The mid-afternoon sun glinted off the lake water and the damp made the air heavy and still.  Hermione kissed Ron’s cheek and languidly made her way towards his mouth, twisting her fingers into his own.  He rested his other hand against the curve of her spine.  There were times, he decided, when two people just had to be alone.

A snotty chuckle broke through their quiet closeness, and they turned abruptly to face the irritatingly familiar sound.  Without Crabbe, Goyle looked unbalanced standing next to Malfoy, like a very large planet rotating around a very small star.  Ron and Hermione never took their eyes off the pair as they slipped their wands out of their pockets and held them tensely at their sides.  “Well well,” Malfoy drawled, “I’m surprised to see Potter’s lackeys without him.”

“You always were one to mistake friends for lackeys,” Ron snarled.

Hermione smiled kindly, with a pointed look at Goyle, “Or lackeys for friends.”  Goyle grunted and cracked his knuckles menacingly, shifting his shoulders to appear even larger.  “Did I hit a nerve?”

Malfoy grabbed his own wand and jabbed it into the empty air between them, holding Goyle back with his other hand.  “I suppose you two would have to kiss each other, because otherwise no one else would lock lips with either of you.”

“Why so cranky, Malfoy?” Ron demanded, “Are you jealous, can’t get Goyle to stop living in your pocket long enough to snog a girl?”

Hermione glanced at the opening in Malfoy’s shoulder bag.  “It could be that you’re ashamed of your Muggle books,” she remarked thoughtfully.  “It’s really annoying when you can’t get away to read, isn’t it?”

Goyle rushed forward to tackle them at the same time that Malfoy fired a whipping jinx at Ron.  “Petrificus Totalus!” Hermione shouted, pointing her wand a Goyle and feeling like a first year, but the curse knocked him backwards onto the ground and she twisted around to face Malfoy with Ron.  Ron stood up gasping and flinching “Conjunctivito,” he shouted, slashing his wand through the air.”  Malfoy howled, rubbing his eyes franticly.  Taking advantage of Malfoy’s distraction, Ron pointed his wand at his own chest and muttered “Finite Incantuatum.”

Squinting through crusted eyelashes, Malfoy pointed his wand at Hermione.  “Incarcerous,” he bellowed, and Hermione did her best to dodge the vine-like tendrils of rope, but one twined around her ankle and pulled her backward.  The ropes wrapped around her, tying knots as soon as they had her tightly in their grasp, but her wand remained in her hands.

“Furnunculus,” she roared, and watched in satisfaction as his pointy face erupted in boils.

Ron didn’t even wait for her spell to hit him before he fired his own, “Expelliarmus.”  He caught the wand deftly while Hermione untangled herself from the ropes.  With a flick of his wrist, he sent it into the lake.

Malfoy watched his wand bob in the water for a moment with a shocked expression plastered across his boil covered face, and then scrambled for the wand in Goyle’s hand.  Hermione remembered the spells in Snape’s potion book with a hint of irony.  Levicorpus, she thought without expression, and she and Ron started back towards the castle.

Malfoy surged into the air upside down with a squawk.  “Put me down, Granger!  Ron and Hermione’s hands found each other as they kept walking, ignoring him as he fussed and wriggled behind them.  “Granger!  Weasley!  Get back here!”  The two decided to walk very slowly.

As soon as they were back inside, Hermione waved Harry over.  “I hung Malfoy up by his ankle,” she told him, and he raised his eyebrows.  “He’s out by the lake.  Could you let him down in about a half an hour?”

Harry nodded.  “What did he do?”

Ron scoffed.  “He was Malfoy, isn’t that enough?”

Harry flushed, “N-”

“He and Goyle attacked us,” she slapped her forehead.  “I forgot; Goyle’s petrified too.”

Harry pulled on his cloak.  “Can’t you let them stew for a bit?” Ron whined.

“No,” Harry said, shaking his head and pushing the Fat Lady’s portrait out into the hall.

He sprinted down the first set of stairs before he had to stop and catch his breath.  The rest of the way out of the castle, he dragged his feet, but he raced through the grass as soon as he crossed the threshold to the outside. “Potter!” he heard “Potter, get me down!”

Harry grinned.  “Hang on, Malfoy, I’m coming.”  Malfoy’s bag lay on the ground, his books scattered on the ground.  He gathered the books together and put them bag in the bag, spying a yellowed copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and an open notebook with “The Sphinx’s Rage: Chapter One” scrawled in Malfoy’s own loopy flowing script before he pulled his wand out of his pocket and pointed it at him.  Liberacorpus, he thought, and his target plummeted to the ground, landing with a furious snarled string of obscenities.  He fell to his knees and didn’t bother rising to his feet, but crawled over to Goyle and snatched his wand.  Harry wasn’t looking.  He had turned back to the castle and began jogging back to the castle.

“Stupify!” Malfoy yelled, brandishing his wand.

Harry dodged aside and pointed his wand directly at his attacker and shouted “Expelliarmus!” and then when he missed grabbing Malfoy’s wand, he called without thinking, “Accio Malfoy’s wand.”  The wand knocked out of Malfoy’s hand didn’t fly to Harry.  Instead, a faint splash heralded the wand’s rise out of the depths of the lake.  It zoomed into the palm of his hand, and Harry tried again.  “Accio Goyle’s wand.”  He held them together in his left hand.  “What was that for Malfoy?” he shouted, irate.  “I got you down!”

“Yeah, but your friends put me up there in the first place, didn’t they?” he raged.  “Give me back my wand, Potter, or I’ll-”

“I think you can do more damage to me with your wand,” Harry responded.  “I want your word that you won’t curse me if I give these back to you.”

“What? No!”  Malfoy howled.  “Give me back my wand!”

“Promise me that you won’t hex me while I’m going back to the castle,” Harry reiterated, “or I won’t give you back your wand.”  At last, Malfoy nodded, and Harry turned and fled back to the castle before Malfoy could renege and accost him again.

~*~

Severus shelved the last of Belby’s stolen notes, his completed catalogue pasted to the top of the cardboard box in which he stored them.  He had placed a dot next to each potion Belby had published, and the important ones were underlined, but he rested his head in his hands, unwilling to deal with Belby’s scheming any longer.  The fourth year essays on why the Unforgivable Curses were unforgivable sat unmarked on his desk, and he knew he needed to finish them before class the next day, but he didn’t have the energy to do that either.  He slumped against the wall next to his bookcase, his eyes closed, rubbing the bridge of his nose where a headache was forming.  Before he realized it, he had drifted off to sleep.

A knock at the door woke him with a start. “What?” he demanded irritably.

“Can I come in?” Potter’s voice echoed, muffled by the walls and door.

“No,” he spat, eyes opening into slits.

“Alright then,” he heard, and closed his eyes again, satisfied until he heard the door swing open.

“Detention, Potter!” he roared, standing up to his full height and marching toward him, a murderous glint in his eyes.

“McGonagall sent me to tell you that she wants to talk to you this evening about what books you want to assign next year,” Potter hurriedly told him.

“Professor McGonagall,” he corrected automatically, nonplussed.

“Yeah, I know,” Potter muttered, annoyed.  “Hey, maybe you’ll be the first Defense Against the Dark Arts professor for more than fifty years to teach for two years in a row.”

He sneered, “Don’t tell me you believe in the curse, Potter.”

He expected Potter to tell him he hadn’t started teaching for the next year yet, but instead, the young man’s head came up sharply.  “There was a curse; Voldemort cast it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he derided, “The Dark Lord didn’t do everything.”

“Dumbledore wouldn’t hire him right out of school, and no one has lasted more than a year since,” Potter murmured.  “Dumbledore told me himself.  Of course, he was still Tom Riddle then.”

Severus colored, chagrined.  “Tell Professor McGonagall that I’ll be there in an hour.”

Potter turned to leave, his hand on the doorknob, “It’s kind of fitting, isn’t it, that I defeated him, and you get to be Defense Against the Dark Arts professor again because of it,” he mused before he shut the door.

“My heritage has nothing to do with anything,” he snapped too quickly.  “It makes no difference.”

Potter shook his head slowly, lingering in the doorway.  “You really are a hypocrite sometimes, aren’t you?” he said without bitterness, even a little amusement.  “It matters that I’m James Potter’s son, but it doesn’t matter that you’re mine.”

“The situation’s are entirely different,” he glowered.

“How?  He didn’t raise me either,” Potter’s eyes were wide and his voice low.

Severus growled, unwilling to acknowledge the validity of the point.  With an uncaring wave of his hand, he dismissed his student.

Potter paused before he left.  “Do I still have detention?”

“No,” Severus muttered sulkily.

Potter’s feet clip clopped down the hall, and he was out of sight before Severus realized that they hadn’t shouted at each other for the first time.  The realization so shocked him that he almost called the boy back to rail at him.

~*~

The wadded parchment soared past Ginny and hit the pudgy “new” first year in a Ravenclaw bow in her hair square in the small of her back.  “Nice shot,” a girl strolling behind Ginny proclaimed.

“Aw, not that good,” her friend who had thrown the parchment demurred.  “It’s hard to miss a target that big.”

The Ravenclaw girl spun around and ducked her head to the side as another parchment wad nearly hit her in the face.  “Wow,” the first girl exclaimed, “I didn’t know something that big could move that fast.”

Ginny pivoted on her heel, surprised that she recognized the two girls as “old” Gryffindor first years who had spent a lot of the year previous defying Snape and the Carrows and playing gallant.  They finished the year in the Room of Requirement and she’d played exploding snap with them once.  She didn’t hesitate, but walked between the two girls grimly, and stood behind her.  Digging her elbows into the tops of their skulls, she folded her hands and rested her chin on top of them.  “I’m a lot bigger,” she grinned, “And I move a lot faster.”

“Ginny Weasley!” the girl who had thrown the first parchment ball panted.  Ginny racked her brain for her name.  She lifted her elbows off of their heads and grabbed their red and gold ties, pulling them around to face her.

“Cox, Jenkins,” she said mock sweetly, recalling their names at last.  “If I see you doing anything like that, I’ll tell Professors Flitwick and Switch, and you wouldn’t like that, would you?  Switch doesn’t like it when his students are mean to other students just because they can, and Flitwick really doesn’t like it when people make fun of the kids in his house.”

Jenkins stared at her, shocked, with something like betrayal in her expression.  “Is that all you’re going to do, tell on us?”

The Ravenclaw girl watched her out of half closed eyes, chewing the bottom part of her lip.  Ginny transferred Cox’s tie to the other hand and used her newly free hand to play with her wand.  “If I hexed you, I’d be acting like a bully.”  The two girls shivered, and when she dropped their ties, they sauntered off as quickly as they could.

When Ginny looked up, the Ravenclaw girl was still watching her, so Ginny walked across the corridor to her.  “I could have taken care of myself,” the girl muttered furiously.

“Hey, they make my house look bad, that’s all.”  Ginny folded her arms and leaned back on her heels, rocking back and forth.  “I never said you couldn’t.”

“Yeah, well, next time, stay out.”

“Hey, they’re still making my house look bad.”

The girl rolled her eyes and flounced off down the hallway, the ends of her bow flapping as she moved.  Ginny caught sight of Luna gliding past.  She fell in beside her, and through an arm over her shoulder.  Her feet took up Luna’s floating steady pace as Luna let her keep her arm around her shoulders.  It almost seemed as if she didn’t notice it was there.

~*~

The redcap was gone, a Grindylow in its place.  It swam lazily through seaweed fronds and a fake rock dome of the sort that might have been found at a Muggle pet store, only much larger.  When it saw Ginny, it extended its spindly fingers and pressed its palms flat against the glass walls of its tank.  Ginny sent it a dark look and stood in front of Snape’s desk with her hands on her hips.  “So what do I have to do today?”

“Follow me,” he ordered, sweeping out from behind his desk and swooping out of his office.  Ginny trailed behind him glumly as he made his way through the hallways to the Transfiguration classroom.  “Your head of house has graciously allowed us to use his classroom.  You should thank him.”  He conjured a scraper, a wash cloth, and a bucket of soapy water and handed them to her.  “There is gum on the underside of the desks,” he said flat voiced.  There was always gum on the underside of desks; Ginny thought Snape might be running out of ideas.  By the time she had finished the fourth desk, she began to wonder if the creators of Droobles Best Blowing Gum had collaborated with former professors of Snape’s mould to create a product that they could legitimately tell their students in detention that it could only be cleaned by hand.  She thought about chewing a whole package of the stuff and chucking it at Snape’s back during class, one point if it stuck to his robes, five if it caught in his pony tail.  For a brief moment, she glanced up at him and pondered what he would look like if he had to cut his hair.  It didn’t bear thinking about; he’d look too much like Harry.

Snape watched her as she worked, his arms folded across his chest, staring down the short, straight nose he had inherited from Harry and Ginny did her best to ignore him.  “Have you rethought your plans of vengeance on behalf of your young swain?” He asked, his voice flat.

She set the bucket down on the top of the closest desk, darkly amused.  “I think Harry taught you a lesson on his own.”

Snape’s head snapped up.  “Explain that statement, Miss Weasley.”  He enunciated his words sharply, elongating the consonants and shortening the vowels.

Ginny hid a smirk, unperturbed.  “I’ll let you off this time, but if you ever say anything that horrible to him again…” She trailed off threateningly, unwilling to give him anything to prepare for.  He smiled nastily, choosing to take her lack of specifics as a lack of imagination.  Ginny fumed, scraping the last of the gum off the last desk and had to stop herself from throwing the bucket at his face.  She wrung the wash cloth out into the bucket and vanished the washcloth and the scraper.  With a scowl, she vanished the water as well, leaving lumps of detached gum at the bottom of the bucket.  Conjuring a piece of parchment, she dumped the gum into it and wrapped them up before throwing them away.  At last, she vanished the bucket too.  “Done,” she told him with a broad smile, and rushed off to wash her hands.

She caught up with the professor halfway back to his office, her hands still dripping.  “Stop following me, Miss Weasley,” he growled, “You are dismissed.”

She wiped her hands on her robes.  “I’m not following you; I’m just going to the same place.”

He sped up incrementally and Ginny sped up with him.  Each time she matched his speed, he walked faster until he was almost running down the corridor, Ginny still at his heels.  “Do you want another detention?”

She smiled sweetly and batted her eyes.  “Afraid you’ll miss me now that I don’t have detention with you?  I’m flattered, but really-”

“Shut up.”  Her teeth closed with a satisfied click.

Harry waited at Snape’s office door with a plate of pilfered pastries from the kitchens and a glittering foil covered paper gift bag in the other.  Ginny waved at him gleefully while Snape jerked his office door open with a sour expression.  Holding the bag out to her, Harry smiled.  “Congratulations on being done with detention.”

She took it with a snort.  “He just ran out of things for me to do.  He had me cleaning Switch’s classroom.”  When she turned the bag over, a bag of stink pellets fell out into her palm.  Pocketing it, she wrinkled her nose with a wry smile.  “Most boys get their girlfriends sweets.”

His face fell.  “Yeah, I know.”

She pulled him into a kiss and one of the pastries toppled off the plate.  One handed, she caught it and took a bite, getting icing on the tip of her nose.  Harry wiped it off, headless of Snape watching them.

~*~

Severus stood in the doorway to his office as the two made their way through the pastries and Potter sent the plate floating back to the kitchens.  She looped her arm around Potter’s waist and pulled him close as they strolled down the corridor.  Potter’s hand touched her hair tentatively, rubbing her ponytail with the pad of his thumb, before settling his arm around her shoulders.  She had a brass barrette with green and blue rhinestones holding half of her hair back.

Cursing his own maudlinness, he almost swore he could see a soft golden glow around them.  From behind in the dim light of the torches in sconces along the walls, Miss Weasley might have been Lilly Evens.  It was with some small horror that he realized he had been carrying a torch for her for more than twenty years.  That she was his grandmother merely compounded his disquiet.

The two lovers spoke to each other to quietly for him to hear, and Miss Weasley whispered something into Potter’s ear making him laugh.  He shook his head smiling at her and Severus snorted derisively.  The younger Potter would have taken Lily's place better than Miss Weasley, which was itself a disconcerting thought.

He shut the door and put his head into his hands.