The next day Delilah woke up even earlier than normal, practically bouncing off the walls. She settled down, taking deep breaths before she was calm enough to head up to breakfast, where all the students should have returned.
Sure enough when she got to the Great Hall, people were starting to return. Delilah saw Fred and George, scheming with Lee Jordan, and her blonde dork.
She gave Fred and George a high five as she headed towards Draco.
"Hey," she said in his ear as she sat down beside him, making him flinch.
He turned and grinned, but Delilah still noticed the tired look in his eyes. The same one he got after each summer break.
"Hey."
He stared at her lips and moved closer. She leaned on his shoulder.
"Classes don't start until tomorrow," Delilah casually stated. "And neither of us have any homework."
Draco's grin widened.
"RoR?"
Delilah smiled. "You read my mind."
They finished eating and headed up to the Room of Requirement.
Everything was ready for a... love potion?
"So... I guess we're making a love potion?" Draco guessed.
"Yeah, but let's not amplify it. That would be messed up."
Draco nodded when his eyes lit up.
"I agree." He was trying not to laugh. What was so funny?
"What?"
"I think you're right." He moved closer and nudged her playfully.
Delilah shook her head, attempting not to laugh. Why did she have to like such a dork? Alas her heart had chosen and she had gone with it.
"Can I kiss you?" Draco asked.
Instead of responding, she kissed him.
She could feel him grinning and smiled.
"We should probably start the potion," Delilah awkwardly commented a moment after they had breathlessly pulled apart.
He nodded.
As they made the potion, the room started to smell more and more like Draco's cologne, mint, and old books.
Then, after a few explosions, burns, and lost eyebrows they were done.
"I think it worked," Draco said.
"I think so too."
They both sat awkwardly, staring at each other.
"What do you smell?" they blurted in unison before laughing.
"You first," they said. "No you."
"Ok I'll go," Draco decided. "Your lemon and lavender shampoo and apples from my family's orchard. What do you smell?"
Delilah smiled. No wonder she liked the dork.
"Your mint cologne and old books."
He nodded, grinning.
They sat comfortably for a minute, staring at the fireplace. Delilah grabbed Draco's hand and sneakily looked at his watch.
"It's almost lunch," she commented. "Want to come back after?"
He glanced at his watch, looking surprised at the time.
"Yeah, sure."
They quickly ate lunch then returned to the Room of Requirement.
Before they went back to making potions, they planned the DA meetings for the rest of the month.
Then, Delilah and Draco started the next potion.
The next day wasn't nearly as relaxing as the previous one. The only hopeful thing even mentioned was the next Hogsmeade trip, which happened to be on Valentines day. Yet that wasn't enough to make the day seem bright.
It started in Defense Against the Dark Arts. The Christmas spirit seemed to have made Umbridge even more fake than ever. Then, in potions, Snape was as foul as ever. Christmas obviously hadn't treated him well either. They both gave them a bucket load of homework.
But hey, that was just a normal Monday.
"Hey, so... you saw how the next Hogsmeade trip is on Valentine's day?" Draco asked at lunch.
Delilah nodded, her face full of a sandwich.
"Um... would you like to go with me?" he awkwardly asked.
She choked on her sandwich and started coughing.
Draco looked around, panicked.
The piece became unstuck and she could breathe.
"You alright?" he asked, his face full of worry.
"Yes, to both questions."
Draco's eyes lit up as he grinned.
"Really? Great."
The day managed to get better from there. Sprout and McGonagall still gave them homework, but McGonagall gave them time to work on it, making it more manageable.
Sadly they still had to spend all night working on it.
"Ugh," Draco complained an hour before midnight. "When will this end?"
Delilah smiled.
"We're close," she sleepily said as she finished the conclusion on Snape's essay. "There. One more to go."
She glared at Umbridge's essay. She didn't care to write an essay about whatever chapter they were on.
Draco nodded, mumbling inaudibly under his breath. His head lolled onto Delilah's shoulder.
Delilah nudged him and he shot up.
"Sorry."
She smiled.
"Don't worry about it, I don't mind."
In fact she kinda liked it....
She wrote down some crap for the Toad and let Draco rephrase parts of it.
While he did, she leaned on his shoulder, enjoying how he still smelled like the love potion. Maybe some spilled on him? Eh, it was too late to worry about it. He'd have told her if he'd been burned.
Her eyes closed.
Someone was giggling. Wait, multiple people were. Delilah moved a little closer to the warmth besides her. The voices got louder.
"Shhhh, you'll wake them," a girl said, her voice full of amusement.
"They are never going to live this down," someone else replied.
"Shhhhhhhhhh," Daphne hissed. "I still need a little blackmail for the time they caught me out of bed with- oh it doesn't matter."
"What? Who?"
"Oh it doesn't matter."
"Andrei," Delilah murmured, grinning. "It was last year."
She opened her eyes and saw a small crowd of students hovering over them.
"Hi Delilah," Nicci excitedly said. "You should go get ready for school. Breakfast has already started."
Draco mumbled something and pulled Delilah closer. His eyes fluttered open. He kept his arm around her, and she found that she quite enjoyed it, especially when he rested his head on hers.
"Breakfast time?"
"Wanna head?"
"We should probably change first."
"Don't have to," Delilah murmured.
"Umbridge."
She groaned.
"I don't want to move."
"Me neither."
"Ahhh they're so cute," a random second year exclaimed.
"Ugh let's go," Draco muttered.
"Next time let's try and fall asleep in your room," Delilah commented.
It took a moment to realize why his face turned pink, but when it did her face turned to match his.
"Not what I meant."
"I know, but...."
Draco didn't finish his sentence and she didn't ask him to.
They sat up and for the first time Delilah noticed how big the crowd was. There were at least seven students, and a crowd of merfolk, laughing and exchanging more money. They really liked their bets.
Delilah went to her room, got ready for the day, then headed back to the Common Room. The crowd had been replaced by
He grinned sleepily.
"Time to head up?"
She nodded.
They headed up to the Great Hall, sat in their normal spots, and started eating. Delilah thought that they had missed the daily owl post, but was wrong. The owls rushed in and the Daily Prophet was dropped besides Draco.
He scanned the paper, his eyes widening. The moment he finished reading, he handed it to Delilah.
"You need to see this."
It wasn't hard to see what he meant. The front page had ten black-and-white photographs, nine showing wizards' faces and the tenth, a witch's. Some of the people in the photographs were silently jeering; others were tapping their fingers on the frame of their pictures, looking insolent. Each picture was captioned with a name and the crime for which the person had been sent to Azkaban.
Antonin Dolohov, read the legend beneath a wizard with a long, pale, twisted face who was sneering up at Delilah, convicted of the brutal murders of Gideon and Fabian Prewett.
Augustus Rookwood, said the caption beneath a pockmarked man with greasy hair who was leaning against the edge of his picture, looking bored, convicted of leaking Ministry of Magic Secrets to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
But Delilah's eyes were drawn to the picture of the witch. Her face had leapt out at her the moment she had seen the page. She had long, dark hair that looked unkempt and straggly in the picture, though Delilah had seen it sleek, thick, and shining. She glared up at Delilah through heavily lidded eyes, an arrogant, disdainful smile playing around her thin mouth. Like Sirius, she retained vestiges of great good looks, but Azkaban had taken most of her beauty.
Bellatrix Lestrange, convicted of the torture and permanent incapacitation of Frank and Alice Longbottom.
Was that why Neville Longbottom lived with his grandmother? Delilah felt a stab of pity. She looked at the headline over the pictures.
MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN
MINISTRY FEARS BLACK IS "RALLYING POINT"
FOR OLD DEATH EATERS
The Ministry of Magic announced late last night that there has been a mass breakout from Azkaban.
Speaking to reporters in his private office, Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic, confirmed that ten high-security prisoners escaped in the early hours of yesterday evening, and that he has already informed the Muggle Prime Minister of the dangerous nature of these individuals.
"We find ourselves, most unfortunately, in the same position we were two and a half years ago when the murderer Sirius Black escaped," said Fudge last night. "Nor do we think the two breakouts are unrelated. An escape of this magnitude suggests outside help, and we must remember that Black, as the first person ever to break out of Azkaban, would be ideally placed to help others follow in his footsteps. We think it likely that these individuals, who include Black's cousin, Bellatrix Lestrange, have rallied around Black as their leader. We are, however, doing all we can to round up the criminals and beg the magical community to remain alert and cautious. On no account should any of these individuals be approached."
Delilah didn't know what to think. Fudge seriously was still blaming Sirius for all their problems? Once the news that Voldemort was back, he was going to get sacked anyway, so he may as well admit he was wrong. Stupid stubborn adults.
She handed the paper back to Draco.
"Wow."
"Exactly," he agreed. "No wonder Longbottom looks pale."
She could see what he meant.
"Yeah, so maybe you could be civil to him."
Draco grinned,
"I haven't messed with him for a bit, don't worry. I won't start now. We all have too much on our plates anyway."
"So reassuring," Delilah mumbled into her food as he continued reading.
She glanced around the Great Hall, curious to see people's reactions. Oddly enough, most people were still going about their day to day business. Then again, few people did get the newspaper daily.
Up at the staff table, however, it was a different story. Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall were deep in conversation, both looking extremely grave. Professor Sprout had the Prophet propped against a bottle of ketchup and was reading the front page with such concentration that she was not noticing the gentle drip of egg yolk falling into her lap from her stationary spoon. Meanwhile, at the far end of the table, Professor Umbridge was tucking into a bowl of porridge. For once her pouchy toad's eyes were not sweeping the Great Hall looking for misbehaving students. She scowled as she gulped down her food and every now and then she shot a malevolent glance up the table to where Dumbledore and McGonagall were talking so intently.
Delilah turned to Draco, who was frowning.
"What happened now?" she inquired.
"A Ministry Unspeakable, Bode, died."
"A... what?"
"Someone who works in the Department of Mysteries. No one knows what happens down there. It's a really important job. Father told me all about them over break. He seemed very annoyed with them."
"Alright. How did he die?" said Delilah.
"He was recovering in St. Mungos and someone sent him some potted Devil's Snare."
"And no one noticed? Didn't it attack whoever brought it to him?"
Draco shrugged.
"No, maybe whoever sent it put a stunning charm on it? Could they do that?"
"I don't know."
She glanced at the doors, and groaned. Hagrid had another cut and his old ones still hadn't healed. Upon further examination, he also looked downcast.
Hagrid waited for some Ravenclaws to pass and then headed to Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
Delilah watched for a moment, then turned to Draco.
"Do you know why Hagrid is upset?"
She didn't know why she asked him, he probably wouldn't know.
Before he could respond, Ron exclaimed, "You're on probation?"
"He's on probation," Draco responded.
She rolled her eyes.
The fact that Hagrid was now on probation became common knowledge within the school over the next few days, but hardly anybody appeared to be upset about it; indeed, some people seemed positively gleeful. As for the freakish death of an obscure Department of Mysteries employee in St. Mungo's, no one really knew or cared. There was only one topic of conversation in the corridors now: the ten escaped Death Eaters, whose story had finally filtered through the school from those few people who read the newspapers. Rumors were flying that some of the convicts had been spotted in Hogsmeade, that they were supposed to be hiding out in the Shrieking Shack and that they were going to break into Hogwarts, just as Sirius Black had done.
Those who came from Wizarding families had grown up hearing the names of these Death Eaters spoken with almost as much fear as Voldemort's; the crimes they had committed during the days of Voldemort's reign of terror were legendary. There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors.
Delilah did her best to treat them normally. She knew what it was like to be talked about only because of relatives. She got lots of glances and heard plenty of conversations about Harry, who was the subject of much renewed muttering and pointing in the corridors these days, yet there was a slight difference in the tone of the whisperers' voices. They sounded curious rather than hostile now, and once or twice she overheard snatches of conversation that suggested that the speakers were not satisfied with the Prophet's version of how and why ten Death Eaters had managed to break out of Azkaban fortress. In their confusion and fear, these doubters now seemed to be turning to the only other explanation available to them, the one that Harry and Dumbledore had been telling since the previous year.
It was not only the students' mood that had changed. It was now quite common to come across two or three teachers conversing in low, urgent whispers in the corridors, breaking off their conversations the moment they saw students approaching.
"They can't talk freely in the staffroom anymore," Delilah quietly said as she and Draco passed Professors McGonagall, Flitwick, and Sprout huddled together outside the Charms classroom one day. "Not with the Toad."
"Do you think they know anything?" Draco asked.
"We won't find out. You know Decree... What number is it now?"
For new signs had appeared on the house notice boards the morning after news of the Azkaban breakout:
- by order of -
The High Inquisitor of Hogwarts
Teachers are hereby banned from giving students any information that is not strictly related to the subjects they are paid to teach.
The above is in accordance with Educational Decree Number Twenty-six.
Signed:
Dolores Jane Umbridge
HIGH INQUISITOR
This latest decree had been the subject of a great number of jokes among the students. Lee Jordan had pointed out to Umbridge that by the terms of the new rule she was not allowed to tell Fred and George off for playing Exploding Snap in the back of the class.
"Exploding Snap's got nothing to do with Defense Against the Dark Arts, Professor! That's not information relating to your subject!"
When she next saw Lee, the back of his hand was bleeding rather badly. That must be how Umbridge punished students. The same day she noticed some scars on Harry's hand. She needed to talk to him about that.
Delilah had thought that the breakout from Azkaban might have humbled the Toad a little, that she might have been abashed at the catastrophe that had occurred right under her beloved Fudge's nose. It seemed, however, to have only intensified her furious desire to bring every aspect of life at Hogwarts under her personal control. She seemed determined at the very least to achieve a sacking before long, and the only question was whether it would be Professor Trelawney or Hagrid who went first.
Every Care of Magical Creature was now conducted in the presence of Umbridge and her clipboard. It was safe to assume she also was in every Divination class, and from what Delilah heard Trewlaney wasn't putting up a good show.
Sadly Hagrid wasn't either. Though he seemed to be following Delilah and Hermione's advice and had shown them nothing more frightening than a crup, a creature indistinguishable from a Jack Russell terrier except for its forked tail, since Umbridge's first visit, yet he also seemed to have lost his nerve. He was oddly distracted and jumpy in lessons, losing the thread of what he was saying while talking to the class, answering questions wrongly and glancing anxiously at Umbridge all the time. He was also more distant with Delilah, expressly forbidding her to visit him after dark.
"If she catches yeh, it'll be all of both necks on the line," he told her flatly, and with no desire to do anything that jeopardized his job further, she abstained from walking down to his hut in the evenings.
It seemed that Umbridge was trying to make Hogwarts life miserable, and she was starting to succeed.