"Ron, don't forget what we agreed on!"
After a muffled, half-asleep grunt from Ron, still curled up tight in his blankets and showing no sign of actually moving, Harry threw on his regular clothes in the dark, snatched the gold watch off his desk, buckled it hastily onto his wrist, and hurried out of the dormitory without waiting for a proper answer.
Saturday, five twenty in the morning.
Normally at Hogwarts you'd be genuinely hard-pressed to find a single student wandering the halls at this hour, the whole castle was usually dead quiet until well past dawn, but today was a little different from the ordinary.
Harry, who'd half expected to be running late, found the common room and the tower stairs full of shuffling, half-dressed figures instead, their unsteady, stumbling steps making them look like a band of aimless ghosts drifting toward some unknown purpose.
"I really don't get why Professor Watson had to wake us all up this early—"
The sight of Neville and the others already gathered on the stairs, grumbling between wide yawns, eased the small knot of worry that had been sitting in Harry's chest.
"Maybe we've got a long way to travel, is why—"
Seamus guessed listlessly, barely awake enough to form the sentence properly, but Harry, trailing silently a step behind them all, already knew that couldn't be the real reason.
This study trip was meant to be there-and-back in a single day, after all—they wouldn't be sleeping outside the school grounds tonight. Almost certainly, they'd be taken straight to Avalon Prison by Portkey rather than any other slower method.
It was late October now, and at five in the morning the sky outside the tall windows was a pure, unbroken black without the faintest trace of dawn light yet showing anywhere along the horizon.
The gusts of cold wind blowing in through the drafty corridor openings were sharp enough to shock Harry yawning nonstop into fully awake—and the thick moisture hanging in that frigid morning air told him that today was unlikely to bring anything like good weather for the trip.
To look after this whole crowd of young witches and wizards heading out so early, the house-elves down in the kitchens had come in early too, well before their usual hour, though it hadn't cost their cooking a single bit of its usual quality, everything was laid out as beautifully as ever.
Only about half the candles floating above the Great Hall were lit at this hour, their dim, warm golden light falling in patches across the tables, laid with breakfasts that looked, and smelled, every bit as good as they always tasted.
Professor Watson sat alone at the staff table, looking somewhat isolated up there in the dim, half-lit hall.
He looked much as he always did, relaxed and composed—checking off names, one by one, on the trip roster submitted by the various Heads of House, and every so often spooning a bit of breakfast into his mouth.
Harry pulled his eyes away from the staff table and spotted Hermione near the front of one of the tables.
She didn't look her usual bright self either this morning. Hermione and Ginny sat pressed close together, heads tilted in toward one another, dozing lightly, entirely oblivious to the generous spread of food laid out in front of them both.
"Morning, Hermione, Ginny—"
Harry walked over toward them.
"Did Professor Watson say anything?"
At the sound of Harry's voice, Ginny gently nudged Hermione awake and straightened up in her own seat, blinking.
"He said roll call starts at half five—"
"I think that's about now, actually—"
The words had barely finished leaving Ginny's mouth when Professor Watson's clear voice rang out from the front of the hall.
Without the first, second, and third years present, and without the exchange students either, the Great Hall felt noticeably emptier than usual, and now it filled all at once with the scattered scrape of benches being pushed hastily back from the tables.
The young witches and wizards who'd been dozing quietly in every corner of the hall finally perked up at the sound and began drifting, somewhat unsteadily, toward the staff table at the front.
Harry glanced back at the food still laid out untouched and, thinking he couldn't very well get through a whole morning like this on an entirely empty stomach, hurriedly wrapped a few greasy meat pies and a couple of boiled eggs in a spare napkin and stuffed the whole bundle into his pocket for later.
"Roll call starts now—"
Professor Watson said, with a touch of authority carrying in his voice, enough to properly settle the room.
Name after name fell steadily from Professor Watson's lips, working down the list. Harry listened closely to each one and finally, by the end of it, confirmed what he'd already suspected: Malfoy really hadn't come after all.
"Before we set off, I want to remind you all of something—"
Bryan said solemnly, standing now behind the staff table.
"However you conduct yourselves at Avalon Prison today reflects on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as a whole, not just on yourselves individually. So, I expect every one of you to keep to the order given throughout, and to stay properly quiet during the visit itself."
Harry privately thought Professor Watson's reminder was a bit unnecessary, honestly.
He'd yet, in all his years here, to meet a single student bold enough to act up in front of the man.
Seeing the young witches and wizards around him nodding along in ready agreement, Bryan gave a small, satisfied nod of his own in return. He drew his wand from his sleeve and gave it a sharp flick, and the benches scattered haphazardly along the tables snapped back into neat rows.
"By house, and within each house by year, oldest to youngest—form a single-file line, please. Prefects are responsible for holding proper formation throughout. Once we're moving, we stay in line unless I say otherwise, understood—"
"Professor Watson—"
Among the cluster of gathering Slytherins, Nott raised his hand urgently, waving it slightly to catch attention.
"Draco and Pansy aren't here."
"Then you and Miss Bulstrode will serve as Slytherin's temporary prefects for the day instead—"
Bryan said, adjusting on the spot. He paused for a moment, considering, then turned his attention over toward the gathering Gryffindors.
"Mr. Potter, you'll be standing in for Mr. Weasley in his place—"
Before Harry could quite process this sudden assignment landing on him, Hermione had already pulled him away from Ginny's side and set him straight to work helping line up the rest of the Gryffindors into something resembling order.
It took a good ten minutes, full of shuffling feet and jostling elbows and low chatter, before the whole hall finally settled back into something like quiet.
From the slight, visible furrow in Professor Watson's brow as he surveyed the result, the students could guess easily enough that he wasn't especially pleased with the crooked, wobbling lines they'd managed to form between them.
More than half of Hogwarts was now crowded into the Great Hall. The tails of all four lines had already spilled well out past the doors into the entrance hall.
After helping a lanky seventh-year find his place in the queue, Harry shivered hard as a gust of damp, moisture-filled wind came whooshing suddenly into the entrance hall through the open front doors.
Just as he'd already expected from the feel of the air earlier, it was raining outside now.
"How exactly are we getting to Avalon Prison, then, Professor?"
Seamus's question carried out clearly from somewhere inside the hall, and Harry hurried back toward the front of the line to catch the answer.
"By Portkey, of course, Mr. Finnigan—"
Professor Watson gave the answer everyone had more or less already expected, unsurprised by the question.
Under the watching, curious eyes of the students, the tip of the wand Professor Watson raised bloomed with a pale golden, flowing light, spreading out from the point like liquid.
The light kept pouring steadily out, splitting cleanly into four separate streams above Professor Watson's head, each one flying off unerringly toward one of the four waiting lines.
As it flew, the light shifted shape mid-air, stretching itself out into large, translucent bubbles that enveloped everyone standing in each of the four houses, as if Professor Watson had simply scooped up every single student present inside four enormous, gently glowing pale-gold sacks.
Curious despite the strangeness of it, Harry reached out and touched the shimmering barrier beside him experimentally.
That thin, warped film of light had the texture, under his fingertip, of a soap bubble but it didn't pop nearly so easily as one.
Most of the other students, like Harry, were poking curiously at the soft, glowing barrier surrounding them and so no one else noticed Professor Watson produce, from who knew where exactly, a single oak leaf in his open palm and glowing with an even more dazzling gold than the bubbles around them.
"Please take note, everyone—in ten seconds, we'll be using the Portkey to reach Avalon Prison!"
Bryan raised his voice slightly, drawing the eyes of the increasingly restless, fidgeting young witches and wizards back toward him.
Ten, nine, eight, three, two, one!
As the countdown reached its end, the soft golden barrier enveloping the students suddenly blazed with fresh, overwhelming light—for one disorienting moment, Harry's entire vision held nothing at all but blinding gold.
Whoosh!
A dizzying, spinning sensation of nausea struck without any warning at all, twisting through his stomach.
Countless chaotic flashes of light filled Harry's vision, leaving him unable to make out anything solid or fixed around him. His shoulder seemed to collide heavily with Colin's somewhere in the chaos, but before he could even register the pain of the impact—
Thud!
Along with the sudden, heavy impact against solid ground came a sharp rush through his nose of fresh, damp, earthy soil, the smell was overwhelming for a moment.
"Ah, my glasses!"
Harry had no attention left to spare for the general chorus of pained groans and complaints rising up all around him in the aftermath—in that same disorienting instant of his cheek meeting the ground, his glasses had gone flying off somewhere out of reach, and now everything spread out in front of him was nothing but a soft blur.
A pair of pale, small hands pressed the glasses back gently into his own palm a moment later, then helped pull him up to his feet by the arm.
"Thanks—"
Harry took the glasses gratefully and put them back on, only then realizing, as the world snapped back into focus, that it had been Ginny who'd helped him up off the ground.
He gave her a slightly bashful, grateful smile in return, and she pressed her lips together in something close to a small smile back at him.
"We've arrived, then, right—oh!"
At his first proper glance around, taking in their new surroundings, Harry's brow furrowed sharply. He let out a startled, sharp gasp, his arm jerking on pure instinct as he reached automatically to draw his wand from his robes.
"You'd best not move a muscle, kiddies!"
A sharp, bitter command rang out from somewhere close by—and under the weight of dozens of cold hostile stares that seemed to converge on him from every direction at once, Harry froze stiff on the spot.
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