Malfoy's Hogwarts News
The next morning at the Gryffindor Table, the Quartet became painfully aware of how loud the other students could be while they all dealt with the tiredness and mild cold that came with staying up in the Astronomy Tower, shivering, or down in Sirius’ cave, also shivering, for much too prolonged a period of time in early March.
The group was in clear agreement with the concept of Crouch Jr being the one out to kill Harry and Draco, but weren’t happy or at peace with it in the slightest. The sour mood was quickly broken, however, when suddenly the morning owl post descended upon the Great Hall, and Hermione perked up from stirring her cereal to grin as she spotted a gray owl swooping towards her.
“I‘ve taken out a subscription to the Daily Prophet. I’m getting sick of finding everything out from the Slytherins.” She sent a particularly nasty look in Draco’s direction after that, and he blurted something incoherent back, as he had a fork full of eggs in his mouth. She waved him off as if to say ‘only joking’, while she raised a hand up to the gray owl. She paused however, hand flinching as it instead dropped a simple square letter, not a newspaper.
“This isn’t a newspaper, though… It’s--” She was startled then, suddenly, as several different owl’s landed on her still empty plate and her head and shoulders, one extra owl flying a circle before choosing to drop his letter and peck at Draco’s had as he spat out his eggs and cried, attempting to wave it off. “How many subscriptions did you take out?!” Ron exclaimed, struggling not to laugh as Harry stood up and smacked the bird off of Draco.
Hermione fumbled with the letter the first owl had given with shaking hands. Once it was opened, she scoffed, worry leaving her face to make room for disapproval. “Oh really!” She sputtered, going rather red as she read. “It’s--oh how ridiculous--” She thrust the letter at the boys across from her, Harry and Draco, who held it between them and saw that it was not handwritten, but composed from pasted letters that seemed to have been cut out of the Daily Prophet.
YOU ARE A WICKED GIRL. HARRY POTTER DESERVES BETTER. GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM MUGGLE.
“They’re all like it!” Hermione explained, tossing down her fifth one just as Harry and Draco had finished processing the first, setting it back down shakily.
“Hermione, you might want to stop opening those…” Draco warned as the enraged muggleborn picked up the last letter. “It’s hate mail. Whoever wrote it probably has it--” She slit open the letter with one finger, then immediately screamed as the whole thing suddenly exploded with green acid spraying onto her hands, immediately causing them to flare up in large yellow boils. “Cursed…”
“Undiluted bubotuber pus!” Ron exclaimed, as he picked up the envelope gingerly and sniffed it.
“Ow!” Hermione exclaimed, and the boys could all see tears springing from her eyes as she tried to rub the puss off her hands with a napkin, but her fingers had become far too sore for her to even hold the thing. “You’d better get up to the hospital wing,” Said Harry worriedly while the owls took off. “We’ll tell Professor Sprout where you’ve gone…”
“I warned her!” Said Ron once Hermione was far enough away, looking red himself as he glared down at the remaining pus left on the table. “I warned her not to annoy Rita Skeeter! This is your fault too, Draco. Harry told me about how you made an enemy of her at the Weighing of the Wands Ceremony or whatever. If you hadn’t…” He trailed off when he noticed the blonde wasn’t paying attention, instead standing slowly, with a calm expression of someone almost wrapped in a trance as he slung his book bag over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Harry asked while Ron looked on in confusion. Draco didn’t even look at them as he walked off, only saying, “To make an enemy out of Rita Skeeter.” Then disappearing.
He and Hermione both weren’t in Care of Magical Creatures, at first. Pansy Parkinson had made quite a deal out of it, snickering with her friends and repeatedly asking Harry, “Potter, have you split up with Draco at long last? Finally give you the slip, did he?” and, “Where’s your girlfriend, Potter? Why was she so upset at breakfast?” It had been a hard thing to ignore, even as Ron insisted him to. He decided then that he very much didn’t like Pansy Parkinson, or any Slytherin that now followed her just as blindly as they had Draco.
This class turned out to be quite interesting, however. With the ending of their unit on Unicorns, Hagrid introduced them to ‘Nifflers’ today, furry black creatures with long snouts that loved to hunt for shiny things, like gold. Hence why the ‘lesson’ was each student getting assigned to a Niffler and teaching it to dig around Hagrid’s garden for gold coins. It was easily the most fun they had ever had in Care of Magical Creatures, and Hagrid looked quite proud at the laughs from the students and grins on everyone's faces.
Several times, however, Ron pointed out how he would’ve wished Hermione could have been here for the fun, but Harry found his mind only drifting off to Draco, wishing he could’ve been here too. Might have swayed his stance on Hagrid a bit, which they were still trying to work hard on, and making regrettably slow progress with.
Finally every coin was found and the kids all gathered around Hagrid once more, sitting on the ground to better handle their laps full of coins. Ron’s looked to be the best hunter, as he struggled to carry them all. “Can you buy these as pets, Hagrid?” He asked excitedly, examining the coins with a hopeful grin.
“Yer Mum wouldn’ be happy, Ron,” Hagrid said, to which the red head began to pout. “They wreck houses, Nifflers. I reckon they’ve nearly got the lot, now,” He added, pacing around the patch of earth as the last of the students scurried away with the Nifflers close behind and arms full of coins. “I on’y buried a hundred coins. Oh there y’are, Hermione!”
Harry and Ron both turned around sharply to see Hermione making her way towards them across the lawn, arms crossed in an attempt to hide her heavily bandaged hands. She looked quite miserable, and Ron started to sneer as Pansy said something to her girlfriend Daphne beside her, and the two girls giggled.
“Well, let’s check how yeh’ve done!” Exclaimed Hagrid, breaking the tense silence while Hermione carefully sat down beside her friend. “Count yer coins! An’ there’s no point tryin’ ter steal any, Goyle, it’s leprechaun gold. Vanishes after a few hours.” He added as the Slytherin boy blanched, then emptied his pockets, looking extremely sulky. As expected, Ron’s Niffler had gathered the most coins, earning him an enormous slab of Honeydukes chocolate as a prize.
The bell rang for lunch, and while the students scurried off to class and Ron and Hermione headed over to help Hagrid put the Nifflers back in their cages, Harry wandered around his hut, mind racing as he tried to think of places Draco could be.
“What’s he doin’?” Hagrid asked after a minute or two, nodding worriedly over to Harry and cursing under his breath as he saw behind the boy Madame Maxime watching them through her carriage window.
“Thinking about Draco Malfoy.” Hermione sighed, shaking her head as she carried off a crate back to the stack they had formed outside Hagrid’s hut. “Again.” Ron added, doing the same. Hagrid huffed a laugh that died as quickly as it came as worry took him over. “Why so often now? What’s gotten into him? They hate each other and then suddenly--”
“Don’t ask us!” Ron exclaimed, dusting the dirt off his hands. “It’s not like they gave us any warning either!” Hermione placed a hand on Ron’s shoulder, then smiled over to Hagrid.
“Let’s just take it as a good sign, alright? No more ridiculous squabbling between Potter and Malfoy.” Hagrid and Ron nodded their agreement, before she continued, “Anyway, right now Harry’s worried because Draco ran off quickly after the Skeeter incident. And now he must think--”
“We have to find him!” Harry exclaimed, jumping between his two friends and hurriedly waving goodbye to Hagrid as he steered them back to the castle. “Thanks for the fun lesson Hagrid, but we gotta go!” And with that he grabbed Hermione and Ron’s hand and bolted up the stairs to the castle, dragging them behind.
“Harry--Harry! Harry what’re you doing?” Ron yelled, stumbling to keep up with Harry’s panicked pace. “We have to use the map, Ron,” He whispered. “We need to know what he’s up to--”
“What he’s ‘up to’? Harry, I thought you were--” “We are, Hermione! We are. But no one acts like that just to miss two classes and then not be ‘up to’ something. Which means he’s up to something, and I have to figure out what.” Harry dropped their hands outside the castle, backing up into the already opened doors and looking quite troubled or worried, actually. “I can’t let him get hurt by her. Not like you.”
Hermione and Ron gave each other a worried look, but gave in and followed their friend, knowing there was no way to stop him when he got like this now.
“I don’t blame Draco, though,” Hermione commented as they hurried up the stairs to Gryffindor Tower. “I hate that Skeeter woman! I’m going to get her back if it’s the last thing I do!” Ron smirked, glancing over at her with one eyebrow raised. “Well be quick about it, or Draco might just beat you to it.”
Eventually they were back in the boys dormitories, waiting as he scanned the Marauder’s Map for the familiar dots with Draco’s name above them. After a minute he exclaimed, “Ah ha!” and shoved the map under his friend’s noses, pointing a finger at Draco’s mark, which stood beside the Weasley twins, standing in front of what appeared to be a blank wall.
Then, quite suddenly, the three pairs of dots disappeared.
“Er--What?” Ron said after a moment of all three looking down in confusion and shock, and they all jerked their heads up, glancing at each other. Harry gnawed his lip, then walked away, collapsing onto his bed and holding the map up in front of him, scowling. “It’s impossible. How--Where--”
“No one can leave the castle, Harry.” Hermione said slowly, coming around to sit on the side of the bed, Ron doing the same on the opposite side. “The map must be wro--” “The map’s never wrong!” He jerked forward, scanning it like mad for any signs of them reappearing somewhere else.
“Where is he…?”
His friends waited a half hour more, before insisting they had to leave to catch a quick bite to eat, and Harry, once the bell rang for the start of the next class, was forced to stuff the map under his pillow, and head down for Divination as well.
-*-*-*-
The Trio wouldn't see Draco again until Dinner, though Harry had tried in vain to spot him in any crowd of Slytherins that passed. As the hours passed, the Potter boy found himself getting increasingly worried, though if it was for his friend's safety or him staying true to his change to goodness, he wasn’t sure. He knew the way he found himself thinking about him in classes and what he was up to wasn’t new; he’d been doing it every year something remotely strange happened, but that was out of hate.
He wasn’t quite sure what this was out of.
He was sure it was getting on Ron and Hermione’s nerves, however, as they kept rolling their eyes and muttering to each other while he froze up and stared into the distance at nothing during class, but they were often distracted themselves by the Slytherins and other annoying students making fun of Hermione’s bandages and the news in general.
Eventually this slog of a day wore out, and the Trio was headed downstairs to dinner, Harry dragging his feet while going over every place Draco could be for the hundredth time in his head, nearly convincing himself that okay, there must be something up with him if he cares this much--
But then the platinum blonde is standing right before them, hands on his hips, the same grin as always present on his face and a wink sure to come, and all that worry melts away into a very Harry-like smile back.
“Missed me?” The darker skinned boy nodded, and stepped straight up to him, maybe a little too close, because the blonde took a step back, going pink, then staring pointedly away. “Well, you shouldn’t have. I wasn’t in danger or anything… Just… working.”
“On what?” Hermione saved no time for awkward pleasantries, skipping straight to the point, as usual. Draco, however, quite used to Hermione's behavior by now, didn't miss a beat, instead giving the anticipated wink in her direction and saying, "Follow me." Before walking off.
The Gryffindor's looked at each other, confused, for only a moment before Harry was following the Malfoy boy blindly and Ron and Hermione rolled their eyes once more, following albeit reluctantly.
Draco started leading them on a very familiar path, then, and Harry leaned into his ear, whispering, "What are you doing?" When it became clear that there was only one place he could be going. But the blonde waved him off along with Hermione's own protest as they turned the corner onto the Room of Requirement corridor.
And Draco still ignored them yet, and Harry didn’t seem to care, still in awe and recovering from the shock that he was actually here, but Hermione did. And Ron, because he could tell the others knew where he was going, but he didn’t. He didn’t quite want to speak up and ask, however, as everyone around him seemed pretty focused on where Draco was taking them.
After watching him pace back and forth in front of a seemingly blank wall three times, however, Ron was really starting to doubt his friends sanity--not for the first time--but then he had to doubt his own as he blinked and where there was once plain wall, now a plain door was added as well.
The three in front of him started to step into the room and Hermione turned to raise an eyebrow at him, gesturing forward. “C’mon, Ronald, we don’t have all night!” Ron shook his head, sighing as he thought this couldn’t have been the most insane thing his friends had ever done, and instead stepped in as well.
The three Gryffindor’s were immediately taken aback by the sight before them while Draco simply grinned and chuckled at all their reactions to what he had made the Room of Requirement into this time. In front of them lay rows and rows of countless desks where typewriters sat, magically typing away due to conjured up floating hands, piloted by the ginger headed twins at the head of the room, grinning and waving to them playfully. As Harry peered over the nearest desk to get a look at what these hands were actually writing, he shook his head, raising an eyebrow to Malfoy in a, ‘really?’ expression. There, written in bold lettering at the top the sheet of blank paper read,
MALFOY’S HOGWARTS NEWS
Hermione gasped when she read it, while Ron burst out laughing, all the while Draco kept asking, “What?” and “What’s wrong?” and “You don’t like it?”, clearly fake in his obliviousness. The twins walked over, grinning wide, hands out, and he waved a finger.
“You’ll get paid after the first wave of consumers, alright? That was the deal. And anyway, I spent all my allowance setting this up today. With your help, boys, of course.” Hermione sent Harry a look as if to ask if he had any clue what was going on, but he just shrugged, stepping forward to ask instead.
“Draco… what exactly is this?” The blonde smirked, then stepped forward, looking happy to provide answers. “Well, this morning, after seeing all that hate mail Granger got, I thought to myself ‘Draco, it’s time you stopped this Skeeter woman. She can’t attack you, and you have the money. Best you do something with it, right?’ And so I did. This newspaper,” He picked up the only completed copy sitting on a pedestal at the head of the desk nearest the door, “Has been something I’ve thought about for a while. Right now it’s slow, as it can only run when the twins,” He nodded to Fred and George, who smiled and waved back, “Are working on it, but once we get enough money I’ll be able to pay a full workforce, and they can go gather info from the school to add to the paper.”
Hermione frowned, then glared at the Weasley boys standing on either side of their new boss. “Don’t you two have better things to do? Maybe study? You have N.E.W.T’s next year, you know…” The two looked at each other, then shrugged, both making ‘Meh’ sounds, and she groaned, rolling her eyes. “Boys--No! Weasley’s…”
Harry smiled to himself at their antics, then stepped over towards Draco, who was observing his room with a triumphant smile. “So, this is how you’re gonna beat Rita Skeeter?” “Oh yes,” The blonde said, winking at him. “This is how we’ll beat her. You’ll help right?”
Harry felt as if he’d stepped in the summer air, because a sudden unexplainable warmth had hit his cheeks. But he nodded, still smiling. “Yeah, yeah we’ll help.” And in that moment, as he looked from his Slytherin friend, to all the good work he had done for Hermione and his sakes, he realized that he couldn’t remember now how it even felt to think Draco would do anything to hurt them. He couldn’t imagine how he would have ever let that thought enter his head either. From his perspective, standing here, Draco Malfoy was perfect.
-*-*-*-
In just the next week, Malfoy’s Hogwarts News replaced every Daily Prophet article or Witch Weekly magazine seen in student’s hands, and snickers and jeering towards the Quartet quickly turned to apologies and praise. Inside those messily typed pages lay the truth at hundreds of kids fingertips, a truth about how Rita Skeeter forced students to give her quotes, followed them around and stole private information, and as well as several pictures of Hermione and Krum on dates and staged ones of Harry and Tess ‘before she met Percy’, as Draco was fooling the world saying.
Tess had been quite corroperational in helping, and the only one who put up a fight had to have been Harry, though he eventually gave in at the prospect of getting Skeeter off his back. And it worked. Not a single soul outside of Pansy’s gang that everyone started to ignore in favor of Draco picked on him. Some Slytherins who had gone along with mock ‘disowning’ the Malfoy boy now read his newspapers and begged for more entries.
Popular opinion made a rule that Slytherins would be the only workers. Punishments. You get what you get.
Even more surprisingly, the teacher’s hardly seemed to care either, only focusing on students being late or too loud in class, instead of asking what they were up to. Even Snape had resisted berating the creation of the new newspaper, and the theory had sprouted that, alongside Harry, Dumbledore had taken a liking to Draco as well, and ordered no punishments to be handed to students working the paper.
That or he just really hated Rita Skeeter, which was just as, if not more plausible.
Speaking of hate for Rita Skeeter, since the invention of the newspaper Hermione’s want to put an end to that woman’s lies had grown and now changed into the desperate want to find out how she’d been spying on them. In one Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson she even went straight to Professor Moody and asked about seeing her on the grounds during the Second Task, to which he said no whilst being very confused.
“Well, Rita’s definitely not using an Invisibility Cloak!” She had announced at lunch to the Quartet then, where Draco was scribbling ideas for the next paper entry onto a scrap piece of parchment. “Moody says he didn’t see her anywhere near the judges’ table at the second task, or anywhere near the lake!”
“Hermione, is there any point in telling you to drop this?” Ron had asked then, frowning even as he attempted to enjoy that day's lunch. “No!” The muggleborn shouted stubbornly. “I want to know how she heard me talking to Viktor! And how she found out about Hagrid’s mum!”
And even as the Quartet tried to calm her down on the subject, she had been persistent, and Harry and Ron had only each other to simply enjoy the start of spring with when Draco was wrapped up in his news, and Hermione was either focussed on Rita spying on them or going on dates with Viktor.
“Haven’t we got enough to worry about?” Ron asked one night while playing Wizard’s Chess with Harry whilst Hermione laid flat on her back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling and not blinking as she tried to think of ideas. “Do we have to start a vendetta against Rita Skeeter as well?”
“Blame it on Malfoy.” Was her only response as the twins burst into the common room and kids immediately trampled them for hints on the next day's paper.
Harry thought he might, as he settled back into his chair and looked out of the window at the school grounds beyond, grimacing at a beetle perched on the glass, unmoving. He flicked his fingers at the glass to make it fly away, but it still didn’t move. Rolling his eyes, he stood up, and declared he was off to bed, but not before tossing a galleon over to Fred and George for the next day's paper.
Yes, they had enough to worry about without adding a vendetta against Rita Skeeter to the mix, but hey, it was a good newspaper, he had to admit.