Harry gives a short, half-hissed sound as he fishes the mirror out of the fire. His thumb isn't quite burned, but it's a little too hot to be entirely comfortable, and he catches the mirror in the side of his robe, holding it within the safe glove the fabric creates. He carries it back to the Gryffindor table, setting it down, and he frowns at it. It steams just slightly in the air, and he frowns at it, tilting his head just to the side.

"And how did that go?" George asks dryly, glancing up from his toast and his copy of the Owl Gazette. He's wearing someone else's glasses, and Harry's made mildly uncomfortable by how different it makes his face look - suddenly, George resembles Percy in studious regard and stature, and it is... Incredibly wrong. Fred isn't anywhere to be seen, and it's early in the morning; neither Hermione nor Draco have made their way into the great hall yet.

"Take those off," Harry says, and George puts them on the top of his head. "What are they?" 

"Study specs, something I'm playing with." George passes them over, and Harry takes them, momentarily hanging his own glasses in the collar of his robe as he slides them onto his nose. He has to squint to read the words in the Gazette, focusing exactly on the blurry lines of text, but once he does, he sees the way words are highlighted. Adverbs, nouns, adjectives, and underlined in red is a misprint in the text - one of the reporters had misspelled the word "commitment" as "comittment". "What do you think? Seems a bit better than spell-checking quills to me."

Harry nods his head, passing them back and sliding his own glasses back onto his nose, and George puts them back on, looking down at the page.

"I hate glasses on you," Harry says. "It's weird." George laughs. He leans back in his seat, putting the tip of his quill against the corner of his mouth, and he gives Harry a seductive wink. Harry kicks the bench out from under him, and he lets George drop onto the floor, laughing even more - laughing his head off, in fact. "It is." George pulls himself up off the ground, dragging the bench up with him, and he grins at Harry, pulling the glasses off and making a few adjustments to them with a little screwdriver. 

"You got a thing for glasses, Harry, my lad?" he asks lightly, and Harry rolls his eyes. 

"Yeah," Harry answers. "It's a thing called short-sightedness." He turns back to the mirror, letting the tip of his finger brush tenderly over the edge of the mirror's gilded edge. It's warm to the touch, but it isn't actually too hot anymore. Picking the mirror up, he examines it, turning it over between his hands, and then says, "It didn't go well." George nods his head seriously, giving the mirror a suspicious glance, but he doesn't say anything more. Harry sets the mirror aside and settles beside the other boy, taking a slice of toast for himself and taking a bite.

"Surely you're not giving up?" George asks mockingly as he replaces the specs.

"For this morning, anyway," Harry mutters, and he pages absently through his Potions textbook. "I've Snape first thing."

"Oh, good for you," George says. "Maybe he'll give you a hand, be nice and helpful, like." Harry sniggers, and he gives Fred a wave as he comes in.

"Oh, looking good, dear brother!" Fred proclaims, and he reaches immediately for the spectacles, plucking them off George's face and putting them on his own. Somehow, Fred looks even worse than George had with them on, and Harry winces visibly. "What, think you've got the monopoly on glasses, Potter?"

"They make you look like Percy," Harry says. Letting out a quiet shriek of horror, Fred tears the glasses off and drops them onto a plate of bacon. George shakes his head, muttering something about being the superior twin, and takes them back. Fred grins at George, waggling his eyebrows at his brother, and plucks pages six and seven out from between the pages of the Owl Gazette that George is reading - the sports section. "How's Hermione reacted to Draco the past week or so?" Fred glances up from the Holyhead Harpies' Quidditch score, twists his mouth, and then bows his head again.

"Being a bit too nice for my liking," Fred says. "She should whack him around the head whenever she sees him."

"She's been alright with him," George says, with the same irritation as Fred. "You'd think she'd be a bit smarter with him." Harry doesn't miss the way Fred and George meet each other's gaze for a half-second, and he just follows the momentary quirk of Fred's lip and the downturn of George's - they can tease each other without even breathing. "I'm just saying, she deserves a lot better than that little bastard's company."

"As do you, obviously," Fred says lightly, with a nod in Harry's direction.

"As do you," George agrees, albeit as an afterthought. "Little sod's only going to get worse, you know. His father-"

"Oh, shut up about his father," Hermione says, dropping heavily into the seat between Harry and George and reaching for a kipper. "All of us have met him, so there's no point repeating something Arthur's said about him." George blinks stupidly at Hermione as Fred and Harry share a concerned glance; there are slightly dark bags under Hermione's eyes, and her hair is a little more frazzled than usual. "He's just a stupid little boy, George. Just don't think about him."

"You alright, Hermione?" Fred asks, a note of genuine concern in his voice. 

"Mmm," Hermione hums, and refuses to say anything more as she begins to eat her breakfast. Harry lets the matter drop until they're walking down to the dungeons together a half hour later. "I was up all night. I kept thinking about that article Skeeter wrote. What she said about Viktor- God, I can't believe it's legal!" Harry listens as Hermione talks animatedly and furiously about what Skeeter had written about Viktor further into the paper - Harry had only scanned the front page, but within she'd continued with accusations as to his heritage (she'd insinuated both vampire and harpy) and his assumed infidelity. "If it were a Muggle newspaper, we could sue her for libel!"

"If it were a Muggle newspaper, she'd be out of a job," Harry agrees, and Hermione lets out a vicious "Ha!" of sound. As they come towards the door of the Potions classroom, she glances at Harry, her lips pressed together. "What?"

"Nothing," Hermione says, slightly too fast. "Just- you will be careful, won't you, Harry? You and-" She drops into a whisper. "You and Blaise. If she found out anything about it- What she knew about me and Viktor... It was like she was there, but we didn't see her." Harry nods his head putting his hands into his pockets as he shifts his bag on his shoulder.

"Yeah, I will be," he assents, and the two of them walk into Potions together.

 ---

"Longbottom," Snape says sharply from the corner of the room, where he'd been examining the contents of Crabbe and Goyle's shared cauldron. Harry watches Neville's shoulders suddenly stiffen, but it had been too late anyway - Harry sees the silvery steam coming out of Neville's cauldron, and the whole classroom smells like lemons. "Stop, and get out. Potter, ensure Longbottom's new poison does not kill us all."

"Yes, sir," Harry says as Neville walks out of the room with his shoulders hunkered down and his gaze on the ground. He lifts the cauldron off the burner, setting it gently down on the desk. The lemon scent gets even stronger, and Harry breathes through the fabric of his sleeve as it starts to become painful. "Professor, didn't you tell us to use lead-lined cauldrons, and not the iron ones?" 

Snape stares at him from across the room, his nostrils flaring, and then says, delicately, "Retrieve your belongings and get out, all of you."

"That's grand, Neville," Seamus Finnegan says as they evacuate the classroom, clapping the other boy on the back as Ron laughs. "No more Potions for today!" Neville looks utterly miserable, and Seamus says brightly, "Oh, cheer up. You could've killed us all, and it turns out we're all going to survive!"

"That is true," Dean agrees magnanimously, and to his and Seamus' credit, Neville does seem a little cheered by their kind words: it's only now that Harry realizes there's blood on his face. Harry exhales, coughing slightly and rubbing at his nose.

"Oh, God," Hermione says. "Your nose is bleeding."

"Yours too," Harry says, holding a handkerchief to his bloody nose and holding another one out to her. Neville looks ready to cry, and Harry says, "It's alright, Neville. Could have been much worse." 

"Okay," Hermione says, "Neville, Harry, Ron... Oh, God, probably you too, Theodore, Blaise... We should all go to the hospital wing." Theodore's left cheek has a single, bloody tear running down it, and he looks entirely uncaring of the fact. Neville actually looks the worst, blood on his lips and one of his eyelashes dark with blood. "Neville, why didn't you say?"

"I was hoping he wouldn't notice," Neville says, and Harry pats him on the back. 

"Okay," Theodore says, standing straight. "Injured Slytherins, with me, Gryffindors with Granger."

"Nice alliterative phrasing," Hermione says.

"Thanks," Theodore replies cleanly. Harry is embarrassed for both of them. As everyone heads towards the hospital wing, Harry glances at his bag, and then swears. The mirror is still inside the classroom.

He knocks on the door, and Snape opens it, stepping from within a Bubble Charm that comes right to the edge of classroom. Snape has a Bubblehead Charm around him too, and with a gloved hand, he holds the mirror. 

"I won't be returning this to you until it is appropriately clean," Snape says quietly. "Despite Longbottom's ardent attempts to murder us all, I have no wish to distribute the poison within the Slytherin dormitories." The mirror has Neville's failed potion clinging to it, and it frosts over the mirrored glass. 

Harry stares at it. 

Within the mirror, on the other side of the glass, Harry can see a wall of icy bricks. Instead of his own reflection, he sees the shifting corridors of a maze built of frost and snow. 

"Indeed," Snape says, with an air of satisfaction, as if it was him that figured out the mirror's secrets. "It will be returned to you forthwith. Go to the hospital wing."

"Yes, sir," Harry says, and he coughs bloodily into his sleeve as he rushes to catch up with the rest of the class.