Chapter 21:1

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THE RESTRICTED SECTION

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THE RESTRICTED SECTION

It was April, which meant that spring had arrived. The afternoons were getting warmer, the snowcaps disappeared from the mountains, the red sunset hesitated long into the day, and Victor Sparrow had finally returned to normal.

The same could be said of the Hogwarts Express, which had been retrofitted to deliver boxcars of birdseed, heavily sprayed in a density reversion tonic called Reverto-Gro. The seed was fed to Sparrow by the bucketful, until he shriveled to a size small enough that Professor Snape could administer an anti-serum. When Fred and George saw Victor for the first time in a passing glance on their way to Quidditch practice, the boy looked as if he would have preferred expulsion over life as a gigantic yellow bird.

For months, life at Hogwarts was relatively uneventful. The twins, in their self-imposed hiatus, continued monitoring the map from the comforts of Gryffindor Tower, but nothing at all noteworthy had taken place. Even Lexington Parsimonae had pulled back on his investigation. He mostly kept to his office in fear of Peeves, who carried on haunting the castle. The canary attack was assumed to be the last hurrah for the Toilers of Trouble, and for Lee, Angelina, and the twins, they wondered if the prank that had been played on Victor warned the treasure-seeking perpetrators of the ruined paintings that no one was safe.

But that morning, for Fred and George Weasley, April the first meant more than a cursory change of calendar pages on the common room notice board. It was their birthday. They were turning twelve. And they were determined, beyond anything else, to access the Restricted Section of the library to find the photograph of Aruzula Darc.

They had decided to accomplish the task on their birthday, but not for lack of trying. No matter how often or how resourcefully they attempted to sneak past Madam Pince, their plans were always thwarted by Nymphadora Tonks. She followed Fred and George relentlessly, between class periods and after meals. Even her owl peeked in on their dormitory window from time to time. With Sparrow being dropped from the list of likely suspects, since everyone agreed that the lone Toiler of Trouble would not have pranked himself so detrimentally, the Weasley twins became the sole focus of her personal investigation.

Tonks wore her takedown of Victor Sparrow as a badge of honor. The notorious trickster would finally be punished, if only for amassing contraband. But when it came to catching the Weasleys, Nymphadora was not very good at the job. Her squeaky shoes typically gave away her position, and she was vastly unaware of the Marauder's Map and its power to help the twins evade pursuit. But Fred and George could not escape her whispers of conspiracy, which is why Charlie became their biggest defender. He was convinced that Tonks only followed them because Slytherin was set to play the winner of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. After the amazing match of Ravenclaw against Slytherin, where the Slytherin team conquered by two hundred and seventy points, no one was more aware of the team matchups than the Quidditch Captains. Tonks desperately wanted Gryffindor to lose, but not as much as Charlie wanted to bring home the win.

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