Chapter Text
The whole Umbridge thing makes her want to scream, just a wee bit. It’s seventh year, NEWTs are fast approaching, and Miri has not kept a low profile for her entire Hogwarts tenure just to fail her exams horrifically.
I could hire a hitman, she thinks. Nobody would know.
The whole ‘oh no I’ve been reincarnated as a supremely magical being from a story’ hadn’t been terribly upsetting to digest, in the very beginning, because once the education bit is done with, there’s really no need to be mixing in with the bad parts of the wizarding world. Muggleborns have it great, in her sensible opinion, because the occasional name-calling from a bigot is far too easy to brush off when faced with the knowledge that none of them know how to measure the angle of an isosceles triangle. Thus, her plan is to graduate Hogwarts, score well enough to earn extra credit for Flitwick to commit major fraud in the muggle education system, and then leave with a forged A-levels diploma for a Russell Group uni.
She paces around her room – that is to say, a one-person dormitory, because there are no other Ravenclaw girls in the class of 1996 (because all of her potential peers died as babies during the last war, but no one likes to talk about the current extremely low student body population) – and makes a cacophony of ugly noises in frustration.
It’s not like she’ll fail if she doesn’t pass Umbridge’s defence class. Her OWLs are splendid, and one poor mark in her NEWTs should be fine. Except Flitwick had been very clear about his requirements for crime and she’s not banking on any personal favours from him, from the goodness of his heart and her aptitude as a charming young student.
Reincarnation makes one a bit mad, apparently. She’s not winning any personality contests.
I probably don’t have enough pocket money to hire a hitman, though.
Well, then. These are dark times indeed, because now she’s seriously considering interacting with The Plot in order to get ahead. The Plot, as in, everything that Miri has been fervently avoiding the past six years, contentedly quiet and mysterious in her self-imposed bubble. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t have friends, but absolutely none of them are stupid Gryffindors that interact in any way with the Harry Potter circle.
Miri works up enough anger to wear herself out and fall asleep.
The next day, she sits at the very front of the classroom, right in the murder radius of Umbridge’s horrendous sugary sweet perfume, and does her absolute best to be a model student. She raises her hand around the beginning, when everyone should be in a good mood from breakfast and coursework questions are vaguely appreciated.
“Excuse me, professor,” she says quietly.
Umbridge, in her fat toad-faced glory, smiles in a way that middle-aged women think are cute but actually make them look incredibly insecure about the wrinkles that absolutely everyone notices, despite caked on makeup or aesthetic surgeries. “Yes, Miss Prince?”
No relation to Snape. Probably. He’d spent most of her first year squinting suspiciously in her direction.
“I’m having a bit of trouble visualising the amount of magical power we’re supposed to exert for the flagrantare spell. Is it possible for you to demonstrate for us?
Umbridge’s smile vanishes. The odious woman tuts and slaps the chalkboard with an extendable metal pointer, the noise rattling high-pitched and tinny, agitating Miri’s ears. And on the board, the same three words that have been there since September, glare back at all the NEWT students: Theory is king.
“How silly of you to forget that this is a theory based class,” Umbridge says, in that awful, simpering little-girl voice, rapping the board again with the pointer. “It’s been over a month, children, do pay attention. Three points from Ravenclaw. I expect better from your house.”
Miri swallows the words begging to burst forth and ducks her head down.
Nobody really says anything else for the rest of the class. The Weasley twins make a ruckus, but it’s half-hearted because they really can’t afford anymore detentions at this point in the Quidditch season, and the other usually brave, outspoken students are too tired today. Even the Slytherins look sort of empty and drained. And when it ends, there aren’t any annoyed eye rolls or disgruntled whispers that are expected of a difficult teacher and a student losing house points. Because everyone’s afraid of her, this vile woman, and the power she has over their grades and their future. Better step in line, soldier, or you’ll be targeted. Being a NEWT student, a finalist, a respected upperclassman, has never felt so small.
She spends her entire hour break in the lavatory, trying not to break down.
It’s unfair.
It’s not that she’s going to cry (but she absolutely will), but she wants to break something. Really break something. Recklessly throw around the bombarda curse and not care about the consequences. Do something stupid. Act like a maniac.
So Miri stares up resolutely in the bathroom mirror and gets a hold of herself. Her eyes are red, her hair is a mess, and anyone can tell she’s been crying. But crying after encountering Umbridge seems perfectly fair, and there’s the added side effect that might be a hallucination, but she’s apparently a beautiful crier. She’s never cried in front of a mirror before, but wow. Damn. Miriam Prince, with the blotchy marks on her eyes and cheeks contrasting against the wintery colouring, looks like a siren honing in for the kill.
After the hour is up, she marches to Transfiguration, about to do something abnormally stupid in all of her planning.
She sits next to a Plot character.
“I need to talk to you,” she says, glancing at the grandfather clock on the opposite side, counting down the scant amount of time left before class begins.
George Weasley blinks owlishly and stares at her for a good second. His twin brother, Fred, on the other side of table row, cranes his neck to stare at her as well. “To me?” George asks incredulously.
Which is fair. They’ve never interacted before, in memory.
“And not me?” Fred pipes up.
Preferably not, honestly. Even if she’s avoided The Plot up until now, she isn’t totally blind to the world around her. George is nicer than his twin, less intense, more helping Fred out in pranks than the other way around. They’re both perfectly decent people, but if Miri has to do this, then she wants to single out the empathetic one. Butter him up, make him feel special, and all those sappy emotions inside his slightly more pensive soul will aid this transitional period.
They’re identical, but the way George carries himself is… attractive, for lack of better words. The twins are obviously handsome young men, miraculously, despite being gingers, with their tall, slender frames and strong, memorable faces. And sitting this close to George, at least, she notices that all that Quidditch training must’ve done something, because their shoulders are actually quite broad, forearms quite vascular, and jawline quite sharp. But Fred’s resting face is more foxy and George’s veers innocent and her choice is made.
“Yes, George, you,” she says. Then Professor McGonagall emerges from her office a minute early and the moment is gone. “After class, please.”
And she saunters to the back, in a row with a Ravenclaw boy (called Roger Davies, but they’re barely friends, so it’s basically like being alone), and gets to work on changing the scent of incense smoke.
By the end of the two-hour block, everything smells like white tea and lilac, her head hurts, and her sinuses still ache from the emotional breakdown in the bathroom earlier. But there’s a job to do, so she takes a glimpse on the other side of the room, where George is coincidentally looking at the same time, and they both immediately break eye contact and finish packing up their things to take leave. Miri walks out, down the tower, and detaches from the small crowd, heading left through an unused hallway and into an open, quiet courtyard, where a big oak tree is littering orange-red leaves on crunchy grass. It’s an odd hour right before dinner, so it’s empty.
She turns around and George is right there, wearing a curious expression. His twin is nowhere in sight, but is probably lurking nearby.
“And what does the mysterious Ravenclaw want with my dear brother?” He asks, lips quirking into a signature coyness.
“You’re very different,” Miri says rudely. “I know you’re not Fred, so don’t trick me.”
She also wants to ask how anyone is fooled by those switch-up games anymore – completely identical or no, they’re still their own unique person, and after a short amount of time, anyone ought to be able to tell who’s who. The teachers, perhaps not, if they only see the twins one to two hours a week, usually trying to avoid gaining undue attention for pranks. But she’s heard enough gossip about the prominent Weasley family, about how apparently their parents can’t even discern them apart. And that’s a proper mindfuck if she’s ever heard one.
And then his face breaks out in a hideously sly smile. He bends forward a touch, Miri takes a step backwards on instinct – personal space boundaries erected long ago, as she doesn’t want to touch any icky children, except now they’re in their seventh year and legally adults – and is met with the cool surface of a stone wall. George’s hands are in his pockets, but he could very well take his hands out and trap her. She’s backed up against a wall in an abandoned courtyard with one half of Hogwarts’ most prominent troublemakers.
“Not what we were expecting, Prince,” he says gleefully, very much exerting his height and frame to lock her in. The prankster must be entirely aware of what he’s doing. “We’ve had bets since the first year about you. When you’d stop avoiding the Gryffindors. Odd duck, you. Can’t say I imagined this.”
Slowly, Miri feels a flush crawl up her neck. Did he think I was… propositioning him?
That would explain why Fred hadn’t come along. Anything other than that would have the other twin stubbornly present.
And George actually followed, she contemplates. So he’s either interested or curious enough to be interested.
She doesn’t deny his statement about the Gryffindors. They’re all far too close with Harry Potter and The Plot for her liking, so she was completely disinterested in friendships with any of them. She was also a fairly weird eleven year old girl, being technically mentally an adult and barely remembering how pubescent interactions and social dynamics worked, so nobody really actively reached out to befriend her anyway.
It didn’t help that Miri had been a round-faced, grumpy little pre-teen squirt. Puberty hadn’t been kind, and she’d been pimply and ugly between the ages of eleven and sixteen, with flat and thin greasy hair (which could’ve lent credence to Snape’s suspicious glares). But between the summer of sixth and seventh year, she finally finished growing up and her hormones finally settled devastating her body and emotions. So now, at seventeen, the baby fat has melted off so there’s an actual shape to her person now, something dainty and delicate, her face has cleared up into smooth paleness, and she chopped her hair short so now there’s beautiful, soft volume that frames her face instead of weighing it down. Pre-Shining Duvali, perhaps.
“I would’ve assumed you to have an excellent imagination,”
“I do,” he says, looking entirely too pleased with himself. “But you’re not much to think about, usually.”
“How kind of you to notice,” she says dryly.
There's a flutter of minor activity passing through the courtyard, as two young students hurry along the exposed part of the hall, presumably rushing to dinner. If they look around, they might see George leaning over someone, but they’re hidden behind a pillar enough for it to be blurry. When their giggly presence wanes, Miri tries to gather her courage to say her piece.
“I’ll get out with it, then, the reason why I’ve dragged you away–.”
“--bold of you to assume you can drag a Weasley anywhere, but continue.”
Right.
Even though he’s the nicer twin, he’s still a twat. There are ways to shut him up, though, and she supposes causing some mischief won’t matter, once she’s done with this year and merrily fucking off to muggle London to live the rest of her days in relative normalcy.
“While you are very attractive and cuter than your brothers, if I wanted a shag I would’ve taken you somewhere more private,” she says, a touch presumptuous. Maybe that hadn’t been what he was thinking and now she’s made a fool of herself, but she trudges on. George has an unnerving poker face. “No, I want in on your defence group.”
His face remains impassive – but still a smiley, coy look. “A what now?”
She doesn’t know the exact timeline of when Harry Potter establishes Dumbledore’s Army, but it’s probably around this time. The twins stopped acting out in Umbridge’s class so much last week, Chang and Edgecomb have disappeared from the common room lately, so she’s making the educated guess that they’re getting their necessary practice elsewhere.
“The room of requirement isn’t foolproof. And Edgecomb is an utter sneak – she’s been trying to get around whatever secrecy spell you’ve put on her. I would know; I’m her prefect.”
The only seventh year Ravenclaw girl, in fact. It would be funny if it wasn’t so depressing.
In her cohort, there’s scant handful of students. The years above them had been even worse, with zero students sorted into Slytherin one time. In her first few years at Hogwarts, Miri remembers the quiet, peaceful lull of the Great Hall, with seats barely filled, house colours dotted here and there like meagre coins in a pauper’s cup. But now, with a bit of a giggle, the post-war baby boom has hit the school, and she had counted maybe two dozen Ravenclaw first-years during the sorting ceremony. They’ll have to hire more staff members at this rate.
Seconds tick on.
George keeps his face still all the while, and she’d be impressed if she weren’t annoyed to be missing dinner. Objectively, the Weasley twins are incredibly intelligent to pull off half the hijinks they do without getting caught. And when they do get caught, it’s usually for a purpose, all without disrupting their own specially calculated personal schedules. If they spent less time on pranks and more time in books, she’s sure that they’d take her number one spot on the marking list. And they’re good actors as well, because George seamlessly shifts lower, hand outstretched on the wall behind her, smiling innocently.
Very close. Too close.
This isn’t a schoolgirl fantasy, she thinks sullenly, before remembering that she is, indeed, a schoolgirl.
“Are you waiting for something?” Miri asks. “Or do you want me to dumb it down? I want to join your–.”
“You were crying between DADA and Transfiguration.”
He manages to look concerned. She thinks he’s stalling, waiting for something. It’s really not a difficult proposition – the answer is either yes or no. In the dim lighting of the abandoned corridor, with the torches flickering weakly, his hair looks golden and his face warm.
“What a gentleman you are, to be considered for a woman’s tears,” she says flatly. “I ought to be forever honoured to have captured your attention.”
“Can’t a man be concerned?”
She smiles demurely through her lashes, but the mounting irritation probably makes her look a bit evil instead. “Is that what it is, George? Fiendish Weasley charms? Or are you… thinking if I’d be a good fit for your practice group? Your first conversation with me, and I’m every bit as dull as you’d imagined.”
“Quite a bit duller, matter of fact,” he muses, but still leans forward even closer to the point where she could very easily kiss him or bite his nose off. “Like a giant wad of chewed up Bertie Botts. The vomit flavoured ones, of course. You’re the sharpest spoon in the kitchen, dear.”
“And you’re surprised that I cry after class, when you say such loving things to me, dear.”
He pauses but she can’t read his face. “If you’re so upset, what will you do to me in revenge, might I ask, Prince? If I’m so special for you to single out and drag me into the darkness, where I’ll surely be subject to all your hidden perversions. Prepare me for the horrors, love.”
At that, he winks.
Is he asking for my… magical abilities?
No, they share NEWT level Charms, DADA, and Transfiguration, so he knows she has a stronger than average magical base. And she also takes Arithmancy, Astronomy, and Muggle Studies, which he may or may not know, but six NEWTs is quite impressive. Most students take three or four. And he’s undoubtedly seen her name at the top of the OWLs board, so what is it that he’s asking?
If she’s fit for Potter’s defence group, hopefully. They need to weed out any suspicion, given that Umbridge is about one breath away from banning co-curriculars altogether. High-level spells won’t impress George Weasley, if he’s the one initiating her. The only thing that would impress a prankster is…
This is a horrible idea, she thinks, but there’s a tightly wound ball of excitement vibrating deep inside.
“I am going to prank you, and it will be extremely concerning and nerve wracking on your end,” she says. “But then you’ll be stressed out enough to let me in your fancy clique, where I can practice all my seventh year level spellwork and potentially help out Potter and his gang.”
He raises an eyebrow and doesn’t move.
“Are you trying to be funny? Unfortunately, you’ll never be able to contend with the legend of Gred and Forge.”
Miri takes out her wand and George flicks his wrist to match. His is a long, springy wood, pointed lazily at her ear. No matter. She points her wand at herself and whispers the spell historically used to knock people out for intense medical surgeries. The last thing she sees is George’s panicked, shocked face, as he catches her from slamming into the floor. And then there’s nothing.
When Miri wakes up, she’s a bit upset with herself. Not for the stupid prank, but because she realises how cleverly George, intentionally or not, was able to direct the conversation away from the defence group whilst she actively knew he was avoiding the question. He didn’t agree to anything, say anything would implicate him to eavesdroppers, or hint that such activities existed, all while Miri so mulishly showed her hand. Knowing what someone wants is basically winning.
“Awake, are we?”
She sits up in the dark, dank broom cupboard suspiciously absent of brooms and suspiciously full of crummy stains. Oh god, this is one of the infamous sex closets.
“I hadn’t realised the medical wing had changed so much over the years,” she says grumpily.
“All the dementor attacks in the past few academic years really sucked the joy out of the architecture,” George agrees airily, not even lighting a lumos as they sit in the cupboard. She feels her wand tucked behind one ear – of which, the back of her hair feels like one giant rumpled mess – and her book bag behind her, used as a pillow. “But luckily I was able to cure you of your completely accidental curse, or else I would’ve had to explain to Madam Pomfrey why I skipped dinner to hang out with unconscious girls. I imagine it would’ve been terribly awkward.”
He doesn’t sound upset, but it’s difficult to tell with this one. The more Miri talks with him, the more nuanced he becomes. Funny, tricky, happy – these emotions are surface-level, worn on his sleeve.
“That would’ve been an awkward conversation indeed,” she agrees, after a beat. “Did you learn minor healing charms in the defence group?”
And now that they’re alone, quietly tucked away in a private space (yet popular, oxymoronically), he doesn’t immediately resort to the sly outlook. He leans back against the very dirty wall, lounging like a cat, and lifts one eyebrow at her, from what she can vaguely make out from the sparse yellow light through the gap under the door.
“Someone is adamant that this alleged defence group exists.”
Oh, wait. Maybe he’s not being annoying on purpose, maybe he literally can’t say anything to recruit her without getting cursed by the group’s security wards. Which is so obvious – Miri had just literally lied earlier about Edgecomb trying to spill. Well then, this made this an horribly roundabout journey, trying to get vouched for by a member, when it would’ve been much simpler to talk to Harry Potter or his cronies directly.
“If I were to gain membership about this alleged DADA study group, which may or may not exist, to whom shall I reach out to?” She asks.
Through the darkness, she thinks he smiles.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he lies so blatantly and poorly it almost makes her laugh. “But as luck would have it, I think my brother and friends will be looking for me soon, and perhaps another person who may or may not wish to join us in our educational endeavours. I have no idea how they know our location. Magic is just sneaky like that.”
Which is why he kept her in the closet, away from prying eyes and open ears. He must’ve somehow communicated with Fred, during her stint of unconsciousness, for recruitment.
Coincidentally, or fatefully, they hear footsteps pattering down the outside corridor and the whisper of fretfully familiar voices. He sits upright, crossing his legs, leaning a bit toward the door to hear who’s outside. Miri is ninety-nine percent sure that she’s got this in the bag, she’ll join Dumbledore’s Army and perfect every last jinx, curse, and hex practical exam, so she relaxes as well. And then remembers that they’re in a sex closet.
“Wow, your cock is massive,” she says suddenly, very loudly, still in her typical monotone register.
There’s an affronted gasp and then silence beyond the broom cupboard door. George looks at her, Miri keeps her face passive, and the two of them sit there awkwardly, cross-legged, hands on laps, and fully clothed.
The door bursts open. Dust filters through the air, accusatory rays shining through.
“Do you mind?” George says. “We’re busy having sex.”
Fred Weasley and a few other Gryffindors – notably, the Plot centric ones – stand outside the broom cupboard. If she’d heard suspicious noises coming from one of the most infamous sex cupboards in the school, she doesn’t think she’d barge open and do a search. If anything, Miri would actively not try to look for naked people.
“I don’t mind at all, dear brother,” Fred says immediately, hopping onto the chaos. The Gryffindors – Harry Potter and friends, apparently – behind him look either concussed or nauseous. “I don’t know what you see in George at all, Prince,” he says, turning to Miri, “he’s the ugly twin, unfortunately. I’m much more handsome. And, well, luckier, I’d say.”
That’s probably a dick joke.
Miri refuses to give the pranksters the reaction they’re looking for – that’s how they feel powerful. Instead, she’ll remain unaffected and politely oblivious.
“Why should I care? I’m only using your brother for his body. Everything between us is strictly sexual.”
The other Weasley, a fifth-year Ron, chokes and makes a squeaking noise not unlike a mouse. In hindsight, this must be a rather odd interaction for everyone to have, because until now, Miriam Prince has been a veritable unknown. She keeps her head down, alone, mentally fulfilled enough by the thought of being a cool magic-having witch and having said magical abilities in the muggle world. There are ways around Ministry detection, and she’s not above lying and stealing her way through life, so she’s about to have a wonderful set up as soon as she graduates from this damned castle.
Fred and George share a look, to which she doesn’t bother analysing, because a red-faced Hermione Granger fumbles with her bag to pull out a parchment. While she’s doing so, Miri decides to push the prank even more, and uses everyone’s distraction to wandlessly transfigure the dust bunnies in her hand into warm yoghurt. She’s a whiz at minor amounts of wordless and wandless magic, but she’s never been able to combine them.
Granger unravels the parchment, conjures a self-inking quill, and says something about being ready to sign. Miri stumbles a bit standing up, George immediately gets on his feet to help her and hits his head on the low ceiling because all the Weasleys are unnaturally tall, and Fred ducks through the entrance to lend a hand.
This is going to feel extremely gross, she thinks, more than a little evilly, and accepts Fred’s hand.
He immediately lets go, skin turning white.
She passes by him, book bag slung over her shoulder, and hums out the wandless banishing charm before grabbing a hold of the quill levitating above the parchment, to which the magic purposefully disguises the entire legal script.
“So–.”
Miri signs it before Granger can speak. She’s not particularly interested in hearing the ‘thank you for joining’ spiel, nor does she want to actually ingratiate herself with the Chosen One crowd, and doesn’t have any questions so far. If need be, she’ll find Cho Chang during breakfast tomorrow to get the meeting times. Something tugs and tightens at her magical core for a split second, then the back of her eyes water as the text unscrambles itself and reveals itself to be a list of Dumbledore’s Army participants. “You ought to change the name,” she thinks out loud, remembering the series of events of the fifth book. Not her problem, really, because she remembers all the serious shit happening after exams conclude. “The ministry’s out to discredit Dumbledore and Potter in any which way. If the wrong person discovers a student paramilitary group, they’ll definitely intrude on the school.”
She scans the paper and finds Marietta Edgecomb’s name still there. Well, there’s still time to kick that one out before she fucks it all up.
“Well, have a good day, then,” Miri says, noticing the flabbergasted looks of the students. Potter seems positively unwell. Granger has her mouth open like a fish, brows furrowed. Ron Weasley is bright pink, and the twins are in varying states of stultification.
And then she walks away, off to the Astronomy tower, early for class.
NEWT Astronomy is… intense, to say the least. There are only two students in this class, despite how NEWTs combine all four houses together, and even if the war hadn’t occurred and killed all her peers, Miri thinks that this class would still be incredibly tiny. There’s a heavy base in the wacky wizarding mathematics, or at least what passes as maths in this world, and physics. Even if Flitwick will cheat her into the UCAS system, she’s absolutely certain she could sit down at the local sixth-form and pass the Physics A-Level from her Astronomy notes.
Miri eyes Kenneth Fowler warily when Professor Sinistra doesn’t arrive by eleven-thirty.
“Do you think she’s sick?” He asks.
He’s a Gryffindor, a short and stocky boy with blond hair and blue eyes, but she doesn’t remember his name from the Plot at all, so she hasn’t outright avoided him that much. But they’re definitely not friendly enough to start smalltalk like this. Cedric Diggory had been in their class last year and the two boys had been actual friends, leaving Miri happily alone with her telescope. But then, well…
“Maybe,” she responds, brave enough to interact with so many people today.
Fifteen minutes pass and they mutually decide to head down the tower, at least to knock on Professor Sinistra’s office door. Worst case scenario, they skip class and try again next week.
They hear raised voices downstairs, and she doesn’t have to glance at Fowler to run down alongside him to their professor’s office. He casts a silencio on both of their shoes, which is rather bright of him, and they stand outside the door, listening in on the troublesome argument between Umbridge and Sinistra.
“Unsatisfactory number of–!”
“Low–.”
For the second time that night, Miri finds herself in wordless conversation with Fowler, who makes an uncomfortable face at the discussion being had. Umbridge wants to cut the Astronomy NEWT due to low class size. Sinistra is arguing that all NEWT classes are small because they’re specialised courses for further enrichment, and also the Hogwarts population in general is at a historic all time low. There are less than twenty students in their graduating class – what did they expect? The most populous NEWT is Charms, with thirteen whole people.
The argument doesn’t seem to let up by midnight, so they both agree to leave, discontent.
And at that, she’s back to pacing around in her room.
Miri reflects on her day. What a wild time. George Weasley, in the flesh, had been quite nice to admire. Fit bloke. It’s a pity he loses an ear and his twin dies in about… two or three years. A real shame that is, because he really is quite fit and now that she’s surrounded by adults again, in her newly adult body, all sorts of new feelings grip her soul.
No romance, she swears. She stops pacing around to dramatically collapse into bed. No feelings. None. I’m going to graduate and then fuck off from the wizarding community until the war’s over. If they die, they die.
It doesn’t mean she can’t wank, though.
The yoghurt prank had meant to invoke the shivers into Fred, as it would seem that she had given George a handjob or equivalent, and it had been funny then but now she’s actually seriously thinking about it. He’d been interested earlier, hadn’t he? Perhaps they’d been flirting all evening. First he follows her to an abandoned hallway without any questions, then he takes her into a broom cupboard. Not for the first time, she wishes she had dorm mates to gossip and complain about boys to.
I could just be horny. Many a mistake is made with the wrong head.
The issues around George Weasley don’t resolve themselves the next day, when she sits at the Ravenclaw table for breakfast and a Plot character immediately sits next to her.
“I love looking at your brain,” Luna Lovegood says dreamily. “So empty.”
Miri is resolutely staring at the pot of peanut butter on the table. Peanut butter? Isn’t that an American thing? The house elves are great, but for the most part, the food served here is extremely British. No matter. She slathers strawberry jam over her eggs and reaches for a crumpet.
“Of brain cells or nargles?” She asks, after a moment.
“Why, nargles, of course,” Luna says. “You don’t have any. It’s very refreshing.”
This isn’t their first conversation. On occasion, Miri has had to level a disappointed prefect glare at other Ravenclaw girls being two-faced to Luna. There isn’t any stereotypical bullying in their house – nay, they’re all much too clever for that – but it’s easy to say backhanded compliments, misdirect, or innocently giggle behind people’s backs. Less Karate Kid, more Mean Girls. And she’s definitely chatted, neutrally, to Luna and her other young peers, in the common room or library, but Miri’s never personally reached out or befriended the girl.
She’s always going off about nargles. It might be something Luna hides behind when she wants to talk to people, or maybe nargles actually exist and only certain people can see them. But either way, it hasn’t made her many friends, judging by how the girl is often sitting by herself.
“I suppose I’ll be seeing a lot more of you this year,” Miri says, not wanting to get into the nargles thing.
Luna’s lips quirk to the side. “Perhaps.”
If she’s going to be a part of the Plot characters, might as well be friendly, now. So she listens to Luna talking about magical creatures that no one else can see, and if she really thinks about it, every other word sounds like a cry for help. Are these animals her imaginary friends that she conjured up as a lonely only child? Or are they metaphors for some other magical oddities that are too difficult to describe plainly?
And then Luna discretely moves in to grab a crumpet and whispers the meeting time and location to Miri of the next DA session. That is to say, tonight.
And then they go back to chatting like nothing happened. Of course, the Ravenclaw underclassman is smart, Miri shouldn’t have expected anything less. She is a tad concerned about Luna, however, because she got a whiff from her long, moon-white curls, of which smelled like petrichor and coal tar. Then again, she shouldn’t expect anything when it comes to Luna – the girl is a veritable oddity, however nice.
Wednesday is a free day, so there’s a whole lot of waiting around doing nothing until the first session. Miri could go to the library and study, but that sounds like too much effort, so she spends it unproductively wandering the brisk autumnal grounds outside and reading Jane Austen for her Muggle Studies class on Friday.
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more, she reads George Knightley’s confession to titular character, and promptly snaps the book shut and throws it on a pillow.
Miri shows up to the seventh floor early, throws a minor notice-me-not charm on herself, and glumly sulks against a wall.
The way the notice-me-not charm works is that people briefly passing won’t see her at all. If they’re preoccupied with their own thoughts, she’s practically invisible. It’s easy to throw on when travelling through the crowds, so peddlers and hawkers don’t try to bother her. It doesn’t work at all when someone is specifically looking for her – not shallowly, but with a certain mien of intensity, of her at the forefront of their mind – so she’s more than a little surprised when a pair of twin shadows pass by against her wall and one of them stops.
She looks up from her shoes to see George.
“Is that a notice-me-not charm?”
Fred is half a step in front of his brother, blinking curiously, as the charm shatters away, and his eyes refocus to spot her.
“Clearly I’ve been noticed, so I might have to work on my spellwork,” she says, standing up straight, and moves in front of the twins to the blank wall ahead.
Show me Dumbledore’s Army’s practice room, she thinks, pacing back and forth, parallel to the wall. And curiously, a wooden door appears from the brickwork, old and creaky, with a brass knob and hinges. Brass is an excellent conductor for electricity and magic – moreso protective magic than anything else. It doesn’t detect and clean like silver or reinforce like gold, it acts like a channel to separate and control. Curiouser and curiouser.
The room inside is a magnificent duelling chamber, with high ceilings and practice dummies galore. There’s a large mirror encompassing an entire wall, not unlike a dance studio. Perhaps to check fighting forms?
The Boy Who Lived and co. are already inside, somehow having gotten here earlier than Miri, and she’s done fuck all today. Ron Weasley takes one look at her and flinches, and hurriedly goes back to practice his wand swishing or whatnot. Potter looks up from a book – since when did that boy read? – and exchanges some sort of mental communication with Granger, and Miri stands there at the entrance, waiting all the while.
She turns around and the door is gone. The twins didn’t come in with her, apparently.
“They roam the floor in the beginning, making sure to distract other students or professors if they come this way,” Granger says. “They’ll come back a quarter past.”
Fair enough, she supposes.
Potter makes up his mind, puts his book down, and walks up to Miri with his hand stretched out. Bold move for yoghurt hand.
“Prince,” he says firmly, as if he’s known her all along and definitely didn’t learn her name for the first time last night after reading the sign-up sheet. “Welcome to Dumbledore’s Army. We’re here to prepare ourselves for when Voldemort will next attack.”
The room is dead silent; the other two Gryffindors have stopped whispering to observe this interaction.
Is this… a trap? Is there something she’s missing?
“Okay,” she says, very tentatively touching his hand, warm and calloused, before quickly withdrawing it. Typical Quidditch player. Is George’s hand also covered in calluses? Fred had long, rough fingers, strong and athletic, but he’d very quickly let go of her hand last night due to all the… substance.
Potter looks quite intense for a fifteen year old boy. “So you believe it? That Voldemort’s back?”
Is this a major Plot point? She doesn’t subscribe to the paper, but she does recall everyone calling him a liar out of fear and a government cover-up, until the big bad appears at the end of the book in public and tries to commit many crimes. And now, perhaps a few students have been gossipping about Potter being a drama queen attention seeker. It doesn’t help that the boy really is the main character and can’t help being a bit dramatic, naturally.
“Do you… not want me to?”
“What? No, no,” he says, with a degree of panic and relief. “Merlin, no. It’s just that everyone thinks I’m a liar.”
There’s a pause in the conversation where she thinks she’s supposed to comfort him, but she’s really not close enough or bothered enough to do so. And she’s not above stewing in awkward silence to make the other person speak up, so she stands there and waits for him to continue.
Potter flushes. “Er, well. You’re a seventh year, yeah? How’s your defense?”
“I’m here for a reason, Potter.”
“Right.” He turns his head to look at his friends, wearing some sort of confuddled expression, before turning back to her. “We’re working on elemental curses today, if you...”
The door reappears behind them and Potter quickly makes an excuse to greet the members trickling in.
Granger is at her side next, also quite intense.
“This isn’t just a club,” she says, a shiny Galleon in hand. “We’re not some defence association – we’re preparing to fight. We’re all taking it extremely seriously here, because You-Know-Who wants to murder Harry. Secrecy is key, Prince. The meeting times are enchanted on these coins, in the inscription on the edges, don’t lose it.”
And Miri delicately plucks the coin out of Granger’s hand and shoves it in her pocket. “What makes you think I’m not taking this seriously?”
Granger makes a guilty face, all scrunched up, almost cutely. “I didn’t say that.”
Miri smiles blandly and moves on to greet an oncoming Luna.
The lesson starts out strong. Potter has a knack for teaching, and he really ought to consider that career path instead of aurorship or whatever he’s supposed to do after the war. There isn’t any hand holding here, or obvious lesson plan, but it’s somehow structured well enough to learn and flexible enough to breathe. The spells she’s memorised the theory for delightfully zap out of her wand – eight inches, silver birch, unicorn hair – and it’s so invigorating that there’s an actual, real smile on her face as she fiercely burns the practice dummy into a pile of ashes.
“Arsonist, much?”
George is right behind her. It takes immeasurable self control to not flinch or yelp, as she suddenly feels his breath on the back of her neck and her skin tingles with dreadful warmth, a numbing yet sharp static, as she feels his body heat come out in waves.
“Funnily enough, I was just thinking about you,” she says, not bothering to turn around.
She tucks her wand behind an ear, just as George had done it, and does a wandless banishing spell at the ashes. Once it’s swept away, a new dummy springs up from the ground, much like an exuberant weed.
“Me? The most dashing of Weasley men, as you’ve so kindly stated? Oh, how flattering,” he croons, leaning forward so his head hovers over her shoulder.
Miri sees his smile from her peripheral vision, still refusing to move to look at him at all, not letting him win. So she takes a deep breath, empties her mind, and raises her hand in the direction of the new dummy. “Flagrantare.”
It’s highly likely she’ll be in a scenario where she’s lost her wand, or simply cannot access it, so she’s been practising wandless spells the past few years. The finicky thing about wands is that they’re fragile little sticks and rather easy to snap or misplace, and horrendously expensive. Seven galleons? That’s over a hundred pounds in muggle currency! And it’s the nineties, so that actually means something. Flitwick and McGonagall both warned her that it can be counterintuitive to practice wordless or wandless magic with an underdeveloped magical core, but now she’s an adult and old enough to explode things with her mind. Without a permission slip, even.
The dummy doesn’t evaporate like the other one, but it weakly catches fire around the crotch area. Not her intention, but funny.
At that, she takes a brisk step forward and whirls around, keeping an impeccable sort of self-satisfaction. “Well now,” she says lightly. “It appears I’ve made the curtains match the drapes?”
George, quizzically, exaggerates a gentlemanly bow. “Why, madam, if you were so curious, all you had to do was ask.”
She’s about to retort, say something funny back, but at that moment Potter shows up, braving conversation to comment on her wandless magic. And then George winks and starts harassing his two younger siblings on the other side of the room, working on water elementals, and getting them all soaking wet. Someone screams. Probably Ron, not Ginny.
“It’s not worth it, mostly,” she tells Potter, when he asks her to share the knowledge. “You won’t really get tested on it for your OWLs or NEWTs, unless you’ve got a particularly hardass exam proctor.”
Potter’s mouth smushes into a thin, hard line. “It would’ve been useful,” he insists, all too grave for a teen boy with poorly shaved stubble on his chin, “if, for example, I was stuck in a graveyard and had my wand taken from me by a dark lord.”
Angst doesn’t suit him, but it’s not the right time to be cracking jokes, so she simply shrugs and mildly agrees.
“Then I’ll teach you how to wandlessly accio your wand back from this aforementioned dark lord.”
He laughs, abrupt, eyes widened in surprise behind those horrifically ugly glasses. “You’re…” He then visibly changes gears, most likely about to say something boyishly offensive about Miri’s personality or her in general. “How come I’ve never seen you around before? There aren’t many people at Hogwarts who believe me. And the Prophet hasn’t helped.”
Because I’ve been purposefully avoiding you above all else, she thinks. Also you’re a bit dull and I have better things to do.
“Well,” she drawls, casually leaning on one leg and looking him up and down. “That’s a bit presumptuous, Potter. I see you around plenty. I hadn’t realised I was so boring that you’ve never spared me so much as a glance.”
“Er,” he stumbles, makes a hasty promise for wandless work for the next lesson, and then she’s back to burning the practice dummies by her lonesome.
All in all, she thinks the evening goes swimmingly. Magic bursts out of her fingertips, that heady feeling of power from her navel, an aguamenti extremi conjured from wandtip and drenching an entire row of moving dummy targets. DADA spells are different from charmwork or transfiguration, because above all else, there needs to be power. Power that can only be practiced over and over again, like a muscle, until it grows strong. Clever witches and wizards can minimise the amount of power necessary for battle, but all the strongest players have been the ones with a well-honed magical core.
She sees herself in the mirrors on the opposing wall, corrects her stance again and again, until her body is like fine lines drawn on parchment, coiled to attack. Potter’s cheery propaganda about leading children to the battlefield is working, because for a scant few moments, Miri can imagine herself fighting dark wizards. All cackling, of course, in their stereotypical horror movie costumes and shouting non-PG things to an audience. Then she shakes it off and remembers her dream of confundus -ing her way into a nice real estate deal in West London alongside several exotic pet lizards.
Leaving the lesson is the stressful bit, apparently.
“You’re a prefect,” Ron Weasley realises, in a bout of absolute brilliance. The Ravenclaw prefect badge shines brightly on her uniform robes, to everyone’s stunning shock.
Miri raises an eyebrow. “An observant one, aren’t you.”
It means that she’s pushed to roam the nearby corridors, as it’s well past curfew, to make sure Filch or Umbridge aren’t stalking the shadows like evil creatures from a children’s novel. So she’s stationed at one end of the hallway, faking being busy examining a portrait that may or may not be depicting inappropriate relations with frogs and ballet shoes, whilst the other prefects – Bones, Granger, Ron Weasley, Goldstein – position themselves at other ends, guiding the students without a handy dandy badge of authority out to their common rooms.
All the younger students disappear, one by one, and then the fifth-years, then the sixth-years, then Miri is the only one left. She’s the oldest (and a prefect), so being caught is less damaging for her. Besides, she’s never received a detention before, so it’s a bit exciting to be caught up in all this thrill.
Anyway, what can a professor even do to her? She’s not a child; any punitive measures meant to make her feel shame and regret will be met with, at most, a mild shrug.
With that being said, there’s a jolt of fear in her heart when she sees a shadow growing behind her on the ground, someone terrifyingly tall and large, and she quickly whips her head around to give a disappointed frown to George Weasley, who has attached himself to her like a parasitic fungus in the past twenty-four hours.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” he says, with another over the top wink. “I won’t be a bother. I’ll escort you to your tower, fair maiden, out of the goodness of my heart as your noble knight.”
She’s somehow caught the attention of this man.
Not somehow. That would make it seem like it’s a great unknown. Miri knows exactly why George has developed an interest in her, and she’s not that upset about it. What’s the most that can happen in fooling around with the Plot? Some minor attraction on the side won’t make her suddenly develop a case of idiocy.
The brief thought or you could join me flutters across her mind, but it’s an unlikely prospect when they barely know each other.
“Less of a knight, more of a jester, perhaps,” she muses.
The halls are dark, the torches extinguished in the late hour, and all she can see are shadows. But then they walk by a rayonnant window – a later renovation to the medieval castle, perhaps – and the moonlight shines on them both and he’s so utterly visible and human that she’s tempted to hold his arm, rip his hands out of his pockets, and feel his touch. There’s something special about him, about both twins, really. People who want to make others laugh do so because there’s something deep within urging them to feel… useful, necessary, and distinct to the world. She’s never felt the urge to make someone laugh, never felt it necessary to prove herself like that. What was it like to grow up in the middle of so many siblings? To have your identity split in half? To not be seen as a unique individual, capable of independent thought?
Miri doesn’t think the twins detest each other – no, they’re quite attached – but personally, she’d hate to be defined by the existence of others.
“Such marvellous flattery,” George whispers, but his voice still echoes into the night. “And here I thought you to be incapable of humour. How can I make you laugh, Prince?”
And then they hear footsteps round the bend.
They both pause.
For a ridiculous moment, Miri thinks it’s Professor Sprout based on the shadow of a short, squat woman, and minutely relaxes. Sprout would rather laugh at two older students dodging curfew than take away house points or give detention – in fact, she’s quite certain the old lady encourages a bit of unofficial adventuring. But it’s not Sprout, it’s Umbridge, and they hear the tap-tap of kitten heels and the hem-hem coughing of that distinctive nasally voice. And there’s Filch’s voice behind her, complaining about students getting into trouble, and George immediately takes her hand and drags her to the closest door of a broom closet.
There are far too many broom closets in this school than there are brooms, Miri thinks, a bit incredulously.
George mutters a muffliato on both of them as he tucks them behind a large panel of wood, perhaps an old cupboard door, in the musty, pitch-black closet. He layers a few disillusionment charms over the wood and their bodies, and only stops when the staff members are close. Miri picks up where he left off, carefully taking her wand from her ear to wordlessly add to the wards.
The closet door opens. Filch mumbles something about disgusting teenagers, but doesn’t appear to notice them, and he closes the door behind him with an unsettling thud.
“One of the portraits said there were students causing mischief here!”
Umbridge’s shrill voice can be heard through the door, having unfortunately stopped right in front of the closet to have a chat with Filch, instead of wandering off looking. And chat they do, all a bunch of trivial nonsense about the campus layout and tricky children, to the point where Miri is startlingly aware of the position she’s in, a strong arm wrapped around her, pressing her tightly against his front.
If only George had decided to go back to the Gryffindor tower with Fred, instead of waiting around in a shady corner to harass her. Miri might’ve gotten away with a stern, passive-aggressive word from Umbridge, as long as she’d made up some prefect patrol excuse, and then gone on her merry way home. Instead, she’s stuck with a known troublemaker, and if they’re caught together, opposite genders that they are, that horrible bitch of a witch will make them actually suffer for it. How annoying. Hiring a hitman is sounding more and more like a good idea.
George shifts his body subtly, but there’s not much she can think of other than his body and the heat of it burning her alive, so she knows what’s going on.
He shifts again, fairly naturally, because standing perfectly still is painful on the legs, and she moves with it, resting backwards. His arms, one wrapped around her ribs and the other around the collar, stiffen, and she admires the hard-earned muscle. The back of her head is at the base of his neck and she can hear his breath hitch and heart skip a beat.
She moves slightly and his arms tighten around her in warning.
But why would she ever let up on this, because there’s nothing funnier than seeing young men squirm about their body and biology betraying them, and she very accidentally feels something hard dig into her lower back. She bends her hips away, as if immensely shocked, and she can feel his palpable embarrassment in the silence.
Luckily for George’s sanity, Umbridge and Filch finally move on to wander another corridor, but not before they hear them talking about waiting at the base of Gryffindor tower to catch any troublemakers from entering. Potter’s name is thrown around quite a bit, quite unfairly, as well as a general ‘Weasley,’ but Miri imagines that the mentioned people are actually tucked nicely in bed by now.
George tears away like her skin burns as soon as they’re gone, all the way to the other edge of the broom closet. That is to say, barely a metre away, because these spaces are disgustingly cramped.
“I…” he says, swallowing, finally stumped on what to say.
Her night vision has developed enough to somewhat make him out in the utter darkness, but she likes what she sees enough to say her next piece. “Gryffindor tower’s being guarded from entry, it seems.”
“By the tossers themselves,” he says, latching onto the new conversation segment quickly.
“I suppose that means you’ll have to sleep in the Ravenclaw tower,” she says, all too casual.
“Me? A lion in the eagle nest? A preposterous thought.”
“Is that cowardice I hear?”
“Slay that thought,” George says. “Interesting proposition, I must say, and much preferable to sleeping the night away in a broom closet with Quidditch practice tomorrow morning.”
“Naturally,” Miri says wryly, and leads him away to the Ravenclaw common room.
The riddle is easy enough, as the statue door knocker is half-asleep and can barely mumble out some recycled gibberish and opens about a second before Miri even says her answer, and then they’re stumbling into the empty common room, which is more of a library than a meeting space. Apparently other houses have squishy sofas and plush carpet – all there is here are desks, books, and mini labs. And George seems to notice this, because he warily eyes the sparse decor and the complete lack of anything resembling a bed.
“Would it be frowned upon to transfigure another house’s belongings into, say, a mattress?” He asks.
“Quite,” she says. “But I’ve never been devoid of a good night’s rest to need such a thing. You see, as the only seventh year girl in Ravenclaw, I have a dormitory room all to myself. No pesky roommates to keep me up with their snoring.”
He’s bright enough to catch on to what she’s saying and doesn’t say anything for a minute.
“Well then, goodnight to you, Mister Weasley,” she says, winking obnoxiously, identical to the one he’d given her earlier, and leaves him to ponder on all her ridiculous statements, heading to bed.
The Ravenclaw table is abuzz with gossip come the next morning. Miri is immediately sat with all the older girls, excited to speak with her for the first time, as the events of the early morning comes to light – a few students stumbled upon one of the Weasley twins fallen asleep in the common room. Then he woke up, didn’t say anything, and darted out in a rush for quidditch practice. The bet, currently, is who shagged him and then dumped him outside. And which twin it is.
“How interesting,” Miri says, arranging breakfast for the day. Strawberry jam and scrambled eggs on toast, tomato sauce with black pudding, and a very tall glass of milk.
“By common reasoning, there are only a few suspects,” Sue Li says. She’s a very short and skinny little fifth year, but she speaks with an unyielding conviction that makes anyone not want to cross her. “Fred or George Weasley are seventh years, and despite all their troublemaking, they’re morally righteous Gryffindors, so they’d never be with a girl younger than fifth year. That leaves a total of nine potential people in the Ravenclaw tower.”
Miri drinks her milk resolutely. She didn’t factor in a male lover. But Wizarding Britain isn’t ready for that yet.
Quickly, one by one, the fifth and sixth year girls chime in their alibis, which are backed up by dorm mates. Then, as if in one terrifying telepathic motion, all eight upperclassmen girls turn to stare at Miri, who is quite enjoying her meal.
Chang and Edgecomb know that she came back to the tower late, definitively, as they’d seen her patrol the corridors outside the Room of Requirement last. So Edgecomb, the brat she is (but an otherwise fairly average teen girl), gasps first, whisper-squealing, claims that the only possible person must be Miriam Prince, with no alibi for her nocturnal activities.
“There is a nonzero chance that Fred or George Weasley snuck into the common room for an unrelated prank and accidentally fell asleep. The third years that found him were up very early, and he left very early as well, perhaps to escape scrutiny,” Padma Patil points out diplomatically.
Nerds, all of them. Even when gossipping, they sound like little robots.
“That sounds more likely,” Miri chimes in. “I’m not so sure a Gryffindor would be willing to shag me.”
The girls tut, and it’s an altogether wild experience, feeling the full brunt force of hanging out with girls her age (not counting the reincarnation years, but all her peers have apparently matured enough to be ‘adult’-ish, so she doesn’t immediately feel incredibly slimy just by associating with them). “No, no, don’t say that,” Li says. “You’re pretty enough.”
It’s not the best compliment, but it’s not the worst, either.
“What makes you think that?” Chang asks, ever the kind, sweet one of the bunch.
Let’s hope they’re all a bunch of gossips, she thinks, and flashes a quick glimpse up at the staff table at the head of the Great Hall. “What?” Miri says, putting on her best poker face. “I thought everyone knew.”
Lisa Turpin snuggles up uncomfortably close on her side, Nora Moon on the other side as a copycat. Female attention has never felt more… confusing, however nice.
“Professor Snape’s my cousin,” she lies.
Everyone connects the dots in their heads fast – the Potions master abhors Gryffindors and treats them much more rudely compared to other houses for whatever mysterious reason, thus Gryffindors despise Snape and tend to act out in his class, which makes him all the more irritated, which breaks down into an unbreakable cycle of Snape-Gryffindor hatred. Maybe a few exceptionally intelligent lions with good manners have managed to pierce the icy walls, but it’s a fair assumption to make that anything Snape related is unpopular within the other house’s tower.
“Oh,” Chang says, after a long silence.
Miri finishes eating.
“Aren’t you… a muggleborn?” Edgecomb asks carefully.
“Am I?” She says, lips quirking. “He’s not a pureblood by any means, if that helps.”
There’s more stunned silence at the table. Miri knows it shouldn’t backfire on her because she doubts any of them are dumb enough to spread the rumour to the teaching staff – or, at least, the rumour will be so far removed from her that it won’t even be effective anymore. At least one of these girls, Edgecomb or one of the Moon sisters, will be gossiping to some other house friends by next week, but that sort of shit won’t affect her NEWTs or personal life, so there’s really no harm to this. Perhaps it’s more than a little funny to leave her last year of Hogwarts with such a mysterious allure. She hasn’t encountered the name ‘Prince’ in any noteworthy history books, so it’s not like one of them will stumble their way into finding out all his family secrets anyway.
And, well, has there seriously never been a muggleborn student before with a coincidental last name? Take the Black family for example – that’s a somewhat common name, really. In Hogwarts’ ancient history, surely there’s been one silly little example somewhere.
“He’s not a pureblood?” Patil asks dubiously.
What an odd hang up.
“Can’t you see the family resemblance?” Miri says, very seriously.
They’ve got the same colouring, but that’s the end of their similarities. But if they squint and convince themselves to stretch the truth, then maybe they could look… extremely distantly related. Seventh cousins, maybe. About how related everyone in Wizarding Britain is to each other anyway.
“Yes,” Patil agrees quickly. “Sorry. It’s just, wow. New information.”
And with that, Miri successfully avoids detection for having brought George Weasley over to the common room as the other girls stew in revelation, completely forgetting the events of the morning. She can’t imagine something like this will happen again, as it’s unlikely she’ll find herself engineered into a scenario where she’ll be stuck along with him again and absolutely must invite her back to her quarters, so she ignores the thought entirely. It’s better off thinking that he must’ve been plotting a prank.
And then the morning quidditch practice team saunters into the Great Hall, almost late for breakfast, still in their sports uniforms. Miri has finished eating, so she passes by them at the entrance, smelling the salt of their sweat and the heat of their bodies.
George’s eyes instantly catch hers, and she feels him continue watching her even as she breaks eye contact and hurries off down the hall to the library. She doesn’t want to think about how bloody attractive that uniform is. It’s adhesive and skin-tight in all the right spots, yet with thickly padded plates where the bludgers might hit, rather like armour, and it’s ridiculous but the emblazoned names on the back of the apparel makes them look all the more official and tantalising. She can only imagine going off in the corner of some locker room getting bloody fucked raw in her schoolgirl outfit and his Quidditch uniform, the dirt and grime from a hard-won match dripping from the back of his neck onto the pristineness of her soft skin.
Oh my fucking god, she realises, having ducked into the closest girl’s lavatory to settle her thoughts. I’m so fucking horny.
Turns out being a repressed adult-turned child turning back into an adult has left quite the mark on her, because she’s suddenly aware of things like sexuality again. Violently. And she checks herself out in the lavatory mirrors, vain as a peacock, wondering what other physical parts of her she needs to keep track of. It’s odd, being a reincarnation, because she’s lived a whole other life before this, however tragically short it was, but she still feels like an eighteen year old. Perhaps there’s something to discover about the mind and body being connected, but she’s not nearly tempestuous enough to research that field (in science or in magic). But regardless, Miri – or whoever she was last, it doesn’t matter now anymore – has now grown up to match her mental state. And it’s, well, nice. Comforting. Too many sex-related thoughts to feel completely sane, but she supposes that’s par the course for young adults.
Everything in the mirror seems alright. She’s no longer a weirdly foreign child-shaped creature. All the pimples are gone, the pudginess has dramatically reduced into nothing, and she’s mostly woman-shaped.
I could go out to any city right now and they’d treat me normally. Like an adult.
That’s a fantastic revelation.
In fact, she’s highly tempted to head to Hogsmeade right now and immediately buy several litres of vodka. But alas, it’s a Thursday, and there is work to be done.
Miri spends the rest of the day haunting the library, scribbling through A-Level textbooks, trying to calculate the area under a curve without a calculator and reading up on prose and rhetoric. Hogwarts doesn’t teach nearly as intelligently as muggle schools do, as there are only essay-writing study groups up until fifth year, once a week with the head of house, which is meant to improve one’s general language abilities. No other English classes, and Arithmancy, which is like maths but slightly less logical, is an elective instead of a core subject. Bizarrely enough, witches and wizards in this country are meant to be home-schooled or privately tutored in all the basic aspects of education – being able to read and write, and maybe a bit of history and some equations – but there’s nothing nearly as structured as primary school.
It does explain why Muggleborns tend to stick around in the wizarding world, even if they’re obviously unwelcome from much of society. They have nowhere else to go, after having not done any normal, formal education. Nobody in their right mind would hire some prick who hasn’t done legal schooling since the age of eleven.
The smart ones, however, can escape. The uneducated can be a powerful tool to control, easy to manipulate, easy to keep them locked up where they can never leave, thinking that where they currently are is the best place on earth.
Miri refuses to let anyone control her.
Wednesdays and Thursdays are her free days, and she’s got an afternoon block for NEWT Muggle Studies on Friday, which is where she finds herself having another rest day, really, because all this shite is easy peasy. She just needs to write something about the Korean war or Hollywood celebrities and it’s an easy O. Honestly, she mostly just zones out in the class. Except today’s Halloween, which means that she can’t just nap in the back of the room, and she has to actively participate in whatever inane trick-or-treating group exercise that Professor Burbage has set out for them.
“I hope you’re all sufficient in Transfiguration,” the professor says, quite happily.
The five students – Prince, Davies, Fowler, Jordan, and Stimpson – are all muggleborns or half-bloods, well aware of the holiday’s traditions. Miri is sat next to Patricia Stimpson, a plain Hufflepuff girl with an unfortunately large pair of ears, who’s only technically a muggleborn because both of her parents are muggleborns. The entire blood purity classification system is a bit bonkers – apparently all four grandparents have to be magical for a child to be considered a pureblood. Davies, Fowler, and Jordan are half-bloods, but seemingly diversely raised enough to understand that Burbage is a batty old coon and everyone in this damn class is here for that easy O.
“What’s this, professor?” Lee Jordan asks.
Everyone’s got a pumpkin in front of them. For the first few minutes of class, she’d thought they’d be carving jack-o-lanterns, which seemed like it could be good fun. But instead, Burbage wants them to transfigure the pumpkins into a typical muggle party costume, and they’ll spend the entire two hours wandering around the castle in their costumes, handing out muggle candy to the younger students.
Miri hadn’t realised that celebrations had been a thing in 1995, but as true as day, there are stacks and stacks of the red confectionery tubs on the desks by the pumpkins. Did Burbage somehow get in an owl order from the nearest Tesco? She picks out the Milky Way and Galaxy chocolates in the tub closest to her – for personal safekeeping, of course – before beginning the arduous task of transfiguring a pumpkin into workable clothes.
It’s a tricky subject. Object permanence is hard to manage, after a time, so if she doesn’t get the spells right, then she’ll end up butt-naked in the hall and covered in pumpkin guts.
“Any ideas what you’ll dress up as?” Stimpson asks.
The Hufflepuff girl is very much not involved with the Plot, and thus Miri had not been afraid to befriend this girl over the years. Nothing like best friends, but they’re reasonably friendly enough around each other, moreso than she is with her female Ravenclaw underclassmen. Sometimes they even sit next to each other in the library.
“Probably something grossly obscene,” Miri says, thinking. “So Professor Burbage doesn’t dare do this with next year’s cohort.”
“Stopped in its tracks, I like it,” Stimpson says.
In the end, Miri isn’t stupid enough to walk around in something that could get her in trouble, but it’s definitely sexy and will make more than one head turn, enough for one of the more prude staff members to raise concerns next year. She goes with a catsuit, something out of a Batman comic, and it’s a shiny, body-hugging latex that covers just about every square inch of skin yet is more revealing that anything she’s ever worn. Apparently she has boobs. And hips. Who knew?
Stimpson barks out a laugh and transfigures a matching Poison Ivy costume, although it’s more of a green muggle dress than risqué vines. “Very brave of you,” she comments, terribly amused at Miri’s fake looking cat-ear headband. “Is there anyone in particular you’re hoping to catch the attention of tonight?”
She barely resists saying your mum.
The other Muggle Studies students, Jordan and Davies, the frat boy-types, manage a matching muggle cop and firefighter costume, but somehow missing their shirts and also wearing body glitter. Perhaps they’re more familiar with the porn versions of the outfits than the real thing. And Kenneth Fowler is a bit too enthusiastic dressing up as a clown for Miri to ever want to be alone in a room with him ever again.
“Ah, sadly not,” Miri says. “The last time a decent looking bloke passed through these halls was before the Founders’ time.”
They stifle a giggle when Burbage comes by to judge the costume’s accuracy. The professor makes zero remarks on their relative inappropriateness and deems everyone ready to go around and hand out sweets. The six of them go out in a group, startling the nearby students at the entourage of colour and muggle-ness, with more than one dropped jaw and buggered out eyes at the raunchiness of it all. It’s a Friday afternoon and there aren’t any other concurrent NEWT classes at this time, so none of them are particularly rushed to finish by the two hour mark, and the odd little group end up walking together to the Great Hall for dinnertime, still wearing their festive outfits. Miri doesn’t think she’s sustained an interaction with this many people before for this long, but it’s nice and cheery and they’re speaking of inane, boring topics like so many other students of their age.
She walks a little closer with Davies, who might be something of a friend now. Despite being a rather average seventeen year old boy, therefore quite boring, he’s a nice chap.
At the Gryffindor table, they hear rioting. Their quidditch team is patting Lee Jordan on the back, catcalling with whistles and jaunts, and slapping him all over his glittery, bare torso. Fred and George pretend to swoon and fawn over him, and the image unlocks something extremely perverted within her, which she immediately locks up in the deepest recess of her mind. Some of the Ravenclaw boys follow suit and harangue Davies into flexing his abdomen and pose to show off his biceps. More than one girl – Patil and Turpin, notably – sigh at the entire scene, and Miri quickly escapes to sit next to Luna at the very end of the table, close to the staff. No, no more hormones. It’s been a stressful week as is.
Luna is pleased enough that someone has willingly sat next to her at the table that she doesn’t bother with any formalities.
“What is the meaning of this? How ridiculously inappropriate–.”
Well. Burbage can deal with Umbridge on her own. Not her problem. Umbridge had banned meetings of students of three or more, something about deterring clubs from forming (which was rather petty and also made for a headache-inducing screaming session from Madam Hooch, heard throughout the halls, until the rules relented enough to allow only quidditch), but technically their trick-or-treating affair had been a class trip, not a ‘group.’ Headmaster Dumbledore takes a slow sip from his goblet to hide his twitching lips, and Miri suddenly remembers that the old man is also something of an adventuring soul, like Professor Sprout. Other than Harry Potter, he’s the one person she’s avoided the most, very careful not to catch his attention, lest he does something idiotic and reads her mind or sees ‘potential’ in her and hamfists his way into making her join the upcoming war. Luckily, she’s kept a low profile, and she’s certain he barely even knows her name.
“Are you looking forward to the match on Sunday?” Luna asks.
“A bit,” Miri admits. “Gryffindor versus Slytherin matches are always dramatic enough to be exciting.”
She mushes up the faggots with the haggis on her plate and pours a sickening amount of gravy over it all, slightly peeved at her earlier daydreams with quidditch uniforms.
Luna gasps. “Like a telenovela!”
It’s better to not ask how Luna knows about Spanish soap operas, so she doesn’t, and the conversation moves on to preparations for the match. It’ll be a cold, windy day, so Miri plans on sticking layers of heating charms on her cloak, scarf, and gloves, and Luna is confident she’ll withstand the temperature when wearing a massive lion’s head hat that she’s charmed to roar at opportune times. It’s an impressive bit of magic for a fourth year, and the girl has bright prospects for the future. If only she doesn’t frighten potential job interviewers away.
The Great Hall is golden and lively tonight, all amidst its Halloween decorations, but it’s not quite the same as the muggle version. The ancient magical holiday Samhain must still subtly influence this society.
“Wanna try a celebration?” Miri asks, when the dinner meal ends and a vast array of desserts appears. “Not a celebration like a party – it’s the name of a muggle chocolate assortment.”
The Muggle Studies NEWT class hadn’t run into her during their merry jaunt around the castle. Then again, they hadn’t been able to penetrate the library, as Madam Pince had taken one look at the group and summarily banned them from entering and being a sugar-coated nuisance. And she eyes the wrapped up sweet in Miri’s hand with a degree of trepidation before calming into a sad sort of smile, pale blue eyes turning watery.
“I think eating chocolate with you can be called a celebration,” Luna says. “A celebration like a party, I think.” And she quietly accepts the sweet.
The next day is the day before the first quidditch match of the season, which means the entire school is caught in a tizzy. Miri can’t go two steps outside of her room without bumping into someone or other rushing to charm heated clothes or whatnot. Her laundry is still draped over the desk in her room, as the house elves are doubtlessly far too busy preparing the stands and court and cooking up refreshments. Students are not meant to be snacking in the stands, but sometimes the games drag on for a fretfully long time and people get a bit peckish.
And on the morning of the match, she wakes up irritatingly early from all the clamour down in the common room. Ravenclaws tend to be punctual freaks, but for big events like these, they’re the first to go, far too early for it to make any practical sense. And her laundry still isn’t done yet, which she honestly should’ve accounted for, so Miri is faced with the impending horror that she might have to wear her back-up uniform today.
Or muggle clothes, because it’s the weekend it’s allowed, she thinks, pacing yet again in her room. But the heating charms won’t work so well when paired with non-wizarding robes.
And so she emerges from her room, feeling more than a little foolish at her earlier concerns because her winter cloak drapes over her entire body like one giant curtain. Unless the hemispheres magically swap, it’s highly unlikely anyone will be seeing the black uniform skirt that she wore as a third year under her cloak showing off several inches of thigh. And besides, most girls modify their uniform slightly, cutting off a few inches, as much as they can get away with without Professor Flitwick admonishing them for literally being able to look up to their knickers.
Cons (or pros, depending on the person) of being three feet tall, really.
“You haven’t left yet?” Miri asks, after most of the lot have left, ridiculously early. She pretends to ignore the giant growling lion head on the chair.
“Lord Melon doesn’t want to go out,” Luna says, troubled. “He says it’s too cold.”
Magic is funky like that. Sometimes inanimate household objects, when surrounded by witches and wizards for decades, imbibe enough magical residue to develop personalities. It’s not impossible that this fucked up taxidermy experiment has absorbed enough magic from Hogwarts’ ambience alone to develop feelings.
There are several things that Miri can do right now. She chooses what she hopes is the best one.
“Fiducia ultra solacium,” she says softly.
The lion – named Lord Melon, it appears – stops growling, and levels a terrifyingly intelligent eye on Miri with a weak snarl. It looks awake, almost, which is as good of a reason as any to explain why she hadn’t chosen Care of Magical Creatures as an elective – all those creepy, beady eyes of unknown intelligence, staring, staring, staring. She’s never been much of an animal person, having chosen not to bring a pet familiar to Hogwarts, after all. Or maybe she’s just scared of the idea of not being the smartest person in the room.
“It’s a spell that brings out your inner confidence,” Miri tells Luna. She caught some seniors last year using this spell, right before exams, so it’s probably a mildly illegal stimulant. “I doubt… Lord Melon is actually too cold. Your heating charms are more than sufficient. It’s possible that he’s just a bit nervous to go outside and meet so many people.”
Luna wears a contemplative face, much more lucid than she usually is. “Oh. That could be it.”
And then after fussing with the lion head for a bit more, they head out to the pitch at a perfectly normal time in the morning.
The players are warming up on the pitch, flying low to gain bearings of the wind and temperature, low enough to the ground. Lee Jordan is testing out his sonorous, so there’s the occasional loud noise from the staff section of the stands, as well as the hair-raising lion roars from the Ravenclaw section with Luna’s very big hat.
Reluctantly, Miri can’t help but focus on the pair of twin Beaters. From this far away, she can’t tell who’s who, which rankles.
I cannot believe I find a ginger hot, she bemoans. They don’t even have souls.
And after some more waiting around and playing guessing games with Luna as to what Madam Hooch tells the team captains – likely, a warning to not horribly disfigure each other for the sake of house rivalry – the game finally starts. Some fifth year boys behind her, Goldstein and Corner, snigger at the sight of Umbridge’s hideously gaudy green tweed coat, much like an actual toad, in the staff stands on the other side of the pitch, and Miri smiles to herself at everyone hating on the world’s worst professor. Mutual hatred for Umbridge has made her many friends, lately.
“Somehow uglier than Snape,” Corner whispers, Miri distantly eavesdropping. “Never thought I’d say that about that bat, but nobody likes that fat pink toad.”
“Shhh! Man, she’s right in front of us.”
And then the whispering stops right when it gets interesting. One of the girls must’ve gossipped, then. Miri wonders when the rumours will reach the other houses, or Severus Snape himself, even. That would be a very fine day to pretend her hardest not to laugh and play up the confused muggleborn act.
The game itself starts out strong on Slytherin’s side. The entire house brings out the choir toads in the first twenty minutes and starts singing ‘Weasley is our King’ to the tune of some popular tune on the wizarding radio, and if she were an unaffiliated third party, Miri would’ve found the entire thing entirely comical. Except she’s not, to her surprise. Ron Weasley reacts out of nerves from the teasing and loses an embarrassing amount of points for a Keeper, so the other Gryffindors have to pick up the slack.
She doesn’t remember all the fine details of the Plot, but she’s sure nothing that bad will happen here, other than teenage antics. Harry Potter always manages to save the day in the end.
The players zip by in the air, fast as the eyes can see, quick as quick is, and she’s enraptured by it all. The Weasley twin beaters have differing styles – one is protective, defensive, keeping an eye out on the opponents, and the other is veritable madness, powering through the pitch with force, slamming his bat with audible bangs from all the way over here, relentless and ruthless. And one of the twins flies close enough to the Ravenclaw stand and twists around in the air like a rocket, enough for Miri to catch his face and see that it’s George here who is the one in charge, blasting away all defenses.
Her breath hitches.
Odd. How odd. Everything is odd. Normally it’s Fred leading the pranks, the trouble, the laughter. But it’s George who tears up the skies like there’s a deep-seated, burning anger that needs to be released.
In the end, Harry Potter saves the day by catching the snitch at the last possible moment for Gryffindor to win. Slytherins groan, yell up something fierce, as is entirely their right, considering how much effort they must’ve put forth to memorise that song, but then all the houses are in uproar when the players start arguing in the grass below. Madam Hooch hurries down to stop it, but then Malfoy starts saying something and Potter says something and then they’re actually fighting each other.
Potter is holding back George, the Gryffindor Chaser girls are holding back Fred, and they’re off to quite literally beat up Malfoy.
At the end of it, she feels somewhat sorry for Draco Malfoy, who is nursing an impressive amount of bruises, but more sorry for George and Potter, who are whisked away by a furious McGonagall. Everyone slowly trickles away from the pitch, rumours spreading instantaneously about what on earth Malfoy could’ve said to enrage them to that point of violence.
Honestly, not much, Miri thinks. Malfoy could volunteer in a soup kitchen and someone would still hate him on instinct.
She spots Umbridge hurrying away to the castle, a rather nasty smile on that woman’s stupid toad face, and a bad feeling sinks to the bottom of Miri’s stomach. Something foul is afoot. And the only people she’d be after after George and Potter, who threw the punches, so something will happen to them.
Not my problem.
Except it is, and Luna at her side, as they glumly walk the frost-lain path through the grounds, makes a squawking noise. “Miri! What are you doing? You’re attracting nargles,” she says, accusatory.
Miri swallows and decides to do something stupid.
Without much of a further acknowledgement of Luna, who doesn’t look too put out anymore, Miri follows after Umbridge, casting notice-me-not spells and various other powerful disillusionment charms that assure her to be all but invisible to someone not paying attention. Then she’s entering the castle, going up the grand staircases, keeping Umbridge just out of view so she isn’t spotted, and finding her way to the transfiguration hall, to Professor McGonagall’s office. It’s warm inside, so she points her wand at her cloak and banishes it to her dorm room. And she listens in from the open door, to hear what’s happening. It’s not good. How horrified George and Potter must be, getting banned from quidditch. And distastefully banning Fred as well, purely by association.
And then she stalks them down the long shadows of the darkened day, in the depressed air of the halls, after McGonagall kicks them out of her office.
He’s upset. I don’t like it when he’s upset.
Not the most astute observation, but George is walking with anger in every step, shoulders tight and tense, and Miri realises that she wants to do something.
So she releases all the spells on her person and walks up behind the two of them, heading to their tower, and says, “I need to talk.”
“This isn’t the time, Prince,” George says bitterly, for once not smiling. Potter looks too enraged to even speak.
“I know,” she says, but she doesn’t, not really. She’s never been the victim of nefarious plots and true injustice like the Plot people have faced. She’s always just been… there. In the corner. At the sidelines, minding her business. Why should she care that these people are suffering, when Miri is nearly in arm’s reach of all her hopes and dreams? “No, I don’t know. But, just follow me. Please.”
Miri reaches out to touch his arm, and she doesn’t know what prompts her to do that, but George doesn’t protest and lets himself be dragged away, darkly. Potter heads back to his common room alone.
She leads them to a broom closet on another floor, except it’s not a broom closet, it’s the hidden entrance to one of the prefect’s lavatories, which is as private a place as can be in this entire school. There aren’t any spying portraits, and the school enchantments protect against any other devices from entering or listening in through the walls. George might know this place, he might not, but he doesn’t show any recognition or care in his face, rigid as it is.
And then he bursts into a rage, exploding about Malfoy insulting his mother, Potter’s mother, muggles, muggleborns. He bites his lip – chapped, pink, usually stretched wide in a smirk – to check Miri’s reaction. She keeps herself perfectly composed, sitting on a stone bench by the fountain pool.
“I want to hire a hitman,” Miri says, hardly even joking.
George catches on that the topic has moved from Malfoy to Umbridge. Malfoy’s just a schoolyard bully – nothing actually dangerous. He’s even funny at times, the way snobby rich kids can be. But Umbridge is just the absolute worst. She’s the worst kind of power, the worst kind of corruption, of biblical greed and nothing but. Sadistic, even. And in charge of watching over the children of the country.
“Too expensive, unfortunately,” he says, after a moment. “Or maybe one of the poor hitmen would be better. They’d botch up the job and leave her in St. Mungo’s to suffer. The cack would deserve it.”
She doesn’t think he’s joking either.
Then he sighs, hands in his hair, looking up to the ceiling. “Merlin, how am I supposed to tell Fred that I’ve got him kicked off the team?”
“You can tell him, and then tell him your plans to get her kicked out of Hogwarts.”
“You think we haven’t tried?”
He tells her all that they’ve done so far. Pranks to scare her off didn’t work, so they tried to snoop into her office, but the door’s warded up with ministry spells, it would take a miracle to get through them by the end of the year. He gets all worked up again, pacing around in front of her, thick quidditch boots stomping on the echoing floor tiles, an eerie resemblance to Miri’s nightly ritual.
“I’ll help you,” Miri says, and her head is spinning from all the thoughts popping up in her head, at her sensibility screaming at her, at her morality begging her, and her entire personal history taking a nosedive at all her sacrifices. “You’re worth it. I know you don’t know me but god, the entire school wants her to get the fuck out, it’s not just you two. I despise her, I want her out, I want to pass my NEWTs, I–.”
I want to be safely away from the Plot. The war. The dark lord.
“I want to help you,” she says, trying to keep her voice strong but failing miserably. She wants to tell him that it’ll get better, but it won’t, it really won’t. His twin, his other half, will die soon, his friends will be irrevocably traumatised from the war, and it won’t get better at all because wizarding society will carry this dark wound for generations to come. She doesn’t actually want to help him. She’s selfish. She wants to help herself. She wants to live a luxurious muggle life and read books and bake cookies and pretend her school peers aren’t suffering from the cruciatus and dying in spades out of soul-split madness. And Miri tries to embody all these complicated emotions in her face and body language instead of her words, and reaches her hand out for a handshake.
He studies her for a long time. He stands as an inscrutable figure, taller than life, the dirty, sweaty quidditch player standing out against the clean lavatory, in his dark red and black uniform that makes his hair look nearly brown as his eyes. And he bends down in front of her stone bench, kneeling, to look her in the eye.
Then George grabs her face and kisses her.