'Have you tried asking Cedric Diggory?' Harry suggested. 'He's the only other champion who you can ask, but I don't know how much he'll remember. I stunned him when I came to investigate the screaming.'
'The screaming?' Hermione looked slightly pale.
'The Beauxbatons champion,' Harry replied calmly, as if the very idea of Fleur suffering didn't make his blood boil.
'Oh.' She looked quite relieved and Harry's wand hand twitched with anger.
'Ask Diggory,' he told her sharply. 'The Ministry is advised by Malfoy's father, and he's probably not the only supporter of Voldemort in their ranks either.' He cast a completely unnecessary glance at the distant pink figure of Professor Umbridge. Hermione followed his eyes, and he quickly looked away as if afraid of being caught, just the faintest suggestion of distrust. So it begins.
'So how was your summer?' Harry raised an eyebrow at her, and she looked down, admonished. 'Sorry,' she muttered.
'It was surprisingly tolerable,' Harry smiled, there was no reason he couldn't be civil, he supposed. She might be useful later, most of the Gryffindor's listened to Hermione when she wanted to be heard.
'Your relatives?'
'Oh,' Harry grinned darkly, 'they weren't any trouble at all.'
They'd tried to be trouble. His uncle had dared to go rummaging through his things in search of his wand, earning himself some quality alone time with the asp, and Dudley had tried to hit him once. He hadn't tried it again, not after his dinner had turned into a small pool of maggots halfway through the meal. He'd refused to touch anything that looked remotely like chicken for almost a week afterwards. Harry suspected his transfiguration trick had done more for Dudley's diet than any number of grapefruit.
'That's good,' Hermione smiled uncertainly, then she caught sight of Diggory getting up to leave and was gone in moments.
Harry helped himself to more eggs.
'What did happen in the maze?' Neville asked, slightly nervous.
'You don't want to know, Nev,' Harry said quietly. 'I'd rather not talk about it either, sorry.'
His friend nodded understandingly, then took another bite of toast, carefully balancing slices of tomato along its edge. 'Potions,' he sighed after he finished eating the tomatoes that had fallen free.
'Potions,' Harry agreed. The Triwizard Tournament had had some upsides, and avoiding Snape's dreary dungeon was foremost among them.
He rushed down the last few forkfuls of eggs, gathered his bag from under the bench and followed Neville down. Snape had probably been saving every scrap of disdain from the last year until this lesson.
'Ah,' Snape murmured from the back of the dungeon once everyone had filed in. 'At last we have the privilege of Mr Potter's company again.'
He strode down the aisle between the desks, tutting softly. 'This June you will all be sitting an examination in which you will prove just how much you have learnt about the composition and used of magical potions. Some of you,' his eyes drifted past Neville to rest on Harry, 'have not spent all of the last four years as wisely as they could have done.'
He waved his wand at the board, casting a simple, wordless revealing charm to disclose the recipe of the revealing charm to the class.
The Draught of Peace.
'Partner up,' the potions professor drawled, 'and I suggest due diligence in the preparation of this particular potion, it requires a delicate touch.'
'Come on, Nev,' Harry began to arrange his things across the desk between them.
'You want to work with me?' 'Why would I choose anyone else?' Harry stared at him curiously.
'I'm terrible at potions,' Neville stated.
'You don't think well with Snape looming over you,' Harry corrected. 'There's no way he'll be able to pass up commenting on me, so if we're together that means I'll draw all his attention.'
Neville tentatively reached for the moonstone, but Harry caught his hand.
'Make sure everything happens exactly as it says on the board,' he warned, 'I don't think Snape was joking about due diligence.'
His friend gulped, but began to slowly add the powdered moonstone just as the instructions said to. The potion very slowly changed to a bright purple. It was a only a few shades beyond Uncle Vernon's most spectacular effort of facial colouration.
'Let it simmer,' Harry reminded him gently, when Neville's hand strayed towards the syrup of hellebore.
From his favourite shadowy spot at the back of the dungeon Snape was staring at the pair of them, an unreadable expression on his face.
Harry ignored him.
Across from them, Ron and Dean were frantically retreating from a violently sparking potion. The bowl of powdered moonstone was sinking, upside down, into the top of the cauldron.
'That will be zero, Weasley, Thomas,' Snape sneered, vanishing the contents. 'Apparently when I instructed you to be careful you thought yourself above listening.' Their potion flared pink and Neville stopped moving in motionless surprise. He was staring at the potion in shock, glancing at the instructions and back at his cauldron.
Is he really so surprised that it's working?
He left Neville to keep things going, trusting him to add the syrup and leave it to simmer until it was ready. Snape had not been kind enough to provide powdered porcupine quills, which meant one of them had to carefully and meticulously grind the whole ones down to a very fine powder.
'Longbottom,' Snape remarked dispassionately, 'you've found yourself a new victim.'
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