"Harry. You actually slept through the whole night like that, Harry!"
The darkness before his eyes scattered in slow, shuddering waves as Harry struggled to peel his heavy eyes open and adjust. blinking hard to the harsh, pale light spilling in through the window.
"Ngh—"
The moment he moved, even slightly, his whole body ached as if it had come apart at every joint overnight and been carelessly put back together wrong, and the thick stuffiness in his nose left him thoroughly, miserably congested.
"What—Ron?"
His thoughts crept along sluggishly, dragging themselves through his own skull, as if someone had poured a full barrel of sedative down his throat while he slept and left his nerves too stiff and slow to think straight about anything at all.
It took what felt like ages for the commands his brain kept sending to his limbs to get any response back at all. Harry struggled to prop himself up on his elbows against the mattress, trying his best to sit up properly in bed.
Watching him fail at it again and again was more than Ron could stand by the fourth attempt. He bent down over the bed and simply hauled Harry up by both shoulders.
"You actually slept through the whole night like that, mate? Dead to the world?"
Ron's brow furrowed deeply with concern, watching as Harry rubbed at his cheeks with both palms, trying to wake himself up by force.
"I was thinking about something. Didn't notice the time going—"
Harry mumbled, his cold was making his voice come out thick and stuffed up, it was barely clear.
"That's not what I meant, mate—"
Ron looked even more worried at that non-answer, sitting down on the edge of the bed now.
"If you really care that much about why Remus and Sirius are keeping this wedding business a secret from you, you could just write them a letter and ask outright, couldn't you—simple as that—"
"Write and ask."
Harry worked hard to follow what Ron was actually suggesting, the words were taking a moment too long to register. It was a good while before he answered slowly.
"That's not what I was thinking about, actually. Forget it, Ron, really. Remus has his hands completely full as it is, and now he's got the whole wedding to worry about on top of everything else. Sirius is busy guarding the Minister for Magic right now. I don't want to bother either of them over something so small—"
'Something small.'
Ron pursed his lips at that, unconvinced. As far as he himself was concerned, it really wasn't much of a big deal at all but judging by how Harry had actually behaved the whole night through, tossing and turning, he seemed to be taking the whole matter rather more seriously than his words let on.
"If you're sure you're up for class today, we'd better get ourselves down there, Harry. There's still time to catch something hot for breakfast before it all goes cold on us."
"You're right, Ron. Going into Professor McGonagall's Transfiguration class on an entirely empty stomach is really no good idea for anyone—"
Harry let out a heavy, congested breath and got unsteadily to his feet, swaying slightly.
"Hiss!"
The instant he stood fully standing, a sharp, sudden stab of pain shot through his head, twisting his whole face into a wince, and he clapped a hand to his own forehead without thinking on pure reflex.
The sight gave Ron a genuine fright, his whole face went pale. Years of "rich experience" with exactly this kind of moment had him drawing his conclusion without hesitation.
"Your scar's hurting again, Harry! It's your scar, isn't it—"
Ron stared, horrified, at the scar Harry was still clutching under his hand. He was just deciding whether he ought to run and go tell someone immediately when Harry, forehead still knitted tight in discomfort, gave his head a small shake—the same motion he did when Luna shooed off the invisible Wrackspurts that pestered her.
"Oh—I don't actually think it's that—"
Harry patted his own forehead experimentally, a little puzzled himself now that the first shock had passed.
"I don't think it's the scar, Ron, honestly. It's just—oh, I must have caught a chill last night, sleeping like that without the blankets. My head's been aching a bit generally. Whew."
The sudden stab of pain a moment ago had, if nothing else, snapped Harry swiftly and completely out of his lingering fog of confusion, sharpening everything back into focus. He drew a deep breath of the cold morning air coming through the cracked window, then let it out slowly.
"Give me two minutes, Ron. I need to wash my face and brush my teeth first—"
Ron didn't say anything further to that. He only shrugged, still watching Harry with a lingering trace of worry.
On their way downstairs a few minutes later, they'd already passed a fair number of other students climbing the other way up the staircase in search of their own classrooms.
The two of them ran flat out for the last stretch, and in the rush of cold wind against their faces as they went, the exhaustion of a bad night's sleep quickly fell away from Harry.
By the time they leapt down the last few steps together into the entrance hall, aside from a lingering, stubborn stuffiness in his nose, Harry no longer felt anything was wrong with him.
"What's going on? Has something big happened again?"
At least several dozen students were crowded thick in front of the large notice board in the entrance hall, craning over each other's shoulders.
A second-year boy, who'd also clearly overslept judging by his rumpled robes, came springing down the stairs right after them—and catching sight of the commotion gathered at the board, shot off toward it like the wind, ramming straight into Ron's shoulder hard enough to stagger him on the way past.
"Oi, watch it, you little squirt! I'll dock points off you, see if I don't, running about like that!"
"Oh—Prefect, right, I nearly forgot you had that badge on!"
Fred and George, just then squeezing their own way out of the inner ring of the crowd, heard Ron's indignant shout over the noise. Fred said it with a wide, mischievous grin, and the two of them strode over quickly, each throwing an arm around Ron's neck from either side, boxing him in.
"Come sign us up, would you, dear Ronnie? Our lovely Prefect Know-It-All's table over there is already jammed solid with people!"
Harry glanced instinctively into the Great Hall through the open doors and only then noticed that, indeed, another crowd had Hermione surrounded thoroughly on all sides at her table.
"Sign up? Sign up for what, exactly?"
Ron tried to wriggle free of his two brothers' hold, twisting his shoulders, but Fred and George had him locked in tight between them and gave him no room to escape.
After a couple of half-hearted struggles, Ron gave up and asked instead, resigned to his fate,
"Sign up for what?"
"Oh, the study trip, of course, little Ronniekins!"
George said, grinning just as widely as his twin. "It's right there on the notice. This Saturday, the school's organizing a special study trip.
The whole activity's been approved by both the Headmaster of Hogwarts and the Minister for Magic. Fourth years and above can register with their own House prefect; the prefect hands the finished list along to the Head of House, and once the Head of House has checked it all over, Professor Watson himself will lead the students on the trip."
"A study trip. What exactly are we actually going to do on it?"
"Tour Avalon Prison!"
It clicked for Harry all at once. He looked over at Ron in astonishment, his own voice was turning bright and fast with sudden excitement.
"Don't you remember, Ron? Hermione told us about this—the very first night term started!"
Ron blinked at that, working through it, and it came back to him too, a while behind Harry.
"Are you two completely out of your minds?"
But once the memory had come back to him, he didn't show anything remotely like Harry's excitement about it.
"Touring a prison—I honestly can't for the life of me see what's meant to be fun about that. There might even be Dementors stationed there, for all we know!"
"Don't be daft, kid—"
Fred gave Ron's hair a rough tousle, mussing it further than it already was.
"The Daily Prophet said the Ministry's already decided not to use Dementors to guard Avalon Prison. They've got other security measures in place instead—brand new ones, apparently and we're going to be among the very first people outside the Ministry to actually see them in person!"
Ron had no room left to argue his point further, because by then the crowd of students who'd already read the full notice had pressed in around him, plenty of them were clamouring loudly to sign up on the spot.
Ron had no choice, in the end, but to dig the quill the goblins had given him and a roll of blank parchment out of his bag and start taking down names for everyone crowding him, resigned to the task.
Sending a whole crop of students to tour an active wizarding prison—only Professor Watson, really, could have dreamed up an idea quite like that and actually made it happen.
The students, by this point in the school life, were long past being surprised by Professor Watson's particular gift for stirring up talk and turning heads with a single notice board announcement.
Over the following two days, the single hottest topic at Hogwarts, without any competition, was the coming study trip.
And among the whole tangled knot of topics swirling around it endlessly, the hottest strands of all were exactly how they'd actually get to Avalon Prison in the first place, where precisely this mysterious new wizarding prison was even located on a map, and just what kind of defences it might have replacing the usual Dementors.
"It's like Azkaban—an island out in the open sea, has to be!"
During Thursday's Transfiguration class, while Professor McGonagall was busy with her back turned at the blackboard, Ernie of Hufflepuff declared to the people clustered around him with total conviction, leaning across the desk to make his point.
"Think about the very name of the prison, if nothing else—Avalon's an island straight out of legend, everyone knows that!"
"I'll bet you a whole Galleon it's not what you're saying at all—"
Seamus kept his voice down, mindful of the professor, but spoke with just as much total confidence as Ernie had.
"My dad told me the legend about that island once. Listen, you lot might not actually know this, but Avalon's an island sitting in the middle of a lake, not the open sea at all. There's absolutely no way it's out in open water like you're saying!"
Harry was just about to jump into the growing debate himself, when Ron gave his foot a vicious kick under their shared table.
At the front of the room, Professor McGonagall had turned around at some point without anyone noticing over the noise of their own argument, and was now fixing Seamus with an icy, intimidating glare that promised trouble.
Seamus had successfully earned himself a detention—though fortunately for him, Professor McGonagall was reasonable enough about the timing of it, and scheduled his detention for Sunday, so at least he wouldn't end up missing the long-awaited Saturday trip over it.
"What? Malfoy's not going on the trip?"
And then, later that same Thursday evening, a fresh bit of gossip made its way around—and it left Harry stunned.
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