Neville Longbottom had a small, round face. He was the sort of boy whose reactions always ran a half-beat behind everyone else's, and whose memory was, to put it charitably, spectacularly unreliable.
His round eyes frequently held a vague, unfocused quality, and when he spoke, he had a habit of dropping his chin slightly, as though struggling to remember what he'd meant to say next.
In his five years at Hogwarts, his slow reflexes and poor memory had caused no shortage of embarrassing scenes.
There was the time he'd been clutching the Remembrall his grandmother had specially sent him that small glass ball enchanted to remind you when you'd forgotten something and still stood there frowning in bewilderment, asking the nearest person what on earth he could have forgotten.
Then there was the time he'd worried so much about forgetting the Gryffindor tower password that he'd written it on a slip of paper, only to lose the slip of paper itself.
And yet, none of this made him a fool.
People tended to assume he was dense. He wasn't, not really. Most of the time, he was far sharper than he let on.
When Sherlock had pointed out that he had a natural aptitude for fencing, for instance, Neville had immediately seized the opportunity and committed to morning training sessions alongside him. In sheer persistence and willpower, he even surpassed Harry, who also trained with Sherlock though Harry would never have admitted it.
And when his pet toad Trevor went missing, Neville never blundered around searching at random. He went straight to Sherlock.
When he'd learned, just before the start of term, that he'd been made a prefect, he'd stood completely still for a long moment, stunned to his core.
It had never once occurred to him that a responsibility like this could fall to him.
As people had been saying all summer, Sherlock Holmes was Gryffindor's Lion King, the great and celebrated detective. Harry Potter was the wizarding world's saviour, the Boy Who Lived. Even Ron Weasley, who seemed unremarkable at first glance, had earned the title of Gryffindor's Chess Grandmaster.
Which of them wouldn't have been a better fit?
Even Dean Thomas or Seamus Finnigan, names no one had even bothered mentioning in this discussion seemed more plausible candidates than him.
He simply could not understand what, if anything, he had done to deserve such a responsibility.
The Longbottom family, however, held an entirely different view. They thought the honour was exactly what Neville deserved—none more firmly than his grandmother, Augusta Longbottom, who declared that Dumbledore and McGonagall possessed remarkable wisdom and an unerring eye for talent.
Whatever the case, the fact of it was settled. Neville was a prefect. And so, with nervous care and genuine effort, he set about fulfilling his duties clumsily, but conscientiously.
During the prefect rounds aboard the Hogwarts Express, for example, he came prepared with a small notebook listing every point he needed to check, working through it item by item so as not to miss anything.
Fortunately, Parvati Patil Gryffindor's other prefect was an outgoing and capable girl. She'd noticed Neville's nerves at once and quietly taken on a good share of the burden, laughing softly and telling him, "Don't worry. We'll do this together."
Then there was Hannah Abbott, the girl who, at the Sorting Ceremony all those years ago, had been the very first to put on the Sorting Hat.
She and Neville shared a deep passion for Herbology, and since Gryffindor and Hufflepuff took the subject together, they'd spent many hours side by side in the greenhouses, studying various plants with equal enthusiasm. Over the years, Hannah had become one of Neville's rare close friends of the opposite gender.
This year, Hannah had been made a Hufflepuff prefect. When she spotted him looking lost during the train rounds, she'd gone out of her way to rescue him, showing him how to remind students of the rules in a manner that was both firm and kind.
With Gryffindors themselves, things were at least somewhat easier. Except for the incoming first-years, most of the castle's students had known Neville Longbottom by name for years.
But to Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs, and Slytherins, the name "Neville Longbottom" meant very little.
And Gryffindor, of course, had Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter twin stars of the house, a pairing whose reputations were anything but hollow. The Lion King and the Saviour. Not to mention that the two of them had won the Triwizard Tournament just last year, blazing brighter than anyone in recent memory.
So naturally, people began to whisper: Who exactly was this Neville Longbottom? What gave him the right to step into a prefect's badge that, by all logic, should have gone to Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter?
It was precisely in this atmosphere buzzing with curiosity, scrutiny, and a faint undercurrent of doubt that the spotlight, as if by unanimous agreement, converged on Neville.
As has already been established: Neville was not as oblivious as people assumed.
When he walked through the Great Hall, he could always find clusters of students with their heads bent together, their eyes drifting toward him, their mouths curving in small, knowing smiles.
Even people who actually knew him would greet him with an overly enthusiastic warmth that felt slightly artificial, their voices pitched a note too high, their smiles a shade too wide: "Neville! Haven't seen you in ages!"
He was quite certain they'd been talking about him the very second before.
It made his skin crawl. Neville was naturally introverted, someone who had always preferred to stand quietly at the back of a crowd. This kind of attention felt unbearable like invisible needles pricking at every inch of him, leaving him with the sensation of eyes boring into his back, words stuck in his throat, and nowhere to sit that wasn't somehow wrong.
It was exactly why he'd made a point of sitting with Sherlock and the others.
He'd already noticed it on the train: only his dormitory-mates Sherlock, Harry, and Ron looked at him without that odd, assessing quality in their eyes.
Compared with everyone else, Ron's blunt grab for his prefect badge snatching it out of his hands with a loud "Let me see that!" was, strangely, the most comfortable thing that had happened to him all day.
Being near them let him breathe needed and had no barriers or performance.
"Forget about them," Ron said, pulling Neville into a one-armed embrace after catching the murmurs drifting from the surrounding tables.
"You should keep a little notebook," Ron went on, "write down the names of everyone who talks about you, then watch them like a hawk and wait for the first time they break a school rule, and then—"
"Ron, that is not what prefect authority is for!" Ginny cut in sharply. Then she turned to Neville with a softer expression. "He's right about one thing, though just ignore them."
She glanced at Harry with warmth in her eyes. "You could take a page out of Harry's book. He's been dealing with this his whole life."
Harry opened his mouth, he'd been about to say that he actually did mind the attention, quite a lot but then he caught the look Neville gave him: quiet, trusting, with a faint edge of need. He smiled and nodded instead.
Once the reason for the stares became common knowledge, curiosity settled and subsided. Hermione gently tugged Sherlock's sleeve and tilted her chin toward the staff table. "Professor Lupin is here."
As Harry had quietly observed during the summer, after Hermione had spent more than a fortnight staying at Sherlock's home, something between the two of them had shifted as a gradual change.
Gestures like this one came naturally to her now, and Sherlock seemed, by all appearances, to have grown entirely accustomed to them.
"The situation with werewolves is considerably more complex than with giants," Sherlock said. "It will require far more thorough preparation."
He nodded and turned to look at the staff table.
At the centre sat Headmaster Albus Dumbledore in a magnificent high-backed golden chair. He wore his usual deep purple robes scattered with silver stars, and a matching pointed hat to go with them. His long silver beard fell to his chest, swaying faintly with each breath.
His half-moon spectacles caught the torchlight of the Great Hall and seemed to gleam with quiet wisdom as though they could see straight through a person.
On either side of Dumbledore sat the three Head of Houses: Filius Flitwick, Pomona Sprout, and Severus Snape.
Professor Snape wore his customary black robes, his expression as forbidding as ever as if a storm were about to break. His gaze swept the hall at intervals, and when it landed on Harry it carried an unmistakeable flicker of irritation.
Between Snape and Dumbledore, one seat remained conspicuously empty: Professor McGonagall's. By tradition, she would be at the castle gates right now, receiving the first-years who had crossed the Black Lake in their little boats. She and Professor Grubbly-Plank, who'd led the new students, were both absent.
And there, further along the table, was the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor Hermione had mentioned: Remus Lupin. He looked considerably better than he had in recent memory, smiling openly as he chatted quietly with Flitwick beside him.
The long staff table held still more faces: Professor Aurora Sinistra of Astronomy, draped in robes the deep blue of a night sky traced with constellations; Professor Sybill Trelawney of Divination, wrapped in an enormous purple shawl, her gaze drifting somewhere beyond the hall; Professor Septima Vector of Arithmancy, a quill in hand as though mid-calculation; Professor Charity Burbage of Muggle Studies, plain grey robes, a gentle air about her; Professor Bathsheda Babbling of Ancient Runes, white-haired but alert and sharp-eyed…
With the sole exception of the ghost who taught History of Magic Professor Cuthbert Binns almost every member of Hogwarts' teaching staff was present for this year's opening feast.
More surprising still: Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, former Auror of the Ministry, was here, his enchanted eye was revolving steadily as it swept every corner of the hall and so was Igor Karkaroff, the former headmaster of Durmstrang, splendid in his fur-lined coat, though his expression held a peculiar, melancholic distance.
Such an assembly was rare even by Hogwarts' standards. It was nothing short of a gathering of the great and the notable.
Just then, Hermione nudged Sherlock with her elbow again, pointing toward the right end of the staff table. There was a careful note of puzzlement in her voice. "Who is that? I've never seen her before."
Everyone followed her gesture.
Their eyes travelled along the row of professors, finally settling on a woman engaged in conversation with Mad-Eye Moody.
To put it plainly: her fashion sense left something to be desired.
She was short and heavyset, built rather like a rubber ball. Her curly, greyish-brown hair was dry and frizzled as old straw.
In it, pinned at the very most prominent position, sat a large pink bow worn at the edges, the velvet slightly frayed, yet displayed with evident pride. Over her dark robes she wore a fluffy pink cardigan, its collar and cuffs dotted with errant fibres.
The overall effect was jarring, as though several competing wardrobes had been forcibly combined.
As if on cue, the woman turned slightly and lifted her wine glass to take a sip and they all got a clear look at her face.
It was a pale face, the skin hanging loose, like the dried rind of an orange. Beneath her chin, a soft dewlap wobbled gently. Most striking of all were her eyes: heavy-lidded and prominent, the eyeballs seeming almost to bulge from their sockets, the sort of gaze that made people quietly uncomfortable.
The others reacted mostly with mild unease at the strangeness of her appearance. Harry, however, went rigid as though he'd been struck by lightning. He stared at her, unable to look away, his voice was carrying unmistakeable shock.
"It's her."
"Who?" Hermione demanded, and everyone else turned to look.
"She was at the trial, Pettigrew's trial. She was sitting right next to Fudge. She works for him."
He remembered it vividly: he'd expected a woman like that to have a rough, rasping voice. Instead, she'd laughed in a peal of silvery tinkling completely at odds with her appearance. He'd complained about it to Sherlock at the time, and the incongruity had stuck with him ever since.
"Someone from the Ministry?" Hermione's frown deepened, and something cautious entered her eyes. "What's her name? Why is she sitting at the staff table?"
Harry scratched the back of his head, faintly sheepish. "Sorry—I've forgotten…"
"Dolores Jane Umbridge," said Sherlock. "Senior Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic."
He delivered the name without a moment's hesitation and continued without pause. "She's here for the same reason as Moody and Karkaroff to assist Professor Lupin with our instruction. The difference is that she represents the Ministry."
A silence fell over the group.
They all understood, with perfect clarity, what "represents the Ministry" meant.
At that moment, Professor Grubbly-Plank strode quickly into the Great Hall, she had clearly just returned from the lakeside. She made her way directly to the far end of the staff table and settled into the seat that had, in previous years, belonged to Hagrid which happened to place her right next to Umbridge.
Umbridge noticed her immediately. A smile spread across her face, smooth and practiced and entirely unconvincing and she extended her hand in greeting.
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