12

Chapter 12: Making Up and Hooking Up

Harry was hanging in the air upside-down.

It was not comfortable for three reasons.

First: his blood was rushing to his head, which was obviously unpleasant.

Second: his shirt dropped over his face, leaving his skinny torso to everyone's view.

And the worst of it all was the reason three: there was a pissed off Auror in his direct vicinity. In fact, it was she who had kept him suspended in the air after relieving him of his wand. The situation was rather bad.

"So, care to explain?"

It wasn't a shout, the tone wasn't even angry. But it might as well been growled for the promise of violence in her seemingly apathetic voice.

"Why does a pipsqueak like you try to curse me in the back?"

Harry winced. He bloody well knew it was a bad idea to cast direct magic on Tonks, but he by chance stumbled upon a brilliant piece of magic that would make her think that everyone was singing instead of talking. Unfortunately, it was not without a rather obvious problem: it was a charm. A Mind Alteration Charm, to be exact. And those were all about as direct and uncompromising as a kick to the nuts.

Harry spent a couple of hours hesitating before deciding that it would be worth it if he succeeded, conveniently forgetting that there was a chance that he would be caught.

The result was obvious.

"Well?"

Harry grunted and muttered something hardly intelligible.

"What was that?"

"I said: just a prank," Harry repeated a bit louder. Tonks stared at him bemusedly, not that he saw it with his shirt blocking his view. The Auror flicked her wand, turning him in the correct direction and dropping him on the floor. Loud swearing ensued.

When finally Harry righted his clothing and glared up at the offender, said girl was wearing a rather amused look.

"Lil' workaholic? Now, now, why would you try to prank an 'onest Auror such as me? The one, may I remind you that protected you all those dark, creeeepy evenings when you were alone, defenceless, weak..."

Harry made a sound that resembled a mix between a person's rumbling stomach and that funny little noise that sounds when the last of the water in a bath goes down the drain.

"I even carried you to your tower like my own lil' damsel in distress!" she ruthlessly continued. Harry's teeth by all means should have been shattered from the pressure he put on them.

Let us say here that out of many traits Harry had, one of his most admirable ones was his humbleness. But, as it often is with humble people, he was also painfully prideful. A fact that leads us to the understanding why exactly was it that Harry – not a spiteful or vengeful sort of person – truly decided to prank Tonks, who was driving him up the wall by her comments. And now, she was mostly oblivious to the danger from the steaming boy.

As a child, Harry was quick to anger. His rage was usually demonstrated, in order of magnitude, through loud yelling and/or insults, long ranting monologues and outright violence with nearby electronics starting to behave funky. However, ever since the Voice and he were merged into one by the healing power of Fawkes, his rage was even quicker to produce if one tried enough. The other difference was that even when seeing red, Harry still retained some hold over himself and didn't go completely berserk.

He wasn't seeing red when Tonks started her usual teasing. He was angry, but instead of blowing up like old Harry would, he clamped his emotions down and started imagining more... violent pranks. It helped.

"Lil' workaholic?"

He blinked, returning from his daydream of Tonks being stuck in a seemingly endlessly repeating loop of one single day. She was staring at him strangely.

"What?" he groused irritably.

"You just spaced out in the middle of a conversation," she offered. Harry scoffed.

"You mean I decided not to listen to you endlessly insulting me."

She rolled her eyes.

"Some people can't take a joke..."

"A joke that is deliberately said so as to piss someone off? Sounds like an insult to me."

Tonks shuffled her legs nervously.

"Sorry, kid. I guess I went a bit overboard."

Harry stared at her thoughtfully for a couple of moments, and then slowly nodded.

"Stop doing that and I'll agree to a ceasefire," he said, not without some pomp. The Auror grinned and offered him his wand handle first.

"No promises, kid, it's a part of me. I'll try to tone it down though."

"Fine, I guess," Harry murmured and put his wand away.

"By the way, was it you who cast that illusion on me about a week ago?" she peered at him suspiciously, prompting him to school his face into a mask of confusion.

"I don't know what you're talking about?"

"So it was you. Cheeky little bugger," she muttered. "And don't look at me like that – I'm a Metamorphmagus, I know all there is to know about facial expressions and those little signs and tells people do when they lie. I don't need Legilimency to know when someone's bullshitting me."

"Handy," Harry admitted, giving up his pretence as her explanation sounded rather plausible. He paused. "Wait, what is a Metamorphmagus?"

"I'm capable of changing my appearance and body structure in any way I want within reason," her hair cycled through different vibrant colours that wouldn't be out of place in Dumbledore's wardrobe. The boy nodded appreciatively.

"Cool. Is it a type of wandless self-transfiguration like animagism?"

"Sort of. It is more of an inherent skill, and you can't learn it. You can do something similar with Transfiguration, but it requires a wand. And anything major is ritual territory."

"I see. Pity," he mumbled. Tonks raised an eyebrow to a rather fascinating height – she even pulled her hairline higher so as to give it more space.

"What's the matter? Shy of your body?"

"Not of the body. Of this," he gestured to his head.

"Hair? You don't need to be a Metamorphmagus to change it. You could just cut it, lengthen it, paint it..."

Harry stared at her for a second in incomprehension, then it dawned on him that through the past two years he let his hair grow out nearly to his shoulders and now he had a mass of hair obscuring his scar. He silently put that lock aside, demonstrating the red outline of a lightning bolt.

Tonks' reaction was rather amusing, especially in comparison to the one he usually got. She stared at him with huge eyes, jaw dropped.

"Wait one god damned second... you're Harry Potter, kid?"

"The one and only," Harry inclined his head, masking a grimace. "Accept no substitutes."

It seemed, however, that he didn't hide his face well enough.

"Sorry. Just a bit surprised," her voice was sincerely apologetic. He waved it off.

"Forget it."

They stood in awkward silence.

"Well, now I feel like I kicked a puppy. You know what? To hell with this, let's start over. Hi, I'm Tonks. Just Tonks," she sheathed her wand and offered her hand to Harry. He stared at it for a second, and then shook it with a grin.

"I'm Harry. Just Harry."

When remembering this first awkward step of their friendship, Harry would always smile. From then on, every time he returned from Flitwick, it was not tired, irritated and plotting bloody vengeance Harry Potter who entered the Gryffindor Tower spitting fire and spooking ickle firsties, it was a weary, but amused and nearly skipping Harry who once even agreed to have his photo taken by the almost fainting Colin Creevey.

Meanwhile, the greenhouse project was... being a pain.

The two boys certainly had an ambitious idea – to create a plant habitat that consisted of several isolated parts that were suitable for different kinds of flora. Harry and Neville, however, had a huge row over the parchment with the plan regarding which specimen to acquire.

"A bloody Bloodsucker Oak, no pun intended? Neville, are you crazy?"

"Well, you did ask me last year about them, and I got interested..."

"Nev, they eat people! There's a reason they are called like that!"

"They are interesting!"

Harry groaned and leaned back, massaging his aching forehead.

"Please, Nev, don't tell me they are 'just misunderstood'. Honestly, you're disturbingly reminding me of Hagrid, only with plants..."

The shy blonde revealed a sudden increase in spine density when it came to his position on man-eating plants. Fortunately for Harry and his self-preservation instincts, he remembered a certain funny little fact.

"Wait. There are too few acorns on the market. And those that are available are going to be bought by hospitals as a component for heavy-duty blood replenishing potions, remember? We simply can't have one."

That deflated Neville.

He still argued that Devil's Snare would be useful for ingredients, but Harry pointing out that the sheer size the adult specimen reached wouldn't fit into the room saved them both from having to re-name their side project into "Extreme Botany".

However, Harry also had to make some stipulations. Instead of a couple of Nirnroots and a Mandrake Neville decided to create a small fungi farm, and he refused to have anything to do with a certain interesting underwater plant from the Caspian Sea which was used in potions that enabled a temporary magical boost. It appeared that Jelly-Rush was in the grey area of British ingredient registry and wasn't allowed to be grown without direct permission of the Ministry – which, taking into account that a couple of high-ups were profiting from it, wasn't likely to be given to the gardening duo any time soon. Harry was certain he could find a couple on the black market through Tearshape, but Neville put his foot down and declared that he prefers to abide by the laws when there are no good reasons not to. Admitting the worth of his friend's words, Harry acquiesced. Not immediately, though.

And after taking a tea break they started planning the greenhouse itself. And then the real problems started.

"We need three things. The first is separation between the different parts. That one is easy, I have a suitable charm/ward system outlined in one of these," Neville tapped a pile of dusty tomes by his seat with his finger. "Next, there is the ground and humidity. Also solvable with some spell work and specialised fertilisers I can get. The final part is the tricky one."

"Light."

"Right in one, light," the usual minor stuttering was gone from Neville speech. He was talking Herbology, and that was his element. "The problem is that I haven't found any light spells for indoor greenhouses that don't have access to sunlight. Not on a scale that we need. There are some examples for single pots, one for from five to seven plants, but the problem is, we need it to cover all of them."

"I assume there is a reason why we can't just cast a lot of the smaller ones."

"A lot of the specimens in our list orient their metabolism by the positioning of the light source. If they feel multiple sources of similar intensity, they will become confused and won't properly grow."

They kept silent for a while, letting the problem sink in. Harry sighed.

"This is exactly the thing that will require a flash of genius from one of us. Either that or we find the damn full-power spell. Regardless, let's go eat."

"Wait, but we aren't finished yet!" Neville protested, but Harry waved him off.

"If there is a thing I've learned from Ron, it's that the complexity of your problems is proportionate to your hunger."

"Fine, I guess."

They walked to the Great Hall, making small talk and occasionally exchanging greetings with the familiar students along the way. However, Harry went straight past the doors to the Hall, intending to eat in the kitchens as was his habit.

"Harry, where are you going?"

"The Kitchens. I eat there," he threw over his shoulder, pausing.

"Ah, I wondered where you guys always vanished to during din... ners..." Neville stopped by the open doors with a stunned expression on his face. Harry lifted an eyebrow.

"What?"

"Come over here," the blond said in a serious voice. When Harry bemusedly complied, Neville pointed at the ceiling.

"Light."

It didn't take long for Harry to get what his friend was saying.

"That transparency charm. You think we can do it?"

"I don't see an alternative."

"And we'd have natural light, which is better than any light spell. Fine, I'll look into it. Now, let's move on, we're being looked at."

Hermione Granger was a good person.

She was honest, straightforward, compassionate, and rule-abiding but not to a degree that it would clash with her sense of what is right and wrong. She was very smart and hard-working, talented in many things that counted. She knew it and was proud of herself for this. But the trait she valued the most, even beyond her intelligence, was her loyalty to her friends.

She did have her share of bad qualities, true. Many of them were born from her good ones: her compassion together with her straightforwardness and loyalty occasionally (weekly at least) made her nag at her friends to stop them from lazing around. Her respect of the rules and bookish tendencies made her trust authority and things she read a bit too much, sometimes blindly. On occasion she clashed with Harry about it, his opinion of any authority figures except Dumbledore and some others being suspicious at best. Hermione acknowledged her weaknesses and downsides and tried to correct them.

The one attribute that she never wanted to change was neither good nor bad, thus being in the grey area. Hermione was a very proud person. It pushed her forward just as much as her thirst for knowledge did, sometimes even more so.

However, recently her pride clashed with her most prised virtue: loyalty.

Her best friend, Harry, was receiving special tutoring from professor Flitwick, who was one of the three of her most favourite professors (the others being Vector and McGonagall. Babbling was annoying her with the continuous use of that damn nickname). The same Harry who was not as good as she was in theory and admitted as much himself (even if he was very, very good in anything practical). Granted, he was learning duelling, which wasn't something that Hermione was that hot for, but it didn't matter!

Why wasn't she being given advanced material like Harry was? It wasn't fair!

Hermione understood that she was over-dramatizing the situation and that she shouldn't be jealous of her friends, especiallysince Ron didn't bat an eye at the special attention Harry was getting, proclaiming that "if it was needed, Harry would teach me, but now I need to do my damned Potions essays that I owe to the Greasy Lord of the Bats". And if Ron wasn't jealous, she shouldn't be at all!

But she was.

She was trying to beat the annoying emotion down, but she could only do so much. Only time would tell if she would be able to get over herself.

Harry was gliding down the stadium, waving his fist with the Snitch triumphantly. The roar of the stadium ignited something in him, as it always did in these sweet moments after victory.

Malfoy was already on the ground, sulking and dragging himself to the Slytherin locker rooms. His team was not much more chipper, glaring at the figure of their Seeker but not wanting to say anything that would compromise the fragile hierarchy of their house.

The Gryffindor team went to the school together, periodically sharing a group hug and laughing at the smallest things. They had that certain mood when you are at the same time tired and giddy, and feel like you can move mountains by bitch-slapping them.

The majority of the Gryffindor house was behind them, making cheerful background noise that made Harry smile fondly. The Seeker glanced at Fred and George, who have somehow gotten their hands on a few bottles of Firewhisky and were even now sharing it with the Chaser girls and their new Keeper, a cheerful seventh year named Luke Channeler.

Harry looked forward, at the Hufflepuff crowd, walking some fifteen meters ahead of them. After a second glance he identified the closest people to him as Hannah Abbott and Susan Bones, and a crazy idea came into his mind.

"Hey, Harry, want a gulp?" Fred called, gesturing with a bottle in his hand. Angelina scowled at him.

"Don't be ridiculous, he's much too young to drink this."

"Give it here," Harry said abruptly and snatched the Firewhisky out of Fred's hand.

"Wait, Harry, it's serious, this isn't for kids. You don't need it," Katie tried to persuade him.

"I feel that I'll need it now," the boy grinned and took a sip. After a couple of seconds he got a pained grimace and gulped the substance down, starting to cough. Red clouds of smoke went out of his ears and nose, and some escaped his mouth.

"Wow. That... was something," he rasped and immediately drank again. This time he didn't wait a second to savour the taste, swallowing it straight away.

"That's the shit."

"Whoa, take it easy. Too much too soon," George commented, concerned, taking the bottle out of Harry's hands.

"Nah, I'm fine. Just a bit... braver. Now, wish me luck, guys."

"In what?"

Harry didn't wait for their responses, marching to his objective determinedly. Gryffindors forward.

He quickly reached the chatting girls.

"Excuse me. Susan?"

"Yes?" the girl stopped and turned around, staring at Harry in surprise. He quickly swallowed his fear. Come on, get it over with quick. The faster I do it, the less is the probability I'll stutter. Harry breathed in.

"Will you go to Hogsmeade with me on this weekend?"

Whatever she expected to hear, this wasn't it. Susan stared at him with huge eyes, her jaw a bit slack. Harry had to force himself not to look at her slightly open mouth. Bad brain, bad brain, bad brain...

"You want to go out with me?" she asked faintly. Harry nodded energetically.

"Correct."

"Well... yes?" she didn't look very sure, but he would take what he could.

"Great! See you... see you this Sunday!" he waved and doubled back to his team, trying with all his strength not to sway from the sudden vertigo.

The twins were grinning. Katie and Luke were moderately amused. Alicia and Angelina were wearing proud expressions.

"They grow up so fast," Angelina pretended to brush off a tear.

"Oh, shut it, you," Harry grumbled, smiling nevertheless, wordlessly taking the bottle from George and accepting congratulatory thumps on his shoulder.

A couple of hours later, he sat in the indoor greenhouse-to-be, trying to figure out the problem of lighting.

Oh, and he was drunk.

His thoughts were alternating between running past him with the speed of sound, dragging with the slow determination of a flobberworm and veering off the needed road in a completely unplanned direction. The fact that despite it all he was still making progress was speaking highly about his determination.

The boy leaned back in the chair, almost overbalancing it and barely managing to grab onto the table to prevent himself from falling.

"Bad chair. Oooookaaay, we need one source. One. One so... source of sun food... Yeah," Harry chuckled.

"Or we need many, but plants will be confussssed. Why will they b-b-be confused?" he frowned. "Because they will see many little suns."

He grew quiet, letting the sound of his thoughts banging into his skull in constant movement soothe him. After two minutes of silence he lifted his finger and proclaimed quietly:

"We need a lot of curtains."

He hummed and added in a surprisingly clear voice:

"Invisible curtains. That means curtains made of magic. But if they are invisible, then light will still... penetrate..." he was sent into a fit of giggles.

"That means I need to see that ward scheme that Neville was waving around."

He got up and carefully walked to the other table, employing the wall as his walking aide. Soon, he was frowning at the slightly blurry to his eyes runic matrix.

"Ooookay. Now this can be modified, I guess. Need to ask Hermione... or not. Nah, Gryffindors forward."

Fifteen minutes later, most of which were spent reading a reference book of wards employed in botany, he got the most of what he wanted to do down. Another half an hour, fifteen tries, a lot of blue smoke, three small-ish explosions and an undetermined amount of obscene lexicon used, Harry was staring at the sole (yet) stone planter that had the runic set devised by him etched into its surface.

"It'll do," he muttered, reflecting on the fact that it is his first ward. "Now... go to sleep."

He stumbled out of the room, not bothering to close it, and started determinedly cruising towards the Gryffindor tower.

Next day

"So? Does it work?" Neville asked, looking at the symbols with respect. Harry was still frowning at them.

"Yeah. Yeah, it should do it. But I really don't know how I thought this up. I mean, I'm not that great at Runes – Hermione's way better."

"So, mind explaining this to me?" the blond gestured at the matrix they were leaning over. "Just keep it simple."

"Okay. I just might understand what I've done here..." Harry mumbled the second part, regarding the runes with befuddlement.

"See – the basis for all this I've gotten from that habitat isolation ward you've chosen, but I heavily modified it. Look, these two create an air barrier that prevents the air parameters of the space within the ward to be disturbed by outside interference and convention. Here is the pressure modifier, here's the barrier power. It's all well and good, but..."

"Wasn't it a 4x4 matrix?"

"Yes, it was. To make it do what I wanted I needed it to be a 5x5. The new 9 runes are what I've added," Harry violently scratched the back of his head, glaring at the offending configuration. After another moment a look of comprehension settled on his face. "Look. Here's the three to regulate visibility, those three mean that those regulations would apply to everyone and everything, but certain added individuals or things. The last rune is the one which serves to key people in."

"Ah. Okay. So, tell me if I got this right. This ward makes it so that the plants don't comprehend the fact that they are surrounded by light sources except for the one that is inside the ward?"

"Yep, sound about right. My first thought was to make the ward impervious to light completely, but then we wouldn't see anything inside."

"And you suggest applying it to all the planters? It seems overcomplicated, Harry."

"I was drunk. This piece of intoxicated brilliance is ridiculously overcomplicated, I'll give you that, but this is the best thing we have."

Neville snorted at the choice of words.

"What about the Main Hall enchantment?"

"Wouldn't work. See, that is basically a transparency charm. But this room is in the dungeons, if we made our ceiling see-through, all we would achieve is an ability to look up and see another class."

"Yeah, point taken."

The same day, somewhere in the forest in the south of Britain

Sirius was looking at the house in front of him in sadness. What he remembered to be a modest, but neat house grew much more rundown than he would have thought. He walked up to the door cautiously and knocked. There was a sound of something crashing from inside. Sirius twitched in amusement as he listened to the footsteps approaching the door.

"Who's there?" asked the voice he hasn't heard for a long time. Sirius smiled nostalgically and called out the old password for these occasions.

"The keeper of booze!"

The door slammed open and Sirius barely managed to dodge a nearly point-blank spell, his bones creaking slightly at the awkward jump sideways as soon as he finished saying his 'hello'.

"You dare come here, traitor?" Lupin snarled.

"Calm down, Moony! It wasn't me! It was Wormtail!"

"Don't you fucking say his name! You killed him! And sold Lily and James to the snake bastard! AND AFTER ALL THIS YOU COME HERE?! I'LL MURDER YOU!"

All through the speech, the spell fire continued. Sirius was deflecting all he could, shielding everything else, but never retaliating.

"Listen to me! I got cold feet before we cast that blasted Fidelius! I was friggin' afraid that I'd spill the beans under torture, and suggested that Peter become the Secret Keeper!"

"What?"

"I was strutting around and making the impression that I knew the secret, while Peter would make himself scarce and lie low. That was the plan."

"Keep talking," Remus growled.

"We didn't know that Wormtail really was a rat all along. He was the one who sold them out! Th... that night, I damn near broke down and immediately went after the traitor. When I found him, he screamed for all to hear how I was the one who betrayed them, blasted the street, cut his damn finger off and scuttled to the sewer in his true form!" Sirius was snarling by the end of it.

"Where's the proof?" the werewolf's wand lowered a bit. He was hesitating.

"The previous summer, Fudge visited Azkaban. He left me his Daily Prophet. There was an article and a photo – the one where the Weasleys had won the lottery and gone holidaying in Egypt."

"What does it matter?"

"On the shoulder of the youngest son, there was a rat: The rat. I would never mistake him for another," Sirius pulled the clipping out of the pocket of his jacket and threw it to his once-best-friend. Lupin caught the paper, and not lowering his wand, glanced at it. Blood drained from his face.

"Peter..."

"I broke out the next week. Headed out to see how Harry is doing, then went to Hogwarts. I tried to break into the Gryffindor dorm, even succeeded, but the rat wasn't there. Later, I've dragged the Weasley boy off to talk to him. He said the rat was dead, that a cat ate it. I didn't buy it and after meeting Harry again, tried to search for him. I came across his trail near the Channel, but he shook me off. I tried to follow him to the continent, but had to give up a couple of weeks later. The slippery bastard vanished into the forests."

"I see..." Remus still was looking at the photo. When he raised his faintly shimmering eyes, Sirius was looking at him expectantly.

"How about a hug for an old friend?"

The haggard man made a choking sound and followed the advice with a fervour that made Black's ribs creak pitifully.

"Ack... don't kill me! Moony! Take it easy!" he rasped, patting the slightly shaking back of his friend.

"Shut up! Just... shut up!"

They stood there for some time, finally coming to grips with the situation. When they separated, in an unspoken agreement each pointedly ignored the wet eyes of the other.

"Come in, let's talk."

"Come in? You know what? Moony, grab your best gear, we are going to a bar. Or a night club. I think you need it."

Lupin smiled.

"Haven't changed a bit, have you, Padfoot?"

"You better not even hope," came a cheerful reply. "Nothing can tame me!"

"This honestly sounds like an awful idea. Wait a minute. I'll get my fancy suit."

"The green one?"

"The green one. I love the stasis charms."

The next morning

Remus blinked his eyes open and immediately shut them. As a werewolf, he had a resistance to alcohol, and his friendship with Sirius and James strengthened it to the point when he was called the Bar Juggernaut. Despite all that, his head was hurting.

"Oh blast," the man risked a slow and careful glance to the right. There was a wall. He turned his head to the left and Padfoot's slack-jawed face with a trail of spit on his cheek came into view. Remus would laugh if not for the ache in his head and back.

After further exploring his surroundings, Lupin ascertained that both of them were sprawled on the floor in his house' living room. He still had the green suit that Lily and James bought him in the seventh year on. The room itself had a couple of bags with bottles slightly visible inside.

The man rose slowly and, after carefully stepping over his friend, made his way into the kitchen, where he proceeded to lighten the giant anvil that he felt rolling around inside his skull.

Some fifteen minutes later, a figure stumbled inside the room, dropping immediately on the spare chair, making it creak dangerously. Remus silently offered a canister with marinated cucumbers. Sirius gripped it like it was his sole line to salvation and started gulping down the water inside it.

"Easy, easy. Leave some for the next time," Lupin noted dryly. Padfoot separated from the canister and placed it on the table, looking much more alive.

"Ah. Ooh. Much, much better. Bless that guy for telling us this trick. Say, why do you have marinated cucumbers?"

"I have a garden outside. I had to grow my own food. The dragon dung does wonders with the mundane plants, and it's relatively cheap."

Sirius looked at him seriously.

"These past years weren't easy for you, were they?"

"Like they were for you," Remus parried. "I survived."

"Yeah."

They were silent for a minute, each immersed in thought.

"What do we do now?"

"What do you want to do?"

"I... I want to meet Harry… Properly."

"Last I've heard, there are Aurors on guard duty in Hogwarts."

"Bah, not a problem."

"Dumbledore also hired Moody."

"Oh shit. Things just became a lot more difficult."

"Don't try to break in the school," Lupin told him severely. "Just don't. Wait for the summer holidays. Meanwhile, find out where Harry lives."

"Fine," Sirius grumbled, meanwhile plotting to infiltrate the school regardless. "What are you going to do?"

"Honestly, I'm conflicted. On one hand, you need a babysitter," the man ignored the indignant exclamation that followed. "On the other, I can do a lot that you can't where Wormtail is concerned. I have some connections with the werewolf communes on the continent. They will help."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm not, but currently it's our best shot."

"Then I'll trust your judgement on this," Sirius took another swing from the canister and grinned mischievously. "But now, we need to get you laid. Did you see that girl from yesterday?"

"Padfoot..."

"She ogled you the whole time, and you didn't respond. Well, it was our reunion night out, so you're to be commended, but today you won't have such an excuse!"

"It's dangerous for you to be out, Sirius."

Lupin's tries to weasel out were fruitless, only fuelling his friend's determination to help him.

"One word: glamour charms. I won't hear any more objections."

A house in the middle of London, covered by heavy-duty wards

Rita Skeeter was bored.

Usually this didn't bode well for anyone of importance that would attract her fancy next. She was currently left without a 'project' – her word for a person to write articles about – and so was lying on the sofa, staring into the ceiling and contemplating the social scene of Magical Britain in a search for a scent of prey.

It was right then that an owl flew through the charmed glass of her window, bearing a violently pink envelope.

The reporter threw herself over the furniture, taking cover with a speed that would befuddle anyone who didn't know her very closely, which would account to just a couple of people. When one was a journalist that based her career on dragging big names through mud, one made a lot of powerful enemies and was forced to adopt a philosophy that was nearly as paranoid as the legendary Auror Mad-Eye Moody's. She peered out of her temporary haven to see the owl sitting on the table and staring at her amusedly. After verifying that the object that it carried didn't contain anything remotely harmful, wasn't magical in any way and wasn't sent by her asshole of a father, she grabbed small gold pincers and cautiously opened it. Out of the pink envelope fell a parchment of the same colour. Grimacing at the smell of extremely sweet perfume the letter was drenched in, Rita lifted it, already without any doubt as to who sent it.

There was only one person alive with such a... taste.

Roughly at the middle of the letter Skeeter threw all her (carefully hidden) dislike of the woman out of the window and was looking at the parchment with unholy glee.

She had a new project.