The Great Hall, set tonight with five long dining tables instead of the usual four to accommodate everyone, felt far more crowded than before as the extra table changed the whole geometry of the room—the Gryffindor table now stood pushed close enough to the wall that barely a single narrow aisle separated the students from the stone behind them.
Slytherin occupied the equivalent wall on the opposite side of the Hall, reflecting the arrangement.
Between the two Houses, arranged in order down the middle, sat the tables of Hufflepuff, the exchange delegation with all its mismatched faces, and Ravenclaw.
Startled by the news he'd just been given, Harry turned his head in disbelief, his gaze skipping past the shoulders of Hannah, Tom, Marietta, and Parkinson in line, scanning down the Slytherin table, until it finally landed on Malfoy sitting against the far wall, looking, from this distance, faintly unwell.
As if by pure coincidence, Malfoy seemed to sense Harry's stare landing on him across the crowded Hall—he looked up just as he was carefully carving a lamb chop on his plate.
Meeting Harry's stare directly, something flickered briefly across Draco's grey eyes, then went blank again just as fast. He lowered his head and returned to his dinner as though nothing had happened.
"Where did you hear this, Hermione?"
Harry turned toward her now, brow furrowed deep, abandoning his plate.
"This afternoon Slytherin and Ravenclaw had Herbology together, out in the greenhouses. Nott asked Malfoy right there in the middle of class why he wasn't signing up for the trip—and Padma overheard the whole exchange from the next bench over. She told Parvati about it earlier, during laps around the pitch—"
Hermione said, nibbling absently at a pumpkin pasty while simultaneously counting the names down the roll of parchment clutched in her other hand.
"Give me your list, Ron. The notice said prefects have to hand in their full tallies to the Head of House by ten tomorrow morning, and I need to combine the Gryffindor numbers properly with yours before then. Ron?"
Her outstretched hand went unanswered for a long, awkward moment. Hermione looked up from her parchment to find Ron simply staring at her equally blankly, clearly having missed the request.
"Isn't Malfoy a Slytherin prefect himself?"
Catching the flash of impatience in Hermione's eyes at the delay, Ron immediately began digging through his bag in a fluster as he searched.
"Professor Watson's notice just said prefects have to tally up the students signing up for the field trip—it didn't actually say the prefects themselves had to go on it, did it?"
Hermione took the crumpled list Ron finally handed over, scanned it top to bottom in a few seconds, committed every single name to memory in the process, then pushed her plate aside and pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from her own bag to start copying the names down properly.
Harry's brow stayed furrowed the whole while, as though he were turning some stubborn question over and over in his mind.
"Hey—wait, Hermione, if that's the case—"
Ron kept watching the tip of Hermione's quill fly steadily across the page, right up until she wrote down Fred and George's names in sequence and was just about to add his own name next to theirs.
"If that's the case, actually—"
Ron looked more than a little uneasy now, shifting where he sat.
"I don't think—I don't think I'll sign up after all, if it's all the same to you. I've never once planned on spending my life in prison, so what Avalon looks like from the inside isn't exactly something I lose sleep over—"
The moment he said it, Ron shot a careful, sideways glance at both Harry's and Hermione's faces one by one, half expecting one of them to talk him out of it on the spot, or at least show some sign of disapproval. Neither of them did anything of the sort.
Harry was still frowning, lost entirely in his own thoughts elsewhere. Hermione simply looked over at Ron, calm and unbothered as ever, her quill was pausing but not dropping.
"Do you want to think it over a bit more before deciding for certain, Ron? Lavender's already put her own name down with me."
"Oh—well, if that's the case, then—"
Ron hesitated again visibly, and after a few seconds' pause, weighing something, "I'll talk it over with Lavender first, before I decide anything."
With that settled in his own mind, he abandoned his seat at once and hurried off toward Lavender's spot further down the table, evidently ready and eager to gossip with his girlfriend about the whole matter.
Hermione let out a soft, faintly amused sigh and shook her head at his retreating back, skipping cleanly past Ron's unfinished name on the list to move on to the next entry.
"What on earth is Malfoy playing at, do you think?"
Harry's muttered question made Hermione's quill still, hovering above the parchment. She looked over at him properly, watching him wrestle with the same knot of thought that had clearly been bothering her too, a sharp gleam of astuteness was flickering to life behind her eyes.
Truth be told, something about the whole situation struck her as genuinely off as well.
On the night of the start-of-term feast, back in Professor Watson's office, when the professor had first announced he'd be taking students on a tour of Avalon Prison, the handful of Slytherins present that evening—Malfoy much among them—had all worn expressions of obvious interest at the news.
So why, now that the actual trip had finally arrived and the sign-up sheets were out, was Malfoy suddenly getting such cold feet about it?
Barring some unusual reason behind it, the sort of Slytherin who worshipped Professor Watson as most of them did shouldn't be missing an opportunity like this one for anything.
"It's Professor Watson leading the field trip personally, isn't it, Hermione? That's the thing."
Harry mulled it over for a long, careful moment, then looked over at Hermione, brow still knitted tight, and asked almost hesitant to say it aloud.
As his closest friend of more than four years now, Hermione could hardly fail to guess what Harry was actually thinking underneath the question. She gave a small, confirming nod.
"That's right, Harry. You still think whoever tried to break into Professor Watson's office that last time was Malfoy, then?"
"I honestly can't think who else it could possibly have been—"
Hermione neither agreed with that outright nor argued against it. She only pressed her lips together thoughtfully and glanced up, briefly, at the staff table above the rest of the Hall.
Dinner was winding down by now, and a good number of students had already begun trickling out of their seats in twos and threes, heading upstairs toward their common rooms for the evening.
At the staff table, Professor Watson had just finished up his chat with Professor Dumbledore, the two of them having leaned in close for several minutes. He dabbed carefully at the corner of his mouth with a folded napkin, pushed back his chair with a soft scrape, and rose to leave for the evening.
"So—"
Harry lowered his voice, eyes tracking Professor Watson's retreating back as he moved toward the doors.
"You think the same thing I do, then—that Malfoy's planning to try breaking into his office again while Professor Watson's off leading the field trip?"
Hermione said nothing to that directly, her brown eyes were churning with fast-moving thought.
If Malfoy really was the one responsible for the earlier attempt, then yes—this line of reasoning was more than plausible, worryingly so.
But what she genuinely couldn't work out, turning it over, was this: Professor Watson had already been away from Hogwarts for a good stretch of time before now—so why hadn't whoever was secretly trying to get into his office simply seized that earlier, perfectly good opportunity instead of waiting for this one?
"Let's go and ask him directly—"
A moment later, without further warning, Hermione suddenly sprang into motion. She swept the parchment, ink pad, and quill all into her bag in one efficient sweep, slung the whole thing over her shoulder, and made to follow after Professor Watson's departing figure at once.
It took Harry a second longer to properly catch on to what she was doing; he hastily grabbed his own bag off the bench and hurried after her, nearly knocking his goblet over in the process.
The two of them jogged together toward the entrance hall, weaving between the last of the dawdling students.
"You're not seriously planning to march straight up to Professor Watson's office and just warn him outright that Malfoy might try to break in while he's away, are you? Just like that?"
"Don't be silly, Harry, honestly—"
Hermione's brown curls swung sharply as she shot him an irritated sidelong glance.
"Asking about something like this needs a bit of finesse to it. And of course I won't actually bring up Malfoy by name—we don't have a single shred of proof against him."
By the time they reached the second-floor landing together, slightly out of breath, Harry realized with a small twitch that they'd left Ron behind without either of them noticing.
"Ron's probably staying downstairs with Lavender for a while yet."
Hermione cut him off smoothly before he could even finish forming the thought aloud.
They left the Great Hall's general vicinity almost directly on Professor Watson's heels, following at a careful distance, but by the time they'd actually caught up with him, he had already pushed open his office door and was just about to step inside for the night.
"Harry—and Hermione, too—"
Bryan turned his head at the sound of their approach, watching the two of them jog the last few steps toward him with a look of curiosity on his face.
"You're here to see me about something?"
"Yes, Professor—"
Before Harry could get a word of his own out, Hermione hitched the bag higher on her shoulder, a little out of breath still from the stairs.
"There's something we'd like to ask your opinion on, if you have a moment to spare tonight."
"Come on in, then, both of you—"
Bryan chuckled simply at that and waved them both inside, stepping back to hold the door.
They settled themselves onto the familiar sofa while Professor Watson went, as he always seemed to whenever they visited, to brew a fresh pot of tea by the roaring fire.
Though Harry had been to Professor Watson's office plenty of times before over the past years, he still couldn't help glancing curiously around the room again now.
Nothing much had visibly changed since his last visit—except, perhaps, for the even taller, more precarious stacks of paperwork now piled across the desk.
So what, exactly, could Malfoy possibly be after in here, sneaking into this particular office?
Harry's wandering gaze eventually landed on the glass-fronted display cabinet of confiscated items standing beside Professor Watson's desk.
Or perhaps, it occurred to him suddenly, Malfoy had some important piece of contraband tucked away in there somewhere—something Filch had confiscated during the usual start-of-term search and handed over to Professor Watson specifically for safekeeping?
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