The Weight of Knowing

Liam Roscoe hated Hogwarts.

Not the school itself. Just the way their name kept showing up in his correspondence—always some new complaint about their aging broom fleet. People heard Windwright Brooms Ltd. and thought prestige. They didn’t see the slow collapse the company was trying to stave off. They didn’t see how one wrong move could send them into freefall.

Windwright had only three clients—Beauxbatons, Durmstrang, and Hogwarts—a closed system that should have ensured stability. Instead, it had become a slow death sentence. Schools demanded durability but operated on agonizingly slow bureaucratic cycles. Payments were delayed, invoices disputed, and repairs expected for free. When a broom malfunctioned, schools weren’t just angry customers—they were liability risks waiting to happen.

Roscoe had been an idealist once. He had joined Windwright believing in its legacy, in the prestige of supplying the most elite magical institutions in Europe. He had imagined himself driving innovation, making brooms safer, knowing that the best Quidditch players in Europe—perhaps the world—would spend precious years flying on brooms provided by his company. Instead, he had walked into a company that was rotting from the inside. A name that still commanded respect but barely held itself together behind the scenes.

Reginald Windwright—the dandyish grandson of Stellan Windwright, inventor of the auto-correction enchantments required on every school broom worldwide—had gutted the company’s research and development departments years ago, cutting costs by laying off innovators and replacing them with risk managers and policy experts. What seemed sensible at first glance had been the greatest misstep the company had ever taken. Windwright had stopped evolving. And in the broomstick industry—perhaps more than any other—even a school broom provider couldn’t afford stagnation. Stagnation was death.

Now, every flaw, every mistake, every overlooked complaint had the potential to be catastrophic. And the Shooting Star Classic line was riddled with flaws and mistakes.
Beauxbatons and Durmstrang had recognized the danger early. They hit the right pressure points—not letters, not bureaucratic appeals, but a direct threat to reputation and liability. They had made it clear that their schools would not accept subpar equipment. And Reginald Windwright, desperate to contain the damage—anything to keep his complete mismanagement of the company away from his grandfather’s ears—had quietly replaced their broom fleets, school by school, without ever admitting fault.

Hogwarts, on the other hand, had been manageable. Or so they had believed. Their complaints were fragmented, spread across different voices over the years—a letter here, a Board Governor working independently there, an occasional push from McGonagall—when she became fed up with asking the Board for collective action, Roscoe thought. But they had never consolidated their argument in a way that forced Windwright’s hand.
For five years, Windwright had relied on that weakness.
Five years of stalling.
Five years of managing complaints just enough to avoid scandal.
Five years of denying Hogwarts—because if they could get away with saying no, they did.
And for five years, they had gotten away with it.

Until now.
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Liam Roscoe placed the letter onto the conference table with deliberate care. He wasn’t one for theatrics, but this one deserved it.

"Alright. Someone tell me why this feels like a disaster waiting to happen."
His voice was calm—too calm. A quiet, deliberate neutrality. No need to show his hand too early.

Sandra, already scanning the letter—though not for the first time—exhaled slowly. "Because it is."

Roscoe dragged a hand down his face. "Fantastic." He leaned back, resisting the urge to sigh. "Alright. Let’s hear it. Why is this worse than usual?"

Gareth from Risk Management snorted. "It’s a bloody student." He flicked the parchment dismissively. "Why are we even discussing this?"

Roscoe didn’t look at him. "Because this student wrote a letter that made me keep you overtime, Gareth. Which means we have a problem. Which means you need to stop talking and start listening."

That shut him up.

Sandra tapped the letter with one manicured finger. "It’s not just a letter. It’s a record."

Gareth frowned. “So?”

Sandra didn’t even sigh. “Read me the last formal request we got from Hogwarts.”

Jerry from Compliance shuffled through his stack of parchments. “Uh… McGonagall, last year. She requested replacements due to ‘excessive degradation in balance and flight stability.’”

Sandra nodded. “And how did we shut her down?”

“Wear-and-tear clause,” Jerry replied. “Brooms age. Not our fault.”

Sandra hummed. “Right. And what’s different about this?” She lifted the letter slightly, gaze sweeping across the room.

Silence.

Then Gareth snorted. “It’s a student, not McGonagall. Makes it even easier to ignore.”

Sandra smiled. A sharp, mean little thing. “Wrong.”

She slid the parchment forward. “McGonagall framed it as a request. This student didn’t. They presented it as a liability.”

Roscoe felt something cold settle in his chest.

Gareth scoffed. “That’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it?” Sandra said mildly. She turned to Jerry from Compliance. “Read me the phrasing on Windwright’s liability exemptions.”

Jerry hesitated. Then, slowly, “The company is not responsible for standard wear and tear, nor for degradation due to natural aging of materials…”

Sandra nodded along. “And what’s missing?”

Jerry paled. “…There’s nothing about known defects.”

The room went silent.

Sandra exhaled. “Exactly. And this letter doesn’t argue wear and tear. It argues that we knew the brooms were defective—and did nothing.”
Roscoe’s stomach twisted.

Gareth shifted in his chair, clearly uncomfortable. “So what? We’ve had complaints before.”

Sandra arched a brow. “Right. And those complaints were shut down because they couldn’t prove negligence.” She tapped the letter again. “But this student? They aren’t complaining. They’re presenting proof.”

Gareth rolled his eyes. “What proof? Anyone can say a broom flies badly—”

“Ten hours of flight testing.” Sandra’s voice cut through the room.
“They logged stall points, tilt drift, torque inconsistencies—all timed and documented across multiple brooms.” She gestured to the letter. “They didn’t just say the brooms were failing. They proved that failure was getting progressively worse over time.”

Jerry coughed. "Snape also, uh, mentioned the handling inconsistencies that were documented when the brooms were first sold."

Everyone stared. Gareth swore under his breath. "You mean the ones we called 'within acceptable variance'?"

"Yeah," Jerry muttered. "But now with the data showing those issues got worse over time they’re basically proving that our original assessment was wrong."

Roscoe closed his eyes briefly. It was over.

“And that’s just the legal side. Sandra said, her eyes boring on Roscoe, "If Hogwarts wants to escalate, they have another pressure point.”

Roscoe frowned, expression wary "Which is?"

Sandra’s lips pressed together. "They can argue we’ve been playing favourites."

Gareth frowned. "How?"

"They cited Durmstrang and Beauxbatons getting replacements." Sandra tapped the letter. "If this makes it to Hogwarts’ Board of Governors, they're going to start asking why they haven’t gotten the same treatment."

Jerry winced. "She’s right." His voice was strained. "We didn’t have a formal policy for how those schools got replacements. They just… complained louder."

Sandra gave him a pointed look. "Exactly. We handled those cases quietly—case by case. We never set a precedent."

Gareth waved a hand. "So what? We tell Hogwarts the same thing—case by case."

Sandra’s stare was flat and merciless. "Do you really want to tell Hogwarts' Board of Governors that their school wasn’t ‘loud enough’ to get equal treatment?"

Silence.

Roscoe sighed. "Yeah. Didn’t think so."

Sandra tapped the letter again. "And it gets worse."

“How?” Roscoe asked warily.

Sandra turned her gaze on him, slow and deliberate. "As I said, this letter is now a formal record."

Gareth frowned. "And?"

"And if some kid crashes a broom next week, Hogwarts can argue negligence."

Gareth stilled.

Sandra’s voice remained level, but the weight of it settled over the room like a storm cloud.

"This letter is proof that we knew there was a safety concern. If a student gets hurt now, they can claim we failed to act despite knowing the risks."

Jerry’s hands were shaking. “…How many Quidditch teams do they have again?”

Roscoe exhaled. "Alright. What do we do?"

Sandra didn’t hesitate. "Silent replacement."

Gareth scoffed. "And we’re just deciding that, are we? What about Reginald?"

Silence.

Roscoe exhaled through his nose. "Where is Reginald?"

Sandra gave him a flat look. "At some networking event in Paris."

Gareth frowned. "Didn’t he just come back from—"
"Yes," Sandra interrupted. "And he left again."

Jerry let out a strangled laugh. "Of course he did."

Roscoe rubbed his temple. "Did he even read the Hogwarts file before he left?"

Sandra snorted. "If he had, do you think we’d be having this conversation right now?"

That shut him up.

Roscoe dragged a hand down his face. "Fine. So, we handle it."

Gareth leaned back. "You really think he won’t notice thirty brooms being sent out?"

Sandra tilted her head. "Oh, he’ll notice. But he won’t care."

The room stilled.

Roscoe exhaled slowly, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Alright. We send them. Quietly. And we hope Hogwarts moves on."

Sandra met his gaze. "And if they don’t?"

Roscoe sighed, standing. "Well, 48 is a great age for retirement."

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The broom shed had changed overnight.

Gone were the splintered handles, the unsteady flights, the decade-old relics that had sent first-years stumbling to the hospital wing. In their place—thirty brand-new, perfectly balanced brooms.

Sirius stared. His breath pulled short, heartbeat thrumming.

Hogwarts had spent five years waiting for a solution. Snape had delivered it in less than a week. Without asking. Without demanding. Without so much as speaking to another human being about it.
She hadn’t just found the problem. She hadn’t just fixed it. She had made the system fold to her will so seamlessly that no one even questioned the outcome. Not a ripple. Not even a whisper.

The news spread the way all mundane things did— quietly, with an air of inevitability. The broomsticks were replaced. Finally. And yet, no one spoke of how unlikely that was. No one even thought it.

Without her, Sirius thought furiously, gnawing on his lip, they would still be waiting.

McGonagall’s letters would keep disappearing into limbo. The Board of Governors would still be deliberating budgets, forming subcommittees, pushing for another year of patience. Nothing would have changed. And yet, because she had moved, the world had shifted.

Students nodded approvingly as they passed, pleased—but not surprised. The bureaucratic process was slow, but it worked - was the consensus. Hogwarts had petitioned. Hogwarts had waited. And now, the system had answered.

First-years, once resigned to bruised knees at best, mounted their new brooms without a second thought. Older students, vaguely aware of past frustrations, were relieved but unsurprised. A complaint had been filed, and—eventually, inevitably—it had been addressed. That was how it worked, wasn’t it?
McGonagall herself had raised an eyebrow at the arrival of the new fleet but said nothing. There had been no announcement. Just the quiet rectification of an issue long overdue. A rare instance of efficiency.
She supposed, at last, her efforts had borne fruit. It was the sort of outcome that warranted a letter of approval, she thought.

Sirius' throat felt tight.

A silent battle had been waged for this outcome. And everyone had simply adjusted in its aftermath— as if this was how it had always been.

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That evening, after the Gryffindor house party—thrown by James with Peter’s enthusiastic help in honour of the new brooms, doubling as a way to lift Remus’ spirits—Sirius retired to bed earlier than usual. And yet, he couldn’t sleep.

James had been pleased, of course. So had Remus, Peter, and the rest of Gryffindor. Why wouldn't they be. The general belief was that this was the achievement of their own head of house. And, in fairness, it was a fine achievement to credit McGonagall with. It didn’t affect any of the Marauders personally, not directly, but it was exactly the kind of story they loved. The unrelenting pursuit of justice. The satisfaction of victory. The chivalry of the act. A classic Gryffindor tale. Even Evans had allowed James to go ahead with the party surprisingly fast, caught up in the energy of it.

Sirius would have loved to feel that same uncomplicated enthusiasm. To believe, like everyone else, that this was the simple triumph of persistence over injustice. Unfortunately, he was burdened with the truth. A truth he did not seek to share. That evening he lay there, staring blankly at the canopy of his bed, as the details of all of Snape's moves finally snapped into place with merciless clarity.

She had started where no one else had thought to look—not spells, not curses, but school finances. That was the brilliance of it, wasn’t it? Snape understood what he’d failed to see all along: Hogwarts didn’t respond to complaints or petitions. Windwright didn’t either. Not until liability forced their hand. And liability meant understanding money, contracts, and obligations.

He groaned softly, rolling onto his side as realization after realization settled like stones in his stomach.

First, she’d identified the exact problem. Hogwarts had outdated brooms that no one would replace. Simple enough. Everyone knew it. But unlike everyone else, she hadn't stopped at the obvious. She'd dug into why the problem persisted, mapping every excuse, every "next year," every budget that mysteriously ran dry.

Then she'd traced the contracts.

He’d thought it was pointless at first—tedious, dry reading. But she had known exactly what she was looking for—proof that Hogwarts' need for a broom fleet replacement wasn’t due to normal wear and tear, but to negligence. No—not just negligence. Breach of contract. That was why she’d needed Filch. Filch, who remembered everything. Filch, who grumbled about everything. Filch, who knew exactly when those damned brooms had last been replaced. Never. Not since the ‘60s. She’d manipulated him effortlessly, letting his bitterness lead her to where she wanted to go.

Next, she’d built an airtight case. Hours before dawn, meticulously testing brooms herself—documenting every failure. Every stall. Every twist. Creating undeniable proof of degradation. Proof Windwright couldn’t refute.

And then—Merlin, it had been ruthless— she hadn’t confronted Windwright directly. Instead, she’d gone around them. Quietly. Invisibly. Like a slithering snake, Sirius thought, with a laugh of disbelief. The final move had been played before anyone realized there was a game. First, she had leveraged her connections in Slytherin, called in an owed favour, and sent a seemingly innocent inquiry through a neutral law firm directly to Windwright’s Compliance Department. Sirius now realized Snape had likely asked Octavian Greengrass to disguise the inquiry—something he had been more than willing and able to do. Not an accusation. Not a complaint. Just a polite clarification request about standard procedures. Ensuring Windwright didn’t panic. Routine. Harmless. So, Windwright had answered without suspicion. And in doing so, they had damned themselves. They had unwittingly confirmed in writing that they had provided newer broom models to other schools under the same contractual obligations Hogwarts held. But that alone wasn’t enough. Windwright’s reply, though valuable, could be dismissed. It could be downplayed. And that was why she'd written to Beauxbatons.

Beauxbatons wasn’t just confirmation. It was independent verification. Snape had reached out discreetly, quietly, carefully, obtaining undeniable evidence of exactly when and why Beauxbatons received their upgraded brooms. Independent. Unbiased. Beauxbatons had no reason to lie. They had simply responded with the facts. And together, the two letters formed an ironclad case.

Windwright couldn’t deny their own written admission. They couldn’t ignore the undeniable third-party evidence. She had closed every loophole. Sealed every escape route. Checkmate.

Sirius rolled onto his stomach, his fists clenching under his pillow as his heart hammered painfully against his ribs.

She had won the moment those owls took flight. He’d sensed something big was happening then—but he’d still stood by, unaware. Heat flooded his body as he absorbed the sheer brilliance—and ruthlessness—of it.

This wasn't student-level cunning. This was pureblood heir training in action. Tactics drilled from childhood: Identify the real pressure points. Leverage institutions against one another. Manoeuvre quietly until victory is already secured.

But one thing still nagged at him, stubbornly unresolved: Why?

Snape didn’t fly. She didn’t care about Quidditch. She didn’t crave attention or approval. She'd gone through all of this trouble—days of meticulous work. Careful manipulation. Strategic brilliance. And she had taken no credit.

Sirius frowned, shifting uneasily.

She’d done all this anonymously. Her name buried in bureaucratic neutrality. Her triumph invisible to everyone but herself.

And him.

He finally had the what. And the how.

But why?