Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

June 25, 2006. Hogsmeade Village. Hog's Head.

Shadows swayed and fell as the door closed behind Professor Vector. There were few patrons in this evening, fewer still who paid her any mind. She took nothing with her to a corner table save that she came with: a stack of sixth-year essays, and atop them a fold of creased brown parchment, stick figures on ducking brooms in slapstick patterns around its margins. Charmed just sloppily enough to be plausibly amateur. Of course.

She sat alone at the corner table by habit more than mood, wand in idle motion over a produced teacup as she once more unfolded the topmost parchment, the latest issue of Widdershins Weekly and smoothed it out. No fine print. Nothing official. Just deniable playful margins and the ever-anonymous sign-off of '-WW (no, not that one)'.

Some of the staff had tracked it since early 2004 when it first started showing up in castle corners, in library nooks and brick-wall niches, slipped behind bulletin boards and folded into textbooks. Professor Linton had hated it from the first, of course, even when it stuck to Ask Widdershins (Q: What's the best way to avoid detention without lying? A: Time travel. Failing that, befriend a Slytherin) and articles as A Brief Ranking of Staircases That Try To Kill Us and What Your Sorting Says About How Uncomfortable Your Family Get-Togethers Are and Defense Against the Dark Arts, Ranked by Professor Stability and An Open Letter to Prefects: Are You Okay? (Blink Twice for No) and We're Not Judging Who You Sit With. (Except We Are).

That last had been particularly on the nose, in Vector's view. There was, after all, one particular student group in the castle who'd quietly invited just that sort of speculation for years now. Every professor in the castle knew of them, even if the students themselves had never said the name. Technically, there was no such group. But then, technically, there had been no Marauders once, as well.

Not that the Contraries were anything like the Marauders.

Vector eyed the page. This issue was different. No schoolyard needling. No gossip in guise. The latest Widdershins article was something else entirely:

On the Ethics of Disappearing - and Other Traditions That Made Sense in the 15th Century

Vector read slowly once more. She didn't skim.

'...Statute was built for doors. Time, as my Muggleborn friends keep trying to explain, is increasingly fond of Windows...'
'...not, strictly speaking, a condemnation of Muggle Studies, per se. It is more an observation that our curriculum rests somewhere between five decades and fifteen centuries out of date...'
'...The question isn't whether the world will notice us. It's whether we'll still be pretending not to notice them when it happens.'

Vector sighed, though not in disapproval. Not quite. She knew exactly which of the five had penned this. Merlin knew, she'd marked enough of their essays. And that was the thing about the Contraries: they didn't shout. They simply sat - together - even when gossip said they shouldn't.

First came the two: the Rosier cousin with his courtroom diction and immaculate cuffs, and Bosco who thought so long and spoke so late that topics had moved on without her. They weren't alike, but neither flinched from the other, and in the early years, that was rare enough to matter.

The third, Kade, arrived by suspicion. He spotted the pair in third year and grew convinced they were planning something - something Slytherin, probably, and therefore interesting. When he finally confronted them, they weren't. They were just... sitting. So he sat too.

Silvertree, the fourth, ran the numbers, liked the odds, and claimed her seat as a kind of protest.

And finally, the fifth - Mulford - who'd been circling since the beginning, and one day simply chose to sit.

They didn't part. They didn't budge. They stood their ground and waited for the world to catch up.

Gryffindor didn't lead the charge this time - though one wore the lion. One was an eagle. Two, snakes. And the badger, of course - the one that rumor held had nearly been Slytherin. To some minds, of course they didn't roar.

When a gossip column in the Prophet cast its shadow on them in fifth year, they responded with a letter - polite, unsparing - questioning the ethics of targeting underage students in print. With citations.

Most of them had clean academic records, though of at least two, Vector suspected that was more by contrivance than by truth.

Vector sipped her tea. The dancing figures on the margins of the parchment gave mock salutes as more brooms sailed past them.

Most of the students read this newsletter. Most of the staff pretended not to - including, Vector suspected, Linton. Even if that was only to find fault in it.

The Ministry appointment to the new Magical Ethics course had been disappointing in more ways than Vector cared to catalogue. She'd hoped for nuance. They'd sent someone she instead suspected they'd simply promoted away from the Ministry.

She folded the parchment, slipped it back beneath the essays, and lifted her chin to gaze across the room at the various patrons of the Hog's Head. Most were speaking in low, amicable day-to-day calm and quiet, the ambient rhythm of slow drinks. Voldemort, after all, was nearly ten years dead. Peace held.

And somewhere out there, wrapped in the stillness of summer, five soon-to-be seventh-years were reading a map their elders were only beginning to realize existed.

Chapter Text

September 1, 2006. London. King's Cross Station.

Rosier

Pale smoke curled over the back of the Hogwarts Express where it stood in pristine anticipation on Platform 9 3/4. As it had for decades prior and as it would for decades hence, the train waited for its bounty of children pouring in from both barrier and less conventional means. Owls hooted. Cats shrieked. First-years looked variably bright-eyed and nauseated and sometimes both. Older students peeled off toward familiar flocks, and parents gave send-offs both patronizing and perfunctory.

At the very edge of the bustle and barking of the crowd, a seventh-year boy stood. His green-trimmed dark robes fell in a crisp, collected manner over a posture that followed suit. Neither trunk nor bags rested anywhere in sight; he had long since stowed them. His darkly angled, thick brow lent him an imposing look that had most younger students offering a slight berth. At least, those who hadn't had older siblings whisper in their ear and give cause for more curious looks instead. He resisted the urge to close his eyes against those.

Cassian Rosier paid little mind to the crowd at large, save to offer polite nods to occasional peers. His attention returned invariably to the barrier, in long sidelong looks. He made no attempt to conceal his focus. There was no need to. Nor did he check the time. The delay was predictably unpredictable, a pattern not broken in a half dozen years.

With a sharp pop, another teenage boy appeared beside Rosier. There was no flinch. Not this time, anyway.

Rosier barely shifted, his gaze remaining on the barrier. "Mulford," he greeted in an even tone. Right on schedule.

The green-clad Marius Mulford straightened his cloak about his shoulders, gently elbowing Rosier in the process. Where Rosier stood prim and trimmed, Mulford looked like he'd spent the morning swiveling between mirror and wardrobe. His lightly curled brown hair was tousled in an elective manner, and so too his cloak left slightly askew even after its nominal adjustment. Rosier felt no need to look to confirm this.

"Really, Cassian?" Marius answered, voice richly amused. "Surnamed, after everything we've suffered? Exams, gossip, the emotional fallout from those House unity parties-"

"Mulford."

"-and the Prophet's slander, Marlow's endearing espionage attempts-"

"Mulford." Rosier didn't raise his voice, but let the syllables stretch with intent. The rhythm was in motion.

"-the late-night debates, that one time you personally annoyed Kai into joining the dueling club-"

And two, three... Rosier counted another beat in his head. He knew how this song went.

"Mulford."

"Well now you're just timing it."

Rosier allowed a fractional curl at the corner of his mouth. "Marius," he gave at last.

Marius nodded to that, satisfied now that all was well in the world. He turned to the bustling platform. A few passing seventh-years caught his eye; he offered them a disarming wave and smile. "Well then," he said aside to Rosier. "Read any particularly soul-destroyingly dry legal tomes this summer?"

Two, actually, Rosier considered. There were also the Muggle novels Kai sent, but he never mentioned those. Before Rosier could quite begin a reply about the legal texts - thoughtful, the tilt of his mouth and eyes suggesting it wouldn't be a quick answer - another voice cut in from off to the right of them both.

"He didn't annoy Kai into joining the club, you know," came from a light-haired Ravenclaw girl who'd been wrangling a battered trolley. Anselma Silvertree waved her wand in quick flicks as she levitated a stack of papers back into order. "Joining was always probable, for her. The only anomaly was timing. 'Annoyed' suggests she did it to spite him, which isn't really how I would describe the incident."

"Incident?" Marius said in amusement. "Merlin, Anselma, you make it sound like a scandal."

Anselma arched an eyebrow. "It was a scandal." Privately, Rosier agreed.

"You mean learning that Kai was, in fact, a teenager?" Marius asked, eyes flicking to Rosier.

"I did apologize," Rosier said, not looking at either of them. His eyes were on the barrier again.

"Only after dooming the duelists for years." Marius' tone was mock-tragic.

"She performed well enough early on, by club standards. But I'd hardly call it dooming," Anselma put in. "And Cassian's role was more provocation than annoyance, anyway..."

"I did not provoke her," Rosier put in mildly. And we all would have known if I had.

Marius folded his arms loosely, curl of lips wry. "You called her a ledger, Cassian."

And unfortunately, she heard 'boring', Rosier finished in his head. It was not his proudest attempt at ribbing, in hindsight.

Anselma finished stacking her parchments, bound them with a flick of her wand, and turned back. "Regardless, it's history. She's late again, it looks like. Where's Marlow?"

Rosier answered her by inclining his head toward a knot of first-years standing around the sun-warmed and freckled Gryffindor seventh-year like a throng of the Pied Piper. Marlow Kade was only half-changed into school garb - his cloak hung loosely over a colorful Muggle T-shirt. He hefted another trunk with casual strength, earning baffled first-year stares as he slid it smoothly into place.. He turned back with a grin and said something that made three of the kids burst into laughter.

Marlow's ease with the populace at large had been something that puzzled Rosier, in younger years. It was only in more recent ones that Rosier weighed Marlow and Kai as not so different and Marlow merely more outgoing with it: both bulldozed past posture and age and name in their own way. More with irreverence than disrespect.

Watching the scene, Marius tilted his head. "How-" he asked, not for the first time, "-was he not made a prefect?"

After patting one of the first-years on the shoulder, Marlow turned to head the way of the trio, still wearing a warm manner.

Rosier took the question, never moving his gaze from the barrier. Surely by now... "McGonagall may have overlooked what he did to Silas Avery in fourth year - but that didn't mean she didn't know."

"Frankly, she should've made him prefect for that alone. Kai too, for that matter."

"Avery was formally disciplined," Anselma put in. "Public apology. To say nothing of that him saying the word at all made him an unperson in his own House for half a term." Her lips pursed, then she quickly added, "Misuse of magic is unfortunately common enough without condoning vigilantism." McGonagall's lack of endorsement therein, perhaps. At least, Rosier imagined so and Anselma seemed to agree.

"Avery pulled his wand first," Marlow corrected as he strolled over, having overheard enough to know the old shape of it.

Then, Rosier's posture subtly shifted, for the barrier let through a familiar shape. The other three glanced to him in turn, then to follow his attention.

The last of their number came through, though bearing no Hufflepuff colors as yet. Kai Bosco pushed her trolley through with a squeaking complaint of old wheels. She was still in Muggle attire, wearing a jean jacket, hair combed, and just enough effort to count as ready. Her eyes swept Platform 9 3/4 in seeking. She locked eyes with Cassian Rosier first of them, as she always did. It had been so since first year. Before the others had gathered. Back when the alcove table in the library was just a quiet place to be quiet, and neither of them had needed to explain why they were there.

"You don't have to sit with me," he'd said, the first time.

"Don't have to not," she'd answered.

Now, the plain manner of Kai's expression softened toward a ghost of smile. A slight questioning lift of brow across the span of the platform: You alright? Cassian answered with a tipped nod.

Some slender thread of taut tension in Cassian loosened as he folded his hands behind his back. He hadn't been waiting for her the way one waits for someone to arrive. He had been waiting for the rhythm of things to resume. For the day to take on its proper shape.

Kai turned next to the others - a nod for Marlow, a quirk of the mouth at Marius's flourish, a quiet tilt of head at Anselma that likely stood in for warmth. Then she moved on, already focused on stowing her luggage. She would meet them on the train.

Marius, still wearing his own grin of greeting, planted his hands on his hips and glanced around. "Well then. Shall we?"

"The compartment feels smaller every year," Marlow tossed over his shoulder, turning on heel to go.

Cassian's mouth tugged at the corner.

Anselma was halfway through exploring the feasibility of Expanded train compartments before they even boarded the Express.

---

Marius found their compartment. Unnecessarily, but habitually, he held the door and gestured the other four in with a sweep of his free hand. It was tight-moving on the train, but many students had tucked in by now, and so a pattern of weave could be found.

The window seats went to Kai and Cassian as per tradition, if only because they were the least likely to get up and wander off amid the trip. Marlow sat beside Cassian this time, Anselma beside Kai. Only then did Marius himself scoot into the compartment and close the door behind him.

"The train is getting smaller," Marius echoed of Marlow earlier, casting an amused glance between the benches. His gaze paused near the window before he sidled to squeeze in beside Anselma, who allowed more room when Kai preemptively shifted as well.

Cassian surveyed the platform beyond the window. Only a few stragglers remained. A first-year boy hugging his mother, among them. Cassian looked away. Soon, they would be off.

In his peripheral, Kai glanced past Anselma to Marius. "Last year, at least. You alright?"

"Born to the seat, Snake Charmer."

Kai exhaled through her nose, but Cassian heard the amusement in it and was privately relieved. Her eyes met his, for the shared history in the phrase. She rested an arm near the window. Her jacket was worn at the elbows. He'd never seen her replace something before it frayed.

The phrase had not been a kindly one in their first year or second - nor had it originated from Marius. No. More than a few had gotten certain ideas about the quiet and odd Hufflepuff Muggleborn who sat with a Slytherin Rosier - cousin line or no - a mere two years after the war. Cassian himself had overheard more unkind implications than he'd ever known how to answer at the time, and so had not answered.

Him the gossip mill had known what to do with. Manipulative. Hufflepuff lackey. Drawing her in for optics.

But her? She'd barely even noticed the gossip at first, and when she did notice Snake Charmer start making rounds in snark, she'd been more bemused than hurt. Within a few years, it stopped being an insult anyone bothered with. Within a few years more, Marius had reclaimed its use as jest, for reasons that escaped Cassian.

Parchment rustled in the compartment. Anselma, of course. Cassian didn't look. Not until she spoke.

"So, did anyone see the August Widdershins?" Anselma asked. And such was what she had in her lap, drawing varying glances from both benches. Cassian hadn't read it yet, but the margins were already flaring with those ridiculous broomstick doodles.

Anselma's question was a trick of sorts. They all read it. They all politely ignored the elephant in the room of that they were the main suspects for authors - and yet none of them claimed authorship even to one another.

Marius leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees as he glanced at it. "You know, it doesn't make much sense. Widdershins Weekly, in monthly installments!" he said with a mock-showhost affect. Marlow, lounging opposite him, offered a playful sweep of hand to match the cadence.

"Widdershins Monthly doesn't alliterate," Kai commented.

"What about it?" Marlow asked Anselma. "June was something," he added with a frown. "The Disappearing article."

Yes, Cassian thought. It's almost as if the author is someone in this compartment. Half the articles - especially in recent years - strayed too close to concepts the five debated among themselves to be coincidence. Cassian himself had initially thought it was an older student, maybe even a disillusioned professor. Less so of late.

Cassian's theory was Anselma. The only real mystery, to him, being that she hadn't taken credit. She most persistently asserted to broaden the circle of conversation, and while the humor wasn't her usual style, Anselma understood the utility of satire. Kai's humor was dry enough, but she was more reactive than instigating in these matters. Marlow wouldn't have bothered with under-the-table means. Marius didn't write manifestos. He defused them.

"'How I Took a Muggle Summer Class And It Went Fine,'" Anselma read off of the August issue.

Definitely Anselma, Cassian thought of his theory. But his eyes shifted to Kai. "That was your idea."

Kai's brow furrowed. "Yeah," she said simply. "Not bothered if someone gets it in their head that spending time around Muggles isn't awful, though."

"Well, the author's obviously not Muggleborn," Anselma commented. She glanced up, briefly meeting Cassian's eyes, and he wondered what she was playing at. "It's got wizardborn perspective."

"Are we sure it isn't just some fifth-year Ravenclaws?" Marlow asked offhandedly, gesturing to the parchment. "Emeline Fosse, maybe. Don't they have a Muggle literature club?"

The elephant in the compartment loomed large, Cassian thought. No one was saying it, but everyone knew it.

"Whoever they are," Kai said quietly, "I think they're clever. And they don't let it become cruel-spirited."

"They're also probably flunking Charms," Marius put in, eyeing the shoddy dancing-stick-figure charmwork on the margins of Anselma's held issue.

"Or canny enough to muddy the waters," Kai offered plainly to him, eyes flicking to study his face. Given her preference for directness, Cassian wasn't sure if she meant the charmwork or the conversation circling it.

"Could always pin it on Flitwick," Marlow put in with a grin.

Anselma, looking at the parchment still, hummed and tapped halfway down the page. "Misspelled paprika."

Cassian couldn't decide if she sounded annoyed. "They are getting closer to being plain about things," he finally said. There was a mouth-pursed pause, and then he said, "They didn't cover Anselma's theories in June, but they came close."

"I would rather someone wrote about it where people were reading. So long as they get it right."

Kai, reading over Anselma's shoulder, suddenly smiled faintly. "Says there'll be a listing of suggested Muggle summer classes in London, in the spring issues." The nudge toward wizard participation in such had been her idea, in a form, though she'd never been sure how to broach it.

"Still your idea," Cassian said. He finally allowed himself a pointed comment: "Either the author is a fly on the wall to our conversations, or they're very coincidentally aligned." His gaze flicked over expressions around.

Anselma glanced up at Cassian again, a flicker of frown crossing her face before she said, "Obviously. I actually spent most of last night building a comparison chart of potential authors-"

Marlow had blinked at Cassian's assertion. A slow grin was forming on Marius' features as Anselma spoke. But before Anselma finished and before either of them could say anything, Kai spoke.

"It's not all that strange if it is coincidence. We're not special. We're just early. It could be half the castle. Especially those with Muggle family."

Cassian hesitated. She wasn't wrong. But his experience of Widdershins still leaned that it was one of his friends. And if that led to blowback... He turned his head to the window, straightened his sleeves.

"Yeah," Marlow said. As the other Muggleborn in their group, Marlow spoke to this easily. "It doesn't take anything but someone whose Muggle mum has a blog, and them thinking a little about it."

Kai's jaw tightened, and her gaze dipped to her hands. For there it was. It wasn't the first time she'd said it, but Kai followed Marlow's words with what had in one quiet fifth-year conversation become the foundation of all thought that followed:

"Yeah. You can't obliviate the world."

Chapter Text

September 1, 2006. Hogwarts Grounds. Hogsmeade Station.

Kai

In the Contraries' earlier years, older students commonly glanced to the heads of the carriages whether they meant to or not. Some had pretended not to. Others had looked with long and quiet stares. Over the years, it grew less and less noticeable, as the students of the Battle of Hogwarts graduated and left behind only those for whom the carriages still seemed to move on their own. Kai was one to whom the threstrals remained unseen. Anselma probably would have said something if she saw them. Marius and Cass never seemed to.

Kai had seen Marlow glance toward the front of a carriage, even before they shared Care of Magical Creatures as elective. It had been Kai's most anticipated class until she actually took it. These days, she preferred reading about creatures to the grimy reality of caring for them. But she still took the elective. Kai was disinclined to quit.

She hung back a little as they moved from train to carriage, watching Marlow and Cass in a quiet way, for any fresh tilt of attention. None came. Anselma led the procession, and she showed no special attention either.

"Come on, lady Snake Charmer. Don't get left behind." Marius was a few steps ahead, but only just. Kai walked at his flank.

Kai's smile was quick, small, warmer than she wanted. She looked down at her feet, willing it off even as she felt a fondness for the way he said it. The original meaning of the phrase was so far behind her as to be effectively pointless. When Marius said it, it sounded like Yeah, you hang out with Slytherins, and who gives a shit? Still, it was a phrase that only ever came from him. And she couldn't much imagine it from anyone else. And coming from a Slytherin - this Slytherin - it had layers.

"I'm coming," Kai assured quietly, with no shift in pace of stride. Her eyes flicked out toward the dark lake, where the first-years would already be rowing. She didn't remember who she'd been in the boat with - her Sorting night had been a sea of names. But she did remember the thrill that had run through her when one of them mentioned there was a squid. Followed by her confusion of how a squid - a deep-sea-pressure-dwelling creature - survived in a lake. Magic.

"Sorting feast first, squid toast later," Marius said, tone knowing, more level.

A little called out, Kai glanced at the back of his head, eyes narrowing even as her lips tugged. "I wasn't going to," she said, a little quickly.

"Yet," Cass put in from further on.

It had been a ritual in second year, and slightly less common in years thereafter. She'd heard a rumor that the squid liked toast and decided to check. It became weekend afternoons by the lake: tossing toast, not always talking, never alone. It'd also been where she'd nearly hexed Avery the first time, when he'd insulted Cass - and her by proxy.

Kai filed into the carriage after the others - aside Marius, who stood the threshold and let himself in last per usual. This time, Kai sat beside Cass. It was a quiet comfort she didn't have to think about. Cass didn't fill space that way. Not warm or distracting. Undemanding. They'd shared a library table before they shared words, and even now, proximity between them was never awkward.

Across from Kai and Cass, the other two sat, and it was them Marius slipped in beside. Marlow was talking now - something of a Muggle sporting camp done in the summer, his hands animating as he spoke - but Kai's attention wandered. It always took her a moment to settle when the energy grew high. She looked toward the window, and to the starry sky beyond it.

Quietly, she wondered if she'd already have owl post by tonight. Her thoughts circled home, to the debris of past overindulged hobbies, near-cult affections, overexamined leaflets of questionable content.

It hadn't been a quick disentanglement with her mother at King's Cross. Religious societies. Parenting groups. Email solicitations. The influences loomed - not dread, exactly, but the kind of itch that made her skin crawl.

It wasn't that her mother was credulous. It was that she didn't think she was. Which was often worse. And so with three seasons of the year away from her, Kai felt keenly the sense of leaving someone exposed - and someone she'd always had to come back to.

Kai absentmindedly fidgeted, fingers coiling and loosening in her lap, organizing the thoughts as they began to stack higher and higher.

"What do you think, Kai?" Cass's voice interjected on her thoughts, accompanied by a subtle shift of posture that was nearest a nudge he ever gave. "Can wizards play football?"

Kai blinked. Football? Soccer? It was almost absurd - especially coming from Cass.

She glanced about the carriage to find levity in the expressions of the others. Oh. A States joke, maybe? She wasn't sure, had tuned out. Living Stateside was almost a decade behind her now, but she still sometimes tripped.

"American or soccer?" she asked Cass, to be sure.

"American," Marlow answered for him, "Obviously."

"High injury rate. Full-body tackles." Cass' deadpan emerged more readily with Marlow. Cass understood him better. "Perfect for adolescent wand-carriers."

"You'd have to run shield charms with every goal," Marlow said, leaning back.

"Not the worst way to teach basic defense," Cass replied, glancing to Kai, offering the thread.

Marlow followed his gaze and grinned. "See? That's curriculum innovation. Between that and Kai's gun-sense for dueling, next we'll be importing cheer squads."

"Finally, a reason to attend Quidditch matches," Marius said, and then guided the question back toward Kai. "Come now, Kai, wizarding American football would be glorious, wouldn't it?" Marius suggested. "Still safer than wizarding baseball. Especially for the crowd."

Kai let out a breathy chuckle. Her gaze flicked from Anselma's arched brow to Marius' warm regard, before finding refuge in his shoulder instead. She felt a familiar, ridiculous, fluttering wondering of what answer he was hoping for. Kai's fingers tapped together in tangible grounding. "American football is slow to progress until it isn't," she supposed, thinking back on the last summer she flew out to her dad's. "Kind of like Quidditch, except the game can't end five miles away in a cloudbank."

"Exactly." Marius said, pleased. Kai fought down a smile in response.

The carriage rocked gently on an uneven portion of the path.

"Both are often more social events than observational," Anselma offered. Kai wasn't sure if Anselma was pulling the focus off her on purpose, but appreciated it regardless. "Though there is something to be said of the strong tribal tendencies in both."

Trust Anselma to turn a joke into a sociology paper in two sentences. Kai didn't mind. She liked listening to Anselma build ideas up, like watching someone write a book in real time.

Anselma continued, "You're also all talking like Quidditch and American football are comparable, but that ignores a lot in their structures. Quidditch involves acceleration more than positioning."

There was a beat. Marlow blinked, then snorted. Kai exhaled through her nose. Anselma had moved the spotlight well away. With a chalkboard.

None of the Contraries played Quidditch. Well. That wasn't quite true. Marlow had been a Chaser for two years before giving up his spot to a younger student in favor of Charms tutoring. The rest had watched from the stands, or not at all, without ever wondering what they were missing. And it was with a creeping prickle of remembered humiliation that Kai recalled she'd not even called her broom off the ground in the first two weeks of first-year flying lessons. Even now, the memory of scouring the library to try to find some reason for her failures sat with her in discomfit. If something didn't make sense, she had to fix it. This one had never fixed cleanly.

Beyond Kai's attention, the conversation had moved on again.

"-unity songs lately," Anselma was saying. "Better that kids hear that than some of the songs on record, even if it is predictable. It's still got a history of frontloading House stereotypes."

"The Hat doesn't really need help with that, no?" Marius said from where he leaned with loosely crossed arms, eyes light and jovial.

Kai was never entirely sure how to read Marius. She knew his seriousness better than some of them, but it was rare. And rarely public. He smiled, and she thought it sincere in a way, but sometimes it seemed more like someone had once told Marius he smiled well and so he'd never quite stopped. That was something Kai understood even if she failed to emulate it.

It was never a capacity Kai had perfected - she didn't smile for her mother, just nodded and moved on. She'd never mastered the flourish. Not with brooms. Not with faces.

Marlow countered Marius heatlessly. He leaned his head, elbowed Marius. "People've been getting better about it. Haven't you noticed more mixing tables? We've got copycats."

"I'm not sure it's emulation so much as perception of permission," Anselma suggested. "And we didn't invent cross-table seating. It happened before."

"Less with Slytherin," Kai said quietly, and the others glanced to her. "Used to be they sat like they weren't sure they were invited and the rest sat like they weren't sure they could be." She'd noticed it most in a moment of early second year, in the Great Hall, when one of her dormmates had commented and alluded - subtly, but itchingly - that at least Kai didn't bring Cass to the Hufflepuff table. Didn't subject him to it, more like.

She'd never liked how Moira talked about Cass. First like he hadn't been eleven too, and later like he didn't live his summers with a Ministry-appointed guardian. Not that most students knew the latter, she allowed. Still, Kai had held her ground. And it had made her a foreigner anew in her own dorm room for the better part of a year until she'd made clumsy, overthought attempts to patch the air. Not with Moira, not really. Moira had moved on eventually, accepted that Cassian wasn't deorbiting Kai, but she and Kai had no fond rapport.

Cass inclined his head, in her peripheral. "It is different," he allowed. "In the Slytherin common room, that is. Recent first-years are..." He trailed off, rare for Cass, searching for a phrasing he couldn't quite find. "...They belong well."

"They're normal eleven-year-olds?" Marius suggested, a faint warmth of humor to undertone. "Really, it's almost terrifying. Cassian and I used to be the rebels, and now we've little snakes lining up for autographs on the first night."

Kai frowned. Really? Marius played, but she couldn't much picture him signing autographs. Never mind Cass doing it. She tried to picture it. She really did.

"Not literally," Cass commented aside for her clarity.

"Except the once," Marius corrected, a finger raised in counting.

Cass blinked slowly, recalibrating through Marius' absurdity. "Advice isn't the same as an autograph."

"Sure, but you don't exactly hate being asked," Marlow put in. Kai wondered at his confidence. She wondered what Marlow had seen that she hadn't.

Cass gave him tilt of head. "Because it's better than watching them take notes from Avery."

Oh. That.

"Fair. Still, you could at least sign the autographs with flourish."

"I'm not Marius," Cass said, "And there's no autographs."

Marius put in, "And a pity it is. Borderline scandalous." The words had a rote quality to their play, though. Marius' eyes flicked to meet Kai's, catching that she was watching him amid his gesturing. His eyebrows twitched up slightly in acknowledgement. Never one for much eye contact, Kai nonetheless let herself study his eyes for a beat, two, before nerves gave in and she looked out the window.

They were almost to the castle, and so almost to the point where their paths would diverge among House tables again. Anselma was saying something - of that no one here much had liked Reoc, and so his graduation last year had been more celebration than regret. But Kai's mind was drifting again in the shadow of the castle, back toward inevitability and obliviation and a sense of foreboding that she couldn't quite fight.

It looked less like a wonder these days, and more like a cloister at the end of the world. If we can't do anything real, what happens to this world?

---

In the Great Hall, the five of them parted ways. House tables called, red and yellow and blue and green. Marlow was the first to split off, though not before tossing a wave back. Cass too parted early in a manner rehearsed. Marius followed after, adjusting his cloak.

"Alcove, tomorrow?" Anselma asked Kai at the threshold, in rare indulgence of the obvious. She was looking at the Hufflepuff table with an unreadable expression.

Kai nodded. "Always," she said quietly, leaning to bump shoulders with her friend.

Anselma gave her own nod, then said, "Looks like Shackleford's sitting with the other prefects this time."

Moira was, yes, Kai noticed. She glanced to the Ravenclaw table, where some were already trying to wave Anselma over. "Yeah. See you later, Selma," Kai said, and Anselma looked at her once before heading off to sit beneath the blue.

The ambient hum of conversation in the hall was itching. Kai navigated along the Hufflepuff line for an open seat. She found one when two of her other dormmates parted to make room for her between them, not taking no for an answer on either side.

To her left, Nadine Ashworth. To her right, Tilda Twill - which Kai privately thought was an overly alliterative name to give to a child, but Tilda never seemed to mind. Between the two of them, Kai had something like friends in her dormroom. And then there was Moira. And then, across from Kai, Nadine, and Tilda...

Imogen Pell, dark-haired and reading a copy of Witch Weekly, looked up as Kai settled onto the bench. Her smile was snap-quick and scandalous, by Kai's measure, and thereby provoked an internal sigh. "So. Rode the train with Rosier again?"

"Yeah," Kai said, eyes falling to the distraction of a fracture in the wood-grain of the Hufflepuff table. It wasn't the first time Imogen had asked. "And the others." She didn't bother clarifying that. Anyone in Hogwarts knew who that meant.

"Only every year since they were twelve," Nadine put in, reaching across the table to pick a little flint off Imogen's sleeve with long fingers.

"Yes, yes, it's sweet," Imogen said, head tilting to try to examine Kai's face and seeming frustrated that Kai offered nothing. Kai's gaze flicked down the table as someone's charmed fold of parchment went spinning. Imogen persisted: "You're still telling us you're not snogging him?" Her voice was a fair blend of skeptical and fascinated.

"He's my friend," Kai said, expression ticking as she weighed and dismissed the very mental image. She didn't bristle, not anymore, but nor did the implication stick a landing. Especially not after fourth year when half the castle had spontaneously decided she and Cass were such, and proceeded to ride the idea into the ground.

"More co-conspirators, Gene," Tilda suggested in a stage-whisper. "Besides, it's not him she likes."

"It's not-?" Imogen's head swiveled to other tables in fresh speculation.

"Can this wait for the dorm room?" Kai asked quietly, neck pricking with the hum of voices around.

Nadine paused, eyes flicking to Kai's face. "Sorry," she said, and meant it.

Kai's fingers had begun a quiet, slow tap on the edge of the table. She stilled the hand and moved it to her lap.

Imogen's eyes went wide, speculative and scheming, but she snapped her magazine open anew and just sharply said, "I'll hold you to it."

"If you want," Nadine added, and then said, "So, New Civics professor this year. Linton retired. Finally." And so she was directing attention up to the staff table.

Kai followed her gaze.

Headmistress McGonagall sat central, as ever. Kai had never known another, though in her early years at Hogwarts, older students had spoken about the old one - Dumbledore - as though he were a mountain that had vanished from the horizon. Kai supposed maybe he was, being as it was that he was on books, chocolate frog cards, and everything else that could have a moving image applied to it. Kai wondered if McGonagall felt her predecessor like a shadow or mourned him as a friend or simply moved in what must be done. Kai trusted McGonagall much as she could any authority, but it was more from distant reliability than rapport.

Kai wondered if McGonagall knew who wrote Widdershins. She seemed the kind of person to notice everything and rarely tell you whether she agreed. Kai just didn't know whether that silence meant approval, allowance, or looming judgement.

Kai's eyes moved down the table. Flitwick was away - the first-years would soon be herded in and the Sorting Hat brought out.

But all the other familiar faces of the staff table were there. Rhys Vane, professor of Defense for three years now - a record. He was on the mid-aged side, an early-balding former Auror, and insufferably intent on nudging Kai toward the same track - Auror. Aerlen, professor of Transfiguration, Kai's actual favorite class. He was precise, patient, unruffled even in her early years, when she asked questions that compared magic to Muggle chemistry. Sinistra, Kai's at-first-interim and eventually permanent Head of House. It was different than Sprout, certainly, but Sinistra never made one feel stupid if there was a serious matter to bring to her. Sprout had of course been replaced by Longbottom some three years ago. Funny, confident, heroic - almost every student liked Herbology if only for the teacher. Professor Claremont, Muggle Studies, reading some Muggle nonfiction book that looked distressingly like the sort of thing Kai tried to keep her mother away from. None of her friends' favorite teacher. Vector was there, sharp-eyed at one end of the table - Kai and a few of her friends had taken Arithmancy and not found it lacking. Near the other end of the table, the increasingly aging Slughorn of Potions. He'd sworn he was retiring every year, and failed like clockwork.

In her sweep of attention over the more commanding and austere familiar figures, Kai almost missed the new face. And then she wondered how she had, for the person sitting in Linton's old seat was... different.

She was young, for one, but not a graduated peer Kai recognized. Kai's first absurd thought was that the new professor looked more like a lost Star Trek: Original Series ensign than anyone Hogwarts usually hired. She had a poised atmosphere to her smile and eyes and bearing. Longbottom said something a bit off to her left and she smiled and laughed politely. Maybe it was just the robes, Kai thought - too bright, too yellow, against a sea of black. And maybe she was being unfair in her misgivings.

The new professor looked out across the hall again, eyes darting to and fro, smiles given. Her eyes met Kai's by chance, and she gave a small wave and wider smile before moving on.

Ah, Kai thought, unsure where to weigh it. She's the fun kind. Behind Kai, first-years were ambling into the Hall behind Flitwick.

"She seems... spritely," Kai said quietly, eyes turning back to the Hufflepuff tabletop.

To her right, Tilda snorted and leaned closer to Kai, speaking across her to Nadine: "I told you she'd say something like that."

Nadine slid a knut past Kai, who exhaled in long-suffering amusement.

"Rumor has it she's a squib," Imogen commented from behind her magazine.

Kai paused at that, eyes flicking back up to the staff table again despite herself. If she was, what did that mean? What did it not mean? What might it mean for her? Kai's mouth twisted, memory pulling sharp. The Sorting Hat had shrugged off her Slytherin-adjacency without pause - too Muggleborn, too soon, Slytherin too-sharp still for her. But someone always had to be the first of something.

Suddenly the performative friendliness seemed less saccharine. It seemed more like a wager.

A hush was falling over the hum of the crowd now, for the first-years were assembled and the dusty old Hat rested on the stool. Students' attention wavered between the Hat and away; its last couple years of songs had been fairly standard, but no one broke tradition by breaking the quiet it was due.

The slit of the Hat's mouth parted in a way that to Kai seemed almost cheeky, and it began to sing:

Four founders sang me into shape,
With four old truths to guard the gate.
I wore their hearts and shaped their aims,
And watched you turn them into games.

Brave Gryffindors who leap before,
They're asking what they're leaping for.
Sharp Slytherins with clever plans,
Yet still surprised what's on their hands.

Wise Ravenclaws who seek what's true,
While rarely ask what truths will do.
And loyal Badgers, strong and kind,
Yet falter when they're misaligned.

So wear me now - I will not bite.
I do not sort by wrong or right.
I find the shape your magic leans,
The start of you, not what it means.

So wear me still - I'll find your thread,
But know the weaving's yours instead.
I do not bind. I only mark,
It's you who makes the world go dark.

It had fallen quiet for only two heartbeats before the Great Hall rippled with murmurs. Bit morbid, Kai thought, and yet... She glanced over her shoulder to find Anselma briefly looking her way too. Anselma's lips were quirked in a surprised, amused sort of way, for the deviation in the Hat's pattern. The loudest table was Slytherin, before the wave passed, echoes of disgruntlement still stinging in a subtle way. Someone at Gryffindor's table actually whistled, causing a few chuckles to spiral and break the tension.

The Sorting began. Kai watched in a sidelong way, trying to remember the names, sure already that she'd forget half of them before the Sorting was over. She knew without looking that Marlow would be clapping for every first-year no matter their House.

Not paying close attention during the Sorting was a time-honored tradition of Kai's since first year. As she'd been early called - Bosco - she'd been left to sit through the lot of it while still stewing over the Hat seemingly thinking she was too weak or incapable of the first House it had actually considered for her. She didn't think it had considered Ravenclaw, anyway - Kai had declined that one out of the gate, having spent too many hours in Diagon Alley the week prior listening to her mother talk with other wizarding parents, listening to her mother gush of how Ravenclaw sounded perfect for Kai. So, not Ravenclaw had been her mantra, to the Hat's amusement.

She hadn't really had preconceptions of Slytherin. No. Not until the Hat commented that it might be too sharp for her, and had moved on to yelling Hufflepuff before her thoughts could catch up enough to ask what that meant. She understood now, or thought she did. It hadn't said she couldn't belong there. Just that a Muggleborn in Slytherin, two years after the war, might be more statement than student. More target than peer. The Hat had chosen safety. Not hers, Kai thought.

"What's that kid wearing?" Imogen snorted, for she was watching the Sorting more than Kai was.

Kai turned to look. She vaguely thought they were in the Ls now, but her attention had drifted too much to catch the name in confidence. He was a small boy even among the first-years, blond-haired and with an oversized neon-green wristwatch which, Kai supposed, was what had drawn Imogen's attention. "Just a watch," she commented as he ascended the step. "What was the name?"

Tilda to the rescue: "Tristram Little. Sat with me and my little sister on the train, actually."

Not a surname that meant anything to the rhythms of the school. Kai's lips tugged to the side as she watched the Hat slide over his head. "Yeah?" she offered absentmindedly, allowing the opening for chatter if Tilda wanted it.

"Yeah. Cool kid, really. His mother's an accountant, think he said. Dad's a... what was the phrase? Soft engineer? No, that-"

"Software engineer," Kai supplied without looking away from the kid. "Works with computers." Muggleborn, then. His time under the Hat was taking a little longer than some - not uncommon with Muggleborns, she supposed. Kai started to turn back to the table.

"SLYTHERIN!"

The Hall went very, very quiet. Who went to Slytherin was usually predictable, in a way. Clockwork. But Kai barely noticed the silence or its break for how her own mind was suddenly buzzing with a static cramp of clear thought. The next name was already being called. She turned again, eyes tracking the Little boy to the Slytherin table, and then past to how they were receiving him. Readily enough. Readily enough, clapping politely, and so Kai wondered if the sudden break of the rhythm of the Hall was only in her head. Her gaze caught upon Marius, for he was looking at her in an odd way, a serious way, a quiet way, before he turned to make sure a seat was open for the newcomer, lips spreading in some levitied gesture of welcome. Further down the table, Cass clapped along with his tablemates.

Kai turned back to the Hufflepuff table, wide open air of the Hall suddenly feeling far smaller.

Chapter Text

September 4. Hogwarts. Charms Corridor. Spare Classroom.

Marlow

Swish and flick was muscle memory, scarcely a thought to it as Marlow Kade rearranged the space to his liking. Someone had moved all the furniture into a far corner since last term. Some summer brewing, maybe. Marlow didn't dwell on it. He just moved through the room with a mechanic's stroll, guiding desks into place, scourgifying lingering dust, humming to himself as he did so.

Flitwick had been by a few minutes ago, but only briefly, to nod at the setup and vanish again. Marlow's assistance with the Charms tutoring wasn't anything new. He was trusted and useful in it. It slotted nicely alongside his NEWT-level studies where other time-slots had slackened. He was no Anselma or Marius taking what seemed half a hundred courses. Really, Marlow figured some NEWT-students could probably be excused for trying to sort out some time magic to get to all their classes. He idly wondered if any student had ever tried it, then snorted. Probably.

Marlow clustered a spiral of desks near the middle of the room, then settled a few further scattered, and then finally placed two in what he dubbed the 'Kai-Cass' corner in his head. Not because he'd ever tutored either and not because either had ever attended, but for the shape of the thing. There was always that one kid who didn't want to be in the middle of the room. Marlow would know, seeing as they comprised half his friends. Another flick of wand guided the window curtains open, because it was a lovely day out. Frankly, Marlow could've tutored outside just as well. He had once or twice last year, though that had been flavored to charmed snowmen near Christmas.

The door creaked. Marlow turned, wand still amid fixing up. Little early, isn't it? Not that he minded, but he hadn't quite finished setup yet. But he checked to see who'd arrived, raised his free hand in a wave.

Arlene Otters. Gryffindor, his own House. Third year, Muggleborn. A part of his tutoring last year, too. She wasn't so much struggling with Charms as underconfident, Marlow thought, but he didn't put a fence up on the difference. If she wanted a place to feel it out and not be perfect, that was just as well.

She didn't notice his wave. That was a little unlike her. Hell, half a thousand-yard-stare. Marlow didn't much like that thought, as it was the kind of thought that usually meant someone deserved to be hexed. Merlin knew he'd done it a time or twelve.

"Your desk's there if you want it," he said, casting a charm toward said table that sent a few fizzing fireflies of light spiraling to circle and circle above it before scattering. Arlene usually liked the front of the room, no matter how Marlow set it up. "Or you can pick another. Early bird's dibs." He said it lightly enough, turning back to scourgify the window.

"Kade," she said. Some of his pupils went for surname. She was one. Still, the voice was off, hollow, closer too. When he glanced back, she was leaning her hip on another of the desks. Her stare was like the one Kai sometimes got. Not one to which Arlene was prone.

"Alright there?"

She looked halfway to crying. Marlow bit his tongue and waited, posture open but unpresuming.

Arlene's fingers tightened into a fist on the desk. "I... just came from my first Muggle Studies class," she said. "Thought it'd be fun." A small pause. "Maybe a little odd."

Oh. Oh brother. Oh, what I wouldn't give for Claremont to retire. But Marlow said nothing, even as he bobbed his head in a nod, sheathed his wand, and moved to lean against a desk nearer to her. Let her talk it out, he figured. No assumptions yet. I'm trying.

Arlene's mouth and hands worked in rough fidgets, trying to find the shape of her frustration. She looked up at Marlow with wet eyes and burning ones, more heat than he'd ever seen in her.

"It was... like they were teaching us to study Muggles," she finally said, then clarified, "Yes, that's what the class is, sure, but I mean... like animals in the wild. 'Fascinating behavior patterns!' 'Astonishingly clever!' You know. Like we're different species. Her talking about the internet... was like we should be amazed Muggles don't set themselves on fire."

Yeah. Sounds a bit like when Kai and Selma and Cass took it, thought Marlow grimly. He bit his tongue again, but this time spoke shortly after, lowly: "Yeah." His eyes flicked to the door, but it was a nominal thing; his next words came regardless. "You're not crazy." No one said it to him that first time. Not until Kai and Selma got into talking about it in the alcove like it was obvious.

Her eyes rose with that, burning ire in her jaw, her eye, the whole of her posture. "I didn't say anything. Merlin - for God's sake - Kade, they were nodding along! It's mental!" She shrugged her bag onto the desk she leaned against, looking very much like she wanted to hex something. "I thought I was going crazy."

"No," Marlow put firmly to that, plunking it in like a levitated trunk. "You're not crazy, it's bollocks, it's nonsense, it's..." He'd begun shaking his head. "No, you're not wrong. Claremont's an idiot."

"I'm in this class all year. I'm going to go mental," she scathed in a glance to Marlow. "I- this is ridiculous!"

"It is," he confirmed.

"And you people are the only ones in the bloody castle talking about it!"

Marlow's brain did a record scratch. Wait, what? The room seemed just a shade more solid, the walls leaned in. "'Scuse me?" he asked, bemused, cautious. Unless she somehow means...

Her eyes snapped to him, first with her own confusion and then with a headshake. "I-well. I guess that's just gossip, maybe. Pell in Hufflepuff says you and your friends write... you know. Widdershins." She didn't quite look at him as she said it, had a sheepish quality to it like she thought she might be wrong.

Marlow was pretty sure there was an audible dial-up sound in him trying to figure out responding to that. Because yeah, he was pretty sure it was one of his friends. He had no idea how it'd gotten in anyone else's head for sure. Should he lie? Deflect? What would Cassian do? Wait, no. Maybe?

"Oh," Marlow said, feeling a little dumb and backfooted in it. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. "Pell said that, huh?" Cass maneuver. Exceeds Expectations. His thoughts were squeaking a bit on it, because he had no idea how much Arlene gossiped or not and he was not ready to be the one who threw his friends back into the gossip mill.

Not again, anyway.

Arlene, cooling in her irritation, pegged the delay in his response. She glanced to him in bemusement. "Yeah. She said she'd been talking with Fosse in Ravenclaw and they'd realized the paper started around your fourth year, when, you know," she said.

Oh. Oh bloody hell. Well when you put it that way.

Fourth year had been interesting in a lot of ways. The Anselma-definition of interesting more than Marlow's. Marlow hadn't noticed Widdershins until the year after, but if it had started that year - when half their year had been practically stalking Cassian and Kai... Well. February had certainly turned up the heat, what with all the nonsense notes plastered over every wall, anonymous hex-hints and love-curse jokes. It had been awful.

Something must have shown in Marlow's face, because Arlene said, "Is it true, then?"

The dial-up sound was back. What to do? What do I do? Marlow thought to redirect or sidestep again, Cassian-style, but somewhere on the way to his mouth, it became:

"I dunno, maybe." Which somehow felt worse.

Her expression faltered a little. She actually bought it, and what came of that was worst yet of what would test Marlow today. Arlene's shoulders settled. She glanced away to the window, face falling. "I just... whoever writes it. Feels like they're the only one in the castle who's not stuffing their head on things."

Marlow blinked and bit his tongue. "Yeah," he said, struggling for what else to say. "Does feel that way sometimes."

She looked back to him, gaze searching. "You know they're right, don't you?"

Marlow, irritating to himself in it, mutely bobbed his head. He was rarely the idea guy of the group. That was Cassian or Selma or Marius - or Kai, went without saying. He wasn't the one with the fancy spun-up talking about the 'population problem' theory Selma tossed about or Kai's 'first contact' comparisons, or citing magic-Muggle liaison precedents like Cassian. And he had no idea what the hell Marius got up to that made him so Muggle-literate despite being a pureblood.

Marlow was just Marlow. And so Marlow bobbed his head.

"I just..." Arlene glanced to the window again, then back to Marlow. "...You don't know who writes it, then?"

"No," Marlow said. That much was true, at least. It wasn't that he didn't care, so much as it didn't matter which of the others was. Someone was hammering sense into the wizarding world's blockheads, and that was good enough for him. Or it had been. Before he could think the better of it, Marlow heard himself saying, "Why, you - uh - want to talk to them or something?"

Internally, he winced. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

She straightened a little, attention renewed, even as Marlow silently facepalmed. "Yes," she said simply. "At least to thank them. And... maybe ask what they think we can do."

Well. That wasn't the Arlene he remembered off the last year. She wasn't entirely changed. Little more teeth over the summer, maybe. That was easier to focus on than what she was actually saying, for a moment.

Marlow scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah. That'd be a good question," he said, before immediately realizing she may on some level expect him to deliver it. Carry it up the chain. Be the owl. He frowned past her at the wall. As if the bricks might spell out something. How to fix a world that didn't think it was broken. Kind of would be a good question, wouldn't it? Paper's good and all, but...

He couldn't quite picture how the others would take it, but he figured maybe some of them were thinking it too. Kai, at least. Maybe Marius would find it sporting? Anselma, probably. Cassian was the real question. Cassian tended to weigh things in twenty layers of liability and fifty miles of no man's land. Which, sure. Brakes were important, probably.

Before either Marlow or Arlene could say more, the door cracked open again. More students spilling in for the study. Marlow rocked a nod to Arlene in a that'll do sort of manner, only belatedly wondering if it looked instead like I'll take care of it.

Absolutely bloody brilliant.

Probably fine, he tossed into a mental bin for later. Marlow raised his wand for a final round of straightenings.

Back to work.

---

Going to the alcove in the eastern end of the library wasn't exactly like going home, but it was pretty comfortable. It was a table tucked back in beyond the stacks, further from the usual suspects of study tables, hidden away like a secret. Marlow didn't think he'd have found it if he hadn't followed Cassian and Kai to it in third year. That was a sheepish memory. Still made him wince.

A Gryffindor girl of his year had been the start of it, had mentioned up in the common room that 'Rosier and Bosco' were sneaking around in the library and seen awful close to the Restricted Section. Marlow, rougher around the edges back then, hadn't had much of an opinion other than to think the two were a little weird. Cassian had looked like the types of kids Marlow hated in primary school. Kai would have been a little forgettable if she hadn't hung out with Cassian; She'd been the kind who seemed like she was daydreaming in class half the time and spent the other half doing things like asking Sinistra if Muggle satellites impacted magical Astronomy. Marlow had marked that much, but she was still background until the library rumor.

To this day, Marlow couldn't say what his plan was in following them. He'd figured to eavesdrop and make sure they weren't planning something vicious.

And then he had eavesdropped... and they'd been discussing movies. Movies. Apparently Kai'd written with Cassian over the summer and somehow that had ended up with the latter - thirteen, pureblood, Cassian Rosier - attending a showing of Spider-Man. And when Marlow found them in the back corner of the Hogwarts library, they'd been in the middle of a segue from discussing Transfiguration homework to nerdily debating the magical feasibility of spider-powers.

It had put Marlow through a mental reset. Apparently 'suspicious behavior' sometimes meant debating arachnomancy.

And then he'd put in his own comment before he quite thought it through. Five minutes later, he'd sat down. And that was that.

As he came in today, it was only Cassian there so far. So, Marlow claimed the seat beside Cassian without much ado. Kai couldn't hog him all the time. Space beside Cassian was neat and well-organized and free from the theatrics of Marius or Anselma. Not that Marlow didn't have his own moments. But aside that.

"Marlow," Cassian said, not looking up from his essay-work.

"Cassian," Marlow said as he settled into his seat. He tugged forth a sheaf of notes from Charms-work. So many diagrams, so much theory-work. But he felt the rhythm of it well, better than the dry history or transfiguration work. Well, he thought Transfiguration was dry. Kai'd nipped back on it once or twice.

Arlene's words were still in his head, though. What they think we can do. Marlow leafed through the parchments. Maybe when everyone's here, he figured. It was a practiced tradition to start a debate in the alcove before sundown, even if it wasn't usually Marlow that started it. Maybe he'd be the one to do it this time.

Selma arrived next, sat across from Cassian. So many books. That she was taking a NEWT class in History of Magic was still something Marlow boggled over. He hadn't known one could do that, or that anyone did. History. As a NEWT. Voluntarily. Naturally, when Selma set the books down, it was with words on her tongue: "Tarth is better than Linton, I'll give her that."

Tarth being the new squib Magical Ethics professor. The one that kind of looked like the sort who volunteered every weekend and brought biscuits to get-togethers.

"Oh?" Marlow asked, squinting up. Gryffindor-Slytherin of the class was tomorrow, so he hadn't seen her in action yet.

Selma's eyes flicked sharply up to Marlow, sure and attentive. There was also a curve at the corner of her lips, which usually meant trouble. And then she dropped: "Kai asked a question in class today."

To Marlow's left, Cassian's quill paused. Marlow himself thought, Oh, bloody hell.

"What was it?" Cassian now.

There was a devilishly pleased glint in Selma's eyes, the kind of pleased that meant she'd been waiting to tell them. "Professor Tarth uses a discussion format. The day's topic was the ethics of mind-impacting magic. Which is naturally a hazardous ethical umbrella. Some students brought up memory spells and when it would be ethical to use them - questionable as it is, therapeutic uses were raised. And then Kai asked Professor Tarth whether Memory Charms hadn't been banned because banning them would put the Statute itself on ethically shaky ground."

Well. Welcome to Hogwarts, Professor Tarth. "How'd she take it?" Marlow asked. "Tarth?"

Selma tapped the top of her book-stack. There was a sense of a drumroll in it:

"Tarth assigned it as a homework essay question."

A beat.

"Can she do that?" Marlow heard himself ask.

"She did." Selma didn't shrug, but it was in her voice.

Cassian finally responded to say, "Ah." His quill hadn't moved in several seconds.

They were still sitting in the pregnant quiet after that, quills eventually beginning to scratch anew, when Marius made his arrival. He glided out from the stacks and dropped into the seat beside Selma. His own book-stack wasn't quite to the level of Selma's, but came a little taller than Cassian's and likely Kai's, more from the variety of his needed NEWTs than any academic ferocity. "Evening," Marius gave with a warm mellow, sweeping an arm wide in his settling to avoid elbowing Selma amid her homework.

Finally, Kai, who came in her usual amble. Kai had a funny walk, though it wasn't anything Marlow had ever poked. Not unbalanced, but like she was always halfway between thinking about gravity and trying not to be noticed doing it. There was one seat left at the table's end, next to Marius, and so that one she took.

"Evening, Snake Charmer," Marius extended to her with a widened smile, shifting his books to ensure her space.

"Evening," Kai answered, eyes doing that down and around thing that she seemed to think was subtle. "Everyone have a good day?" she asked.

It had somehow gotten worse over the summer. If they're still doing this by Christmas, Marlow thought, I'm shoving them into a broom cupboard lined with mistletoe and charming the bloody door shut. But he bit his tongue and let the others answer her first, and left the two of them their illusions. Or delusions, as the case may have been.

Cassian glanced up for a check-in and a nod before going back to his essay.

Selma said, "I told them about Tarth," to no surprise from Kai.

That had Marius turning and lifting his brows, though. "Oh?"

And so he was filled in too, and when Selma finished, Marius let out a breath of a laugh in amused bemusement. "Well then. Did the Ministry send someone competent? Shacklebolt finally grow a spine?"

Marlow blinked. Little sharper than Marius' usual.

"Shacklebolt does have to negotiate with the Wizengamot." Cassian's words came in a head-tilted aside. "Even Albus Dumbledore could not unilaterally command power blocs."

Marius' leaned his head to his shoulder - toward Kai, of course - and mused, "It's also possible that Tarth played the long game. Snuck through under Wizenmagot noses." He sounded almost impressed.

"Then what if they pull her out?" Kai asked. Her voice was reserved, inward-turned.

"For what, assigning homework?"

"Marius," Kai said, tone a little more pointed than usual.

His hands came up in surrender. "She'll last the year, unless she does something truly scandalous. The only thing the Ministry hates more than a rapscallion..." Marius mimed weaving of a quill. "...is paperwork."

A few quiet chuckles came of that. Kai nodded in hers, but didn't look fully convinced. Marlow didn't blame her.

Then Marlow found Kai glancing to him, for she'd finally clocked his missed check-in. "What about you? Alright day?"

Marlow didn't answer right away. After that stretched a few moments, suddenly all of the rest - even Cassian - were looking to him. What to do, what to do. Arlene's words tugged at the back of Marlow's mind, and what came out of his mouth was, "Had a third-year come by early today. First Muggle Studies."

Cassian and Kai's expressions were twin flickers of Ah, while Anselma grimaced and Marius gave few little nods.

Marlow bit his tongue, then, "She... asked what to do."

A pause. "What are we doing?" he asked. A few blinked. Cassian straightened. Marlow forged on, frowning into the midst of them. "We talk about it a lot, sure, and there's Widdershins, and that's all well, but if half've what we're saying is real, shouldn't we be doing something?"

He rested a forearm over his Charms-work, idly tapped and watched his fingers as he let them play catch up. Half a minute passed.

"Probably," came from Kai, though she shifted a little beforehand. Her voice had that brittle edge that usually meant someone was getting hexed, but there was no one to aim at here.

"And what would we do?" Cassian set aside his quill, folded his hands, and met Marlow's rising eyes. "What do you see us addressing?" Coming from Cassian, that felt practically like a handshake.

Before anyone quite processed it, Selma was already unfurling parchments. Marlow blinked up. Is that a diagram? There was a moment of quiet processing around the table as she spread out three parchments. Then Selma said, "Well, there's three particular-"

"Wait, you've already charted?" Marlow asked, baffled. Why didn't you say anything?

"No," Selma frowned up at him briefly and then gestured to the parchments. "But I do keep track of some of our discussions." Refocusing, she continued: "The issues break into three core umbrellas. The first, of course, is the contact problem." Selma glanced to Kai, passing the thread.

Bloody hell, Selma.

Kai quietly nodded, raising her hands flat to animate the convening of them as she obliged: "Two train tracks. On one of the tracks, wizardfolk who think lightbulbs are new. On the other track, Muggles who think you're either play-acting or mental if you claim you're a wizard. No paradigm. No framework. You can't explain a secret world to people who think secret worlds are for nutters. And once you do - other issues."

"Such as the mind-whammies," Marlow said, echoing off prior debates and the obvious.

Selma nodded. "The second umbrella, of course, is the population problem." The 'population problem' was Selma's baby. She was practically aiming to found her own field around such like it. "We're not a nation-state. Not in any functional sense, population-wise or any other way. No personal-political separation. We're a small town. An ethnic enclave. Micronation at best. At worst, a cult." Her tone was taut, but unapologetic.

"I think I hear some of my ancestors crying," Marius commented, relaxed back in his seat, but with an eye more attentively angled than usual.

"The third umbrella is, well, damage control," Selma said, quieter than usual.

It was a melancholy quiet that descended over the table for that. No one rushed to fill the air. The silence tasted like old fear, and not enough answers. Because no matter how often they discussed, no matter how many options they weighed, no matter how much they hoped otherwise, the fact remained: even in the best case scenario, contact was liable to bear viciousness of one kind or another.

Cassian's attention traveled to Kai, then Marlow, then to the tip of his quill.

Marius crossed his arms, one hand lifted to sway about in a lazy gesture. "So, the plan is: orchestrate a first contact worthy of the Federation of Planets-" Marlow blinked. Marius knows Star Trek? He almost rolled his eyes when Marius' gaze flicked to Kai before the Slytherin continued. "-convince the Wizengamot to join the seventeenth century at minimum, persuade the rest of Earth not to panic about the underground society with amnesia grenades, and hope everyone settles for mutually assured delusion as a starting point."

He glanced to Selma, then Kai. "How long was it we thought, again, before this starts by accident?"

"Twenty years, optimistically," Kai said, eyes falling to the tabletop.

"Very optimistic," Selma said, brief and apologetic in her smile to Kai.

Marlow frowned down at his hand, fingers pulling into a fist much like Arlene's had earlier. "Well then come down from orbit and let's figure a bloody plan," he said.

Cassian, quiet for a time now, straightened his sleeves and refolded his hands after, like he was preparing to deliver a verdict. "We have no immediate control over outcomes or government," he said. "Anselma's second and third umbrellas are beyond feasible reach. If Widdershins-" Cassian paused on the word, as though naming something sacrosanct. "-is any example, then the first umbrella may well be within our reach."

"Humanization," Kai said quietly. "Softer collision if each side's seeing people first."

"Widdershins is still just a rag," Marius commented, but he leaned back his head, hands ruffling through his hair. "Maybe it gets wizards to realize Muggles aren't zoo animals, but there's still billions of Muggles out there who're..." He gestured to Kai, beckoned with a hand.

"Likely to hear 'witch' and tell someone at the bar later that they met 'one of them Wiccans', or else realize there's people with murder-sticks and memory-sticks and... yeah," Kai said, nodding acknowledgement.

"Exactly. No Widdershins on the internet. Just in the Hogwarts bathrooms."

"Then we focus on the wizarding side for now," Marlow said. "And we'll figure out something about the Muggle side."

"We'll figure it out. Wizarding for now," Cassian agreed, brushing at his sleeves. "Widdershins continues, presumably. We can see if Tarth has the character she appears to. We should consider for other ideas in the meanwhile, more ways to proceed."

Selma was already quill-out and writing.

Cassian glanced to Marlow. Marlow bobbed his head to it. That'll do.

Chapter Text

September 11, 2006. Hogwarts. Ravenclaw Seventh-Year Girls' Dorm.

Anselma

A sooty owl stood on the back of Anselma's desk chair, leg lifted with the stubborn patience of a lifelong civil servant. She let the letter she carried plunk against the girl's head. Pepper, named by Adrian years ago, was long since accustomed to the ritual of finding Anselma buried halfway down a pile of books. The Ravenclaw tower's tall windows and blue curtains filtered already cloudy afternoon light.

The owl wavered her leg again, wings ruffling in mild exasperation. The letter thumped lightly on Anselma's ear.

"Wait..." Anselma said, quill suspended mid-sentence. She assessed the most recent paragraph of her History essay. Alright. Wait, no, the phrasing is off. She crossed out a sentence and tried again.

'While it is customary to frame the 17th-century witch panics as examples of Muggle hysteria, this interpretation omits the role of wizarding indifference - and in several notable cases, complicity - in the escalation of public fear.'

Pepper tugged at Anselma's hair with her beak. Anselma's bun loosened.

"Alright, yes, let me see-" Then Anselma pivoted to untie the letter from Pepper, who gave a relieved hoot for it. Anselma flipped over the envelope. No wizarding stationary. Naturally not. Just a plain white envelope. It was from Adrian, after all, and so she smiled in the way she always did when her brother breached the wizarding barrier. Something about it reminded her of their Morse code antics as schoolchildren. While Pepper took off the short distance to the desk-side perch, Anselma turned back to open the envelope and draw out the fold of notebook-paper. Your penmanship is maddeningly clean, she thought with mild envy as she unfolded the sheet over her essay. You and Cassian would be a force.

She settled in, paper crooked open and half her brain still chewing at the essay.

The letter read as follows:

Hey there, Squirrelbrain,

You're probably already buried in the Restricted Section or trying to figure out how to transfigure your homework parchments into sentient assistants. Still. Someone has to knock on your riddle-tower.

I've been thinking about that potion you mentioned. The one you were struggling with? I glanced through Mum's old Potions books, but I didn't see anything about that one. Still, you said it kept turning out dull? Like, technically fine, but missing something?

So I got to thinking about sauce reduction. Stay with me.

When I first started professionally, I used to reduce it too far. You follow the steps, let it simmer, get the texture. Kill it. Technically edible. But flavor's not just chemistry. Judgement. Got to know when to stop, not just what the book says. Maybe you're trying to match the rote too closely. I know you get up in your head sometimes. Time to fall with style.

Anyway, if it's a useless thought, so be it. I know sometimes you're halfway to solving your problems just by writing them out.

Send news. Not just grades. I'm still working on that custard thing I ruined in August. Mum says she'll help me charm some biscuits for you and your friends next week. Blink twice if you want them to not be whizzing around. Just be biscuits.

-Adrian

P.S. I talked to Dad and I think you're right about Kairiel. We're still turning it over. Sounds like something a doctor could've caught, maybe. Do you think she wants help?

Anselma skimmed the Potions part with a small smile - she had solved that, yes, but she always appreciated her brother's attempts. She knew he tried, and Merlin knew he'd been her tutor-by-owl in Potions all of first year. He knew some of their mother's books front to back. He was intuitive. He was brilliant.

He was a Muggle, like their father. Like half of her too, by blood, by bone, by upbringing. And she suspected that if given half the chance, Adrian would have understood potions more intimately than any pureblood ever would.

Anselma lingered on the postscript.

Do you think she wants help?

Her first instinct was to analyze it. To break the question down to its parts, chart it out upon parchment, and stare it into submission until a solution suggested itself to her. She nearly reached for parchment. But she didn't this time.

She thought instead of her profile of Kai, of what she'd sent Adrian. The pauses under personal stress, the drifting attention. The maintenance-level patterns Kai had in keeping her things. The grounding behaviors, the executive friction. Avoidant spirals that never quite hit dysfunction but always skirted the edge of it. Introversion, social fatigue, personality could have explained some of it, but not all of it. Not the pattern.

No singular behavior was diagnostic. But the sum was consistent. It made her ache, just a little.

She'd asked Adrian to cross-reference with known Muggle diagnostic frameworks. Executive dysfunction. Possible masking of autism or attention-deficiency or anxiety. Non-clinical trauma adaptations, just in case. And he thought she wasn't wrong to ask.

Anselma wasn't going to do anything about it. Not right now, she decided, even with her hand halfway toward a fresh parchment. She curled back her fingers. Not without data. Not without Kai, Anselma had to remind herself. Again. Even if Kai did want help. It was harder, sometimes, not to solve a person like a problem. Anselma didn't know what help meant yet. But she knew, sure as the Earth went around the sun, that Madam Pomfrey didn't either. Not for this.

Anselma breathed out, looked up from the postscript at last.

The letter was folded aside, notebook paper's lined opacity setting oddly against the essay parchment's golden grain. She put it further back away, tucked below her privacy-charmed list of Widdershins-author suspects that she'd further annotated after the evening of decisions a few days ago. That list sat atop the growing stack of First Umbrella notes.

The Widdershins suspect pool remained broader than she would have liked, but only because Anselma had been disinclined to dismiss possibilities out of hand. The others seemed to find it useful to keep the author anonymous. All Anselma could think was that it could handily be a group project. She understood the premise, of course: plausible deniability. The paper could technically get someone in trouble, but weren't they already all in now?

She couldn't move without data. The others would just turn it into another round of winking and deflection. But she could still sort the clues. And pretend she didn't know already.

If I can get the author in private, maybe they'll open to the group. Cross-contribution. It was her theory. And she didn't believe it.

The door of her Ravenclaw dorm creaked, making Anselma pause in reaching for the parchment. It was just Peony, headed to flop upon her bed with practiced melodrama. She hadn't seen the ruckus firsthand, but the essentials had circulated: one Gryffindor, Peony's notes, and a Transfiguration cheating scandal. Anselma had offered to help compile prior infractions for the professor. Peony had just stared at her a moment before declining.

Anselma looked away from Peony on the bed. She was probably alright. Unwinding, as Peony sometimes did. Anselma didn't press. Some people moved differently, and unlike with Kai, Peony's patterns never crossed the line from common to concerning. Peony burns hot, not deep. It was just how she reset.

So, Anselma turned back and pulled out the suspects-list.

Name: Kairiel Bosco
Motive: Yes. Ethical alignment with Widdershins content near-total. Tends toward protective engagement. Prefers critique, not above confrontation. Possible initiating motive in February 2004 Valentine's incidents. (Note: Cypress wand not diagnostic, but notable.)
Writing Match: Possible
Analysis: Style is creatively fluent, variable. High abstraction. No known note-taking. Retention inconsistent (likely due to executive friction, not disinterest); recall similarly variable. Prefers discreet, targeted acts over broad public projects. Ambivalent about visibility.
Verdict: Moderate possibility.

Name: Marlow Kade
Motive: Yes. Mentorship instinct. Strong protective drive.
Writing Match: No
Analysis: Style is straightforward, conversational. Limited abstraction. Mimicry plausible given exposure, but lacks noted interest in stylistic precision. No evidence of note-taking. Retention high, recall unrefined. Prefers action or speech to reflective writing.
Verdict: Unlikely.

Name: Marius Mulford
Motive: ??? No explicit ideological investment, though persistent engagement with group discourse suggests otherwise. May obscure motives purposefully.
Writing Match: Possible
Analysis: Stylistically chameleonic. Creatively fluent, high abstraction. Retention and recall excellent. Known openness to public engagement. Lexical overlap between Widdershins and alcove discussions persistent. Pattern of minimizing or deflecting discussion of Widdershins may indicate strategic distancing.
Verdict: High possibility. Strong stylistic match. Motive remains obscured.

Name: Cassian Rosier
Motive: Yes. Long-term career interest in inter-magical/Muggle policy suggests strong personal investment. High risk-awareness. Possible initiating motive in February 2004 Valentine's incidents.
Writing Match: Possible.
Analysis: Writing is controlled, formal, technical by default. Moderate abstraction. Capable of satire and dry wit, typically deployed in speech rather than text. Comfortable with legalese; less so abstraction. Expresses cynicism and institutional critique similar to Widdershins tone, but typically avoids public provocation.
Verdict: Moderate possibility.

The probable answer stood out.

The only question Anselma could not satisfy was that of why. She picked up her quill, but only to hover over the suspect list.

Why would Marius write Widdershins? Why would he hide it?

It didn't seem like him. Or rather, it did in too many overlapping patterns. Marius liked a stage. Liked ideas, liked disruption. This wasn't just his style - it was his wheelhouse. So why hadn't he claimed it?

It seemed like the manner of thing he would long since have broken form to confess before now, likely with a toast. He engaged in every group debate, often from a contrary - Anselma's eye twitched - angle, and remembered more of those conversations than Anselma would have credited him for when he joined them properly back in fifth year.

Peony's shoes hit the floor with a thunk. Anselma twitched, found the entry on the suspect list again. Just Peony. Right. Now, Marius...

He'd been Cassian's friend before then - loosely, in a dormmate fashion. And to some degree Kai's as well, if one counted ambushing Kai in the library stacks with unsolicited discussion prompts based on the aisle. But he hadn't actually joined the group until the Prophet gossip column broke. And then he'd already been sitting there with Kai in the alcove when the rest of them arrived, like he'd always been there. Kai had a reply to the Prophet half-formed and had already owl'd her father for sources on Muggle journalistic ethics. Marius had been grinning across the table like he'd passed her the match, then politely looked away while she lit the fire.

Anselma wasn't stupid. She could do the math on a plausible motive, but it struck her as so straightforward, so quaintly sentimental, that she resented its neatness. If he'd done it for Kai, he'd buried it with two years of rhetorical shell games. There was no tactical reason not to claim it. No credit or favor he seemed to want.

Reluctantly, Anselma quilled it in under his name: Possible initiating motive in February 2004 Valentine's incidents.

If it is him and it is his reason, he is ridiculous.

---

Anselma took the opportunity to go to the alcove early today. Cassian was often the first there and Anselma wanted to speak to him without distraction. She made her way promptly to their eastern library haunt, books in arm - one of them carrying, folded between pages, her most recent Widdershins notes and First Umbrella annotations. It wasn't unlike her first approach, back when Cassian and Kai and Marlow were that improbable trio of Slytherin and Hufflepuff and Gryffindor who clustered together at the end of the Hufflepuff table at lunches and ignored the side-eye.

For Anselma, the choice to sit with them had been socially experimental in nature, though not cold. She'd already long since grown exasperated with the flimsiness of House dichotomies and disillusioned with the false boxes the wizarding world imposed on itself and her brother and anyone else that stepped sideways. So, one day, she'd simply risen from beneath the blue Ravenclaw banners and sat down beside the three without ceremony.

"You're missing a House," she'd said.

She had thought they might find it funny, but it hadn't landed very well. They'd let her stay anyway.

Anselma stepped out from between the library stacks to find Cassian at the table, as expected. Cassian was nothing if not reliable in his patterns, a metronome of quiet constancy. And for Anselma, there was no pageantry in taking the seat across from him. She set down her books and began to pull out her parchments almost immediately. One motion after the next, aligning and overlapping notes in front of her. If he twitches, I win. Not that this is a contest. He'd be easier to work with than Marius, though. Time to fall with style.

This probably wasn't exactly what Adrian had in mind when he wrote that.

Without looking up, she asked, "Are you the author of Widdershins?"

Cassian's quill paused mid-sentence. It was not an abrupt motion so much as that of someone realizing they'd come upon an unexpected detour sign.

Anselma adjusted her parchments, moving her list of suspects - still charmed for privacy of eye - to the top of them. She moved her stack of books off to the side with a flattened hand.

"No," Cassian said, after several moments. There was a puzzling undercurrent beneath it. Almost suspicious, searching. Anselma respected it, in a way. Then: "You're not?"

"No," she answered, swift and simple, and more than a little annoyed to confirm he'd suspected her. Widdershins was respectable in the abstract, but some things could have stood to be written plainer.

The Slytherin's quill remained still. Anselma glanced up at him, reassessing. Cassian was looking at her, with that angular face and heavy brow that made half the first-years think he was terrifying instead of simply being a legalistic enthusiast. Anselma supposed that was its own kind of terror, but not the type first-years were prone to account for. She waited.

Cassian drew a slow breath and then straightened his sleeves. "There is liability in being the author of Widdershins. Not extensive. The paper itself is anonymous, technically non-malicious, arguably satirical. Difficult to discipline without setting a precedent."

It was a probe, in Cassian's fashion, offered like a courtesy.

"So the Ministry wouldn't go after a student over it?" asked Anselma.

"The Ministry loathes embarrassment," Cassian answered. His gaze sharpened. "If not you..." He glanced aside to his own books. "Then someone else. You have a suspicion," he determined.

Anselma knew his bias, figured out quickly where his thoughts were leaning. "Kai is less likely," she said.

"Then?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Anselma wasn't usually given to dramatics. Weeks of deduction had led her here, and tonight's internal audit had done the rest. It felt obvious now, inevitable.

Cassian tilted his head, waited.

And yet Anselma couldn't find it in her to put the word forth. Not when it was her friend. Not when Cassian didn't seem to realize himself. Anselma wasn't sure exactly what lay between Cassian and Kai, but she didn't think it romantic. Cassian hadn't shown any romantic inclination to Kai that she could measure. Cassian hadn't shown any romantic inclination to anyone that she could measure. But that didn't lessen the tension that made her tongue hesitate. Accusing Marius might make Cassian flinch protectively, if nothing else.

But he didn't. "If it isn't you or me or Kai and it isn't outside of us," he said simply, expression growing contemplative, "then it's Marius."

It wasn't that Marlow didn't count. It just wasn't his realm.

Anselma nodded, a small motion. She hesitated, then added, to that, "He likes Kai."

Cassian's expression betrayed nothing, which meant he was likely turned inward in survey. So Anselma gave him time to be so, whilst carding among her parchments. Unnecessary, but permissive.

"...I knew he was flirting with her in third-year," Cassian commented, narrowing his eyes faintly. "But that seems... excessive as a motive."

"I agree," Anselma said. There was a hesitation, and then she pulled her wand for a flick at the suspect parchment. With a weight of hesitation, she slid it across to him for inspection, and inspect it he did.

There was a long, pregnant pause when his eyes finally found Marius' position in the list and surveyed its damning confidence. Cassian's gaze drifted lower. There was a shallow tick at the corner of his mouth as he surveyed his own entry on her list. Not quite a smile, but close as Cassian usually came.

His next words were low, contemplative: "The earliest Widdershins articles were almost nonsense. Satire of the squid. Wandwood personality quizzes. A letter to Battle-of-Hogwarts veterans." His hands folded. "And not a cruel one."

"I have no idea why he's doing it," Anselma said, too flat for her own taste. "But if it is one of us, he's the only one who makes sense. Did you not hear him last Monday? He sounded like a Widdershins article with legs."

Cassian listened. Cassian was always good at listening, with that attentive stillness of inventory taken. And then he said: "We should assume the possibility. But we don't confront him yet. Not unless Widdershins shows unnecessary escalation."

Anselma frowned at that. "If we're trying to work on the First Umbrella, we should be coordinating with the author, not-"

"And if he doesn't want to be found, Anselma? If his motives aren't simple, then it remains that he has kept it from us for two years without failure. If he doesn't wish to be discovered, are you prepared for the possibility that he has accounted for that?" His eyes dropped back to the suspect list. He tapped a finger on the entry for Marius, invoking her own descriptions against her.

She could appreciate the premise, but she didn't like it.

"He's seventeen. He's hardly a chessmaster," Anselma asserted. "The most probable answer is the simplest one. He's a seventeen-year-old boy with a performative streak."

"It's plausible," Cassian allowed, tone calm, yet not dispassionate. "Which is why we proceed with care. If he hasn't revealed himself, it isn't out of bashfulness. If he hasn't revealed himself by choice, he doesn't want to. That is not the mark of a show-off. Least of all in Slytherin."

Anselma stared at Cassian, but there was no give in the boy's expression. There rarely was. He seemed metalforged by assuredness, it seemed to her, and thereby out of step with that he was seventeen too. So was she, but Anselma left that aside as she reached out to retrieve the suspect list.

"Alright," she said, more brusque than intended. "So he isn't a show-off. Then what is his game?"

"We don't know," Cassian said, tone brooking no argument, lawyerly in affect.

He continued, "It is entirely possible he's doing it..." There was a prolonged pause there, Cassian nearly closing his eyes. "...to impress Kai." He sounded almost long-suffering at the thought. "It is entirely possible he has other reasons. It is entirely possible it entertains him. It is entirely possible that he truly believes in what he is doing. It may even be all of the above."

"Then why wouldn't he say anything?" Anselma challenged.

Cassian didn't answer right away, eyes venturing to where his quill rested. His lips thinned. Anselma knew him well enough to see the calculus in it.

"He's Slytherin," Cassian said at last, as though that explained everything. And perhaps it did, to him. His head tilted down at an angle, a thinking gesture.

"...And?" Anselma asked, dubious and a little annoyed at Cassian falling back on the stereotype. "That's it?"

Cassian, uncharacteristically, almost looked annoyed in turn, mouth pinching. He raised an eyebrow in manner sardonic. "Breaking: Pureblood Slytherin has been discovered distributing anti-Ministry publication," he said in a dispassionate irony. "See page three."

Anselma hesitated - and then her voice fell low in response. "Not a week ago this hour, we casually discussed that we can't control the government, Cass." She rarely used the nickname, Kai's originated nickname, but it felt appropriate now. "We're a little past fear of headlines."

His head tilted. "Accepting risk is not the the same as courting it. If Marius is the author, his reasons aren't necessarily at odds with us."

"You don't sound sure of him," Anselma countered. And she watched. Because surely he knew it, as her own suspicion of Marius sharpened. Marius was chaos wrapped in charisma. Cassian knew it. So, what was he choosing? Tolerance? Complicity?

Cassian's expression hardened. Internally, a younger part of Anselma wanted to flinch, for she saw something in him in that moment that was every bit what the first-years saw, cold-eyed and heavy-browed and taut-jawed and tense. He closed his eyes. "I have accepted for over a year that it might be one of us. Possibly even you," he said, voice carefully even.

His next words were sharper. "Why do you think I would extend to him any less than I would to you?"

That gave Anselma pause, even as her mind smarted against the reminder that he'd suspected her. You don't think I'd write better than that? flickered in her thoughts. But aloud, she said, "I don't understand why him being Slytherin would preclude getting him to work with all of us."

Cassian's eyes reopened. Quietly, calmly, he asked: "What would you do, Anselma, if a teacher asked, in front of a disciplinary board, and the answer could cost you your future prospects?"

The moments after were quiet. Where initially Anselma's mind rebelled, increasingly the wall loomed. But Anselma's mind didn't prefer a no-win. In half a minute, her eyes were narrowing. In another half minute, she was tucking the suspect list away and pulling out one of her First Umbrella notes. Because she did have a possible answer to this. She slid it across to Cassian.

Cassian read. Cassian's eyebrows elevated in slow motion, into a sheer disbelieving silence. The corner of his mouth twitched, halfway between admiration and horror.

Cassian stared at the parchment for at least ten heartbeats before - in a tone that didn't seem sure whether she was brilliant or mental - he said, "Former DA members?"

A beat.

"Former DA members?" Cassian repeated, like she'd handed him a grenade disguised as a teacup. Privately, Anselma tallied the moment of having made Cassian repeat himself. His fingers twitched against the edge of the parchment, as though unsure whether to set it down or thrust it back across the table.

Anselma answered. "Formed under high Ministry scrutiny. Well aware of its shortcomings. In many cases, intimately aware of the Daily Prophet's shortcomings. Principled, in many cases. Professor Longbottom is down in the greenhouses. Several work in the Ministry. Granger, notably, especially." Her voice was quiet, calm, patient by her standards. It's not all complicit bureaucrats and stained records, Cassian.

"Anselma," Cassian Rosier said faintly, and he almost sounded his age in that moment, possibly even younger. A faint touch shrill, even. "This list includes Harry Potter."

"I haven't written to any of them," Anselma said, though her tone did betray that she'd considered it. "But you asked what I would do if questioned on Widdershins. You wanted ideas on the First Umbrella, last Monday. We need to think in allies, no, Cassian? That means someone who's actually graduated, at least, and someone who isn't bound to their position by Ministry benevolence. In layman's terms, summon a bigger fish."

Cassian was silent.

He straightened his sleeves. He looked down at his quill. For some reason, he straightened his sleeves again. "Not without consulting the others," he finally said. "If we reach out to any of these, even Professor Longbottom, there's no pulling that back."

"Alright," Anselma said, enthusiasm on the rise. She straightened in her seat. Finally. Cassian on side was the hard part, in her mind. Soon enough the rest would-

"But we let Marius keep his authorship for now. If it is him," Cassian interrupted her thoughts.

"Or we could just ask him to drop the act and work with us," Anselma countered.

Cassian's eyes narrowed in fresh displeasure. "He is working with us."

Anselma's own manner cooled, though more in a resigned frustration than irritation outright. Marius was the one keeping secrets. Shouldn't that be bothering Cassian? "Kai likes him," she said, only mostly sure of that, before she could fully think through her own words. "Doesn't it bother you that he might be performing?"

Once more, Cassian was quiet. His hands folded against another smoothing of his sleeves. His eyes angled toward the stacks in thought. And Anselma gave him the space to think. Eventually, Cassian said, "Then we inform her of his potential authorship."

Anselma relaxed back in her chair. It wasn't quite her preference, but it felt like the beginning of Cassian swaying to her line of thought. "Alright," she agreed. "We'll tell her. Later," she added, begrudgingly. At the edge of her thoughts, concern skirted. Would Kai feel betrayed? Relieved? Or maybe nothing at all? Anselma didn't know.

Cassian tipped a small nod. After one last, long stare at the First Umbrella DA-list suggestion, he slid that parchment back across the table to her. "We'll discuss this with the others too, later," he said, tone taut.

As Anselma folded it, she felt a flicker of satisfaction.

Chapter Text

September 11, 2006. Hogwarts. Music Room Side-Storage.

Marius

"Incendio," and the fourth draft of the evening went up in flames. One would think it would be more satisfying to set things on fire, but pryomania had skipped Marius Mulford's generation of the family. Marius watched the parchment blacken and curdle to cinders upon the dusty floor of the music side-room. Rather a metaphor for his everything, wasn't it? Oh yes, Widdershins continues, presumably. No pressure. None at all. Let's just solve world peace with by-lines on bathroom parchment.

The scent of the burnt ink and parchment was fetching, at least. Maybe when Cassian and the rest decided it was time to expand to Muggle outreach, he could make a perfume out of it. Salem eau de Cologne. He could bottle it up, label it so, and sell it to disillusioned Muggle conspiracy theorists. 'A hint of ink, trace of fire, and just a whisper of oh yeah by the way the Men in Black are real and it's us and we use the flashy thing like five-year-olds with festival toy wands.'

It wasn't like the Muggle world had any pre-existing fears of traumatic, violent, invisible insurgency. Oh, wait. What was the date again?

Not that most in the wizarding world knew the date. Or cared. But the Muggle world did. Marius still remembered second year, a week or so after the date, marked like a fingerprint in his mind. He'd been in the library - not looking for Kai, but if he happened upon her, then well then! And then he'd found her, in the history aisles, looking at some odd-material letter and an unmoving newspaper clipping. Kai, even with her background, had found out in a letter from her dad in Colorado.

And of course, Marius, fool he then, had strolled over, leaned on the shelf beside her, crossed his arms, and said something like, "Researching to write home? Blimey, no half measures."

She hadn't answered. Not right away, not like she usually did in their delightfully inane discussions dating all the way back to a first encounter prior. She'd glanced at him, not fully turned her head, and then offered him the clipping without a word. He'd taken it, glanced at it. Read it again. And he'd been thrown not by the tragedy, but how little of the context he understood of it. Missed the trees for the forest.

He'd handed it back to her, probably mumbled something stupid, and then walked away. He'd moved on with his day. But it had stuck in his head like a rattle in the closet, that crippling realization of just how much of the world didn't matter to his. Tut tut, Muggles, why are you crying? Shut up back there.

Marius flourished his wand, summoning up the next parchment to hover beside him as he began pacing anew beside the covered pianos.

Back to the archive with the memory waddling. Distractions, distractions, he had a shadow revolution to run. Merlin, did Cassian think he was French? Guillotines were probably out of style and there were more than a few historical wizards who'd managed to work around the whole head removal thing. Not that most wizards seemed to be using theirs anyway.

Marius flicked his wand toward the parchment again, brandishing the willow instrument like a quill. A small title column appeared on one corner of the page: Top Five Wizards Who Lost Their Heads (And Another Five Who Didn't Need To).

Too much? Marius was halfway to another incendio for good measure before he decided to let that one stay for now. He'd already incinerated four. Perhaps should check the tea leaves for those pyromaniac tendencies after all.

August had been a breather issue. September had room for some teeth.

A few more edge-columns were bandied forth with slow, cursive wand motions. Conducting. Because he was in a music room. Obviously. So ridiculous even a boggart would peek in, blink, and walk out. But wasn't that the point of Widdershins anyway? A rag so ridiculous that fear forgot to bring biscuits.

Marius stilled, canted his head. Not bad, actually. He spun up a new column:

Reader Quotes:

"A rag so ridiculous, mum forgets to bring biscuits." - Sun-Tzu, probably.
"More educational than Muggle Studies, and tastier too," - A Third-Year Cramming To Many Electives To Remember Lunch
"Overpaid, overfed, overwritten, and over here," - A Prefect. Just Pick One.
"This helped me get out of detention once. Thanks, Widdershins!" - Anonymous

With a satisfied nod, Marius glanced to the large, glaring empty space meant for the main attraction. He resumed his pacing. Thoughts danced through his mind. Was there anything recent he could pull on? He'd considered the scathing Hat song at the Sorting Feast, but not really found a particularly interesting way to spin it into an article. Blimey, but that was something. I think Avery choked on air.

Tarth was new, but she was also out. Marius did not, generally speaking, try to pull claws on specific names. Criticizing Claremont's Muggle Studies was one thing, fairly well-earned, but what had Tarth done to earn any critique or reference in the paper? Oh, look, a squib. If you hold very still, maybe she won't not hex you, so stop staring at her like she's a blast-ended skrewt, you bloody morons.

There was, naturally, the whole Three Umbrellas thing. One for civilization-level oncoming train wreck, one for wizarding world self-delusion, and one for a moment of silence at the absurdity of their cause. Yes, Anselma, let's bring umbrellas to stave off and contain political cosmic horror. Usually Marius didn't purposefully consider lifting precise ideas off the debates and round-tables in the alcove, but his anonymity felt like a joke at this point.

The others all assumed it was one of their circle. Well, Cassian did. Marius would bet galleons that Anselma had full psychological dossiers on them, and he did not want to think about that or ever see them, thank you kindly. Kai... Marius was kind of nervous that Kai was actually onto him. Not that he minded. Or not that he would mind, if she was. He hadn't decided yet whether being seen by Kai would feel like vindication (or retroactive forgiveness for plagarizing half her ideas) or like getting caught starkers out in the cold.

Though, he mused, if it was Kai, it might also be like getting mugged by someone with excellent taste.

Or, well, like all of his friends realizing he was all puppet-strings and no puppet.

Anyway.

Marius swiveled back to the hovering parchment, wand in a conductor's flux anew. He traced into the large space on the page: A Beginner's Guide to the Federation of Planets & the Romulan Empire (Which One We're More Like Will Surprise You!)

He stared at it for a beat, two.

"Incendio."

He watched the title curl, blacken, vanish. Was it a bad idea? Was it not? The ashes curled and drifted to the floor, landing in smug grey smiles. "Scourgify." And away they went. The art of disappearing indeed.

Next class was soon. Marius stowed his wand, ruffled his hands through his hair.

---

By eveningtime, Marius couldn't tell whether he was enthused to get to the library alcove or dreading it. Every evening since last Monday, Anselma had come with more ideas on routes and rhythms of staving off the budding proto-apocalypse, Kai had brought her own musings, Marlow had talked about just talking to the kids more - Oh, yes, the Slytherin common rooms invite sleepovers to discuss impending self-destructive tendencies. Well, they do, but... never mind.

And Cassian had done what Cassian did best: took everyone's mess and traced up their ideas into something half-sensible.

Marius was often last to arrive, today no different. The other four were gathered about the table, the end fifth chair left open to him. To one side, Anselma and Marlow. To the other, Cassian and Kai - of course. Oh, he'd not been jealous at any point, per se, but there was definitely an occasion in third-year where he'd wondered to himself how Cassian received so much of Kai's calm attention purely by virtue of existing and Marius- well, he wasn't bothered so much of it anymore, but he'd had an occasion.

He had, after all, been the one to tell Cassian of his screw-up around the ledger-dueling-club incident, despite not even being properly in the circle at the time, because he'd been present for the ledger exchange and had eyes.

She had been brilliant to watch at the dueling club, though. He'd never been one for bloodsport (not that there was any), but Marius didn't much think he'd mind if Kai was involved. Safely.

Marius slid into his seat, loose-limbed as a weathervane and just as open minded to the end of the table he'd partaken. He looked up to survey the delights of the round (square) table. Oddly enough, it didn't look like anyone was actually studying. Odd. Usually someone was at least amid the pretense of it, or playing the game of please for the love of Merlin let me finish this essay before you start an existential debate. Instead, Marlow was leaned back in his seat, looking like he'd been stuck on a Huh for at least five minutes (bless him), Cassian was staring at his folded hands as though they had personally offended him (normal), Anselma was staring at Kai as though she had personally offended her (unusual), and Kai was looking at the table and avoiding eye contact altogether (not uncommon, but worth note).

Not the time for a normal greeting. Maybe? Was it? Marius stretched after setting his books down and folded his arms. "Evening, Snake Charmer," he tossed out toward Kai for normalcy, even as in his peripheral he measured the temperature of the table.

Marlow glanced to him, but more notably, Anselma - Anselma glowered.

Whatever it is, I didn't do it. He was pretty sure, anyway. Wait- He glanced toward Kai again, did a mental rewind of the last few nights. He hadn't said anything wrong, had he? Careless? Bad? Maybe? Nothing sprung to mind.

Kai glanced up sidelong at him and it was a weird look. Kai wasn't always the most readable - though Marius liked to think he'd grown to read her fairly well - but this look was almost uncomfortable. And that still didn't seem quite the calibrated word. Meek? Agitated? Marius couldn't decide on a read, and the first heartbeat of quiet had become two. Not long enough for strange yet, but for simmer.

Then, off to Kai's left, Cassian unfolded his hands and straightened his sleeves. Cassian cleared his throat and turned his thick-browed gaze to Marius. Before Marius could quite decide what to do with the speculative edge in Cassian's eyes, the other boy said, plain and crisp, "Kai's told us she's been the one writing Widdershins."

"Oh," Marius said reflexively, like a man who'd just been handed someone else's homework assignment. He glanced to Kai with fresh appraisal, and she was not meeting his eyes. Oh, you absolute cypress-wanded softheart, he thought. The grin formed anyway. "Well then, is that right?"

"Mmhm," Kai hummed, still eyeing the table.

Feeling he was missing context, Marius flicked out a hand and invitingly gestured to the rest at the table. "Well then." Great, he was repeating himself now. "Is there a reason you look like you're waiting for detention over it? No prefects here, last I checked. Or has someone been promoted?"

Cassian folded his hands up against his nose and mouth. Well, that was a rare enough pose. Cassian usually reserved that one for first-years with uncomfortable questions, or for that one time a Hufflepuff fifth-year had sincerely offered him a Valentine's gift.

In other words, it was Cassian body-language for I cannot believe I am in this situation and I don't know how to escape it with mine or anyone else's dignity intact.

Which was fascinating. Oh, he knows she's lying. Marius' grin crept higher.

Marlow folded his arms loosely and, bless him, Marlow glanced to Marius and said, "Selma and Cass had it figured. Who's writing, that is." Expectably, Marlow sounded rather done with the whole matter. Marlow had rarely engaged the author-circling with any serious investment. "Think it came off a little like they were accusing her." He shrugged.

Except they weren't accusing her. They tapped the author. There was an uncomfortable prickle on the back of his neck at that, but Kai was still sitting there like a damned martyr, and Marius thought well enough that he could put the pieces together. So she jumped between.

Kai's eyes flicked to Marius again and she shifted in her chair, so busy not looking at him that she was practically radiating it.

Behind his own unease, there was a little dance of delight in the back of Marius' mind. Oh, she knows it's me.

Anselma was still eyeing him. If looks could kill. But aside from that, Marius was having a fine evening of trying to decide what to make of Kai's absurdly guileless play-acting.

Cassian lowered his hands to fold on the table once more. "Kai," he said, eyes closed, voice gently cutting through the air like a low piano key. "You are not a gifted liar."

"I-" Kai started, looked up, faltered. She may have been inexpressive at times, but she had no poker face.

"You really aren't," Marius hopped in, leaning forward to cross his arms on the table. Outing painfully bad lies, after all, was a job for the Slytherins at the table.

A good portion of him wanted to leap out of his skin and skedaddle, but that would mean missing out on the ridiculousness of all of this - to say nothing of leaving Kai to whatever Anselma's problem was. "So," he said, casual as a card trick. "How long have you known?" But only to Kai. His head was canted in such a way as to let Anselma's glare hit the side of his head and bounce off undetected.

"...Since fourth year," Kai muttered, to a double take from the peanut gallery.

Marius himself paused for half a heartbeat. Pardon? Since the start?

On the other side of her, Cassian made a quiet huh sound under his breath.

"What since fourth year?" Marlow asked, apparently not quite following that it wasn't Kai.

"Marius is the author," Anselma said, and oh she sounded a fine mix of exasperated and vindicated. Her next words were to Kai. "You knew!?"

Kai's posture shifted subtly, becoming more closed off, though keeping the sheepish edge. "The wandwoods quiz," she finally said. "Had some of the same wording from when I first met him."

Ah, yes. That first day of classes, first year. All the other students had been off scouring the Charms and Transfiguration sections to find ways to be less terrible. Marius, in his bored wanderings, had found the Muggleborn girl in a dusty back-aisle that no one sane ever bothered with, reading up on wand lore as though that was something one simply did at their first day of Hogwarts.

He'd seen the flinch when he first addressed her, sensed the expectation that he meant to make fun of her. Instead, it had become the first of many, many library-encounter discussions that he'd certainly not tried to replicate in any unreasonable measure.

She remembers that too, Marius pretended not to think, while simultaneously trying not to panic of what other innocuous phrasings he may have recycled at one point or another. If she knows that way, who else might?

"Well then." Hadn't he said that already? Marius leaned back in his seat. For lack of else he wanted to address in the immediate moment (or ever, if he could help it), he glanced to Anselma. "There you have it. Ten points to Hufflepuff." He inclined his head toward Kai.

Anselma focused on him. Oh, right. Her glower had lessened, but was still present. "Why didn't you say anything?"

A flicker of irritation found root in Marius. "You didn't seem to mind when it was your ideas getting out into the world," he said airily, twiddling his fingers off into the air.

"But you could have said something now. We're all working together on this - aren't we?"

"Oh, yes," Marius said, frustration stirring anew, even as he smiled and spread his hands in a manner of shrug. "We're doing everything we can. Let me just write to the Prophet about-"

"You don't have to tell everyone! You could tell us," Anselma hissed. "Merlin, you showed up to Kai trying to fake it for you and you couldn't even say it then."

Kai glanced up at that with a frown. "It isn't like that," she said quietly.

Kai. A flicker of guilt twisted around Marius' irritation.

Marlow leaned in then, elbow on the table. "Alright," he said, in his own gruff quiet. "Selma, mind if I...?"

The Ravenclaw's eyes flicked to Marlow, then away. She shook her head and shrugged.

That was enough for Marlow, who rubbed the bridge of his nose before dropping the hand to look at Marius, whose smile didn't quite feel well-worn at the moment. "Marius. You're writing it, yeah?" he asked.

Marius' smile tightened, and then he shrugged. "In parts and pieces."

A beat passed.

"In monthly issues," he added, to Marlow's tired stare.

Cassian - back in his hands-folded-to-mouth posture - gazed steadily and silently toward Marlow in a manner almost beginning to ease of edge.

Marlow gave a steady nod, then held up a finger to Marius before looking to Kai next. "Kai. Why'd you claim it was you?"

Why did you? Marius wondered himself.

The answering shrug was small, sheepish, a little tense. "...I thought I could talk to Marius after, sort it maybe," she said quietly. "Not..." Her hand gestured shallowly toward Cassian and Anselma. "...I dunno. I didn't want to make him say anything if he wasn't ready."

"And if he was never ready?" Anselma asked, annoyance still there.

Sheepish within, Marius found himself in odd consensus with Anselma on that one.

Kai shrugged again. "Figured he should have the choice."

Marius was struck by the oddest feeling of sitting starkers in his seat. His lips kept trying to tug at the corners, but didn't really quite seem to know where they wanted to end up. Naturally, that was how Marlow found him when Marlow turned back.

Marlow's jaw shifted a little. He glanced to Kai, then back to Marius anew. "You don't have to tell us-" On the far side of him, Anselma tipped her head to examine the brick of the wall. Marlow went on. "-but... why didn't you tell us? Or is it just the sort of thing that got started and then wasn't a big secret until it was?"

There were a lot of ways Marius could answer that. Most of them jokes. Several would get him hexed by Anselma. At least two might get him hexed by Kai. Probably a half dozen that would make Cassian litigate. The options were endless, really. He opened his mouth, closed it, poise shifting elegantly to realign his posture to something that felt more well-positioned and magnanimous. They were going to throw him out of the alcove, he was sure. They'd seen the spiderweb now, all webs and no spider, and Anselma was just the quickest of them to take its measure. Incendio, incendio, incendio, he thought, a little hysterically for his taste.

But then there was Kai, looking at him quietly, patiently, plain-mannered and unruffled. He met her eyes briefly and found himself being the one between them to break the contact sooner for once.

"I didn't want to make it about me," he eventually said. "Once it wasn't a joke, anyway."

That settled around the table. It wasn't that Marius found the quiet after his own words unnerving. No. It wasn't even that long of a quiet, regardless. One, maybe two elephants, yes? No problem. No problem.

Cassian and Anselma exchanged a glance across the table. The former raised his brows slightly. The latter shook her head.

"That makes sense," Marlow said evenly, shifting his posture to loom less upon the table.

And Kai? Kai just nodded. She leaned to the table and shifted to let her elbow lightly touch Marius' arm even as her gaze ventured to the woodgrain.

Once more into the abyss - Cassian straightened his sleeves, which was Cassian for drumroll, please. Marius' fellow Slytherin straightened. "Do you want to continue Widdershins, with us?" he asked, looking to Marius.

His own manner was a little twitchy for his liking as Marius gestured with an arm. "If you want to help tuck contraband behind bathroom seats, who'm I to say no?"

"Marius," Kai said quietly.

"...But alright then," Marius said, very much needing to go set more drafts on fire and maybe reconsider the stupid Star Trek article.

Cassian spoke with clinical plainness. "It is entirely possible that risk will come of this. Therefore, fore the record - I am the author of Widdershins." And then he tipped his head toward Kai in their signature, infuriating telepathy.

Internally, Marius felt suddenly paralyzed. Oh.

Kai caught Cassian's look like a tossed book. "I'm the author of Widdershins," she echoed, lips tugging in a ghost of a smile.

Marlow snorted tiredly, but he threw in, "Yeah, alright, I've been writing Widdershins. Have to do something with the spare time this year."

Anselma massaged her temple. "If I were writing Widdershins, it wouldn't sound nearly so bloody ridiculous."

"No appreciation for the theater?" Marius tossed, half olive branch, half grin, feeling half-distanced from his own words too.

"Enough appreciation," she muttered, and shook her head. "Fine. Alright. I'm the author of Widdershins. You need an editor, regardless."

Cassian's mouth ticked at the corner.

Et tu?

Four pairs of eyes didn't quite converge on Marius, but they bounced and lingered in turn, the offering made. An open palm in the air. Well then. Knights of the Square Table it is, isn't it? Marius had the oddest sense that he was looking in from above the table more than sitting at it. Adrift.

Well, best get the sail loosened. That drifting feeling tightened toward something giddy, dazed, dizzy.

Marius did what Marius did best: he spread his hands in the air like he was summoning an audience.

"Welcome to Widdershins Weekly," he said with a grown grin. "We publish once a month."

Chapter Text

September 15, 2006. Hogwarts. Slytherin Common Room

Cassian

As a rule, Cassian Rosier did not often socially engage within the Slytherin common room. He had long mastered the art of being seen there without ever quite being part of it.

In the soft-lit subterrain, groups gravitated and coalesced in low murmurs. Those who wished to be left alone were generally permitted it. There was a quiet dignity to the den of the snakes, sharp-edged and practiced. Less sharp-edged now than in his first year, fewer echoes of bloodline politics spoken like gospel.

Cassian felt no great pull toward his dormitory bed when the dark-leather couches offered sufficient solitude and ease. He could read upon one end and let the talk of others recede into white noise. For all of the tensions of Slytherin, ambient atmosphere rarely soured unless someone specifically meant it to.

At an angle across the room, on a more remote bench than he usually chose, Marius was reading as well. Unusually quiet, for Marius. No flitting from group to group. No weaving and slithering within the common room to provoke chuckles. He did not seem distraught. But Monday had taught Cassian something: he didn't know Marius as well as he thought.

Cassian hoped Monday's ordeal was behind them. Paused between chapters of his text, Cassian turned over the peculiarity of that day in his mind with ill ease.

He had not expected Anselma to come armed with thoughts of pressing the Widdershins author. What had come of that unfolded poorly. No more need be said of it.

He had not expected Anselma to suggest making allies of war veterans and golden heroes for their cause, either. It wasn't until he looked upon the list she gave him that Cassian realized just how much a cause it was. Cerebrally, he had known. He himself had said the words, hadn't he? 'We have no immediate control over outcomes or government.' A clean and true sentence. He had known, conceptually, their goals and their grievances.

After all, everything of the Umbrellas was born of two core concepts: First, Muggles could record, remember, and redistribute at an exponential rate, with no noticeable signs of slowing. Second, wizards did not even have the vocabulary to discuss the issue.

And the wizarding world was not paying heed to the risk. It was ignorance. It was arrogance. It was distraction. Cassian, at his fairest, suspected that the few adults who did pay attention simply had no answers either. The problem was no longer secrecy alone. The problem was the very scale of the problem. There were days when Cassian feared that most wizards might simply choose to lock down harder, never emerging from the aegis of their wards again.

Some days, he wasn't so sure he would choose differently. If it came between Muggle backlash and his friends? Between Ministry backlash and his friends? But then, Anselma had answers to that, or so she believed.

Cassian's fingertips traced the edge of the page he was not reading.

Harry Potter.

No longer did Cassian experience the inappropriate urge to chuckle. He had when Anselma placed the name before him as though it were benediction rather than bloodguilt. Does she truly think a letter with 'Rosier' upon it would find favor? That the Golden Hero would read past that name?

No, he was not looking at the page anymore. Not really. He was eleven again, in a corridor too near to Gryffindor's tower, hearing a pair of red-clad fourth-years not bothering to whisper as they said they were 'keeping an eye on Rosier' - because 'Harry would have'.

He'd held no more than cautious neutrality toward the lions. Until that moment. Afterward, he had simply pretended Gryffindors didn't exist at all - Marlow aside, later - and let his eyes slide over Potter's name whenever he found it in the history books.

Except the once.

Except the once.

He had been reading through postwar released files, the kind unearthed quietly and late. In one, there had been reference to Potter, nearly expelled for underage magic. The suggestion implied, between the lines, that he may well have been if Albus Dumbledore had not intervened. If Albus Dumbledore had not advocated on his behalf.

Of course someone had stood for Potter. Someone had bent rules, spoken up, summoned witnesses. Someone had insisted Potter deserved the benefit of the doubt. And the system had listened.

Of course it had. Potter was Potter.

Potter hadn't been assigned a Ministry handler for 'observation'. Potter hadn't needed to explain that he wasn't like them.

At his fairest, Cassian suspected that Potter probably hadn't even asked for any of it. The world had just stepped in. The wizarding world loved its redemptions, but only with the right shape.

Cassian was no one's golden boy. Just a Rosier with good grades and no disciplinary record, which everyone assumed was suspicious anyway.

And now Anselma looked at Cassian every hour in the alcove as though to ask are you ready to bring up the DA list now? As though Cassian was supposed to pick up a quill and write to Harry bloody Potter. As if Cassian himself weren't a liability for being anywhere near the parchment.

What would they even write?

Good tidings, Mrs. Granger
If you haven't noticed, it is a mere matter of time before Muggles experience explosive awareness of wizardkind and wizardkind responds with panic. Given we have no immediate control over outcomes or government, would you mind condoning our underage attempts at a subversive cultural coup?
Signed,
Rosier & Friends

Cassian snapped the book in his lap shut more violently than intended.

The air moved to Cassian's left, followed by the thump of someone sitting on the couch, near enough to be invasive.

"The book offend your honor, Cassian? Not dry enough?"

Cassian looked up to find Marius beside him, halfway already to lounging in that nonchalant way that Cassian had long-since written off far sooner than he should have.

"Or too dry even for you," Marius mused languidly. "You stared at the same page for almost five minutes." He tilted his head. "You're brooding."

"I was thinking."

"Same thing."

How did I never suspect him as the author? As a fellow Slytherin, logic ought have dictated Marius as Cassian's first suspicion. Instead, Cassian had allowed himself to cordon Marius into the role of jester even as his dorm-mate wrote circles around the castle. And Kai had known. Cassian hadn't.

What else had Cassian missed? What more dangerous factors might he be blind to?

"I was done reading," Cassian said, a little dismissive.

Marius lifted one foot to rest on the other knee. "Rosier," he said, tone quiet, tone ribbing.

Internally, Cassian twitched. He knew what Marius was doing.

The timing played out, and Marius repeated, "Rosier."

"This really isn't necessary," Cassian said, closing his eyes against a thin prickle of humor, unwelcome but insistent.

"Rosier," came in amused, drawn-out syllables.

Cassian had the flicker of a mental image of thwapping Marius on the head with his book, like a bloody Gryffindor at roughhousing.

"Rosier." And then Marius waited.

The rhythm was known. The song was made. The cadences had swayed and bloomed and the structure of the thing laid forth, and all that remained was for Cassian to not dance out of step. Wearily, he played his part and said, "Well now you're just timing it."

An amused huff came from Marius. "Cassian," he said, and so the usual game had been turned back upon Cassian, as though Marius had ever been the one to withhold camaraderie. "Well then, is it-"

Before Marius could finish, a small figure moved into their peripheral. Cassian turned his head, eyes settling on Tristram Little. The Muggleborn Slytherin, these past few days sans that odd neon watch he'd arrived in. Ambient magic made for dysfunctional technology. Cassian privately hoped it had not been expensive, and thought poorly of whichever Ministry liaison had not seen fit to warn the Little family in advance.

Beside Cassian, Marius shifted his posture to one of openness toward the kid.

"Excuse me," the first-year said. The boy was short. Cassian didn't remember ever having been that small at eleven. Marius may have been.

Briefly, Cassian glanced past Little, a swept survey of the room to check if some older student had put him up to this. Such was a common rhythm. It did not seem to be the case now.

Cassian looked him in the eye and shifted into a more attentive posture.

"Sorry," Little added, glancing between them. "I just- I just got back and... the prefects were out. I wasn't sure who to talk to, but..."

"It depends on what the problem is," Cassian said, when the boy seemed unlikely to continue. I thought I saw Hagen only a little ago. The prefect boy in their year, often floating the perimeter, but not now. Cassian studied Little's expression. A faint discomfit, maybe? He didn't trust his read with certainty. "We're not prefects, but we can answer questions."

Marius stage-whisper-added, "They would have made him a prefect, but he already walked too much like one."

A little smile tugged levity to Little's expression before it dropped away. His eyes favored Marius between the two of them, which was familiar enough that Cassian was untouched by the implied shying. "I'm just not sure who to talk to," the boy began again. "I was in the corridor, and one of the prefects from Hufflepuff spoke to me..." He shifted his feet a little. "...and she said some things about... that I should be careful about older students in Slytherin."

Beside Cassian, Marius inclined his head in a way most would miss. From alcove conversations, Cassian knew to associate it with a preempt of sardonic rant. None such came. There was doubt in this reading too - was he reading in Marius what he wanted to see, or his reading thrown by Marius having more to him than Cassian had thought?

"That isn't something a prefect of one House should be telling a first-year of another," Cassian said, thereby drawing the boy's eyes back to him. There was an ill curdling in the back of his mind, a pondering of what exactly the Hufflepuff prefect had said. It wasn't that there were no grounds for a Muggleborn Slytherin to be a point of uncertainty. It was that there were far too many ways that warning could be delivered to instill anxiety instead of awareness. Cassian would be surprised if he himself hadn't been one of the Hufflepuff's targeted mentions - if there were specifics made.

There was that look in the boy's eyes now, the one Cassian had prior labeled as discomfit, and this time Cassian thought perhaps it was more guarded. "Is it true?" ventured Little.

The vaguery sent icy papercuts of discomfit through Cassian's skin.

"What? That you should be careful?" Marius put in, which was just as well, for Cassian didn't trust his own read of what the boy truly wanted to know.

"...No," said Little, a small knit forming between his eyebrows. "I'd read the history books before school," he added, in a clarification that stung with the grim awareness of what he'd likely read. "But - the prefect. She said..."

Cassian sat back, adjusted his sleeves.

"She said they- you- Slytherin. That Slytherin..." His voice faded.

With heavy thoughts, Cassian picked up the thread and permitted himself to guess. "She said that Slytherin would weigh your background. Or something of that nature."

Little's gaze lingered on Cassian's as he nodded, something in it more challenging than shying - not hostile, but yes, his read earlier. Guarded. Cassian held the look without flinch.

"There will be those that do," Cassian said evenly. "Within Slytherin, there will be a few for whom no proof of belonging will ever be sufficient. Outside Slytherin, there will be those who weigh your being here more than your background. Some will read meanings in, assumptions about your person or what you mean for us. If either sort makes themselves known, then you will know the people whose respect is worth your barest concern."

Little stared at him, then finally looked down to his feet. One of his shoed feet shifted on heel.

"My mum's expecting me to write about school, what House I'm in," Little said, voice snagging on the word House. "She has the history books too. I don't know what to tell her."

In the corner of his eyes, Cassian saw Marius fight down making a face. He suspected if Little hadn't been eleven, Marius may have had one of his more scathing asides. Cassian couldn't blame Marius for the temptation, nor Little for his frustration.

What, honestly, would begin to reassure his mother?

"You're getting on with your dorm-mates, no?" Marius put forth, even as a hand came up for a half-made rustle of his own brown curls. "A place to start. Just maybe don't lead with 'Mum, they all sound like they've stepped out of a posh pub and don't believe in t-shirts.'"

Not the cordoned jester at all.

An undignified snort broke from Little, and the beginnings of a smile. "I don't know," the boy said. "She might find it funny if I wrote that. She found Diagon Alley a little odd." He paused there, looking apologetic - his eyes darted to Cassian.

Cassian resisted the urge to close his eyes. Dryly, he said, "Was it more the hats, or the raptors being sold to eleven-year-olds without falconry permits?"

Thank you, Kai. The latter had been one of the first joking recollections Kai had ever made to Cassian. The very first thing she had asked her family's Ministry liaison about after receiving her Hogwarts letter. Not about books. Not about magic. Not about Hogwarts. About that almost-innocuous line: owl OR cat OR toad. She'd apparently made a puzzled remark: owls required permits.

That had, apparently again, come after asking the liaison if he was a solicitor.

Little's posture shifted at Cassian's words. The boy looked almost unsettled to find out Cassian possessed humor, which Cassian considered just slightly unfair. "It was all of it," Little supposed. "Starting with it being behind a pub. The animals. Dad almost went down a side-alley and that got... weird. Mum said the ice cream shop was the only thing that felt ordinary. The bank wasn't - Dad found that odder."

"What, not enough dragons in Muggle banks?" Marius put in.

"The goblin wasn't joking about the sound?" Little asked, voice rising in rapt curiosity.

"As a rule," Cassian said, "Goblins do not joke. Least of all in Gringotts."

A new voice cut in. Silas Avery's shadow fell near Little, though he kept the Muggleborn boy at a remove. "They do their job," Avery said with a feigned lightness. He arched a polished brow to Marius and Cassian on the couch, then to Little a few steps away. "What's this, then? Early admissions for the Cross-House Welfare Society?"

As Cassian glanced toward Avery, Tristram Little when taut-tense, his eyes briefly locking on to Cassian's.

"Don't you have somewhere to be, Avery?" Marius said, not even looking up from a sudden and consuming need to examine the back of his own hand.

"Little, wasn't it?" Avery asked with a distinct catch on the surname, a sharpening of its consonants. "These aren't the best to follow suit of. Hardly ever here. And when they are, it's mostly to second-guess the Prophet or stage interventions for Hufflepuff's public image."

"Ah, and here I thought you liked interventions," Marius murmured in a tone of bemusement. "What with all the reputation-washing you've had to do."

Little was taking a half-step back, as though beginning to sense he'd found himself in the middle of seventh-year discords.

Cassian put in, "Did you need something, Avery?"

Their dorm-mate was still glancing irritably at Marius. When Cassian offered the out, he turned to offer a thin smile. "Ah, yes. I bear news. Or have you heard? Professor Linton is coming back to 'assist' Professor Tarth in teaching Ethics. Can you imagine her embarrassment? I think I'd retire on the spot, wouldn't you?"

Ministry intervention already?

Avery's smile widened. "I can't say I'm surprised, after what she let your friend talk about. Very Muggleborn thing, though, questioning the Statute. Wonder what would happen if she takes it too far. Do you think they might break her wand?"

Beside Cassian, Marius went still. Cassian didn't let his face give anything away, but something clenched behind his ribs. Break her wand? He didn't think they would.

Not yet. Not now. Not on so little premises.

Before either of them could say anything, Avery was already walking away, his venom spent. Little had vanished off amid the spite - no, he was off a ways, talking to the prefect Hagen now. Just as well.

"They wouldn't," Cassian murmured aside to Marius, because his friend remained still in a way that Cassian couldn't decipher with certainty anymore. He likes Kai, Anselma had said, and Cassian still didn't know quite where to place that, seeing as he'd filed it away as obsolete years ago. He hadn't planned on it being relevant into the now. Not the pressing issue at the moment.

But Marius didn't say anything. He just shook his head.

---

The next evening in the library alcove, Cassian arrived first. He often did. Across from him, soon enough Anselma in her frequent seat. Marlow beside Cassian today, which he didn't mind. When matters had an occasion to grow heated, Marlow proved a balm upon all parties. His de-escalation of the budding argument between Anselma and Marius on Monday had been, by Cassian's measure, handled with great gravitas and merit.

Marius and Kai arrived in quick sequence and took seats without comment. It was noted by Cassian and quietly folded away. If Avery's words hung within Marius as they periodically did in Cassian, Marius showed no sign of it.

Was he imagining Anselma's eyes coming up toward him, amid her own work? Cassian checked. No. She was reading, taking notes. Nothing untoward, no glances of pressure. Not yet. Cassian returned to his own business.

The table was unusually quiet, even for study, for the first hour or so together.

And then Anselma tilted her head down the table toward Marius. "I have some ideas for articles," she said.

So it begins anew. This had become a regular occurrence since Marius' authorship was outed. Oh- they all had made the occasional suggestion. It was Anselma to come with lists.

Marius, sitting beside her, lifted a receiving hand in loose splay of fingers. "Let's see it, then. We can only go up from A Brief List of Everything You're Not Taught Because It Makes the Ministry Look Bad."

"It was a working title," Anselma said as she passed him a parchment.

Quiet descended as Marius eyed Anselma's article proposals. Eventually he asked, "What is 'P-H-P'? Do I want to know?"

Cassian frowned, trying to measure for himself what it might be. Initials? He ran through plausible options in his head for P surnames, effortfully and purposefully skipping over 'Potter'. His quill rested at a pause between his fingers.

"Isn't that something to do with acidity?" Kai asked without looking up, still half-distracted in her Transfiguration work. "Muggle wording, though. Wait, no, that's pH."

"It's code," Marlow said, frowning.

"Code?" Marius asked, tone rising a note in bemusement. "Like 'SOS'? Or... hacking?"

That pulled Cassian's thoughts away from initials, more toward the escapism books Kai sent each summer. It could be that, he thought. Some sort of computer-system, like in that cyberpunk book.

Anselma seemed to be fighting down an odd expression. Her lips twitched, and her hand came up to curl against her lips. Cassian had the sneaking suspicion that most of them were off on guessing.

"No," Marlow corrected Marius with a shrug. "It's a language. For computers. What's the context?"

Marius lifted his eyebrows down at the parchment. "If Muggles can understand PHP, they can understand Potions."

"Oh." Marlow scratched the back of his neck. "I... don't think enough people would get that one."

Frustrated by his own lacking comprehension, Cassian asked, "What do you mean, language for computers?" Don't computers just use the local area's language? Why the initials?

"Wrong kind of language," Kai said for him, glancing over to offer some relief.

Anselma glanced to Marlow, then leaned in here. "Computer languages are special to the task. Like runes or rituals. They are used to instruct computer systems." She shook her head. "I suppose it might be hyperspecific for use in a wizarding publication - even for Muggleborn readers - but it functions as a cultural window in itself."

"How is that?" Cassian probed, still unsure.

"Because Muggles joke about not getting PHP," Marlow said with a quiet snort.

Marius was leaned back in his chair now, ruffling his hands through his hair. "I'm not sure we should be front-paging Muggles Can Learn Potions, much as I'd love to see Linton's face. Just a little heretical. But if we can figure out another name, and you write the basics of the idea out, alright."

Though Anselma nodded and was turning back to her own space with a concentrated frown, the name of Linton skittered across the space of the table like a sharpened nail on the wood.

Several seconds passed.

Kai said quietly, "He's going to undermine Tarth."

Loose murmurs of agreement coalesced around the table, at the tail of which Cassian found Anselma looking up across the table at him in that questioning way. Maybe he was imagining it, but to his perception, her eyes said the DA list now? Cassian found his eyes sliding toward Kai. 'Do you think they'd break her wand?' Avery's taunt echoed in the back of his mind.

"I have a thought about that," Anselma answered Kai.

Marius and Marlow, none the wiser, each glanced sidelong from their resumed homework. Kai too turned, head at a shallow angle of glance.

So Anselma continued: "Our concerns are real. So... we need to start talking to people who might care. And who have actual authority."

Cassian set his quill aside and began to straighten his sleeves. He didn't need to look to know the others were beginning to make their own connections of her meaning - or at least her implication. The process of righting his sleeves was sufficient for Cassian.

"What, are you planning to write to Shacklebolt?" Marius asked, lips curving into a crooked grin.

"Approaching veterans of Dumbledore's Army, actually." Anselma was all enthusiasm and no pause. Beside her, Marius rapidly blinked in a manner of Pardon? and even Kai's brow began to twitch in re-calibration. Next to Cassian, Marlow started to raise a hand, then dropped it. Anselma went on, unbothered. "Granger. Longbottom. Maybe Lovegood. Possibly even-"

"No," Cassian said, voice soft and just this side of mutinous. "Not Potter."

Anselma looked up at Cassian with a frown, not following the thread of his protest. "Well, maybe not right away, sure, but-"

"Blimey," Marius said, amid his own bemusement. "Why Potter? Isn't he just an Auror these days?"

"Yes, but-"

"Married, a few kids," Kai said quietly. Cassian felt the weight of her gaze toward him. "Doesn't he usually decline non-business mail, anyway? It was in the Prophet a few years ago."

Thank you. Cassian stared at his folded hands, hoping upon the rest of his friends' sense to win out against Anselma's cudgel.

"Not right away," Anselma repeated, after nodding to Kai in the edge of Cassian's vision. "I preferred the idea of Granger, Longbottom, Lovegood. Granger's in the Ministry. Reformist through and through. Longbottom is here at Hogwarts, accessible. Lovegood - look, like it or not, the Quibbler might actually back us up. We need allies. Who better than people who have already seen the Ministry's issues at their worst?"

She leaned forward, voice lowering. "As for Potter? I know how it sounds, but... if he chooses to pay attention, the Ministry has to, even if only to save face. He's Potter. Instant credibility. And he's known Ministry and Prophet scrutiny thoroughly. And he led the DA. He taught kids to defend themselves. He-"

"I don't think our issues are quite at the level of needing to train child soldiers," Marius commented aside, earning an annoyed glance from Anselma.

"-if nothing else," Anselma pressed on, "He might help get the others to take us seriously. Even if he doesn't want the spotlight." She sat up straighter. "If we want to approach the First Umbrella, people is how. Talking to people. Talking to adults that people will listen to."

"All well until they pat us on the head and tell us to go back to our NEWTS," Marlow said.

"Or tell us to stop," Kai put in, quietly.

Anselma turned to her with a frown. "Why? Granger at least, she's Muggleborn, she-"

"Has children," Cassian finished for her, straightening his sleeves. He hadn't thought through this angle of protest before, but now... "That must be weighed in anything we would ask them to consider. They may have been visionaries in their time, but people with young and vulnerable children incapable of Apparating or even controlling their magic yet... are unlikely to be in any great hurry to imagine grave danger on the horizon."

"Or it could make them act faster," Kai allowed to Anselma, eyes briefly meeting with Cassian's. Her lips tugged in what he took for reassurance that he didn't feel.

Latching onto that, Anselma said, "Then it's a matter of reaching out the right way. We have time to think about that. We don't have to lead with the worst possible phrasings. Or the most... complicated figures." It was a tone of allowance, begrudging enough for Cassian to be unsure of it.

"Well then," Marius said. "I suppose I'll have to save my best Potter-fanmail signature for another day."

That earned him an almost wry look from Kai. "I'd half believe you've practiced one."

"Well, if he ever wants a signed copy of Widdershins, I wouldn't say no."

The topic of Potter receding to jest for now. Cassian could live with that.

Marlow folded his arms as he put in, "I dunno, do you think he reads Widdershins?" He sounded like he was joking, but...

"I'd bet a sickle at least one of the former DA does," Cassian said, offering the words like an amused sigh. There was a slight tug at the corner of his mouth. I doubt it. And yet. He folded his hands, thoughts drifting - Avery in the common room, to Tarth, to Kai. "Granger, Longbottom, Lovegood," he tasted the names, then looked up across the table to Anselma. "You aren't wrong. There is merit in considering them." And how he hated that merit.

Her eyes caught his with what Cassian thought might be relief. "Then we consider them," she said.

It was a concession of delay, in Anselma's manner.

Cassian hoped so, anyway.

Chapter Text

September 18, 2006. Hogwarts. Magical Ethics Classroom.

Kai

Kai Bosco was not thrilled to see Professor Linton's return, for what it implied and for what it meant in practice. The 'assistance' for Tarth was so nakedly bureaucratic nonsense that Kai suspected it'd offended Cass's sense of decorum on principle. As for the professor himself... Kai tried to not let her attention wander.

Linton's voice - rambling and roughworn to the point of rickety - made Binns sound flush with vitality in compare. The old wizard stood at the head of the Ethics Classroom like a swaying curtain caught in a draft. He was hunched and wrinkled as a sloughed snakeskin, veins pronounced under the glassiness of him. It wasn't simply that he was old. No. Age was no trouble. It was that he wasn't there in any way that felt meaningful.

The room was split into two rows of benches, absent desks. On one side, Ravenclaw's sixth and seventh years, including Anselma near a far window. On the other, Hufflepuff's. Kai, being the latter, shared a bench with a few of her dorm-mates - Nadine and Imogen, though both sat closer to each other than to her. Kai leaned slightly forward, tracing one thumb with the other in her lap. A small rhythm of grounding.

Linton droned:

"-and so, we understand thereby that the Statute of Secrecy is not a matter of ethical uncertainty... no, no. It is an understanding reached. A boundary, not born of fear, but of wisdom. That Muggles and wizards live in different spheres of the world... The hard-earned truth... that peaceful coexistence requires... careful separation..."

Yes, Kai thought, that's part of the problem. Her mind was starting to drift. Distantly, she wondered if his purpose here was to bore them into apathy. She doubted it was anything so strategic. The man remained dull, either way. Last year, he'd once spent twenty minutes on discussing goblins and wand-rights before remembering that the day's topic had been love potions. He hadn't been much better at discussing those. No one had been able to look their classmates in the eye when leaving, that day.

She wondered if he read Widdershins. He'd made a few absentminded criticisms last year that made her think perhaps he did.

Linton wheezed, low and dry. Behind him, Professor Tarth - now again yellow-clad in soft-looking robes, poised carefully - wore a polite smile amid his speech. The speech felt as though it had been going on for hours already. Time had begun to crawl somewhere around the third invocation of 'wisdom'.

"...Muggle-repelling charms, concealment policies... they're not troubles... no... but answers... Answers to a singular question: how do we protect Muggles from magical dangers against which they have no defense?" Linton cleared his throat, having found a moment's lucidity. "It is mercy, not arrogance, that keeps us apart. Muggles should not live in fear of powers they cannot understand."

All for safety, no? Not theirs, Kai thought, but floundered for a better rebuke in the moment. Marius probably would have had something clever on that, Kai considered. Her eyes followed the scattered chalk impressions on the blackboard. Probably several comments from Marius, if Slytherin were here. 'Hogwarts: A Guide to Babysitting Poor Muggles. How's that one, Snake Charmer?' She could almost hear the grin around the nickname. Kai's lips twitched. He'd seemed loosened up since the authorship came out. He was still Marius. But a curtain had opened.

Linton persisted. "It's quite simple, really... mm... The Statute has preserved the integrity of magical society for over three centuries. The traditions of wandcraft, of healing, of stability... and indeed, the care of the magical creatures we share the world with..."

He trailed off on that one. Linton had always loved to bring up the recent house-elf and other reforms, as though they were a robe he wasn't quite sure how to wear.

"It is easy... when you're young... to misunderstand. To fail to appreciate the dangers of exposure to Muggle society. To mistake curiosity for courage.... Let me be plain. We are not Muggles with wands... no... we are something far... Different. Apart... It was Grindelwald's war that made this clear.... His vision... reckless... romantic... doomed. It taught us what happens... when magical power presumes a place in Muggle affairs. And so we thereby understand that the Statute is wisdom..."

Grindelwald. Who went on to ruin the wizarding world's ability to even talk about the Statute.

To Kai's mounting dread, Linton circled back then, having lost his place in his speech. Kai glanced past him again, but Professor Tarth's angular features gave away nothing beyond thin smile. Still folded into polite composure, she offered no protest. There was no softness, no signal, nothing that Kai could read with certainty.

Kai glanced sideways at Nadine, then to the chalkboard beyond Linton's sway, then to her own hands where they fidgeted with the fabric of her robes.

There was something in the way Tarth stood that bothered her. It was as though she was a balloon tethered to the corner, instead of animate as she'd been last week. Tarth had exceeded Kai's worries at the Sorting Feast, in a few pleasant weeks of good classes. She'd been lively in last week's debate, sharp and inviting, asking questions half as though she meant to learn something too. Now, in Linton's shadow... she stood like she was part of the wall. Had she bent to bureaucracy, or was this survival anew?

It bothered Kai. As did Linton's bumbling mutterings. She waited a few more seconds, to see if anyone else would say anything into the cast shadow of Grindelwald on the topic. None did.

Kai lifted her hand.

At the benches around her, a few students glanced sidelong - especially Nadine of Hufflepuff, closest to Kai - and some shifted subtly away. As if proximity might invite her to cause extra homework or worse. Such had happened before, Kai allowed. If Linton saw Kai's hand, he gave no sign. To look at him, it seemed more likely that he simply didn't notice. His voice had grown airy, his eyes half-lidded and inattentive to the room at large. He kept ambling through his repeated speech.

He really should be retired, Kai thought, brow furrowing a little as she studied how he struggled to even hold himself up. He'd already looked old and wearing down last year. This was... well, a part of her felt sorry for him. Another part wondered if he'd volunteered to be here or not.

"Professor," Kai finally said, hand still raised.

He rambled a few lines further before peering up at her, ill-focused eyes studying hers. Somehow, when he saw who was speaking, he looked more tired still. "No questions yet," he mumbled, stepping back behind the lectern to find his notes and presumably his long-lost place in his speech. Tarth shifted her weight slightly, beside the board.

Kai pursed her lips.

Before she could say anything, Professor Tarth cleared her throat. "Professor Linton," she said with a mild smile, "we do typically make space for discussion in these sessions."

Oh. Perhaps not so curtailed after all. Kai's mind quietly moved toward the theory of survivalist posture.

Professor Linton blinked blearily in Tarth's direction. "Oh...is that so?" he muttered, in the way of someone who might have heard it before, but hadn't filed it anywhere important.

"It helps with grounding in the material," confirmed Tarth, tone gentle and measured.

Linton blinked slowly at that, then turned and made a gesture to Kai, a sort of go on, then.

Kai sat up, but her gaze drifted past him as she spoke. "I simply- Professor, I understand the reasoning of the Statute. But what if it is no longer sustainable? Not only ethically. In practice?"

The elderly professor's quiet extended for so long that Kai began to wonder if he had heard her at all. He finally said, "Unsustainable? Why wouldn't it be sustainable?"

Kai let her hand lower to rest in her lap. Her fingers loosely knit and shifted together, for she sought to untangle her own ideas to present them right. It began by feeling like her own ramble. "A hundred and fifty years ago, Muggles had basic telegrams and telephones. A hundred years, radio. Then television. Fifty, satellites... and tech enough to send men into space and bring them home."

She shifted in her seat, thoughts circling with a growing momentum. Keep going, keep going. "Thirty years ago: early internet, early mobiles. Ten: texting, the Web. Five: phones that could use the Web."

"These days? Sites where they can talk to everyone they know or half the ones they don't. Anywhere in the world, instantly. Same with video, with pictures. Whole libraries. It's like they've... built hives. Of machines. Computers, that is. They're like instant owls, or shared pensieves, kind of floo calls... All of it, in one. In their homes. In their pockets. And that's just this year. What they might have in five more? Ten? Twenty?"

In the corner of her vision, Kai saw a Ravenclaw boy - Rhys Thayer, a frequent voice in debates - frowning, lips moving as he parsed her words. He turned his head to his own hands with a look of intense concentration. Just beyond him, Anselma was watching the professors, from the look of her. Gauging the room, perhaps.

Kai's words trailed, her gaze unfocused as she wandered further into her own thoughts. "Do you really think Muggles won't... outpace us in remembering? Sharing? That they'll never figure it out in enough numbers to make stopping it ridiculous?"

She'd said it first two years ago, just to her friends. Kai ended quietly on, "You can't obliviate the world."

The ensuing quiet felt brittle. Anselma met Kai's turned glance, gave a nod. The rest... Kai couldn't quite tell if anyone had taken it in yet. Most of her peers were glancing at one another or looking off elsewhere. None seemed eager to break the silence.

Up by the lectern, Professor Linton stood with his lips slightly parted. Professor Tarth's arms were folded now, her calm smile held with more effort than prior.

"Is- Can they really do that?" came a question from beside Kai. Nadine.

Nadine Ashworth glanced around the room, then settled back on Kai. A nervous chuckle rose in her. "The- pocket floo-call thing. Doesn't that need a lot of eleka-tricity or something? Wires and all?"

"Not really," Kai said, brow furrowing. Don't you see now? "They have to charge them with the wires, but... then they carry them around. Lots of Muggles have them. Most Muggles now, I think. Not everyone, but... more all the time." She glanced to Nadine for brief eye contact, seeking even a flicker of understanding.

A gruff throat-clearing came from Linton now. "Yes, well, that's - ahem - we're all aware of Muggle phones, Miss Bosco," said the old professor, with a vague wave of hand. "We're quite aware of Muggle gadgets. Motorcars... televisions... microwaves... these things come and go." He gave a sniff, nodded with a growing confidence. "Every decade there's some new obsession. And Muggle-repelling charms... illusions - quite standard, really. More than enough to manage such things."

Imogen Pell, who rarely volunteered in class, shifted her weight to lean onto one hand as she spoke. "What if she is right, though, Professor? I mean, it isn't impossible, is it? Some Muggle catches their kid's accidental magic on video and puts it up on Youtube or something."

Kai glanced to Imogen sidelong. She hadn't expected support from that corner.

"Youtube?" muttered a Ravenclaw in the far corner, to a peer's verbal shrug.

Another sounded a touch more certain. "It's one of the Muggle sites Bosco mentioned. Moving pictures, yeah. Like telly, but anyone can put things on it. Music, animals doing stupid things, home videos like Pell said."

"We've got moving pictures," someone else said, bemused.

The more certain Ravenclaw replied, "Yeah. Muggles can show theirs to the whole world at once, though." They sounded almost thoughtful.

Up at the front of the room, Professor Tarth's lips curled. Kai couldn't be sure, but it looked suspiciously like Tarth was biting back a real smile.

Linton, by contrast, just looked lost.

Elsewhere on the Ravenclaw side, Thayer finally spoke up. "Isn't it just about improving the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes? Scaling up preemptive strategy, maybe. This- 'Web', it has to have locations - vectors?" He said 'Web' like it was a creature or dark artifact, Kai observed in resigned amusement. Thayer went on, "The Obliviators know how to manage what reaches Muggle news. This is just more of the same, isn't it?"

"Sure," Anselma put in, twisting back to look at her Housemate. "It's a matter of training a million Obliviators in caching, hard drives, screenshots, and Muggle nerd intensity."

"We could..." muttered a Hufflepuff boy near the front, his voice uneasy, "...just make it not work or something. Maybe?"

Kai stilled, fingers curling tight in her lap. "Besides being against the Statute," she said, a little heat entering her voice, "I think if we suppress Muggle tech advances, forever, we've already stopped being good people."

The Hufflepuff boy frowned, then turned back away.

Across the room, Anselma was staring at the Hufflepuff who'd spoken with a stricken widening of eyes.

Fresh quiet descended, uncomfortable and thick in the classroom. Linton hadn't stopped shuffling his speech notes for some time now. Kai wasn't sure he was even following the conversation anymore.

Thayer spoke, turning to Kai pointedly now. "Well, then what's your alternative?" His tone tightened into sharper probing as he asked, "Expose us? You think Grindelwald had the right idea, then?"

Someone's breath caught, somewhere behind Kai.

"Of course not," Kai retorted quicker than usual, hands curling stiffly, gaze skirting to the floor. She started to tap her heel against the ground, forced herself to stop. The rhythm felt too close to panic. Chills passed over her skin as she traced how Thayer's own thoughts may have gone that route, because that was not a way she and her friends could afford to be taken. Grindelwald. End the Statute. Rule over Muggles. No.

Never that.

"Sounds like it to me," he said, with a quick shrug. But he sounded almost sheepish, to Kai's uncertain ear.

"Grindelwald!" Professor Linton croaked, suddenly animate again, as though the ghost had dragged him up from the molasses of memory. "It was Grindelwald's war that proved the need of the Statute! Proved the danger... the sheer folly of interference-"

A few students audibly shifted in their seats. A few mutterings passed about.

Kai's voice broke in, tone heated as she addressed Thayer. She'd never interrupted a teacher before. "If the only futures you can imagine are... hiding forever or playing god, then the problem is with your imagination."

The words felt a little too sharp, the moment they left her.

Linton sniffed and wave a wrinkled hand. "That will be quite enough interruptions from you, Miss Bosco. Five points from Hufflepuff... and I think a detention is in order..."

What?

Kai stilled, staring at him blankly. She'd never had a detention. Not once. For that? She'd barely raised her voice. Kai felt the heat settle behind her eyes, prickling closer to embarrassment than regret. It could have been that no one was looking at her, but it felt like everyone was. I'm not sorry. Her scalp crawled with cold discomfort anyway. Where her hand had come to rest against the bench by her side, her fingers twitched and tapped.

Kai glanced side to side. No one was looking at her. Beside Kai, Nadine's hand fidgeted on the edge of the bench. Even Anselma simply glowered at Linton. The rest looked uncomfortable.

Tarth's own eyes moved to Linton, her expression unreadable. For a moment, it looked as thought she might speak, but then she simply met Kai's searching eyes and gave a slight nod. Acknowledgement? Grin and bear it? Agreement with Linton? Kai didn't know, thoughts still fraying like a torn cobweb.

"Sir..." It was Thayer again, voice crisp but a shade quieter. "I... was under the impression she and I were debating."

Thanks, I think, Kai thought, but her eyes were on a triangle of dust near the foot of the next bench forward. There was a faint burn in her face still, heat of not-quite-shame.

The old professor blinked up at Thayer, then shook his head dismissively and looked down at his papers again, as though the further interruption had never happened. He was done with Kai, and with Thayer too.

Should have waited, Kai thought, uncertain. Or asked? More a question... less bite. She knew that pushing back in the wrong way could just make some prickle, just as she knew that some would prickle no matter how they were pushed back. Cass would probably say we can't afford to alienate the Thayers of the world, she thought grimly. Even if the Ravenclaw hadn't been making it easy.

Kai glanced across the room to Thayer, but he was already attentive to Linton's newly itinerant speech. Appeared to be, at least.

The lesson went on as though nothing had ever happened.

---

"You got a detention," Marlow repeated, nodding along to the tilt of the world. It wasn't that he was slow, no - he tutored after all, well by Kai's awareness. He liked a moment to think things over, though, at least when they weren't things that could be dealt with head-on. He turned from Kai with a shake of head, facing out toward the lake. "Bloody hell."

Kai sat on a rugged stone near the shoreline, one knee drawn up crooked. Both Anselma and Marlow were near at hand. The Slytherin boys were in a class of their own, this hour. No doubt they'd have their own thoughts on the detention, later. Kai could almost hear Marius already. 'Well then, it's hardly a real detention. Not much of a rapscallion, are you?'

Further out upon the water, ripples still stirred from where they'd tossed toast for the squid. The last cut of it lingered in Marlow's hand, browned and crumbling. Some had been thrown by wand's aid, but Marlow never minded the manual method.

He squared up for the last fling. "Sounds like Linton," he ended up saying.

Kai huffed quietly in agreement.

Up away from the water's edge, Anselma turned a stone over in her hands under a pensive gaze. "It's a minor infraction, really," she said. "Your record is innocuous."

It felt better to hear it from Anselma, clinical and certain. Even as it still smarted.

Marlow lurched dramatically, and the toast slice went spinning out in an arc toward the depths. One shake of his hands and he glanced back to Kai. "Thayer, though..." He made a face. "Comparing you to Grindelwald? Really?"

"It's what they're going to say, isn't it?" Kai said quietly, glancing over to Anselma and then up to Marlow. "When the Prophet makes a new volley. Or when we do bigger things."

"It's probable," Anselma answered, tone frustrated, words drawn up with a rare reluctance. "His is the biggest name tied to discourse around secrecy and exposure. One poorly phrased thought and..." She flung the stone she was holding off to the side. "Well, it's like something Cassian said the other day. The Prophet's likely to be more invested in what it looks like than what we're saying."

In unhurried steps, Marlow came to sit cross-legged on the ground between the girls, nodding as he did. They'd been here a hundred times. "Sounds like Cassian. So, what then? Is that where the DA thing comes in?"

Kai wasn't sure what to make of Anselma's DA-contact idea. All too well could she picture them being brushed off or the older generation just not getting it. They fought Voldemort, after all. What's the internet against a mass-murdering dark lord? Most of the DA weren't even Muggle-adjacent, barely had a foot in that world for context. Granger, maybe. But she'd done as most Muggleborns did - stepped mostly into the wizarding world and stayed there.

Not that Kai could think ill of that too much. She wasn't sure she would choose differently, if only because her ties to the Muggle world were so weak in compare to her wizarding ones. Except for her mother who needed her.

Kai pushed that line of thought away, uncomfortable in her own mind's prickle against it.

"-I understand the idea," Anselma was saying when Kai's eyes flicked up. "I've drafted a few possible letters now, I'm not sure who we ought to contact first. "

"Why not Longbottom?" Marlow asked simply.

Why not? Kai thought, glancing to Anselma. She pondered, wondered if maybe Anselma found the idea of someone she could write to safer than someone she could talk to. Or perhaps that's just what Kai herself would have let herself think. It could sometimes be easier to engage at a remove.

"Makes it feel realer, doesn't it?" Kai ventured into space of Anselma's frown. Both of the others glanced to her, and so Kai shrugged. "Like diving into the deep end. Once we talk to someone... really talk to someone... that's not Widdershins and classroom questions anymore. It's..." Her fingers fussed with the hem of her cloak. "...feels like childhood's end, I suppose."

Marlow leaned his head and let out a low, long exhale. "Huh," he murmured. "That's... a way to put it."

Anselma was still quiet, uncharacteristically so. Slowly, she nodded. "Yeah. We still have to do it," she said. "I just..."

They waited for her. The infrequence of Anselma's hesitations made the times they did occur feel like a storm brewing.

"I don't want to do it the wrong way. Marius likes putting stupid jokes in Widdershins," Anselma muttered, "But he... might be right. Half of what I write sounds off. Possibly. I don't think he's wrong about... tone." Anselma's tone in the moment was sluggish, begrudging.

Kai frowned down at her own hands. That was the way of words, wasn't it? They could become traps laid for no matter the foresight.

The sparring between Marius and Anselma over edits had waxed and waned over the past week. Not too many cooks in the kitchen - but one wanting sour and the other wanting spice. Kai had tried to think of something to suggest for the paper. Every time she was halfway to proposing something, she realized one of them had already listed it off already.

Maybe that was part of why it'd been so obvious she was lying when she claimed she was the author. She hadn't sounded like someone who'd written Widdershins. She'd just sounded unsure.

Into the quiet, Marlow said, "Alright." He sounded like he'd decided something. And he had: "Then I'll talk to him."

In hindsight, Kai wondered why she hadn't weighed the option. Marlow was the one who spent the most time around teachers out of class. That aside, Longbottom was his Head of House. It made sense.

"You will?" Anselma said, straightening, eyes narrowing in thought. "Alright," she said, in echo. "Do you want my notes?" And there was Anselma again, her voice sharpening on the whetstone of thought ready to go kilometers in minutes. "I can condense the First Umbrella notes - and maybe the Second and Third, if you think it might be pertinent - as well as the underlying-"

Kai was struck by a brief, unhelpful mental image of a cartoon character laying track half a heartbeat ahead of a moving train.

But Marlow was the one to take the beat, raising a hand. "I'll just talk to him," he said, calm and steady. "Merlin knows I've heard it all enough times. I can take this one, Selma, or at least try to see how he might be thinking about it."

"Makes one of us who speaks human," Kai muttered quietly. It earned a snort from Anselma and an amused, crooked smile from Marlow.

"Cassian could handle it," Marlow suggested, though he sounded halfway to retracting it as he said it.

"If you want it to sound like he's before the Wizengamot," Anselma said. "Marius, maybe?"

"He's..." Kai trailed, eyes shifting out toward the lake. "... he probably could," she allowed. Better than me. It wasn't that Marius couldn't speak human, she figured. It was more a matter of him getting out of his own way to do it. Though, thinking on it now, Kai thought the idea of him trying to explain the matter to Professor Longbottom had its merits. She could almost picture the animation of his features, the brows too-raised in playful expression. It's better when he smiles because he means it.

"Maybe if you went with him, yeah?" Marlow said, for some reason. For some reason, Anselma shook her head in the corner of Kai's sight.

Kai frowned over at them, but they were just looking at one another - Marlow with an impish sort of I didn't do anything half-shrug and Anselma still shaking her head. So Kai ran back over the exchange in her head, momentarily wondering if she'd missed something before she did the math and then proceeded to stare into the empty space between the two in a quiet failure to process.

"So, you'll talk to Professor Longbottom?" Anselma checked, abandoning Kai to her stare into the middle distance.

Marlow nodded. "Yeah. Give me a day or two. I don't want to find him at a bad time."

"He rarely has a bad time."

"Still."

Finally, Kai's thoughts caught up to Marlow's earlier insinuation. Her gaze dipped toward the pebbled earth beneath them. Her eyes closed, leaving her with only the sound of the wind on water and the spiral of her friends' chatter away from the precipice of things to come.

Chapter Text

September 23, 2006. Hogsmeade Village. Three Broomsticks.

Marlow

If Marlow Kade's read was any good, Cassian would rather be anywhere but the Three Broomsticks. In his friend's defense, the group didn't go to Hogsmeade often. In third year, it had been novel. Then, fourth year had happened and they'd been quite done with places where others gathered in droves. It was a sporadic thing, nowadays, but they'd wanted a break in routine this morning.

So, flagons in the only full-wizarding town in Britain.

Marlow himself sat at ease. Selma was pretending to relax, though the parchments in front of her didn't look especially relaxing. They bristled with marginwork and underlines, such that Marlow wasn't sure the original writing could be called legible. Beside Selma, Kai sat with both hands around her flagon of Butterbeer, staring into it as though trying to read the future in the froth. They were all a bit quiet today. Different rust on the same gears whilst glasses clinked around them. All knew of the Ethics lesson by now. All were worn by the fact of Linton's existence.

And there was Cassian, utterly still, hands folded. He had no drink. Nothing at all but sleeves askew and a tired stare fixed on the middle of the table.

The target of his attention? A loose scrap of parchment lay spread out, with animated broomstick squiggles spiraling around the edges with maddening playfulness. One of the brooms occasionally veered too close to the edge and vanished with frantic flailing, before reappearing by peeking out from behind the title lettering. Marlow had helped Marius with the charmwork this time, for longevity. It looped and they looped, and a part of Marlow wondered if it wasn't some hazy metaphor of some kind.

The September issue, finished yesterday. Marius had shown up to the alcove with a rough draft of it and they'd pulled it into one piece together. He wasn't here yet, but Marius' - and Selma's - fingerprints were all over the mood.

WIDDERSHINS WEEKLY
In Monthly Installments | September 2006

Welcome to the Wizarding World: Here's Your Wand, Your Owl, and Your Amnesia Spray
-WW (no, not that one)

As your friendly neighborhood Widdershins writer, it is my honor, privilege, and ongoing moral quandary to welcome Hogwarts' newest batch of first-years to our venerable institution - where the staircases are capricious, the ghosts don't knock, and the rules are both sacred and spontaneous.

If you require help in navigating Hogwarts, see the map on page 2. Then immediately dispose of it, as it will be inaccurate by the time you're halfway to Charms.

Struggling with passwords? At least you're not in Ravenclaw. If you are in Ravenclaw... good luck.

Confused about House points? Here's the secret: It's not about the rules. It's never been about the rules. Learn the professor. Learn the prefect. Behave - or don't - accordingly.

A few tips for a long (and ideally uneventful) Hogwarts career:

- Keep your wands holstered unless someone truly, deeply deserves hexing. Use your judgment. Ideally, possess some.
- Keep your owl fed. Otherwise, it will sample the fingers of your Housemates while you debate how to phrase "I love History of Magic" in a letter home without committing perjury.
- And should you, by year's end, feel the urge to Obliviate all your primary-school friends who still know you wet yourself… don't. Memory Charms are not your job. That's what adults are for.

Welcome to Hogwarts. You'll probably be fine.

In other parts of the paper, a handful of other articles:

- Top Five Wizards Who Lost Their Heads (And Five More Who Weren't Using Theirs Anyway)
- A Simple Guide To Muggle Computers (Using Potions Metaphors)
- Top Three Ethics Topics That Make You Look Deep While Avoiding Detention
- The Ancient and Noble Tradition of Hiring Your Uncle (Does Anyone Have One I Could Borrow?)
- Yes, That One Girls' Bathroom is Haunted, No, You Aren't Brave For Peeing On The Floor In It (Yes, Someone Actually Did That)
- Top Ten Ministry Positions You Could Fudge Your Way Into by Age 30

Marlow glanced up from it to check Cassian's expression again. Still unreadable in that distinctly Cassian way - which usually meant some internal calculus was in full swing. Marlow wasn't sure if that was a good thing, or involved divining legal fallout. Get a drink, Cass, he thought, but he bit his tongue.

"It's probably fine," Kai said over her Butterbeer. An idle finger traced patterns in the condensation on the side. "June was harsher, really."

Glancing up from her notes, Selma put in, "If anything, we could have afforded a more serious article. This is still more playful than preferable. Especially the humor lists." It hadn't been the first time she'd said such about the issue. It probably wouldn't be the last.

Marlow had a feeling Selma and Marius were going to be properly butting heads sooner or later.

"Can't be all teeth, Selma," Marlow said, leaning onto the table, fingers curling around his own drink. "That's the whole thing, isn't it? Smile with the bite?" He glanced to Kai, then Cassian.

Finally, Cassian parted his hands. He reached out with a precarious arch of fingers to tilt the parchment to better face him. One finger brushed against a line of the text. "It reads with a very Slytherin tint," he said mildly.

"What, because it mentions perjury?" asked Kai. Her fingers fidgeted at the rim of her flagon, tapping along the edges of it.

Cassian's lips tugged at the corner. "Perhaps. Or the House points tip."

"It's true, though."

"Still very Slytherin-sounding."

"Perhaps it's a time for Slytherin thinking, then," Kai supposed.

For a moment, Cassian seemed ready to disengage. There was a steely narrowing of his study of the article. Then, he closed his eyes and said, "Ah, but then we might be bereft of Hufflepuff pastries."

Kai's tone was mock-innocent. "Slytherin could just buy the pastries."

"Well, yes, but Hufflepuff controls the sugar supplies." Cassian twitched up an eyebrow, as though realizing mid-sentence that he was having fun.

Anselma didn't look up from her notes this time, but Marlow snorted. They used to do this more often, Cassian and Kai - tossing back and forth House stereotypes like two siblings trying on funny hats. They were so deadpan in it that the first few times Marlow had seen it, he thought they were actually sniping at one another. Now he knew it was just a game between them, perhaps one of their oldest. It was steadying to see them at it again, when everything else was on the spin.

While they continued in that, Marlow twisted to glance back toward the door. A trio of younger students jostled through it. Arlene in their midst, looking more chipper than she had those weeks ago in the classroom.

He'd been hoping to give Marius and Cassian both a heads-up that he was approaching Professor Longbottom later today. Marlow turned back to his drink. Apparently, he'd be waiting a little longer. Marius had said he was coming. He hadn't said how roundabout the route would be. Which was just like Marius.

"We'll leave the party arrangements to Slytherin, at least," Kai was saying.

Selma murmured without looking up, "Gryffindor can handle the entertainment."

Not to leave a house unspoken for, Marlow put in, "Ravenclaw's got the thing where every meal course gets explained."

Cassian inclined his head, as though this was utterly sensible. "Hufflepuff can knit the tea-cozies."

Marlow gave a slow shake of head. It was better than Cassian brooding over the paper.

Then Marius swept into the seat beside Marlow as though he'd materialized from nowhere at all. The green-threaded cloak he wore clung askew from the wind outside. He sat, glanced to the Widdershins issue in the middle of the table, and then up to the lot of them. "Well then," Marius said, a grin on the rise, "That's one down for the year."

"It could have been more pointed," Anselma said without missing a beat, and without looking up from her notes. Marius didn't even glance at her.

Cassian reached out to fold the whimsical parchment closed and moved it toward the slight cover of Anselma's notes. Moments later, a gaggle of students swept past the table from the door. Cassian waited, then said, "It's a good September issue."

Naturally, Marius looked toward Kai, who evidently wasn't getting out of giving feedback. She gave in readily with, "It's solid. The Memory Charms bit… I think that'll scandalize a few, though." Kai's ensuing smile toward her Butterbeer was subdued.

Marius lifted his brows over a cheerfully crooked grin, though it faltered a tad when she didn't look his way.

She'd barely met Marius' eyes since Marlow made that comment by the lake. Somehow, I made it worse, Marlow thought. He gave a small shake of his head and took a drink.

"Not nearly enough," Anselma tacked to the end of Kai's words, but Marius had already leaned back in satisfaction.

Marlow bobbed his head once, confirming in his own way. Then he noticed Kai's eyes rising past Marius.

There was a flicker of Ravenclaw-blue. A folded copy of Widdershins landed on the edge of the table, not quite slapped down, but something cousin to it. It was still held at one end. Rhys Thayer. Ravenclaw, prefect. Seventh year, pureblood. Until Kai's experience in Ethics class a few days past, Marlow would have marked him as alright, but the whole Grindelwald comparison was a souring thing, and this didn't seem to be shaping up to be much better.

"What exactly is the point of this?" Thayer asked, voice tight, his focus pinned on Kai. He flapped the copy of Widdershins again, like he was wielding it as evidence. "Debating magical law through anonymous mockery? Isn't proper discourse."

Debating seemed a strong word for the Obliviation-ribbing in the piece.

Kai hit a stall of the sort she was prone to. Her hand held tight around the flagon, her face pinched in indecision.

"No, of course not," Marius said faux-lightly, "Proper discourse is comparing your classmates to mass-murdering madmen."

The Widdershins copy shifted again. "So it is one of you?" countered Thayer, jaw tight, refusing to engage Marius' jab. "Or all of you. Everyone knows. Why the pretense?"

"The newsletter is anonymous," Cassian said coolly.

Thayer let out a short breath. "Right. And it just happens to ceaselessly parrot everything half of you bring up in Ethics every week?" Marlow found it reaching as Thayer added, "The signoff is even his initials. Flipped." He gestured to Marius.

Unseen by Thayer, but seen by Marlow, there was a faint tick at the corner of Marius' mouth and implicated widening of his eyes. Oh, bloody hell. Really?

"Or it is a reference to any of the many, many magical and Muggle publications with those initials," Marius said, tilting a glance up to Thayer. "There a reason you're having such a vexing morning?"

"For what it's worth," Kai said quietly, "Sorry for snapping at you in class."

There was a glance up from Selma, who'd mostly been ignoring Thayer thus far. She didn't speak now, but her lips pinched.

Thayer paused, the edge waning in his posture. He looked at Kai eye-to-eye now and held up his copy of the issue. "Taken," he said, accepting the apology with a small nod. Then he waved the paper. "Look, I don't care which of you writes this. You're not thinking it through. Maybe you don't want to go the way of Grindelwald - but what makes you think someone else won't read things like the June one and lean in? You're catastrophizing. Mocking. You're not actually suggesting any solutions."

Marlow shook his head a little. He started to sit forward, thinking to break the tension, maybe talk the finer points of satire's role in this kind of thing. In some way or another. But then there was movement off to his left - Selma.

Selma straightened, starting to reel up. Marlow saw Cassian's eyes flick toward her, and he figured they both measured the moment anonymity might falter. But then Selma only said, "Alright. Then what would your solution be?"

"Let the Ministry do its job," Thayer said, with hesitation. "That's the whole point, isn't it? We have departments for this. They're trained for it. They know what lines not to cross. You lot-" He gestured about at them with the paper. "-you write like everything's falling apart, and Bosco talks like it. You don't think they've thought about this before?"

Your funeral, Marlow thought, for he knew intimately where this was going to go.

"I do think they've thought about it," Selma said. "Second Wizarding War incidents. Quidditch World Cup breaches. Magical creature sightings. Mail owl taggings. Incident reports from the Obliviators' office have doubled every year since '96. So yes, they've thought about it. They've filed it. And then they did the same thing they always do: treat it as manageable in between buried articles about their office being under strain."

Thayer stared at her, jaw working.

"The solution is this, right here," Kai said, fingers and gaze tracing the tabletop near her flagon. "Maybe exposure happens sooner. Maybe it happens later. But if we can't even talk about it..." She shrugged."... then some hour, maybe next week, maybe thirty years from now, a billion Muggles see a dragon caught on video and we all get caught with our pants down."

The boy didn't speak immediately. His brow furrowed, heavy with frustration. "Still not a solution."

Not wrong. But we're still at the getting-on-the-broom bit.

Across the table from Marlow, Cassian began to straighten his sleeves. Poor Thayer didn't know the tell, but around the table, a few of the group subtly adjusted postures. Cassian folded his hands anew. "The paper is anonymous," he repeated of earlier. "Any resemblance to our own comments is purely coincidental. However, for the sake of argument. First, an honest accounting of the Statute's longevity is in order: it will not last forever. To assume otherwise, to not prepare otherwise is dangerous. Second, we must reject the worst options: increasing Muggle surveillance or infiltrating them to improve Obliviation efforts. These are at best unstable. At worst, ethically indefensible."

"And so it comes to the real solutions, which exist in the middle of these. Namely, preparing ourselves for the possibility of a future where the lines between the magical and Muggle worlds are far more transparent. That may mean educational reform. Ministry reorientation. New departments, even. But it begins with admitting there is an issue."

A fork clinked to the floor a few tables away.

Thayer stared at Cassian. The copy of Widdershins slipped from his hand onto the table. "You make it sound clean," he said, voice taut. "Like there wouldn't be panic. Or worse." The next motion he made was a halting step back, away from their table. "Barely a solution," he muttered, before turning to walk away.

Marlow watched him stride off toward the back of the pub, into a throng of other seventh-years laughing around a few tables they'd dragged together.

"You didn't need to apologize to him," Selma commented to Kai, who simply shrugged.

"Is the sign-off really your initials upside-down?" Cassian asked Marius, with the weary cadence of preemptive long-suffering.

Marius grinned, far too cheeky for the answer to be anything but yes. "It is called Widdershins," he pointed out, spreading his hands like that explained everything.

Amused murmurs circled the table. Cassian, in particular, brought his folded hands up to rest against his mouth and nose for endurance.

"It's kind of hiding in plain sight," Kai muttered, lips quirked in amusement.

Marius, still leaned back, pantomimed a theatric bow to her. "It's what Widdershins does best, Snake Charmer."

And with the nickname, Kai was back to examining her drink intently.

Better now than never, Marlow supposed. He glanced to Selma, then leaned forward with an elbow on the table. "Alright, so-" he said, and heads inclined to him. "-I'm going to see Professor Longbottom today. Try to get a read on... that."

And they were off - soothing Cassian's nerves, downloading Selma's notes into Marlow's brain, and turning plans into action.

---

It'd been a while since Marlow spent much time in the Greenhouses. Taking care of plants wasn't awful, but he didn't favor the idea like some. Better than Kai, at least. Kai wasn't the sort to squeal bloody hell if stinksap or the like got on her, but she would be in an incurable mood for hours after. Marlow didn't mind that part half as much. Just wasn't his class.

In the early evening hour, Marlow stepped into Greenhouse Three. He kept mindful of his footing in making his way toward the shed at the back. Shed, sure, but everyone who had glimpsed the inside knew the Herbology office was nearly as dignified as any other professor's domain. Magic of things on the inside versus things on the outside. There was probably a metaphor of some kind in there. Marlow shook his head.

He gave a knock on the shed door. Nearby, a flowering plant opened its petals as though it were peering toward Marlow. Marlow eyed it for markers of being the dangerous kind. Finding none, he gave it an acknowledging nod before glancing back to the door as it opened.

No professor directly at the door. Longbottom must have opened it from further in. Marlow stepped past the threshold, only to pause when a writhing potted plant nearby stretched a tendril toward him. It had a look of Devil's Snare, and so Marlow shifted to give it a wider berth.

"Oh - just a Flitterbloom, Kade. With you in a moment." Longbottom's voice rose from just behind a shelf that he'd disappeared around as Marlow looked up.

Marlow entered properly and the door gently closed behind him. The Herbology office was a lived-in one. There were the shelves Longbottom stood among, with a mix of thick tomes side-by-side with bins of trowels and potting soil samples. The walls pulsed with life, flowering and vined and blooming with bulbous fruits. In the far corner, Longbottom's desk was cleaner, but only by comparison. Furled essays piled between two pots. A cordoned off corner held a supply of ink and quills - and a dozy-looking green toad whose sidelong gaze went right through Marlow.

Marlow gave the toad a nod. The toad blinked once, unimpressed.

And then Professor Longbottom stepped out from between the shelves, dusting his hands on a well-worn cloth. He'd only replaced Sprout a few years ago, so Marlow hadn't learned from him for long. It seemed an odd thing, Marlow figured, going from a brief stint as an Auror to shoveling soil at the back of a greenhouse. But maybe he'd had enough of fighting in the old days, or maybe Longbottom was more a little like Marlow - satisfied watching kids get better at things.

"Didn't expect to see you today, Kade," Longbottom said, smiling lightly. He tucked the cloth into his belt.

There wasn't quite panic in Marlow, not today, but he still wasn't quite sure where felt right to start in the moment. He shifted a foot. "I was hoping to ask you something. I've got a few- well, that is to say, I've been thinking about how to- that is, talk to you about something. Not as Head of House, exactly. Or not just that."

The answer came calmly. "Would you like to sit down?" The professor studied Marlow before turning to walk toward the desk. He paused at the back corner of it, fingers resting on the edge before he removed his hand and sat. Longbottom looked relaxed, whether he really was or not. "Either way, take your time."

Marlow took a few steps, then rounded the opposite chair to settle in with a thud. Yeah, sitting took some of the edge off. He rested his hands on his knees. "I've got people," he finally said. "And I think we might be out of our depth. I don't think we're wrong. But we're... well. It's bigger than us."

There was more he didn't say. That half the time he wasn't sure if he was a part of us so much as someone who kept showing up anyway. But maybe, he thought, doing things like this was something. Be the owl. He suppressed an urge to chuckle.

Longbottom nodded thoughtfully, as though Marlow had said anything useful at all.

So Marlow ventured further: "I don't know how to say it right, but it's..."

When his silence settled into something solid, Longbottom nodded for some reason. He took a breath in, nodded again as he sat up straighter. Then he was reaching for that corner of the desk he'd tapped, sliding open a drawer behind the desk.

Upon the grime-smudged desktop, a scrap of parchment gently landed between them. The edges danced with slapstick brooms and stick-figures. At the top of the page, bold calligraphy read 'On the Ethics of Disappearing'.

"I don't want to presume," Longbottom said, "But does this help?"

Marlow's mind went into a momentary loop as he eyed the June issue of Widdershins. His brow twitched into a frown. He's read it? He had it in his desk? What was more, it looked like it had been written on. A few phrases in the main article had been underlined. Two of the scrawlings around the edges looked like different hands.

Marlow's quiet felt like it was going incriminatingly long, and so he started with, "Something like that, yeah."

Longbottom simply sat back and waited. He didn't seem to be fishing for any kind of confession. He wasn't even looking at Marlow at the moment - his eyes went past Marlow, his look thoughtful. Maybe he was just giving Marlow room.

So Marlow said, "We're trying to talk about things that no one seems to want to. About secrecy. About Muggles. About... what happens if we don't talk about it." In the back of his mind, Marlow heard the echo of Selma saying damage control, as if the oncoming collateral damage of a Muggle-magical clash were something one could begin to think on clearly.

"And you came to me," Longbottom said. His tone wasn't dismissive. If Marlow wasn't wrong, it sounded almost like a quiet reckoning in an adult's skin, like Longbottom was observing that course of things from the outside. Longbottom scratched his jaw, then nodded. "Well, if you want to try to talk about it, I'm listening. These others-" There was a touch of humor to others, suggestion that Longbottom knew damn well who he meant. "-can come too, if they want to."

This was not how Marlow had seen this going. Not that he'd quite imagined how it might go. If anything, it felt like Longbottom was ahead of him. Ahead of them, even.

Suddenly Cassian's ideas about scrutiny seemed both apt and incomplete.

"I'd have to talk to them," Marlow said, eyes falling to the June Widdershins again.

"Of course."

"We-" Marlow started again. "It's hard to explain." He bit his tongue in frustration, tried to sort the right words. "I came to you because- well, the thinking was you know what it's like. To not..."

"...Be taken seriously," Longbottom finished when Marlow didn't, his tone almost rueful. The professor glanced to the toad at the edge of the desk, then back to Marlow. "If you'd told me when I attended Hogwarts which side of the desk I'd be on for this, I don't think I would have believed it."

For lack of better to do, Marlow bobbed his head in a nod. He wasn't sure he was the one leading this conversation at all, felt on the backfoot.

On the other side of the desk, Longbottom reached for the open drawer again. He shifted and shuffled some parchments in it before finally drawing out a lightly crinkled unmarked envelope. This landed atop the June issue, and then Longbottom pressed it a little further toward Marlow. "I don't want to presume," Longbottom said again, "But I was asked to hold onto this for the author of the paper. If you happen to know who it is."

Marlow stared at the envelope. For the author? In real time, his mind shifted gears from wondering if the DA-contact plan was sensible to wondering if he and his friends were the ones behind on the thought.

"Might have some idea," Marlow said, a little floored and hollow-feeling. He squinted up at Longbottom across the desk. "You..." He trailed off, the question losing shape even as he tried to reach for it.".

Longbottom folded his hands in his lap. "I wasn't expecting you to come to me first," he admitted. "But I do know what it looks like when students don't know if they can trust adults with something. Some of you more openly than others."

The chuckle that came from Marlow was a disoriented one. He lifted a hand to scratch the back of his neck as he glanced down at the envelope. They'd spent all that time discussing who to go to first, and now Marlow was trying to decide where the emphasis fell in Longbottom's admission. Didn't expect Marlow to go to him? Didn't expect one of them to go to Longbottom? Or was it the first bit? Marlow didn't know what he'd expected at all. A warning? A rebuke? Longbottom had handed off a letter like he trusted them not to burn something with it.

"It won't always be talk," Longbottom continued. "If you're serious, it'll get messier. But it starts with talking. Though. Do remember to prepare for your NEWTs."

"Yeah," Marlow said, reaching out for the envelope. He turned it over. Still no markings. "Wouldn't want to flunk our way into things."

A snort. "That's the spirit."

Marlow stood, tucking the letter into his robes. "I'll get that to them," he said, lips curling back as he wondered if that counted as a confession or he'd already crossed that road several minutes ago. "I think I'll be coming back."

The professor nodded in understanding.

"Thanks, Professor. And- guess we'll be seeing you."

"Don't thank me yet," Longbottom replied, watching Marlow with a look just that side of tired. "Just... be sure you know where you're stepping."

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

September 30, 2006. Hogwarts Grounds. Lakeside.

Marius

Marius Mulford had few complaints, at least ones worthy of spectacle. No one, it turned out, particularly bothered about the whole author matter after the Knights of the Square Table. None of his friends, anyway. Except when Anselma had opinions on phrasing. Or tone. Or design schema.

But other than that.

Thayer and Shackleford hadn't tried dragging Marius or the rest before the Headmistress like misbehaving kittens. Then again, as a cat Animagus, the Headmistress probably knew a thing or two about dragging around misbehaving kittens. Not that the Contraries were at all feline-adjacent. Save perhaps Cassian's sulking. And Anselma's plotting. Or Kai's.... anyway. Or Marius' habit of bothering the quiet ones on principle.

Marlow definitely wasn't a cat, at least in any way Marius could think of.

What was he meant to be fretting about again? Nothing? Right. Remarkable. Whatever Kai had been brooding about last week seemed to have lifted. She was no longer avoiding him like a Weeping Angel (which she'd since explained to him - and he was glad did not exist). There'd been a whole few days where she'd not laughed at any of his jokes. Not even a little huff of air. Which usually meant she was either furious or deeply distracted. But all was fine now.

And Marius had a letter! A letter from a fan, one might say. From Lee Jordan. Gryffindor, yes, one can't win in all things. But still a trickster demigod of a pantheon Marius could appreciate, even if the slapstick legends lacked a certain gravitas.

Life was good.

Then, as was often the case when life was good, someone said, hey, maybe we should make a student club, and life grew dark and full of terrors.

Kai sat cross-legged beside Marius, her voice quiet. "What kind of club would it even be?" They were all in a loose circle in the grasses, with the lake off yonder. Toast had been thrown. Toast for the tentacle god. More important, Kai sat beside him afterward, today.

Precisely! Marius thought to the question. Somehow, he didn't think the Headmistress would approve a club called the Statute of Secrecy Breach Waiting Room. Society for Intermagical Relations and Practical Awareness? No, too long. Breach Bunker Society? Too doom. Society for Questioning Utter Idiotic Delusions? For the acronym, maybe. He'd workshop it later, on the off chance they acquired permission. For now, he leaned back on a hand and looked to Anselma, who'd raised the idea in the first place.

Anselma frowned, her own momentum seeming to catch on the question (unusual). Then, "I know we're of two minds on Widdershins itself. Even the appearance of inviting more hands to touch it yet is... messy," she said, then visibly grimaced, as though she offended herself by falling upon so pedestrian a word choice. "But maybe a debate club? Muggles have those. There's precedent."

"If you want it to be all Ravenclaws, simply say so," Marius said blithely, grin quirking. "And don't forget how bogged we'll be in Are Firebolts retro yet and such affairs."

"It's a plausible option," Kai said, nodding to Anselma - who was naturally giving Marius a long-suffering look, as was her preference and prerogative.

Between Anselma and Cassian, Marlow lifted his hands. "We could go more direct and have it be about Muggle things. But I'm not sure that wouldn't end up looking like Muggle Studies all over."

"How do you mean?" Cassian asked.

"Half the castle doesn't take Muggle Studies serious in the first place. And... well... I don't know that talking about Muggle things among wizards wouldn't just circle back to..."

Marius offered as example, in his best impression of a Muggle museum tour-guide, "And here we have a Muggle telly program. Charming, isn't it?" He could almost see the eyes going blank. If people even showed up.

"Fosse runs a Muggle book club," Kai pointed out.

"Yes," Marius allowed. "Wizards do books, Snake Charmer. Books are palatable. Less scary than electricity and lava-lamps." He grimaced, then waved a hand as he added, "Not that we could do things with telly regardless. Short of rerouting ley lines with jumper cables."

A death knell for technology. That snag kept tossing about his mind like a rubber ball. They couldn't bring in sample Muggle technology to try to show off the fun side of things. If they could - well then! Marius' ideas would have been endless. And probably would have inevitably led to their imagined online accounts being banned or blocked. No, not for that reason. Though I don't discount the probability.

But no. No technology in Hogwarts. So, no animal videos. No Neopets or dodgy browser games. No World of Warcraft - which would scandalize wizards only slightly, right? Only slightly.

The trickier part was the flipside. No, he couldn't bring the Muggle world in. But he also couldn't work out a way to get the wizarding one out. A tentative thought, of course, considering it technically amounted to Statute-breaching contemplation, but someone had to be thinking about the idea. It was on the agenda, no? Breach the Statute, Reform the Ministry, Launch cursed wizard-Muggle Neopets, all in a day's work for the Society Advancing Very Elegant Utopian Sedition.

"Yeah," Kai said, of Hogwarts tech-allergies. Her eyes lowered to the gravel, as though beginning to sift through it to turn mud to gold. Marius tipped over a mental hourglass.

Cue her saying something brilliant in ten minutes or so. Give me fifty Kais, it'd be solved before breakfast.

Cassian folded his hands in his lap, head turning back to study the castle. "I doubt Headmistress McGonagall would let us organize anything that involves students leaving Hogwarts." His expression grew intense (Brooding. It's called brooding, Cassian, when you glower at stone like it stole your biscuits.) His brows pulled together in a weighty glower at the distant Hogwarts towers. "That would be the ideal tenet of such a club. And the least likely for us to acquire permission for."

The weight of the improbability. Even Anselma didn't have much to say to that.

"Doing nothing is out," Marlow said, fingers tapping on his knee. "We could always ask. Worst she can do is say no." He frowned down at his hand. "All of this is up against that we're graduating, too. If we want to leave anything behind, now's the chance."

"We could always follow Jordan's advice," Marius said, the words out of his mouth before his brain caught up with his mouth. The others were looking at him, so he grinned, eyes flicking to Kai. "Kai here's gotten only one detention this year, barely. What's risking a few more along the way? They're not going to break our wands for talking about things, no matter what Avery's sniffing."

There was a beat. "Avery said what?" Marlow asked, just ahead of the same question forming on Anselma's lips.

Cassian looked like he'd swallowed something sour (normal). Kai didn't look much better, though what with her history around Avery, that was hardly surprising. He'd been the one to teach her the least popular word in the wizarding world since '98. The one Kai and Marlow had hexed him for lobbing at a first-year, back in their own fourth year.

Time for a showing, then. Marius gave an exaggerated shrug to assure his audience that all was well. "Avery has it in his head that we'll have our wands snapped if we so much as breathe near the Statute. He looked like a self-important kneazle when saying it, but then, I repeat myself."

Marius had tossed the idea about after. It was absurd. Probably.

"It isn't impossible, depending on how matters escalate," Cassian said.

"A little dramatic, don't you think?"

"No." Cassian leaned his head, looking steadily back at Marius. "It wouldn't happen for the reason Avery thinks. Not for speaking. Not reasonably."

All of them were looking to Cassian now, the man of the hour. Kai in her quiet way, half-hunched in a way that would have usually had Marius teasing her up out of it. Posture of a willow sometimes, Snake Charmer. Whomping Willow, when you go dueling. Marlow's steady attendance and Anselma's sidelong sharpness were given to Cassian. So Marius glanced out toward the lake lazily and just listened as Cassian explained the four-hundred-and-thirty-sixth way that all of their grand schemes were going to horribly backfire.

It was Marius' favorite series.

"We aren't just talking about an imminent threat," Cassian said steadily. "We're talking about one most wizards refuse to face. Even when they do, they won't understand it. What they will understand is that five students seem oddly comfortable discussing a breach of the Statute. And there's no avoiding it - if we take on Muggle preparation for the First Umbrella, we'll be skirting the edge of the law."

"The question isn't whether they'll break our wands for speaking of the collision. It's how far we're willing to go to prepare for it." Cassian spread his hands. "It is entirely plausible we contemplate future paths that may cross the line from scrutiny to criminality."

This is the kind of conversation Pensieves are for, Marius thought. Incendio. His hand came up to card through his hair. But yes, job for the Slytherins to remind the Contrary Knights of the Square table that their plans suspiciously resembled cultural insurrection. Or something adjacent. It depended on which umbrella one spoke of. He didn't need to imagine how the traditionalists would react. He had an entire childhood of overheard Ministry dinner parties to reference.

His father had expressed opinions on the matter on many occasions. What he didn't know about Widdershins authorship didn't hurt him.

"Sounds like a problem for later, with how little we're doing yet," Marlow put in plainly.

When Marius glanced over, Cassian's expression was amid a whipsnap from chastened to considering.

"The probability right now is low," Anselma said, straightening up amid a glance to Cassian. "I don't deny the possibility, but it remains speculative."

Before anyone could say anything more on the matter of Avery or Azkaban aspirations, Marius' internal hourglass emptied. The last sand grain fell. And Kai, as she was prone, dropped her minutes-in-waiting mulling upon them in thunder absent lightning:

"Penpals."

...Pardon?

The others didn't entirely look like they were getting it either, though Anselma's expression edged toward intrigue. Marius turned to look at Kai, who was fidgeting with the hem of her cloak and frowning intently down at the dirt. You are allowed to smile when having ideas, Snake Charmer.

"What, Kai?" Cassian prompted.

Kai glanced up at him, then around, down again. "Marius is right."

Often, but... why this time?

"Wizards do books." Kai paused. "But they also do letters. We can't bring Muggles here. We can't bring useful Muggle things here. But we don't have to. We could bring their voices here. There's Muggle websites. For pen-pals. They set up profiles... explaining interests, things they'd like to learn or talk about. Some use e-mail, sure, but there's plenty who use post. I... signed up for a few once," Kai explained, in the tone and manner that Marius associated with her mum breathed excitedly down her neck until she did.

Kai didn't often talk about the woman, but she sounded exhausting when Kai did.

Kai continued, "We could have some Muggle family look over listings and print off likely ones. We could even maybe figure out getting someone to put up listings for our side - students who want penpals. That could be part of a... Muggle-Magic Culture Club, or such? And under that... umbrella, we could probably squeeze in debates, talks, things. Talking about Muggle things more than magical ones. Trying to, anyway. It wouldn't be perfect, but..."

"That's... huh." Marlow nodded. "Do you think we'd... be allowed to do that?"

"Outgoing letters would almost certainly be reviewed by staff," Cassian said, though he'd sat taller. "Are you sure it wouldn't come off too strange to the Muggles? The cultural gaps could appear... significant."

What a charming way to phrase 'the Muggles might be concerned when a wizard mentions their mother doesn't believe in phones or that ending up in the Hospital Wing due to student disagreements is ordinary'.

The shrug Kai gave charmed Marius. "We just prepare a guideline story. Everyone's mother was a Luddite. Or something Amish-like. It's close enough."

Well, when you put it that way, it's a little embarrassing, isn't it? But Marius' thoughts stirred. He'd already made summer excursions for his... less family-approved Muggle-learning pursuits. He'd never, curse him, thought about corresponding with Muggles regularly. It seemed an obvious blindspot, in hindsight.

Anselma spoke. "Cultural exchange. Potential letter sharing. Club discussions. We could probably collaborate with Fosse's book club for crossover interest. The... problem is Claremont."

Right. The Muggle Studies' teacher. Marius had learned more from sneaking into a Muggle library (where someone had asked if he was a cosplayer, to which he'd said yes before he knew what one was) to peruse the encyclopedias than he ever had in the one year he took her more aptly named 'Muggle trivia' class.

"She'd want to be the one supporting any club vaguely tied to Muggles," Marius surmised. "And... everyone would avoid the club like stinksap duty."

"Then we don't ask Claremont." Cassian turned over a hand, thin fingers pulling his sleeve straight with slow precision. "We ask Professor Tarth."

"Tarth?" Marius and Kai echoed as one. Since when is she relevant to Muggle things?

Marlow rubbed the back of his neck. "She's not exactly on the subject. Why Tarth?"

"For one," Cassian said, sleeve-straightening in earnest now. En garde. "She is the rightful professor of Magical Ethics, and so her presence would likely encourage debate discussions if they did occur. Linton may be 'helping' with her class, but it would be unlikely for him to even be interested in heading an unfamiliar club. Second," and for some reason Cassian gave them a long-suffering look, "Professor Tarth is a squib."

...Of course.

"You think she'd get it," Kai said, earning a nod. "And before Linton showed up... she was... involved. Before Linton started back."

Cassian inclined his head. "She has been navigating her position."

"Squib's close to Muggle lifestyle," Marlow said thoughtfully. "What do you think she did before teaching here?"

Enter me, stage left, Marius thought, raising a hand in graceful offering. "Word has it that she was, that is- receptionist in a Muggle hospital. Clipboards. Ambient lighting. Noble post." He twiddled his fingers.

A few nods were bandied, then Anselma said, "Do you think she could act as our sign-off?" The question, of course, was for Cassian.

There was a faint tug at the corner of Cassian's mouth, which was tantamount to a declaration of war. "I would be very interested to hear any arguments against Professor Tarth being an acceptable candidate to oversee." He glanced down at his sleeves, but didn't touch them again. "If it is acceptable, I will speak to her about the club idea on our behalf."

No one objected. Likely because no one wanted to interrupt Cassian's warp-ten heading into the bureaucracy nebula. Or, just as possible, everyone was too busy imagining Cassian's Slytherin poise versus Professor Tarth's professionally sharp smile.

Marius would buy tickets.

---

Ever since third-year, dueling club days had quietly become Marius' favorite. And Marius wasn't even in the club officially. Professional spectator that he was, Marius graced the club with his presence with all the gravitas of one awaiting the attention of a fan and grapes, sitting upon a bench out of the way. He pretended to read.

Out there among the duos, Kai was already at it again. His earliest attendance hadn't been her first time here, so Marius maintained that the proximity between her start and his arrival had been purely coincidental.

Out in the corridors or in the classrooms, Kai often moved quietly, like a shadow that didn't care if you noticed it or not. She read, she walked, she dropped room-rearranging comments, she left quiet chaos in her wake. But in the dueling club, wand in hand? She wasn't flashy. She didn't flourish. She simply fought, like she'd been invited to a western standoff and her opponent to a fencing tournament.

Which was to say, she had that idea Marlow had once dubbed gun-sense - she'd deemed before first year's end that a wand was a weapon, first and always.

"Shouldn't point it at something unless you mean it," she'd said, once, and thereafter said of dueling club, "Wands are the first weapon against wands."

Marius wasn't sure who she was preparing to go to war with, and he wasn't going to follow that train of thought to its likely and alarming stations.

Naturally, Marius often found himself preoccupied with the fact that all of this meant she moved like she did right now:

In a sweep of robes, Kai stepped forward into the dueling line - all quiet, deadly serenity, the kind of drama you only noticed once it had passed. Inevitable. Like a snake slowly, slowly easing itself from within the brickwork, slow and silent and sinister. And like any snake worth fearing, when that Gryffindor across from her took his spot and the duel began proper, she'd be quick, clean, and final.

Someone sat on the bench next to Marius, interrupting his reading. Definitely reading. He was on.... page fourteen. Reading.

Marius looked over to find Emeline Fosse at the other end of the bench. She glanced up at a friend who was moving to join the duelists, then back down to some book she'd pulled out from her bag. Not a wizarding book, that, no. It was the Muggle sort: terribly thin covers, a slight gloss to them, cut into a fine rectangle of stackable fiction. The seating choice appeared incidental - she glanced at him only briefly, nodded politely, and went back to her book.

Unlike him, she was reading.

Not that Marius wasn't reading. Obviously.

"Well, what's the book of the week? Or does it go by months?" Marius asked. Muggle Books Monthly, a new book every week, he added in his head, to dissuade the risk of making the joke aloud.

Fosse glanced over again, holding her page with a finger as she let the book flap closed. Vibrant, violent orange and black dominated the top two-thirds of the cover, suggestions of buildings and explosions and gravel. And maybe a... bird? Marius wasn't certain. Below the image, white-on-black: The War of the Worlds.

And Wells. That sounded distantly familiar.

Worlds? Right then. Marius, having dedicated much of his Muggle-related excursions last summer to the noble matters of Star Trek, felt utterly prepared to engage. So he said, "Science fiction, is it? Spaceships, phasers, boldly unfashionable uniforms?"

There was a pause from Fosse, who then frowned at him like he'd shown up to book club with a coloring book. "Phasers?" she repeated. And then, glancing over him once more, she clarified, "Wait. You know what a phaser is?"

Marius grinned in delight. "Phasers set to stun," he replied lightly, sweeping a hand toward the duelists as someone's timely stunner spell went off. Not Kai, didn't matter.

"But-" Fosse stared at him, "-how?" She stared at him like he'd just announced he kept a Muggle vending machine in his bedroom. Which didn't sound like a terrible idea, come to think. His father would probably protest.

The adjustment of his cloak was gratuitous. But then, so was Marius. Presentation won the day.

That said, Marius decided against elaborating on the intricacies of covertly exchanging Galleons for Muggle money and booking Muggle hotel rooms for increasingly dubious stated reasons. His first attempts had prompted more than one night clerk to look at him like he was planning a heist. There'd also been the papers issues. And the age issues. And then his mystification with the key cards, which refused to behave like either keys or cards. To say nothing of once he finally managed to get into a room and confronted the cryptic box that refused to show him anything but static until he pressed buttons in an arcane ordinance. His earliest summer methods had been... adventurous.

Instead, he skipped to his later, more reliable method:

"Peered in on a Muggle shop this summer, selling tellies and things. Curiosity, of course. Old man there had the show running. Only a time or two," Marius amended. Per week.

That version still had flaws, it would seem, for Fosse responded, "A Muggle shop? But you're..." She hesitated, visibly working through that sentence, finally seemed to process that she was being just a little rude. She said, "Sorry. I just- I would have thought Anselma, or Kade or Bosco of course, but..."

Marius let out a huff of air. Rude. Accurate for most Slytherins. But rude. "What, too green to go to a Muggle shop?" he asked with faux-offense.

"No... it's just- you." Fosse said, brows drawing together in what might have been actual sincerity. "I knew you were with them. I didn't realize..."

...Well, that is the show, isn't it? Marius shrugged off appearance of being needled, turning to look toward the duelists again. "Well then, congratulations on checking the footnotes. Ten points to Ravenclaw." And that was that, wasn't it?

The club's members drifted, though, the end of the afternoon near. One boy in blue-lined robes called over, "Emmy, come here a moment, could you?"

She glanced at Marius, nodded the conversation's end, then moved up and away, though she left her bag by the bench and her book on it.

While Marius only passingly looked for her, he did glimpse Kai occupied by a knot of third-year Gryffindors, looking to be explaining something to them in all seriousness. So, Marius stayed where he was.

He glanced toward the book.

He glanced toward Fosse and her friend.

He glanced toward the book again.

Then, nonchalantly, he reached out and slid over The War of the Worlds. He turned it over carefully to inspect the back. Dramatic blurbs. Then, flipping it back over, he gently opened the first few pages, peering quietly.

He turned pages, occasionally glanced over to check for Kai. He made a check toward Fosse, too, just in case.

On one page of the foreword, he paused and reread. A panic caused by some Muggle broadcaster reading it off on the radio as real news? Marius' lips curved in amusement. It sounded like the sort of thing wizarding pranksters would get up to, if they had a mind to. He started reading the section again, even as Kai's shadow fell upon him.

She didn't say anything yet, which Marius marked as odd, but a slow-budding thought overtook that in his mind. A fiction, portrayed as reality, on live broadcast. A panic stirred.

"Marius, I was thinking-"

What if it were flipped? Muggles love fiction, magic fiction. Stage it. Marius frowned down at the page. A wizard broadcast. For Muggles. Make it look like telly? Or maybe there's something better yet, online?

"-well, wondering, really, if you'd like to go walk down by the lake..."

He stared down at the page, enthusiasm on the rise. Radio's too old. Make it a game, a play-act. Make it a story. Tell the truth so loudly they think it's a joke. They won't believe it. Until they do.

"Hm? Yes, brilliant," he said, half to her, half to the idea.

He finally glanced up and gave a crooked grin. Didn't we do squid toast today?

For some reason, Kai was examining the floor, brow faintly pinched. "You sure?" she asked, and now Marius was decidedly less sure what he'd agreed to.

It was Kai, though, so whatever it was, it was probably fine. So he closed the book, slid it back toward Fosse's things, and said, "Utterly, Snake Charmer."

He followed, wondering how many Muggles one might reach with a weekly dramatized broadcast, and how in Merlin's name he might smuggle such a thing out of Hogwarts. He forgot to ask why they didn't bring toast. Or anyone else. He'd figure it out. Probably.

Chapter Text

October 3, 2006. Hogwarts. Magical Ethics Professor's Office.

Cassian

The door to Professor Tarth's office resembled a broom closet in both form and impression: plain, unassuming, distinctly lacking in polish. Not uncommon. The wizarding world often embraced a certain dated ruggedness. It seemed particularly... pointed, however, when applied to the threshold of the sole squib professor at Hogwarts.

Cassian Rosier stood outside the door.

Before the discovery of Jordan's letter to the Contraries, Cassian would have considered someone else more suited to this task. Someone else still may have been more suited. But adults were watching their group now. And Cassian, self-aware enough as he was, didn't doubt they knew he was involved. Cassian doubted Professor Tarth had DA ties. But her appointment's timing - right beside the June article Professor Longbottom kept tucked in his desk - was curious.

The adults watched them. Maybe, in some way, condoned them.

Including Cassian?

He didn't know. So he took up the mantle of approaching Tarth about the club sponsorship. His second reason was minor, but not meaningless: to see if he could.

A part of him wondered if some would see it as an implicit threat: a Rosier alone in a room with a squib. It was not a power dynamic he'd ever considered toward a teacher before. But he had weighed it. He'd heard the old caretaker, Filch, bemoan students hexing or kicking his cat too many times for it not to sink in eventually:

Filch's only power to protect his own in Hogwarts lay with the goodwill of those around him - and the occasional predictability of bureaucracy.

Cassian held no illusions. Any kindness in the caretaker had wilted long ago. Whatever semblance of power he could have, he clung to like a dying man.

That Tarth navigated her position with care did not surprise Cassian.

He lifted a hand and knocked on the door.

His hands clasped behind his back as he half-turned, avoiding the impression of facing the door head-on. A nearby portrait gave him something to look at. Two cats snoozed side by side, one occasionally kicking in dreams. That latter cat - long-haired, black, fussily groomed - had become a familiar wanderer through the castle's frames since its arrival.

He was no Kai, but he could almost hear her wondering aloud whether portraits liked existing at all.

Most seemed to not mind. The cat, at least, looked content.

In his peripheral vision, the door opened to reveal Professor Tarth.

From the first, he'd noted her quiet deviation from typical Hogwarts aesthetic. She wore lightly colored robes often, certainly, but there was a quality to how she held herself that was... not quite wizarding in a way Cassian struggled to put his finger on. It wasn't that she wore no hats - not all of the staff did. It wasn't the lack of magical paraphernalia on her person - that could be overlooked. It was... something else.

He didn't know. Perhaps simply the poise of one who had learned professionalism in another world altogether.

The door was halfway open when she finally looked at who was outside her door. Cassian kept his gaze on the cat painting for the remaining, polite measure of time - then second-guessed it. Would not looking immediately seem evasive? Would it appear rude? Would-

"Mister Rosier." She said the name with a certain lightness. He caught a curve of smile in the edge of his vision.

"Professor Tarth," Cassian returned, eyes abandoning the cat portrait to meet her gaze. She held the picture of quiet, professional ease. A few years younger and less sunnily dressed, she may have passed for Slytherin.

He continued. "There's a matter - possibly under your subject. I was hoping to speak with you. If now is an acceptable time?"

There, then - a slight widening of her eyes, and then her smile deepened. "Now is acceptable," she said, stepping back and leaving the door open.

That was well enough.

But as Cassian crossed the threshold, he had the distinct and disorienting impression that he had somehow stepped out of Hogwarts and into some foreign domain. Her office matched her poise. Professional, clean, and just out of step with the rooms of other professors. The walls bore a blend of magical and Muggle artwork. Metallic cabinets lined one wall, and along another sat a neat stack of bins - plastic, some faint memory informed Cassian. That was the word.

Her desk looked ordinary, at least. The bookshelf behind it held a mix of magical and Muggle tomes. And on one shelf, behind the desk: a glass tank, its bottom layered in sand. Inside, an earthy-scaled creature lay loosely coiled.

"A western hognose," Tarth offered, following his glance as she took her seat behind the desk. She nodded to the guest chair. "Please, Mister Rosier."

Cassian wasn't sure whether it was sincerity or sleight of hand that let her say his surname without flinching. There were still one or two professors who went out of their way to avoid it entirely.

He sat. "That's the one that plays dead, isn't it?" he asked, politely curious.

"Yes," she said, and cast a glance toward the tank. "A rescue. A Muggle reptile house closed down. Most animal shelters won't take reptiles. He would've been put down."

And that wouldn't have been fair, would it?

Cassian glanced past her again, toward the tank and its dozing denizen. Something about bringing a pet snake to Hogwarts struck him as bold, but therein Cassian suspected that was his paranoia more than prudence. Some brought snakes. It was uncommon and often unpopular, but not unheard of.

He returned his attention to Tarth.

"Put down?" he asked, voice mild, but interest real. There was a quiet, subtle itch under his skin, perhaps for the sheer seeming unfairness of the matter. Symbol of his House or not. "It's a mundane snake, isn't it? Couldn't it be released?"

Her answer came easily enough. "In most areas, it's illegal to release non-native reptiles. Too great a risk to the ecosystem. Even a harmless species might spread disease, upset local populations, or simply starve. If shelters can't take them, and no one adopts them, euthanasia is... standard."

Her gaze drifted partway back to the tank, but she let the Muggle logic stand on its own.

Cassian found he did not much like that answer, even if it satisfied his need for the practice to have reasoning. "If they remove the snake from its native home in the first place," he said "can they not send it back?"

There was, too, a needle that lodged in the back of his mind. Even a harmless species may be too great a risk to the ecosystem. And what, then, of the ones with wands? With power over memory and death?

"Most pet snakes are bred in captivity," Tarth explained. "Even if released into their native habitat, many wouldn't survive."

She folded her hands atop the desk, though in a more relaxed manner than Cassian himself may have managed. "I'm glad to discuss this with you, Mister Rosier... but would you like to begin with why you're here?"

Cassian glanced down to the edge of the desk, adjusting the line of his sleeve. "Of course, ma'am." He lifted his gaze again. "I've come to ask whether you would consider supervising a new student organization."

Her smile ticked anew, just enough that Cassian wondered if it was at his phrasing.

Tarth gave a small hum and parted her hands, even as they stayed close together. "I assume you're not here on behalf of a replacement for the Wizard's Chess club."

That had been a saga of last year, before her arrival, though it circulated readily in Hogwarts gossip: the former club had disbanded after the chessmen went on strike due to a Gryffindor's mischievous charmwork. The siege of the first-floor boys' bathroom had lasted three weeks.

Her tone wasn't unfriendly, though her eyes were alert enough to tell Cassian another story. "What name did you have in mind?"

Cassian drew a tidy bundle of two scrolls from his robes. "We hadn't settled on a name, though several options are under consideration." There is the fallback, if she needs...

He didn't mention that most of Marius' suggestions formed acronyms of variable desirability. Cultural Awareness with Letters and Luddites. Muggle Orientation Branch Investigating Linking Exercises. Society Offering Stationery. Marius had called the last one 'aesthetically minimalist'.

He set the two scrolls meticulously side by side on the desk in front of him. "We're proposing a student society focused on... communication. More precisely, cultural exchange."

He paused to study her expression. Tarth simply raised a brow in an encouraging manner, so he continued: "Between magical students and Muggles. Through letters."

Cassian untied one of the scrolls and unfurled it to offer across the table. As she took it and glanced down, Cassian explained:

"That's... an outline of the proposed structure. Muggles maintain programs to facilitate semi-anonymous correspondence with strangers - often international. Gaps are already expected in language, belief, or lifestyle. We believe that we could begin with students voluntarily writing letters to Muggles who've expressed an interest in atypical or unfamiliar communities."

"We would, of course, establish guidelines to ensure letters remain within expected bounds - tonally and topically - from the Muggle point of view."

He gestured to the scroll in her hands.

"The club itself would be less about the letter-writing and more about sharing what comes of it. The misunderstandings. The insights. It would be..." Cassian's throat caught a little on the pitch, "...fun. Possibly awkward, potentially enlightening. Likely all three."

"There's interest, already. I believe it would appeal to students who feel disconnected from how we teach about Muggles, or simply wish to... expand their horizons."

She continued reviewing the scroll. Cassian classified the quiet as a tolerable one, even as he turned over a private concern in his mind.

Would she mark it as strange for a Slytherin, a Rosier, to propose such a club? Would she suspect he had ulterior motives?

Well, I do. We do. Simply not in the traditional sense. He curled his fingers against the arms of the chair.

Perhaps he should have let one of the others bear this meeting after all. Kai, maybe. Or Marlow again? Perhaps if she declined now, it would be because of him. If she did, would she allow it if someone else asked? If he stepped back?

Cassian straightened one of his sleeves.

"This is a very thoughtful proposal," Tarth finally said.

Is it?

There was a long pause, and then Professor Tarth said, "There is an argument to be made that this falls under Muggle Studies. Did Professor Claremont decline?" Her tone was terrifyingly polite and warm-mannered.

"Professor Claremont's class focuses on anthropology," Cassian said carefully, the shape of Anselma's words fitting oddly in his mouth. He hoped that was the right word. Thank you, Anselma. "The society would be centered on the human element, which we felt was more closely the purview of Ethics."

He felt particularly seen by the professor, in the pause before she spoke.

"And who is we? What students would be heading this?"

Cassian wasted little time. "Kairiel Bosco of Hufflepuff, Anselma Silvertree of Ravenclaw, Marlow Kade of Gryffindor, Marius Mulford of Slytherin... and myself."

Using Kai's proper name felt like a small heresy. He knew she didn't care for it, would have preferred something plainer. But formalities.

Tarth considered the first scroll again, the outline, and then furled it slowly. Her attention shifted to the second scroll near Cassian's hand. She nodded toward it. "And what is that?"

"Drafted guidelines. Suggested rephrasings of magical terminology in Muggle-adjacent language, advisory notes on scam avoidance, and a template for student profiles to be created externally by a designated liaison." Anselma and Marlow had been the most useful in assembling that, though Kai made suggestions as well.

He slid that scroll across to her too, then folded his hands on the table. His attention turned briefly past her toward the hognose in the tank. The parchment crinkled. Tarth reviewed.

"Scams," Tarth repeated, a new note in her voice that Cassian didn't know how to interpret. Her brows did a mild lift and lower, as though the word were a ripple that she needed to crest. Not disapproval or concern, Cassian thought, though he doubted his read. Uncertainty? Surprise?

She smoothed that scroll on the desk before her. She said mildly, "This is your hand, Mister Rosier. But not, I think, your words. Not in Muggle fraud."

Cassian straightened. "No, ma'am. Marlow - Kade, that is. His father works in a tech shop. Mobiles. Silvertree and Bosco also made suggestions. They said such is less common in the post, but... not impossible."

"It seems as though they may have been better equipped to broach this idea," Tarth said, and the words sounded like a question.

"Any of them would have done well," Cassian allowed, inclining his head. "I do not deny that I am... less versed in Muggle affairs, compared to the others." Even Marius, to his mild annoyance. The delay in his next words drew long. Cassian could not tell where he stood with her. Not comfortably and not certainly.

He smoothed a hand over his sleeve. "If you would prefer, I could ask one of them to come by and discuss it with you."

Whatever she heard in that, Cassian did not know what to make of how she turned her attention to furling the second scroll. He did not know what to make of how she glanced up to him with a brief and uncharacteristic frown. It didn't seem to bode well.

I should not have come.

"I will need a name for the club, when I take this to discuss it with the Headmistress," Tarth then said, striking Cassian's doubt as though by Stunner. "Normally, it wouldn't be necessary, but this is a unique situation. I would also need a name for the student head. Are you representing this group, or has someone else been chosen?"

His mouth felt dry, his fingers energized. Cassian said, "We considered a few options for a head. It came down to Kade and myself." The optical answer is obvious. "I will assist Kade in it."

Let the lion roar and the serpents slither. That was the idea, no? Thought perhaps only in Cassian's mind. He had been Marlow's and Kai's first choice. Marlow had been that of Anselma and Marius. Breaking the tie fell to Cassian, and he had no desire whatsoever to deal with a Daily Prophet article this year titled Rosier-Headed Muggle Infiltration Club Arises at Hogwarts - Fact or Fiction?

The look Tarth gave Cassian struck him as almost amused... if not for the shadow that crossed it shortly after. She studied him. Discomfort took root in Cassian. What was she seeing?

"Marlow Kade for the head then," she said, moving right along, reopening the first scroll and reaching for a pen - a pen? - to note in the margins. "And a name?"

"We weighed options. Tentatively, our favored one..." Cassian tilted his head, "...was The Postscript Society." Layered with just enough double-meanings to privately amuse and exhaust his friends.

"Post script," Tarth echoed, separating out the words. Her pen shifted as she added the name to the parchment. "Very well." And then she looked up again, meeting his eyes with that same steady ease she'd offered him the whole way through the meeting. "Was there anything else, Mister Rosier?"

She's with us. Cassian sat forward slightly. "Not at this time, Professor. Thank you - for hearing me." I hope this doesn't put you in more difficult a position than needed.

She simply nodded. There was that study again, and then she said, "I do have one more thing I would like to say."

Chills arose on Cassian. This was the part he'd expected. The warning, likely. The consequence. A-

"Mister Rosier," Tarth said, "If any of you need an adult to speak to, going forward, my door is open. That includes you. Do you understand?"

He inclined his head, precisely enough to hide the breath he took. Thoughts circled and scattered like startled birds.

What does that mean?

"You mean... about the club, Professor?" Cassian asked, uncertain what answer he wanted.

Something passed in her eyes, something Cassian was almost inclined to name as frustration. Too strong a word, perhaps.

"That too, of course," Tarth allowed. Her manner seemed relaxed, patient, open. What was in her eyes? Surely not pity. "But I meant in general."

"I... isn't that what Heads of House are for, ma'am?" Bemusement settled over him like loose chainmail. Though he couldn't imagine Slughorn making such an offer without it being well-oiled.

What is her angle?

Tarth closed her pen, set it aside, and began rolling the scroll once more. Without looking directly at him, Tarth said, "It is," in a way that still managed to sound like disagreement.

Half Slytherin, even as a squib. Not for the first time, Cassian wondered if there wasn't something to Marius' jested idea that she'd infiltrated Hogwarts under the Wizengamot's noses. He found that easier to contemplate than what she was actually offering.

"I understand, Professor," he said, as though through a curtain.

There was vague awareness of thanking her, of being excused, of the door closing behind him.

Cassian stopped after two corridors to study an empty painting of a refined lounge. A yapping grey terrier darted in, chased a long-haired black cat through it into the next portrait over.

If any of you need an adult.

If you need an adult.

And Cassian did not know how to need that.

He already almost was one, wasn't he?

---

When Cassian arrived to the alcove some time later, Anselma and Kai were busy in discussion on one side of the table. Marius and Marlow - altogether absent as yet.

"It isn't like the Prime Directive," Kai said, arms crossed, head tipped toward Anselma. "The Prime Directive's about non-interference, yeah, but it's to let a society to make its own choices, decide its own direction. And it assumes a tech difference. Which, sure. But this is... different."

Anselma wasn't the more devoted of the two to the franchise, but she turned to Kai, fully engaged. "It's comparable to the debates over whether the Directive applies. Has tampering already occurred? Yes. Will there be harm without revelation or intervention? Undoubtedly."

Cassian sat in his usual spot across from Anselma. He didn't need to ask. Comparing the Statute to first-contact metaphors in the Muggle fiction had been commonplace in their debates for years.

Kai glanced at Cassian, question rising in her eyes, but then she murmured, "Moment," and glanced back to Anselma. "It's a different issue, though. We're not the Federation, and it's not the Directive. We're..." Her expression twitched toward a grimace. "...Gary Mitchell, at best. We're Q, at worst. Population thing, right?"

Q was the trickster wizard one, Cassian remembered. Gary Mitchell… he couldn't recall. The slow arranging of quills gave him something to do while he waited for an opening.

The paling of Anselma's expression was new. "Game theory..." she murmured, half to herself. She shifted one of her parchments and reached for a quill to underline something on another.

Kai frowned, lips pursing. "How're you meaning?"

Anselma sat back in her chair. Whatever was on her mind, she looked far too uncharacteristically dour for Cassian's taste. "We're missing an umbrella," she said, staring at her parchments like they'd betrayed her.

Cassian's hand paused partway toward his quill. The three weren't enough? What had they missed?

He offered, "We've accounted for ripple effects," in a cautious manner, still not sure who George Mitchell was and still lacking enough context on Q to know whereabouts the girls were in their thoughts.

Whatever Anselma meant, Kai seemed to get it. "Oh. Oh." Her voice grew soft, horrified. She sat back slowly. "...How did we not see it?"

"See what?" Cassian inclined his head. He suddenly felt rather tired.

"We were too busy looking at the other side," Anselma told Kai, looking toward Cassian after. "...We've discussed how Muggles might fear us. That's the easy angle, after all. It's the one we're taught about in History of Magic, and it's obvious and it will be true for some. But... what comes after? If the Statute falls. What replaces it, in a world where Muggles and wizards both acknowledge the other?"

Cassian let go of his quill, folding his hands. "Plausibly exploitation," he supposed. That was the other wizarding fear, when it wasn't fear itself.

"Take it a step further," Kai said quietly. "If we're not compressed into hiding, but split out and dispersed. Let's say Muggles don't try to destroy us. Don't exploit outright. Let's say they take the middle path."

"Game theory," Anselma said, tone subdued, eyes intent on her parchments. "Not a society. A pantheon."

"Game theory?" Cassian prompted, folded hands coming up to press against his lips. Pantheon. So... worshipped? An itch of dread crept up his neck.

"Our society is held together by secrecy. If that breaks, then outside interests might start mattering more than internal ones - to individual wizards, I mean," Anselma said. "Maybe there's cursory magical society, but if it's integrated... then well, it doesn't matter what we wish was true, we're not equals. Not in power potential. And Muggles aren't stupid. Enough will notice that. Any wizard inclined to becomes a local patron, if the curtain comes down."

Her lips thinned. "Patron, saint, menace, mascot. Depends on the place. Depends on the wizard."

"We've barely figured out how to treat magical creatures," Kai put in, voice hollowing. "You think we're ready for Muggle masses offering us celebrity by birth?"

"So, game theory," Anselma picked up. "If the first three umbrellas are contact, population and immediate fallout... then the fourth is the pantheon problem... Our descendants won't be playing against Muggle technology. Not yet, anyway."

"They'll be playing against one another."

That came to rest on the table between the three of them. Cassian had almost forgotten he had news to deliver on the club. The quiet horror made their prior fears seem pale. It remained distant for now, but the idea loomed in a manner that had his thoughts drifting back toward the idea of whether it wouldn't be better to find some way to reaffirm wizarding isolation forever.

He closed his eyes.

He wondered if the only way forward would break both societies forever. If Grindelwald's ghost would win no matter what they hoped. Perhaps the Statute doesn't just protect us from Muggles or Muggles from us, but us from ourselves.

Bitterly, he wondered if the world of the new Fourth Umbrella would be a world for a Rosier, not a Cassian.

Kai broke in on his thoughts to quietly say, "No. Some will be playing against one another. We'll just have to find a way that the rest remember they're people. And a way for enough Muggles to remember that too, for it to matter."

Cassian exhaled against his hands. He nodded, without opening his eyes. He gave it another measure of time to see if she would say more. When she did not, he forced himself to open his eyes and adjusted his sleeves. An ache lingered in his jaw from the former press of his hands. But he needed to focus on the now. The meeting.

The air still tasted stormy.