For Hermione and her friends, Wednesday nights always felt more cramped, more thoroughly scheduled than any other evening of the week.
That was because the Society for the Promotion of Magical Creature Welfare had a get-together scheduled for that evening.
After nearly two months of Hermione's steady, patient effort—and, more than anything else, after word had spread from the young witches and wizards who'd actually received their "wages" for helping out—the society's membership had exploded quietly in its second month.
By now, nearly a hundred young witches and wizards showed up to every single meeting.
More people meant one obvious problem: chaos.
In the very beginning, Hogwarts' own students had still held the society—which Professor Watson championed so vigorously, lending it with his name—in a certain amount of awe, minding their manners.
But after a few meetings, once they'd gotten the measure of things and realized nothing terrible would happen if they relaxed a little, getting them to sit still and learn alongside so many magical creatures who'd never studied wizarding magic before—creatures for whom this magic came effortlessly, almost insultingly easily, without a wand ever needed—proved next to impossible.
Hermione had tried, at first, valiantly, to get everyone to quiet down and pay attention, even enlisting Harry, Ron, and a few other Gryffindor friends specifically to help her keep some semblance of order among the crowd.
She gave up on that particular strategy soon enough, though. Because she discovered, to her considerable irritation, that the true source of most of the chaos was in fact her own Gryffindor friends themselves
For the past two meetings, then, Hermione had simply given up trying to control the whole unruly mass at once, and instead herded the worst troublemakers off to one side to entertain themselves, devoting her attention to teaching basic magical knowledge to the goblins, the children Professor Rahansen had brought along, the three house-elves, Polly, and the one young werewolf in the group.
Grawp didn't have to attend lessons at all, thankfully—you couldn't very well ask a giant who could barely string a few words of English together to enunciate a proper spell clearly enough for it to work.
Full and thoroughly content, he was currently snoring away contentedly in his own cozy tree hollow at the forest's edge.
Under normal circumstances, Grawp only went to the Great Hall twice a week at most. He'd work the kitchen house-elves half to death fetching him enough food, eat his fill, then head straight back to sleep—and the whole comfortable cycle would simply start over again a few days later.
Of course, every so often, he'd get some exercise in as well, working off whatever energy sleep hadn't burned away.
He might yank up a couple of unlucky trees on the far bank of the river just to burn off his excess energy, snapping them like twigs, or leap into the water for a splash around, sending waves up onto the bank, before heading back to sleep again with a contented grumble.
"He's still growing!"
Once, when Hagrid had come to visit his brother, Hermione had voiced her worry to him over Grawp's rather peculiar sleeping schedule, wondering aloud if it was healthy.
Hagrid, beaming with delight at the question, had told her—
"In the two months since he came ter Hogwarts, Grawp's grown at least two feet, if he's grown an inch! He looks so much healthier now, oh!"
Hagrid gave a great, wet sniff at that, wiping at his teary black eyes with the back of one hand.
"Back when he lived with the tribe, poor lad never got a proper meal, never got a proper rest neither, and he had ter put up with the other giants bullyin' him besides, on account of him bein' smaller. Now everythin's different for him. Thank Professor Watson for that, I do, every day—"
Hermione had genuinely nothing to say in response to that.
She didn't need Hagrid's brother to master magic. She only hoped he could live a healthy, contented life from here on out—and, just as importantly, perhaps more importantly, that he wouldn't accidentally hurt anyone in the process of living it.
The other headache, roughly on par with managing Grawp, was the small vampire living down in the dungeons, keeping her own hours.
After those first uncertain few days, she'd all but stopped showing up to meals in the Great Hall altogether, keeping very much to herself in the cooler, darker corridors below.
Which was understandable enough, actually, once you thought about it properly—wizard food held no appeal for a vampire.
Nor did she ever come to Hermione's lessons, for a similar practical reason, because vampires as a people had always lived alongside both wizards and Muggles both, moving between the two worlds while most magical creatures never did.
They'd always had access to wands of their own, in fact, and over their unusually long lives, they'd been exposed to and had ample time to study, wizarding magic themselves.
Whatever Hermione had to offer in the way of lessons was, consequently, far too elementary to hold any interest for her.
Elun could out-sleep even Grawp, when she put her mind to it—that particular fact, too, came down simply to vampire nature rather than any laziness on her part.
Still, Polly had once mentioned to Hermione, in passing, that Elun took a walk through the castle every single night, deep in the small hours when everyone else slept.
Polly herself had spotted her once, on the way back from a late night stargazing session up at the Astronomy Tower, dressed up as a ghost or dementor for the occasion, giving the younger students who'd wandered the halls at that hour a good fright before vanishing again into the shadows.
Hermione only ever managed to catch Elun for certain once a week, on Sunday nights after the society's regular meeting had wrapped up for the evening—because that was precisely when Elun needed to head down to Hogsmeade to restock her sweets.
Hermione, Harry, and Ron always went along with her on these trips, just in case Hogsmeade suddenly found itself with a few unlucky villagers turned into mummified husks by morning.
As for the rest of the exchange students filling out the group, they were, on the whole, fairly low-maintenance by comparison, requiring far less careful management.
The visiting goblin delegation had all been hand-picked personally by Barnah for the exchange, and they weren't given at all to the sly, cheating ways that wizards liked to assume of their kind in general.
The people Professor Rahansen had brought weren't all that different from Hogwarts' own students, broadly speaking, in terms of temperament and mischief—but their hearts were purer underneath it all, which made them that much easier to get along with day to day.
The young werewolf, Bernell, was a shy child too, never one to stir up trouble or seek attention.
Of course, around the full moon, Bernell did need someone keeping a watchful eye on him—but that dangerous job fell to Hagrid.
As for Freodom, Dobby, and Kreacher, there was hardly need to say much more about them at all—if anything, Hermione sometimes found herself wishing the three of them weren't quite so relentlessly, eagerly well-behaved.
"It's Wing-GAR-dium Levi-O-sa, not Wingardium Leviosa, all run together like that. You have to say the 'gar' long and clear—"
Down by the riverbank, a thriving campfire held up a small, warm, blazing pocket of world all its own for this unusual gathering of students.
A broad-eared goblin, gently corrected on his pronunciation, raised his wand again with determination and tried the motion once more.
Whoosh!
The feather lying on the ground finally responded properly this time—it drifted slowly, gracefully up into the air at first, and then, under Hermione's delighted gaze, shot off suddenly with a sharp whoosh and smashed straight into a nearby rock, scattering into a small puff of drifting down, with a force sharp enough to almost pass for a proper Summoning Charm.
"Oh, very well done, Tevin!"
Her cheeks glowing red in the firelight, Hermione clapped her hands together in delight.
"I think you've got the hang of the Hovering Charm now, really—oh, you just need a bit more practice with the control and you'll have it down perfectly!"
"Thank you for your teaching, Professor Granger!"
The goblin known as Tevin gave Hermione a stiff, formal little bow at that, and those words—"Professor Granger,"—sent her spirits soaring.
"Well then—"
Struggling to hold back an overly wide smile at the title, not wanting to seem too pleased, Hermione let out a small, satisfied breath.
"That's it for today's lesson, I think. Now, we can all go relax for a bit over there instead—"
Roya sprang up at once from where she'd been sitting cross-legged nearby, dragging Hermione by one hand and a few of the other students along with her toward the cabins in a rush of sudden energy.
A little further off, on the square in front of a neat row of two-story wooden cabins built along the riverbank for the exchange delegation, something like a joint social gathering—spanning all three Houses present tonight, and more besides—was already well underway.
At the centre of the grounds stood one long table, improvised from several square tables dragged out of the various cabins and pushed together end to end into a single surface.
The long table was heaped generously with all kinds of fruit, drinks, and cakes—no less lavish, honestly, than any of the regular daily meals served up in the Great Hall.
And all of it, every last plate, was thanks to Dobby, Freodom, and Kreacher, the three of them, who could come and go from the castle kitchens as they pleased.
Scanning the crowd, Hermione—taller than most—soon spotted Harry and the others, sitting together and chatting on the steps in front of one of the wooden cabins.
"What are you all talking about?"
Hermione asked, tugging Roya's hand along as she squeezed her way through the crowd toward them.
Besides Harry, Ron, and Lavender, Fred, George, Neville, Ginny, and several others were all gathered there together too. What struck Hermione as odd, though, coming closer, was that Harry wore an unmistakable gloom on his face as though something had upset him.
"Mum sent Ginny a letter, and it said something—"
Ron said, shrugging one shoulder.
"What was it?"
Hermione didn't bother asking Ginny for the answer directly—she looked straight at Harry instead, reading the gloom on his face.
"Remus is getting married. First Sunday of November—"
Harry said, gloomily, staring at a spot on the ground.
"Oh, Remus is—!"
Hermione clapped a hand over her mouth, her voice was muffled but bright underneath it with delighted surprise.
"Getting married—to—oh, it must be Tonks, mustn't it!"
It wasn't hard to guess as much, honestly—last summer, they'd practically spent the whole holiday together with the rest of the Order of the Phoenix at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.
"Sirius hasn't said a single word about it in his letters to me lately, though—"
Harry said, dispirited, his shoulders dropping a little further.
"Sounds like they're not planning to invite me—"
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy