Classy, right?
Sirius
My friends and I had honestly forgotten about the new girl until she showed up for breakfast with a light grey paper cup in her hand. Due to our many run-ins with Poppy—the matron of Hogwarts’ hospital wing—we all instantly recognised the school’s standard vessel for holding muggle pills. Remus in particular had received many of them, specifically with muggle painkillers in them, which worked better on him than anti-pain potions for some reason.
James nudged Peter, the only one of us who hadn’t noticed yet. He’d been too interested in trying to put what seemed to be at least half a bottle of ketchup on his sausages.
“What d'ya reckon is in it?” I wondered.
“Might just be painkillers,” Remus said. “Lord knows getting used to Hogwarts can induce headaches.”
“And to think we haven’t even done anything yet.” James’ grin told me he had an idea to change that.
“What are you proposing?” I asked, once again letting the new girl slip out of my conscious thoughts.
“Nothing too complicated… We’ll need to access Slughorn’s ingredient cupboards for this one, though.”
I raised a brow. “To make what?”
“Remember that colouring potion?”
“The one that turns any fabric the exact colour of whatever you put in it as the last step?”
“Exactly. Now, how great would the school be if everyone was a Gryffindor, for however briefly, even if it just seemed that way?”
“If it looked like everyone was Gryffindor? You want to magically dye the ties of every student, in all years?”
“Is that doubt I hear in your voice, my dear Remus?”
“Well…” And there was the mischief in his voice that only the three of us ever really got to hear. “It won’t look right unless we transfigure the crests, too.”
James’ face lit up. “Perfect! We can modify that spell we made up in third year, you know, the one that made Slytherin’s crests say ‘Slutterin’!”
Peter frowned, the cogs in his head turning in a bout of pranking brilliance we sometimes got blessed with. “We could do them all in one go if we snuck into the laundry room Sunday, but we’d have to delay the magic so the House Elves don’t notice whilst they’re folding and putting them in the rooms. The robes and ties would have to change overnight for it.”
I grinned. “The potion’s easy enough, we can just put in a mass order for those potion-delaying pills that you can charm to dissolve in a certain amount of time. We’ll just fill those up with the colouring potion, hide the pills in the seams of the ties. The transfiguration’s gonna be the difficult part.”
“Delayed activator charm before we cast the spells?” Peter suggested.
“None of us have successfully done that before,” Remus reminded him.
“What if we turn the idea behind that charm around?” James asked. “We transfigure the crests in the laundry room, and then we cast one of those glamour spells that changes your clothes for two to three hours, so we make it look like the crests haven’t been touched. We’d have to time it carefully, of course, start early enough to ensure we get them all before the elves return, but late enough that they don’t change before they’re put away.”
“We might be able to buy ourselves some time if we shorten the spellcasting process. Maybe we can make the spell cover more ground?” Remus suggested.
I swallowed my bite of toast before I spoke. “What if we used the maxima spell extension?”
James did not finish his bite before he spoke. “Brilliant! That might cover an entire House at a time! We’d be out of there in a minute.”
“Plus the time it’ll take to hide the pills,” Peter reminded him.
“So we go in early enough to do the pills first, time the spells to make sure the elves are almost gonna pick up the dry laundry, cast the glamours, and get out of there.” I waved my goblet of juice around as I spoke, before drinking half of it.
James clapped his hands together. “Alright, the potion takes two days to brew, so we can start that Friday after classes.”
We all nodded, and I looked over the Great Hall just as the new girl punched a Slytherin right at the entrance.
*****
Grace
“How are you doing so far, dear?” Professor Sprout asked me as I was trying to down some scrambled eggs, as I needed to eat at least a bit of breakfast to take my medication.
I nodded vaguely. “I’m alright. Hestia’s been very helpful.”
The girl in question lifted her head out of her coffee mug. “Pleasure.” She was, as she’d warned me last night, not a morning person. Really, she was just a normal person now, instead of being very bubbly and chatty, but I’d decided not to comment. She was entitled to however she wanted to divide her energy throughout the day.
“Well, here’s both of your schedules. I’ve taken the liberty of checking which Houses you share your electives with, as you have none in common with Hestia, and it seems to be mostly Gryffindors, so I’ll introduce you to Remus Lupin for Care of Magical Creatures, and to Lily Evans for Arithmancy and Astrology. I’m only afraid that no prefects or fellow Hufflepuffs are taking Divination this year, but both of the two prefects I just mentioned know people in that class—James Potter and Sirius Black are friends of Remus, and Marlene McKinnon is a friend of Lily. They’re all taking it, so I suggest you ask either one of the prefects to have their friends show you to the Tower.”
She finally gave me my schedule, which wasn’t too bad for the fact that I was taking double the necessary amount of electives. Apparently, three wasn’t uncommon, especially with my own house and Ravenclaws, but only a few other students were going overboard like I was, or so Professor McGonagall had warned me before I made my decision.
I ate my final bite of egg and used my juice to down all of my pills (two Diazepam pills, one Maprotiline pill, and three Aripiprazole—one of them 10mg and the other two 20mg). I poured myself a second cup of coffee, Professor Sprout was now talking to a seventh-year student down the table about getting an extra early career consult so he could apply to some special ministry job for reviewing the testing of experimental potions. I listened in to some other conversations whilst I nursed my coffee, since Hestia was seemingly still waking up mentally, and tuned into a conversation coming from a set of Slytherin students getting ready to leave breakfast. It seemed one of them had forgotten a book, so they’d need to stop by their dorms before their potions class.
“Oh, did you guys hear that the Squib the Selwyns disowned has been put in an asylum?” One of them said incredulously to the others. He didn’t notice Hestia’s head snapping up, her gaze suddenly clear, eyeing me with caution. “For real, it’s insane. Well, the situation, I meant, but I guess the bastard, too. Can you even imagine the shame of not just having a Squib in your family tree, but then the Muggles having to put it in an actual institution for being mentally deficient?”
“Mentally deficient?” I asked him, standing up from where I was sitting at the end of the bench. “You seriously have so little morals and respect for other humans that you’d use terms like ‘mentally deficient’?”
He eyed me up and down with disdain. “And what are you gonna do about it, huh?”
So I decked him.