“Arrgh!” Draco shouted, suddenly thrashing around in bed and trying to escape the sharp pains that had woken him instantly.

Wham!

“Ow,” Draco moaned as he landed hard on the floor. He winced when he realized that that had only made his problem worse. Damn. He’d been in the middle of a really pleasant dream. He stood up as respectably as he could manage given that he was covered in boils and his nostril hair was lengthening rapidly. He caught a glimpse of Pansy’s backside walking away down the corridor towards the Common Room and saw Nott, walking hand-in-hand with her, smirking over his shoulder in Draco’s direction. Fine wakeup call that was. They wouldn’t have dared to do such a thing this time last year. Draco groaned as he stepped out of the mess of bed linens he’d been tangled in on the floor and grabbed a robe to put on over his nightclothes. He tried to make as little excess movement as possible so he didn’t rupture the boils and make them even more painful but he did have to get to the hospital wing.

Madam Pomfrey wasn’t pleased to see him, but she promised to have him fixed up pretty quickly with a potion and a nose hair clipping charm. She was watching him drink the potion for the boils when another student walked in.

“Hiya, Madam Pomfrey,” a first-year Hufflepuff called.

“Good morning, Stephen. Give me a minute, will you?” Madam Pomfrey replied, eyeing Draco as he downed the last of the potion. “Stay there, Mr. Malfoy.”

Stephen had jumped up on a bed not far from Draco’s. As soon as Madam Pomfrey turned her attention from Draco, he began chattering, clearly more comfortable in the Hospital Wing than the average student.

“Did you hear about the Howler at breakfast? I hope I never get one of those, but I guess my parents can’t use them anyways, being muggle and all. The ones who got it this morning, they were really embarrassed… and all of them are prefects! I heard they got gated too so they can’t leave school grounds, like, ever… except to go home for holidays, of course. Tim says he heard that they got caught visiting Hogsmeade! I wish I could go to Hogsmeade…”

Draco snickered. Three Gryffindor prefects getting a Howler – that would be Potter’s crowd. He wondered whether they’d lost their badges. If it had been him caught off grounds, his would have been ripped off his robes on the spot, he suspected. With Granger and the Weasleys, he doubted it was considered that serious. The injustice of it killed his amusement at hearing about the Howler. When Draco was released, he grumbled his way back to the Slytherin Common Room by way of the kitchens where he was rather short with Winky despite the large breakfast she got for him.

He didn’t have much time before he was due in Divination. He was actually looking forward to the class. While all his other classes demanded that he apply himself to something, Divination was about sitting in comfortable chairs and sipping tea. The company left something to be desired, but as far as the graded work went, Divination required some rote memorization and a fair tolerance for batty Gryffindor birds (but they were still better company than Pansy). Compared to his other classes, it was a holiday.

He made his way across the castle and up the North Tower, climbed the ladder into the classroom, and threw himself into his chair beside Parvati and Lavender. Trelawney hadn’t arrived yet but the girls had already started the tea.

They didn’t have to wait long for Trelawney to appear from her chambers. She greeted Patil and Brown cheerfully. They visited her a lot and she permitted it even though she shied away from most of the school, claiming her Inner Eye couldn’t handle it. She made her way to the head of the class and began her lecture.

“Today we’ll begin studying casting stones or rune stones. We’ll start readings with stones late next week. I’d like to begin by discussing what readings of rune stones can and cannot address. Do take notes and drink your tea as we work so we can practice reading the leaves at the end of class.”

All period, Draco and the girls took notes, sipped tea, and questioned Trelawney. At the end of the period, their tea cups drained, they swapped cups and read each other’s dregs

“The necklace – Are you having romantic troubles? A ship – I hope you’re in it for the journey. The outcome may not be as you wish. But there’s also a shoe, so maybe it will play out in your favor but you’ll only be rewarded if you work at it. That’s what the spider means here,” Draco read. He knew the shapes, though he still needed the book to check the meanings.

“Are you cheating?” the Patil girl asked in an accusatory tone.

“Oh course not,” Draco snapped.

“You must be. I don’t see a necklace in there at all. You’ve been spying on us, haven’t you?” Brown argued.

“It’s not my fault you can’t see it when it’s right there in front of you. And who’d put that kind of effort into cheating for this class?” Draco replied seriously.

Both girls looked scandalized. Professor Trelawney came over to settle the dispute before it escalated.

“Read mine then, Mr. Malfoy,” she said, passing him the teacup she’d been drinking from.

Draco took it with a scowl, took one look at the dregs, and rattled off a list of shapes.

“Apple, violin, hawk, tortoise, vase with a man and an eye. Are you going to accuse me of spying on you too?” he snapped, looking up from the teacup to see her looking down, wide-eyed, at him.

“No,” she squeaked. “The day has come! I have a student with a gift. How marvelous. I must inform Albus at once!”

Trelawney hurried to her fireplace and batted aside the perfumed smoke to find her pot of floo powder. She tossed a pinch in and disappeared into the fire on her way to the Headmaster’s office. The girls turned from watching Trelawney to staring at him, both fully speechless.

Draco threw his hands up. “I’m surrounded by crazy people.”

Thinking he’d made a mistake switching into this class, he quickly packed up his supplies, slung his schoolbag over his shoulder and walked out.

That had been Draco’s first class of the day but elsewhere in the castle, Severus and Harry had a free period after breakfast but they weren’t spending it on fun and games, nor even homework or practicing advanced defense. For them, the morning Howler exploding at the Gryffindor table that had the first years talking seemed most insignificant next to page two of the Daily Prophet. And so Severus found himself sitting on the floor with his back against the door of the disused classroom at the base of the West Tower (four floors below the owlery) preventing the ranting, pacing, desk-kicking, toe-stubbing Harry from leaving the privacy of that room.

“I can’t believe her!” Harry kept saying. “She has to know how much I value my privacy and that letter was private. Why would she do that?”

“She’s a stupid child,” Snape offered.

“She’s not stupid!” Harry snapped. “But she should have known better. What am I going to do?”

“Nothing. Don’t write to her anymore. I wouldn’t write to your other friends anymore either.”

“Yeah, well that’s you.”

“It’s the perfect excuse. Keeping lies straight is hard. If you’re not writing anymore, there’s no lies to manage. Just let them think they’ve lost your trust.”

“I won’t. I’d lose them. They wouldn’t understand.”

Snape sighed. “Well you’d better not be planning to write to Ms. Weasley anymore.”

“Of course not. I can’t believe she did that.”

“So you’re still going to write to Lupin and to Ms. Granger and Mr. Weasley?”

“Yes, I am. And you’re going to help because I know you don’t trust me to do it myself.”

Snape scowled. “Are we waiting for a few weeks to give them time to stew on what they’ve done or writing a quick and angry note tonight giving them a piece of your mind?”

“We’ll write something tonight and send it home for the elves to send back with the same owl as last time.”

“Fine.”

“Gah! I can’t believe she did this to me.”

Snape was getting very annoyed with Harry’s continued insistence on that point.

“Well here’s something that will cheer you up,” Severus said, pointing to his watch. “It’s nearly time for Flying Lessons.”

“Oh,” Harry said, his face brightening. “Let’s go.”

They had both been looking forward to the chance to fly again. It was a chance to enjoy the simple pleasures of childhood and fool around in ways that adults couldn’t get away with.

But perhaps they hadn’t properly considered the possibility of unintended consequences.

“You two! On your feet in front of me NOW!” Madam Hooch shouted angrily barely halfway through the flying lesson.

The twins were already on their way to the ground, their happiness gone. Bored with the rudimentary lessons, they’d been fooling around with each other and pulling stunts like dives and rolls, just like they had done when they were playing at the manor over the summer. It had been very distracting to the other students and one of them had fallen over eight feet and hurt herself.

“I am taking Ms. Harding to the Hospital Wing. You will leave drop those brooms and march yourselves straight to your Head of House’s office,” Madam Hooch ordered loudly over the girl’s crying.

The twins were apologizing profusely to Madam Hooch and to Anna Harding, but the damage was already done.

“NOW!” Madam Hooch ordered, picking Anna up, careful not to jostle her broken ankle.

They quickly set off towards the castle. They said nothing to each other as they made their way to Flitwick’s office. They were both old enough to realize that their behavior had been foolishly reckless and someone else had had to pay the consequences.

Severus took a deep breath and knocked on the office door.

“Come in,” Flitwick called.

Severus opened the door and they went inside. They crossed the bookshelf-lined room in silence and stopped in front of Flitwick’s short desk.

Flitwick was holding a piece of heavily-creased parchment (the result of the same interoffice memo spell the Ministry used) with a note from Madam Hooch scribbled on it. It had appeared just seconds before the twins had knocked on his door.

“I must say, I am very disappointed with you boys,” Flitwick said solemnly.

“We’re very sorry. We didn’t mean for Anna to get hurt,” Harry said.

“I understand that, but she did get hurt and you were disobeying explicit orders. There’s absolutely no excuse for not following the instructions of a teacher at this school. Because of the seriousness of this incident, I’m going to have to ban you from flying for a month. You’ll also be serving detention for two weeks.”

Both boys’ shoulders slumped. That meant they wouldn’t be able to fly for the Quidditch team tryouts that were in two days.

“Am I understood?” Flitwick asked.

“Yes, sir,” the twins replied together.

“Then you two should go back to the Tower and get yourselves cleaned up before afternoon classes.”

“So, no Quidditch,” Harry muttered morosely as they walked back towards Ravenclaw Tower.

“It’s our own fault,” Severus reminded him.

“I know. You really wanted to play, didn’t you?”

Severus shrugged. He had been hoping. Quidditch hadn’t been a priority when he was a child and James Potter would have made him even more miserable if it had been but this time around, he’d been looking forward to seeing how he stacked up against the Potter Quidditch genes.

“Well, I suppose this means you’ll have plenty of time to try and rally the Slytherins to the Light if you’re not playing Quidditch,” Harry whispered.

“That would be impossible now and I’ve yet to see an opportunity to make a difference any other way,” Snape replied, clearly depressed by it.

Beginning that night and continuing every night for two weeks, Harry and Severus served their detentions without much fuss. They did feel quite bad about Anna’s fall. It wasn’t just that she had hurt herself and needed to go to the Hospital Wing – Madam Pomfrey had patched her up in time for Potions and Harry had had much worse Quidditch injuries than that. What really bothered them was that Anna had really seemed to like flying and had been good at it but after her fall, she was terrified of it. And, as punishments were meant to do, after two weeks of dusting library and organizing books on little-used shelves in the library, they were even more sorry.

But just as Harry and Severus, released from their final detention, were feeling very sorry for the repercussions of their behavior, two others were busy feeling sorry for themselves in the castle kitchens.

Draco Malfoy had just left a lesson with Trelawney who, after barely a month of treating Draco as a wonderful prodigy who would be a credit to her teaching when his ability became publicly known (for some reason that escaped Draco, Dumbledore had encouraged Patil and Brown in believing the teacups didn’t mean anything and so everyone was still convinced that Draco was a lying, cheating, teacher’s pet), was beginning to sour to him. Draco could see that she was jealous of his successes where everyone knew she herself could scarcely read a teacup properly but that didn’t really make him feel any better about her new attitude. She was still teaching him and he was still learning at a remarkable rate, but he had enough people making his life uncomfortable.

Seeking solace in sweets, Draco had found the painting of the fruit bowl on the first floor and tickled the pear again. Unfortunately, the elves didn’t seem to want him around either.

“The only free elf you is speaking to is over there,” Tizzy, the head elf, informed Draco. “And that is only allowed because Winky is needing to make herself useful. If Mister Draco Malfoy is wanting anything, he is making Winky get it.”

Draco looked in the direction that Tizzy’s wrinkled, green finger indicated and saw Winky sitting in a corner of the storeroom of dishwares, an nearly-empty bottle of butterbeer in one hand and the wadded-up, soggy hem of her apron in the other. Her eyes were red from the butterbeer and the tears. Draco pursed his lips and considered whether it was worth trying. Not one to be put off his own troubles by the problems of another, he decided it was. He crossed the long kitchen, dodging elves at work, and stepped inside the storeroom.

“Winky, I want a butterbeer.”

Winky looked up at him as he came closer to her. Her lower lip quivered and she began to tear up again. She let go of her own bottle, reached under the cabinet of silverware she was sitting next to, and pulled out a new, unopened bottle. She slid it across the floor in Draco’s general direction. He bent to pick it up, uncorked it, and took a drink. Winky took a sip from her own bottle. She was crying softly again.

Draco sat down on a tiny stool rather like the one first years sat on to be sorted but this one and several like it around the storeroom were probably there for the elves to sit on while they polished the fine dishware. Draco drank again from his bottle.

“You know, I hate my life!” Draco felt the need to say out loud.

“Winky is so very unhappy,” she sobbed, not really in response.

Draco did not appear to have listened to the little elf as he continued venting his own anxieties. “My Father, through his own actions, has sullied our name, possibly beyond all hope of redemption.”

“Nobody is appreciating Winky’s work so why bother to work at all?”

“My Mother can’t help me, but she does try, and I suppose that counts for something.”

“Winky hates working for Hogwarts.”

“And if Professor Snape was here… but he isn’t-”

Winky lifted her bottle to her mouth and drained the last of the butterbeer from it.

“And Winky doesn’t like butterbeer either-”

“-and I have to deal with Pansy, who insists she knows my motivations better than I do.”

“-but butterbeer makes Winky not care about clothes and wages and work and masters,” she said, waving the empty bottle around. Being drunk, her depth perception wasn’t so good and the bottle hit the cupboard next to her rather hard and broke into pieces. Her shoulders slumped and her arms fell till her elbows rested on her knobby knees. She didn’t appear at all interested in cleaning up the mess she’d made.

It didn’t matter though. Almost on reflex, and being a pureblood, it was a reflex to clean up an accident with a simple charm, Draco drew his wand and wordlessly vanished the bits of glass.

“Pansy actually has the nerve to attack me,” Draco complained, neglecting the fact that he’d been the one who’s taken their conflict to spells when he transfigured her head.

“Hogwarts is a cruel, nasty place to be an elf,” Winky moaned.

“The professors all hate me… well, except Trelawney,” Draco said with a shudder.

“Tizzy is thinking Winky is a bad, bad elf and Hogwarts should never have hired Winky,” she cried.

“And even the other students hate me,” Draco stated angrily. “You know Granger actually stood up in the prefect meeting yesterday and refused to be paired with me on rounds because she thinks I’m a Death Eater. As if she knows exactly what the Death Eaters are like. I know. I was with them all summer.”

“And Tizzy is being right!” Winky wailed.

“And my father…” he trailed off, unwilling to lump his father in with the rest of the men that he’d been so afraid of over the summer, even though he was still mad at his father.

“Winky is a bad, bad elf, and Masters Crouch knew it.”

“No one here cares about anyone but themselves,” Draco said. He took a drink from hi bottle of butterbeer.

“Dobby is helping Winky,” Winky reminded herself, wiping tears from her eyes with the hem of her grubby dress.

“It turns out I’m not half bad at Divination, but no one cares about that. They all dismiss the subject as rubbish and so they can dismiss me too. I’d like to see Granger try to read a teacup,” Draco complained.

“Dobby is such a wonderful elf.”

“Maybe if Trelawney wasn’t such a fraud, it would be different. Still, she did manage to teach me how to interpret teacup readings… but any 5-year-old seer can read a teacup. I want to learn more. I have extra lessons with her twice a week, you know.”

“But Dobby is deserving better than having to take care of poor, sad Winky.”

Draco stopped, gestured vaguely towards Winky with the hand that held his butterbeer and actually addressed her directly. “You know, you need a family.”

“Nobody is wanting a bad house elf!” Winky protested sadly.

“Surely a bad house elf is better than no house elf at all,” Draco argued, taking another drink of butterbeer.

“But Dobby would never be forgiving Winky.”

“Why do you even care what he thinks,” Draco said dismissively. He remembered the crazy little elf from his father’s service.

“Oh, Dobby is always taking care of Winky and getting her this job and hiding her when she drinks-”

“You can’t live your life to please another,” Draco said. He was sure he’d heard that bit of advice somewhere, not that it had affected his own life any. “Don’t let him get in the way of you getting what you want.”

Winky was silent for a long moment. “Maybe Winky will be thinking about this.”

Draco nodded as if the matter was settled in his favor.

Winky suddenly jumped as if pinched.

“Winky is being summoned, Mister Draco Malfoy, sir. Winky must go.”

Draco sighed as Winky disappeared with a pop. “I still have no idea what to do about my problems.”