Harry, Iris and the Weasley twins agreed that their pranks end after a week. Luckily, with the ward up, Harry's dormitory has been peaceful. Draco's hair returned to normal, there is still a stray glitter and slime here and there but compared for the past few days event, people had been less loud about it. And most of all, for the first time since, Harry's things have not been tampered nor gone missing. Until...
BANG!
Harry didn't know what woke him first. The bang, or the sound that followed it.
The bang was significant. The kind of sound that didn't belong to the natural vocabulary of a dormitory at four in the morning, too sharp and too large, like something structural had made a decision. The sound that followed was harder to categorize — a thrashing, struggling quality, punctuated by muffled cursing and what might have been Hersey's voice saying something that deteriorated quickly into sounds rather than words.
Harry was on his feet before he was fully awake. Around him, curtains were already opening. Blaise moving fast and silent, Theo with his wand out, Draco with the reflexive alarm of someone whose week had recalibrated his threat threshold considerably. Zacharias said nothing, as was apparently his nature, but he was standing and his eyes were sharp.
Harry reached the dormitory door first.
He opened it.
Vaisey, Hersey, and Fawley were on the ground outside.
Not fallen. Wrapped. Something had caught them mid-motion and taken them down hard, something that coiled and gripped with the patient, specific intelligence of a plant that had been waiting. They were tangled in it thoroughly, all three of them, in the postures of people who had been moving quickly and stopped very suddenly against their will. Vaisey was face down. Hersey was on his side. Fawley had managed to get partially upright and was straining against something around his ankles with the expression of a person who had made a significant miscalculation.
The ward, Harry noted with a detached corner of his mind, had worked exactly as intended.
The noise had carried. Doors were opening and down the corridor — second years, fourth years, the sixth-year prefect with his wand raised and his expression sharp. And from the direction of the common room, moving with the purposeful speed of someone who had been sleeping lightly and waiting for exactly this, came Professor Snape.
The head of house has been sleeping in their common rooms ever since the incident happening in their house all to catch whoever has been responsible for all the things happening.
He stopped at the edge of the scene. He looked at the three boys on the ground. He looked at the door of Harry's dormitory, and the six first years standing in it. He looked at the section of corridor floor where the ward boundary ended, marked now by the very clear line between three tangled third years and everything else.
His expression did not change. It never really changed. But something in the quality of his stillness shifted.
"What," he said, in a voice like the surface of very cold water, "is the meaning of this."
It was not a question that expected an answer from Vaisey, who was currently face down on the stone floor. It was a question that expected an answer from the room in general, and it was the kind of question that had been sharpened by seven days of disrupted sleep and accumulated professional frustration into something considerably more dangerous than its words suggested.
Fawley opened his mouth.
"Don't," Snape said, without looking at him.
Fawley closed his mouth.
Snape moved forward, his robes brushing the edge of the scene as he crouched beside the nearest struggling figure with the unhurried precision of someone conducting an examination. He looked at what had caught them. His eyes went very still.
He stood back up.
"Where did you obtain this?," he said.
Nobody answered.
Snape reached down and picked up what had fallen from Vaisey's grip when the ward brought them down. A Fanged Frisbee. Two others like it, scattered on the floor. Standard enough — stupid, dangerous in a confined space, but standard. He set them aside. They were not what his eyes had gone still for.
What his eyes had gone still for was still partially in Fawley's grip. A length of something greenish and fibrous, coiling slightly even now in the torchlight, responding to the warmth of the corridor with the slow, instinctive movement of something alive.
Devil's Snare.
Snape looked at it.
Everyone looked at it.
Harry looked at it.
Something happened in Harry's chest snapped. Something colder and more precise than fear. The specific sensation of understanding something fully and finding that the understanding made you furious.
"Professor," Harry said.
His voice came out very level. He was distantly aware that this was the same voice he used when things were very bad and getting worse, the voice that meant everything else had been set aside in favor of being completely clear.
Snape looked at him.
"They were going to put that under my bed," Harry said.
The corridor was very quiet.
"Potter—"
"Devil's Snare requires darkness and stillness to work most effectively," Harry said, because the information was there and he needed somewhere to put the fury that didn't involve his wand. "A sleeping student, in a dark dormitory, would be — ideal conditions." He paused. "I want to press charges."
Snape's expression shifted almost imperceptibly. "Potter, this is a school matter—"
"Devil's Snare is not a school matter," Harry said. "Devil's Snare in the hands of a student who was attempting to place it in another student's dormitory in the middle of the night is an Auror matter. Sir."
The Sir landed like punctuation. Respectful and immovable.
Snape looked at him for a long moment. Harry could feel the calculation happening. The weighing of house politics, school politics, the question of what Dumbledore would say, the question of what the Ministry would say, the question of how this looked from the outside versus how it was being managed from within.
"The appropriate response," Snape said carefully, "is for this to be handled internally—"
"They tried to kill me," Harry said. "Internally."
"Mr. Potter—"
"And I am not the only one affected." Harry turned to his roommates who all have varying confused faces.
"They also tried to kill Blaise Zabini," Harry said, "and Theo Nott, and—" he paused, and let the pause have its full weight, "—Draco Malfoy."
Something moved through the corridor. Not a sound — more like a shift in atmospheric pressure. The sixth-year prefect had gone very still. Several of the watching students exchanged glances. Draco, standing in the dormitory doorway, had gone from alarmed to something considerably more complicated.
"Draco Malfoy," Harry continued, with the careful evenhandedness of someone reading from a document, "whose father is Lord Malfoy. Who would, I imagine, have significant feelings about an attempt on his son's life being handled internally." He let that breathe. "And who shares a dormitory with me, which means anything placed under my bed in the dark would have affected everyone in that room."
Snape said nothing.
"Also, my godfather," Harry said, "is Sirius Black."
The corridor absorbed this.
Lord Black. The name didn't need elaboration in a Slytherin corridor. It had its own weight, its own history, its own set of implications that everyone present was already running through at speed. Draco's eyes had gone sharp in a way that had nothing to do with the early hour. Blaise was looking at Harry with an expression that suggested he was significantly revising several of his assumptions.
"I'm not asking for revenge," Harry said, which was true in the sense that what he was asking for was considerably more permanent than revenge. "I'm asking for this to be treated as what it is. Which is an attempt on multiple students' lives. Including the son of Lord Malfoy. Including the godson of Lord Black." He looked at Snape steadily. "Sir."
Snape looked at him for a long time.
Then he looked at Vaisey, still face down on the floor.
Then he looked at the Devil's Snare in Fawley's grip.
When he spoke, his voice had dropped to something very quiet that was somehow louder than anything that had come before it.
"Mr. Vaisey. Mr. Hersey. Mr. Fawley." Each name fell like a stone into still water. "You will accompany me. Now."
He looked back at Harry once more. Something passed across his face — brief, complex, unreadable — and then it was gone.
"Go back to bed, Mr. Potter," he said.
"Sir," Harry said. Not agreement. Just acknowledgment.
Snape turned and walked, and the three third years were extracted from the ward's grip with a wordless spell and marched after him in the specific silence of people who understood, finally and completely, that they had miscalculated in a way that could not be undone.
The corridor watched them go.
When they were gone, nobody spoke for a moment. The watching students drifted back to their rooms in ones and twos, the way people did after something significant — quietly, with things to think about.
Harry stood in the doorway of his dormitory.
Blaise appeared at his shoulder. He looked at the empty corridor where Vaisey had been. Then at Harry. "Sirius Black," he said.
"Yes," Harry said.
"Your godfather?"
"Yes."
A pause. "You've never mentioned that."
"You've never asked," Harry said.
"Then what about —"
"Shhh." Harry hissed at Blaise.
Blaise is the only person in the entire school (except for Iris) who knows about Harry's affiliation with Ignatius Peverell. Harry figured that information is best informed in a much later situation.
And they went back to bed.
*****
The Undercroft was quiet when Harry arrived.
It was always quiet here — that particular quality of silence that belonged to rooms that had been keeping secrets for a long time and had gotten good at it. The fireplace lit itself when he entered, as it always did, and the names on the wall caught the light the way they always did, and Harry stood in the middle of the room and waited.
Iris arrived four minutes later, slightly out of breath, her Hufflepuff scarf trailing. She had her bag — the bag, the one that Blaise still couldn't look at directly — slung over one shoulder and the expression of someone who had been in the middle of something and had set it aside because Harry's message had suggested this was more important.
She looked at his face.
"What happened," she said. Not a question.
Harry told her.
He told her plainly, the way he told her everything, without softening it, without rearranging it into something easier to receive. The ward. The bang at four in the morning. Opening the dormitory door to find Vaisey and his group tangled on the floor. Snape arriving. The Fanged Frisbees on the ground, which were stupid but manageable.
The Devil's Snare in Fawley's hand.
Iris went very still.
Harry kept talking. Snape's face. The charges he'd pressed. The Malfoy and Black cards. The three boys being walked away in silence. He told her all of it, and when he finished the Undercroft was quiet again and Iris was looking at him with an expression he recognized — the one that meant she was feeling something large and had not yet decided what to do with it.
"They tried to kill you," she said.
"Yes."
"They brought Devil's Snare into a dormitory where you were sleeping—"
"Yes."
"—and planned to put it under your bed—"
"That's what the evidence suggested—"
"HARRY." Her voice cracked off the stone ceiling and came back at them both. She wasn't loud often. When she was, it meant something. "They tried to kill you. They walked into your dormitory in the middle of the night with something designed to — to suffocate you in your sleep and you're standing there telling me about it like it's a — like it's a chess move—"
"I'm telling you about it," Harry said carefully, "because you were involved. You had a right to know. And because I knew you'd be furious and I needed you to hear it from me before you did something about it."
Iris stared at him.
"Also," Harry said, "before we do anything else, I need you to agree to something."
"What."
"We don't tell Aunt Petunia."
The Undercroft was silent.
Iris opened her mouth.
"Iris."
"I wasn't going to—"
"You were absolutely going to."
She closed her mouth. The expression on her face moved through several stages — fury, calculation, reluctant recognition — and landed somewhere that looked like agreement but felt like it cost her something.
"She'd come here," Iris said finally.
"She absolutely would come here," Harry confirmed.
"She'd walk into this castle and she would—"
"Yes."
"She'd probably find a way to prosecute the entire school—"
"Knowing Aunt Petunia, she'd find a way to prosecute the Ministry as well."
Iris pressed her lips together. Something moved across her face that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one. "She'd be so mad, Harry."
"I know."
"She loves us."
"I know," Harry said, and his voice came out slightly different on that one — quieter, with an edge that hadn't been there before. Because that was the thing about Aunt Petunia, the thing that still caught him sometimes when he wasn't prepared for it. She had taken them in when she hadn't had to. She had kept them when she could have let them go. And now she was in a townhouse in London not knowing that someone had tried to kill her Harry with a magical plant, and she would stay not knowing because knowing would break something in her that Harry didn't want broken.
"We don't tell her," Iris said. Final. Decided.
"We don't tell her," Harry agreed.
Iris sat down on the nearest chair, her bag sliding to the floor. She was quiet for a moment, looking at the fire. When she spoke again her voice had come down from the ceiling and was somewhere closer to its usual register, though the fury underneath it hadn't gone anywhere. It had just found a colder place to sit.
"The boys," she said. "Where are they now?"
"Gone," Harry said. "Quietly. No announcement."
"Snape?"
"Yes."
"He handled it?"
"In the way Snape handles things," Harry said. "Which is to say it's handled and nobody outside this house will ever know the details."
Iris was quiet again. "And inside the house?"
"Everyone knows," Harry said. "Nobody's saying anything. That's how it works there."
She absorbed this. Her fingers had found the strap of her bag and were turning it over slowly, the way she did when she was thinking through something that had too many edges.
"I came in for pranks," she said finally.
"I know."
"I came in for ghost peppers and glitter and hanging you all upside down from your beds." She looked at him. "I didn't come in for—" she gestured, a short, frustrated movement that meant all of this.
"I know," Harry said. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize." She said it quickly, sharply. "Don't you dare apologize. This isn't—" she stopped. Started again. "This isn't your fault. Those boys made their choices. I'm just—" another stop. She pressed her hand flat on her knee, steadying herself. "I'm angry, Harry. I'm very angry. And I need a moment to be angry before I can be anything else."
"Okay," Harry said.
He sat down across from her and waited, the way he always waited for Iris — without pressure, without filling the silence, just present. The fire crackled. The names on the wall caught the light. Somewhere above them the castle went about its morning, indifferent and ancient and full of secrets it had been keeping far longer than theirs.
After a while Iris said, "Are you alright?"
"Yes," Harry said.
She looked at him.
"I will be," he amended.
She nodded slowly. That was enough, between them. It had always been enough.
"Right," she said, straightening up, her voice finding its usual architecture again. "So. They're gone. The ward is up. Your dormitory is safe." She looked at him steadily. "What now?"
Harry looked back at her.
"Now," he said, "we see what the house looks like when I'm not a target anymore."
Iris considered this. "And if it doesn't look the way you want it to?"
Harry almost smiled. "Then we reassess."
She picked up her bag. Stood. Paused at the door of the Undercroft and looked back at him.
She left first. Harry stayed a moment longer, looking at the names, and then followed her out into the corridor and back up toward the light.