The Hidden Marauder (Harry Potter FanFiction)

Intuition

-CHAPTER SEVEN-

Intuition

The practical Defence classes that Katherine ran after school hours were continually busy, and equally as successful as the first had been. The students were all making significant progress, much to Umbridge’s disgust as she often informed Katherine over dinner in The Great Hall, but Katherine gave it no mind. She did not find herself caring at all about what Umbridge did and did not approve of, so simply dismissed her – often by making  a witty remark about Umbridge’s clothes, or annoying ‘hem hem’ habit, to which she often suggested visiting a doctor for some medication for ‘that nasty cough’.

On Friday, Katherine found herself in the dungeons of Hogwarts; the potions room, to be exact; immediately after lessons had finished for the day. Surprisingly, the laboratory like room was actually quite welcoming – Katherine had always enjoyed potions, regardless of the fact that Professor Slughorn had consistently preferred Severus’ potions over hers. She had followed the book to the letter, while she had often seen Severus adding a little something extra or not following the instructions to the mark; proving how talented he was. He knew potion theory so well that he could immediately discover the most effective way of brewing a potion and carry it out – a skill Katherine had always marvelled.

Bringing out a large vial of Wolfsbane, Severus handed it to Katherine silently, as there was little to say. The instructions were already written on the bottle in Severus’ ‘picture perfect’ handwriting, so that Remus would know exactly how to use it. After Katherine had bid a quiet ‘thank you’, she had left too, with few words.

It seemed that, although they had a disagreement the previous weekend upon Katherine’s abrupt arrival to Hogwarts, and disagreed on the idea of civility, they were now, indeed, civil with one another. One could not possibly class them friends – they were people of few words around one another, but one might refer to them as polite acquaintances; each silently acknowledging the other as having had a similar loss; each silently respecting the other for overcoming their losses and working to prevent them in the future, within the Order.

By the time the weekend had rolled around, Katherine was ecstatic to get out of Hogwarts and breathe in some fresher air. When she’d attended Hogwarts herself as a student, at least she’d been able to play Quidditch to taste fresh air – she did so with James and Sirius often, as she was rather talented at playing seeker and chaser. During house games, where she would play for Gryffindor, she was obviously a chaser, Sirius was a beater, and James was the seeker – however in the trio’s personal games, James and Katherine would compete for the snitch, whilst Sirius would try to hit them out of the sky.

Remus preferred to stay on the ground, and without it needing to be said, Peter did also.

It did, however, take rather a long time on Saturday to finish marking all of the written Defence Against the Dark Arts work that Umbridge had so kindly given her. Due to her promise to Dumbledore to remain as an inconspicuous eye, she accepted the workload – not that Umbridge had given her opportunity to say ‘no’. The woman was quickly becoming powerful, and she knew it. She often had a gleam in her eye which raised alarm-bells in Katherine’s head, and she made a mental note to monitor how much power the woman gained carefully.

When she had finally laid the last piece of parchment, which she had generously graded a ‘D’, (Dreadful), down, she stood from her desk in her empty classroom and walked to the regal man’s portrait, slipping through it into her living quarters.  Katherine closed the portrait behind her and grabbed the vial of Wolfsbane potion, stuffing it into her robes, before heading over to the fireplace. She’d been delayed long enough in tasting her freedom, and practically hoisted her wand out of her robes to open the Floo network. It was safe to say that even in a week she’d missed Sirius and Remus more than she thought she would; she absolutely did not know how she’d gone fifteen years without them.