.
Even he had limits to how far he could push without exposing too much.
None of it had been resolved. All of it remained suspended in the particular tension that characterized this year, everyone aware that the structure was rotten and no one willing to be the first to say so openly.
In the meantime, a certain self-proclaimed protagonist had formed an informal alliance with two red-haired identical disasters and one Luna Lovegood.
The results were creative.
Umbridge's tea had once arrived aggressively spicy, the burn lasting several hours.
Her kitten plates had begun emitting small, unsettling sounds during Ministry visits.
The door to her office had developed a heating problem that made prolonged contact with the handle unpleasant.
A particular staircase step had taken a strong personal interest in the hem of her robes.
There had been an incident involving enchanted fireworks erupting from her fireplace at the precise moment a Ministry inspector had stopped by for tea.
None of it caused real harm.
All of it chipped at the image.
What Umbridge hadn't understood, and what Fudge almost certainly hadn't considered, was that authority maintained entirely through fear and bureaucratic backing was structurally fragile in a way that authority built on genuine respect was not. You could enforce compliance. You could not enforce the appearance of compliance, not really, not when the people being compelled were teenagers who had nothing to lose and two of them were Fred and George Weasley.
Harriet had watch about empires fall for smaller reasons.
Well. She had read about empires falling for smaller reasons. The principle held.
The real danger with Umbridge wasn't the blood quill or the Educational Decrees or even the Inquisitorial Squad she was apparently in the process of assembling. The real danger was what happened to institutions that used their power this way. They became brittle. They stopped being able to distinguish between genuine threats and minor irritants, because they had trained themselves to respond to everything with maximum force. And when something genuinely serious arrived, they had nothing left in reserve.
Fudge thought he was consolidating power. He was accelerating his own irrelevance. Harriet filed the observation away with the mild satisfaction of someone watching a slow-motion collapse from a comfortable distance.
Harriet walked through the corridor with her hands clasped loosely behind her back, allowing herself the smallest possible smile. Pressure applied from multiple angles by multiple people who all had their own reasons was more durable than any single visible attack. She would throw her own weight in at some point. Whenever it felt right.
The castle was quieter at this hour. She was making her way toward the classroom currently claimed by the Survival Club. Mutsuko's initiative. An abandoned room repurposed with surprising efficiency.
The twins and Luna were supposed to attend today.
She could have brought Hermione. That would have been entertaining. But not yet.
Hermione was a separate problem, and one she was in no particular hurry to solve. The distance between them had settled into something almost comfortable in its awkwardness, two people who knew each other well enough to know exactly which conversations they were both avoiding. It would resolve itself eventually. Things like that always did, one way or another.
What she was more curious about, if she was honest, was what Mutsuko had managed to turn the Survival Club into over the past week. The twins brought chaos as a matter of principle. Luna brought whatever Luna brought, which was its own category entirely. Combined with Mutsuko's particular brand of earnest absurdity and Kanako's inexplicable expertise in subjects no one had asked her to become an expert in, the results were likely to be either educational or structurally unsound.
Possibly both.
For now, she was simply walking.
Thinking.
Let the Ministry tighten its grip. Let Dumbledore observe from his tower. Let Voldemort play his shadow games. They were all focused on each other, and while giants stared across the board, smaller pieces learned how to move freely between them.
Harriet turned the corner, approaching the corridor that led to the club room, and kept walking.
It was at this exact moment that three Slytherins, Luca, Adrian, and Kieran, chose to make their move.
Luca was tall, with a sneer that appeared to be a permanent fixture. Adrian stood to his right, sharp-eyed, clearly the one who had done the actual planning. Kieran hovered at the back, which told her everything she needed to know about his role in this arrangement.
They had been following her for some time. She had noticed. She had let them continue noticing her noticing them, which they had interpreted as obliviousness. People always did.
"I'm really starting to get tired of this chase," Luca said, stepping forward. "It's because of your existence that we're dealing with this mess. So we've decided to deal with the problem. Permanently."
Harriet considered her options briefly.
She could slip away. She knew the corridors well enough, and their formation was sloppy enough that losing them would take less than a minute. But she was already slightly late, and there was something to be said for expediency.
She didn't reach for her wand.
Instead, she moved.
Luca didn't see it coming. One fluid motion, a grip on his sleeve, a shift of weight, and he was over her shoulder and into the stone floor before the sound of his own voice had finished echoing. She was already turning.
Adrian barely had time to raise his wand arm before he had it locked. The grip was precise enough that he went very still very quickly. His wand hit the floor in two pieces. That, more than anything else, seemed to be the moment it truly landed. A broken wand had a way of doing that to a witch or wizard. It wasn't the pain. It was the sudden, visceral understanding that the thing they had built every assumption of safety around was simply gone.
She stepped through the sequence of motion, and he was forced to follow. His balance broke, his body twisting under her control, until he crashed hard onto the ground. Pain flared through his side on impact, sharp enough to steal the air from his lungs.
He didn't move right away. He couldn't.
Kieran had already made a decision about how this was going to go for him. The evidence was visible on his robes as he crouched down.
Harriet crouched down to his eye level.
"Really?" she said. "At your age?"
Then she headbutted him. There was a sharp crack as his nose broke, and he recoiled instantly, collapsing backward, stunned and bleeding.
She straightened, and then, almost as an afterthought, landed two or three clean punches on Luca, who had just about recovered enough to look indignant. He stopped looking indignant fairly quickly.
She straightened, cast a binding charm across all three with a single wand movement, and looked at them for a moment with the expression of someone who had expected more and was not particularly surprised to have been disappointed.
"How have you survived this long?" she muttered, more to herself than to them.
It wasn't a rhetorical question, exactly. She genuinely wanted to know. Slytherin produced capable people, she had recently confirmed that firsthand. The house had a reputation for self-preservation above all else, for producing witches and wizards who understood leverage and timing and the value of not making yourself a visible target. And yet here were three of them, having followed her through a corridor for what she could only assume was a meaningful stretch of time, and then chosen to act at the precise moment she was heading toward a room full of people she knew.
The planning had been, in a word, optimistic.
She pulled out a rope and efficiently tied them up, then cast a spell that would keep the bindings secure for four hours before releasing them automatically.
"Wooo," said a familiar voice from around the corner. "Big sis, you didn't go easy on the mob."
Mutsuko emerged from the corridor, Kanako at her side, looking blankly ahead, oblivious to the scene unfolding.
"Sorry for the noise," Harriet said, adding a concealment charm to the three Slytherins without breaking stride. "Is the meeting already started?"
"It is," Mutsuko confirmed. "Come on."
Kanako had turned her head slightly toward the empty section of corridor where three Slytherins were not visibly tied up, her brow furrowing.
"Is that..." she began.
"Just your imagination," Mutsuko said immediately.
"But..."
"You just dreamed it. Three stupid trolls, one of whom wet himself, beaten and tied up. That's all it was. A dream."
"Oh," Kanako said, visibly deflating with relief. "That's good. I got scared for a second."
"Nothing to worry about. But you really need to work on your courage, Kanako. How do you expect to survive an isekai like that?"
Kanako straightened up with a look of renewed determination. "Y-Yes, you're right. I could never survive in an isekai like this. I really need to be braver."
Harriet watched this exchange from slightly behind them, her expression carefully neutral.
What a pair, she thought.
She fell into step beside them without further comment.
Behind her, three Slytherins sat invisibly in the corridor, probably reconsidering several recent life choices.
"Don't go anywhere," she said, shooting one last look over her shoulder before turning the corner. "Stay until it wears off. Consider it your punishment."
Not that they had much choice in the matter anyway, she thought.