The Half-Blood Princess

Harley's Patronus

After Harry's third Occlumency lesson-which was surprisingly brief-he sped back into the common room like Voldemort himself was after him, surprising everyone in there.

"What the Hell happened?" Harley called after him, but her only response was the slamming door behind her little brother. That was not good, and the bad mood Harry had come in with was met the next day in Potions by a matching one from Snape.

Actually, it was even worse from Snape, whose black eyes were clouded and his face set in a more tense than usual grimace. In less than five minutes two of the Gryffindors had had ten points each taken from them, and even a Slytherin was not immune to Snape's anger, when he got twenty points taken off for simply asking a question. (Granted, it was a dumb question.)

He was eerily silent as he walked around the room, only talking to take five points from Fred for not stirring slowly enough. Harley alone had not received the brunt of his anger. She wanted to stay behind and ask him if he was all right, but felt that would be prying. Aside, she did not want to upset him more. She knew that when she was angry, she was better off left alone.

Back in the dorms, Harley caught Harry saying something about a Penseive and Sirius Black. He stopped talking when Harley entered the room, followed by the twins and the other students Snape had taken his anger out on.

They had nothing to do, as Harry, Fred, and George had been banned from Quidditch after a fight with Malfoy, but Harry was not planning to be idle.

"I need to talk to Sirius," he said.

Harley scoffed. "Okay, sure, just send Hedwig with a nice, detailed note. Or why not try the Floo Network again? That worked wonders last time."

"Actually, that's just what I was thinking," Harry said, green eyes shining behind his glasses. "If we can create a diversion to get Umbridge away from her office for a little while, I can talk to him in her fireplace, because we know it's not being monitored."

"Seems like a lot of unnecessary risk to have a conversation. Is it about the Order?" Harley asked.

Harry looked impatient. "Yes-no. Both. It's about Order members."

She glared at him. "One of the Dark Lord's visions?"

Harry shook his head. "A different kind of vision. Not mine...just, I can't talk about it. Please, trust me?"

"Okay," Harley sighed. "What can we do?"

She saw the identical gleam in the twins' eyes, and they smiled. "Leave it to us," Fred said.

"We know just the thing," George added.

They worked out a time and day, going over everything fairly quickly. Harley looked at the things that they had created, the Charms they planned on using, and felt a surge of pride. Let Hermione fawn over pigheaded Quidditch players, she loved dating someone as brilliant as Fred was. It didn't matter that he actually was a Quidditch player, or that he got low OWL scores, what mattered was that he was actually a genius, an inventor, and much stronger than anyone thought he was, including his parents. Harley had always hated the way that Molly kind of skipped over the twins because they had been troublemakers and not prefects or Head Boys. They were just as, if not more, important than Percy or Ron or the other two boys.

He pulled her aside once everyone had gone to sleep and said, "You know what this means, don't you?"

Harley nodded, having been dreading this day for months. "You're going to leave. Do not misunderstand, I cannot blame you for leaving. I just...it will be so lonely here without you." She ran her hand down his crooked tie. "You bring life to the place."