No Mouth But Some Serpent's

Chapter 11 - Threats and Throws

Thank you once again to all my reviewers! Questions and such will be addressed in my LJ later.

The plot takes another bound here, as Harry talks with his family and tries to throw the Quidditch game.

Chapter Eleven: Threats and Throws

Harry never wanted to go through a week like that again. The sooner he mastered the Fugitivus Animus spell, the better.

Monday had begun with a murmur of noise as he walked into the Great Hall, one that might have built to hexes and flung food-would have built, Harry was certain, if not for the professors seated at the staff table. Though he sat beside Draco at the Slytherin table, and the Malfoy heir looked as if he would kill the next person who so much as breathed wrong at Harry, he could still feel the stares. They made his breath short and his legs shake, and he ate little and left soon. Sylarana protested. Harry told her to shut up, and she sulked for the next three hours.

The Ravenclaws' taunts had grown worse now that he had, as they saw it, actually put a Housemate in the hospital wing permanently. Harry watched them, at least, with no emotion more complicated than bitterness. They didn't appreciate Luna while they had her, did they?

"Did you get your little snakes to hold her down while you Petrified her, Snake Prince?" one of them asked as he headed to Charms.
"Was it fun?"

"Not fun enough for him," said a seventh-year Ravenclaw knowingly. "I heard he forced poison down her throat while she screamed for mercy, and then cast Crucio while she was still recovering from that."

"He probably bit her himself," said another.

Draco spun around, wand in hand. Harry touched his arm. "Don't," he said softly. "It's not worth it."

Draco spluttered and protested at him for the rest of the day about that, which at least gave Harry something to listen to beyond the taunts.

On Tuesday, Ron stomped up to the Slytherin table. Draco bristled. Ron ignored him entirely, though, and spoke to Harry through clenched teeth.

"This isn't over," he said. "I know there's some kind of, of plot afoot. There's no way that my dad could get sacked and his brother betray Connor in one week unless there was a plot. We'll stop you. You just wait."

"Oh, very good, Weasley," said Draco, leaning forward until he had almost shoved his face into Ron's. "I had no idea that you knew the word afoot. Picked it up from Granger, did you?"

Ron turned red in the face, but Harry asked quietly, "Why was your father sacked? What was the charge?"

"That git's dad said that if he couldn't control himself in a bookshop, he couldn't control himself in the Ministry," said Ron, through clenched teeth. "They did an unfair review of him, and he got sacked."

"And the truth finally comes out," Draco drawled. "Your father should have been forced from his job long since, Weasley. What my father did is a favor to the Ministry, the rest of the wizarding world, and humankind in general."

"I'm going to kill you," said Ron, and reached for his wand, at which point Hermione came up to him and slapped him on the side of the head. Harry stared in shock. Hermione met his eyes for a fleeting moment, and Harry blinked at what he saw there. She looked sorrowful, tired, but not contemptuous, nor as if she had decided he were the source of evil.

"Ron Weasley, you are going to come sit down right now and shut up before you lose Gryffindor points," she hissed at him.

Ron opened his mouth to protest, but Draco said, "Oh, come, come, Granger. He was just showing us his new vocabulary, weren't you, Weasel?"