One unmistakable change that came with finally entering their O.W.L. year was that the professors, almost universally, no longer showed the slightest mercy when assigning homework.
In their morning classes of Herbology and Charms alone—Harry and the others each walked away from both Professor Sprout and Professor Flitwick carrying two full essays apiece, the length requirement in every case no shorter than fourteen inches of dense written parchment.
On top of that already daunting pile sat the essay Professor Slughorn had assigned the day before yesterday, covering the various properties of moonstone and it seemed unlikely, given the general mood of the day, that this afternoon's session with Professor McGonagall would let them off any easier.
Harry could already picture, with grim and justified clarity, precisely how every evening for the remainder of the school year was going to unfold from here: himself hunched over the coffee table in the Gryffindor common room after dinner each night, frantically playing catch-up on an ever-accumulating stack of assignments.
Hermione, for her part, had already resorted to using her precious lunch hour for the same purpose—shovelling food into her mouth with one hand while flipping rapidly through a stack of reference books she'd borrowed from the library with the other.
A sudden burst of noise broke her concentration. She lifted her eyes from the dense, small print in front of her, glaring with genuine, sharpened fury at whoever was responsible for the disturbance to her limited working time.
"I already told you, Ron, it's completely out of the question. Hagrid cannot possibly be keeping a dragon in his hut. Or have you already forgotten the entire lesson he learned last time, with Norbert?"
"Oh, fine then—why don't you tell me what he's got locked up in there, if you're so certain it isn't that?"
Ron shot back, entirely unconvinced by her confidence.
"—maybe it's..."
Hermione hesitated, clearly turning through several possibilities.
"...some magical creature Hagrid's cooked up on his own again. Something like the Blast-Ended Skrewts, last year, remember?"
The corner of Harry's mouth twitched at the memory, and he shuddered automatically.
If that turned out to be true, Professor Dumbledore and Professor Watson might as well simply show Hagrid some mercy and let him keep a proper dragon instead—anything, surely, would be preferable to a second generation of Skrewts.
Ron looked fully prepared to keep arguing the point further with Hermione, but Harry caught his eye in time and shot him a warning look across the table.
If none of them wanted to spend the entire school year being worked to death over homework assignments, the very last thing any of them should do was set Hermione off into a proper argument during the first week of term.
Harry's warning look also served, conveniently, as a natural pivot point for Ron, who glanced left and then right along the table to check who might be listening, before lowering his voice considerably and asking carefully:
"So—about this morning. What actually happened, I mean, with Ginny and Malfoy—"
Hermione, who had already bowed her head back down over her book, lifted her eyes again at the question.
"I've just been wondering..."
Harry said slowly. He already knew, before he'd finished the sentence, that his theory was bound to meet with scepticism.
"...maybe. Well—maybe Malfoy's got some kind of frightening mark on his arm that he doesn't want anyone else to see."
'A frightening mark?'
Ron blinked in confusion at the phrase, while Hermione looked at Harry with an expression that said, quite plainly and without needing a single word, 'I knew you'd end up thinking exactly that.'
"What are you even talking about, Harry?"
Ron pressed further, still genuinely not following the implication.
"The Dark Mark."
Harry finally said the actual words aloud, letting them sit in the space between the three of them.
A sharp, audible intake of breath—
Ron's reaction was precisely what Harry had privately expected it would be. He gasped audibly, then sat there gaping at Harry with his mouth hanging fully open, looking for all the world like one of the castle's stone gargoyles.
"Is it really so impossible, though?"
What actually irritated Harry more than Ron's shock was Hermione's own expression—she showed neither clear agreement nor outright disagreement with the theory, only regarded him with an expression of worry.
"I—"
Hermione closed her book with a soft thud, clearly preparing herself to have a proper, serious conversation with Harry about this.
"You can't simply decide he's joined the Death Eaters, Harry, just because Malfoy happens to be touchy about someone brushing against his arm—"
"Before the battle at Diagon Alley, when we ran into Malfoy at Gringotts that day, I already thought something was off about him—"
Harry rushed to get his full point across before either of them could interrupt further.
"He looked frightened back then—frightened specifically of seeing Professor Watson walk in. But what would he actually have to be afraid of, from Professor Watson of all people? He's always been the most popular professor among the Slytherins by a wide margin, hasn't he? That reaction never made sense to me."
"There are plenty of other possible explanations for that, Harry—"
Ron hesitated before wading properly into the conversation, clearly trying to think it through.
"After all, there's no getting around the plain fact that his father's a Death Eater. Maybe he was just worried Professor Watson would take that out on him somehow."
Harry's breath caught momentarily in his throat at that. He had to admit, turning it over, that Ron had a point buried in there.
"Then what about Malfoy sneaking off from his mother's side, specifically to slip into Borgin and Burkes—"
Harry said quickly, pressing forward before the doubt could fully take hold.
"He was trying to get his hands on something capable of breaking through a powerful magical seal—and it just so happens that that same damned door, and that same corridor, have been showing up in my dreams this entire time.
If you ask me, Voldemort must have given Malfoy some kind of assignment. Voldemort wants something out of Hogwarts, but he can't get inside the castle himself—so he's found himself a mole instead."
Harry paused for breath, then added, with conviction: "Malfoy's the perfect candidate for that role, when you actually think it through properly."
Ron pressed his lips together, genuinely deep in troubled thought now.
There was, after all, no shortage of precedent for Voldemort planting spies at Hogwarts.
Back in their very first year, he'd tried using Quirrell to steal the Sorcerer's Stone from under the school's protection. And then, of course, there had been Cliodna, only last year, hiding in plain sight as Moody.
Still, Hermione wasn't so easily persuaded by the pattern. She kept giving Harry that same infuriatingly worried, careful look.
"Do you remember what Professor Watson said to you over the summer, Harry—"
Hermione said softly.
"Which part, exactly?"
Harry was getting genuinely a little irritated now, the repeated caution was wearing at him.
"The time after we ran into Malfoy at Gringotts—"
Hermione pressed her lips together briefly before continuing.
"He warned you not to rely too heavily on the information you get about Voldemort through your dreams."
Harry frowned, thinking it over properly.
That was, he had to admit, entirely true—Professor Watson really had warned him about exactly that, in almost those words. To this day, if he was being honest with himself, Harry still wasn't entirely sure what to make of the warning.
"So what, though?"
"I think..."
Hermione, of all people, grew visibly hesitant here, stammering slightly over the words.
"...at the end of the day, Professor Watson's warning has to mean something, doesn't it? He doesn't say things without reason. If he specifically told you not to trust the dreams too much, maybe that's worth actually listening to, rather than building an entire theory about Malfoy on top of exactly the thing he warned you about."
"You two just don't want to believe me, that's all this is!"
Harry said, thoroughly exasperated now and then, out of the very corner of his eye, he caught sight of the exact person they'd been discussing walking past the Gryffindor table on his way toward the doors.
"Malfoy—"
Harry immediately turned his head, narrowing his eyes to properly watch Malfoy leave the Slytherin table and head toward the entrance hall.
Whether it was this morning's unusual Meditation class that had given Draco some flash of unexpected perceptiveness or simply ordinary instinct, he seemed, in that moment, to sense Harry's gaze on him from across the Hall, and turned to look back toward the Gryffindor table in response.
Their eyes met across the crowded space.
Draco could feel the wariness and hostility mixed into the look Harry was giving him. And Harry, in turn, sensed something complicated buried deep in the stillness of Draco's returning gaze.
Under the combined watch of all three of them at the Gryffindor table, Draco continued walking on toward the entrance hall and then, before actually reaching it, turned off abruptly into the first-floor corridor instead, disappearing from their line of sight.
"What's he up to?"
Harry dropped the half-eaten chicken leg he'd been absently clutching this entire conversation.
"Er—"
This hardly counted as a real question in Ron's own baffled opinion. He blinked at Harry.
"I'd guess he's finished eating. Off to his next class, maybe?"
"But he didn't take his bag with him."
Harry pulled his gaze back from the doors, giving Ron a meaningful look across the table.
"Maybe he just forgot it in the rush?"
Ron glanced over toward the now-thinning Slytherin table a few times, checking.
"Malfoy's never exactly short of lackeys willing to fetch things for him. That hideous cow Parkinson will bring it along after him easily enough, she always does."
"Then why didn't he simply wait for Parkinson to catch up—or for Nott, for that matter? Their classes should be the same as his."
Harry said.
Ron didn't say anything further in response. He honestly, genuinely couldn't tell anymore whether Harry's instincts here were sharp and worth trusting, or whether Harry was simply being oversensitive after a full summer of dreams and suspicion building on top of each other.
"So, what do you actually think we should do about it?"
Hermione asked, direct as ever, cutting through the uncertainty.
"I think—just like at Diagon Alley, before—"
Harry wiped his hands hurriedly on his napkin and grabbed his school bag from the bench beside him.
"Malfoy's deliberately ditched them so he can go off and do something underhanded without witnesses."
As he spoke, Harry pulled his bag tight against his own body, already thinking through the process.
Last time he'd tried following Malfoy under the Cloak, he'd given himself away but that had been because of his own footprints in the soft earth outside Borgin and Burkes, not because there'd been anything actually wrong with his Invisibility Cloak's effectiveness.
Vanishing right there in the middle of the crowded Great Hall didn't seem remotely wise. And simply following Malfoy into the first-floor corridor would be far too obvious—there was no way to know whether someone else from Slytherin might be keeping watch for that kind of pursuit at this moment.
Under Ron and Hermione's matching worried gazes, Harry snatched up his bag and hurried out through the entrance hall at a brisk walk, then took the main staircase up to the second floor rather than following Malfoy's route directly.
Once safely tucked behind a heavy tapestry in a quiet alcove, out of general sight, he threw the Cloak on over himself and hurried back down the stairs at a considerably brisker pace than he'd climbed them.
At the staff table below, Professor Dumbledore and Professor Watson were both fully absorbed in separate conversations with the colleagues beside them, neither one so much as glancing in Harry's direction as he crossed back through the hall which came as a genuine, small relief to Harry as he slipped past unseen.
He'd already lost a good two minutes to the detour for the Cloak. Harry hurried forward into the first-floor corridor, moving as quickly as the Cloak's awkward folds allowed.
But after turning several corners and passing the closed staff room door, the only living thing he actually found waiting in the corridor was Mrs. Norris, dozing undisturbed in her usual alcove just outside Filch's office. Of Malfoy himself, there was no sign at all.
'Had he gone outside the castle, then?'
Harry considered this possibility carefully, leaning out over a nearby window alcove to check the ground below for any sign of movement but found not a single footprint.
'Unless—'
Beneath the Cloak, Harry narrowed his eyes, studying the corridor stretched out before him in plain, empty view.
It didn't match the corridor from his recurring dreams at all. But if there was some hidden passage concealed somewhere here…
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy