Chapter 14

Percy's Point of View

I woke up much later than Harry the morning after we had returned to the Slytherin dorms. It was nice to be able to lie in without being woken by blinding sunlight piercing our eyelids. The dim, flickering dungeon torches felt much more homely too. I smiled, then started paying attention to what Harry was doing. He had already showered and dressed, if our damp hair was anything to go by. Currently, though, he was scrabbling around on the floor, searching for something.

"Where are they? Come on, come on, they must be here somewhere!" Harry kept muttering. I frowned, giving Harry a concerned look.

'Are you ok? What have we lost this time?' I yawned.

Harry let out a snarl of anger when he came up empty handed. 'Our wands! I can't find them!'

'Tried asking anybody? Draco might know.' I pointed out helpfully, not too bothered about our missing wands. 'And if the worst comes to the worst, we could summon them.'

Nudging Harry to one side momentarily, I stuck out our left hand. 'Accio wands!'

Our hand lit up with a shimmering silver light as our wands came flying out of Draco's school bag towards us. A low gasp sounded behind us, and I spun around, wand held at the ready. Then I relaxed, knowing Draco didn't mean any harm to us. He knew about our wandless magic anyway, so there was no harm in him seeing us perform it in person.

"By Merlin and Morgana, you didn't tell me you could do silent magic too!" Draco whined. I laughed, letting Harry take control once more.

"To be fair mate," Harry said, "you told us underestimation would be a great advantage and not to spill all our secrets… And why did you have our wands anyway?"

Draco didn't so much as flinch as he met our gaze. "You left your wands on our Chess table. I picked them up for you, so they wouldn't just be left lying around. Then when the rumours of you healing the unicorn started up, I hide them so that nobody would find out that you could do wandless magic. Talking about wandless magic, did your hand just glow silver?"

Harry frowned. "Yeah. It's never done that before… Must be the unicorn blood that stained our hands."

Draco looked intrigued and stepped closer to us, taking one hand and expecting it. The stain no longer covered our entire hand, but had formed patterns on our palm in the shape of curving waves, almost like it had exploded out from near our wrist. For a moment we all just stared at the patterns in shock, then Draco pulled out his wand, and traced the silver pattern. It tingled slightly under the touch, as if responding to the magic that flowed through the wand from Draco.

"It reacts to magic." Harry said in surprise. Curious, I decided to test out this new theory of Harry's. He was almost always right, but a little extra evidence never harmed anyone. Besides, I had noticed that my wandless 'accio' spell had been slightly easier than normal.

'Lumos!'

The result was immediate, the silver markings lighting up like starlight, momentarily blinding us before our eyes adjusted to the light. I grinned. This was so awesome! The markings didn't just react to magic, they channelled it. Similar to a wand, but better. Harry couldn't help but smile as my delight spread across our bond.

'It's amazing! You try a spell Harry!'

Shaking his head slightly, but indulging me all the same, Harry also cast the Lumos spell after I extinguished mine. Rather than our left hand lighting up this time, however, it was our right. It made sense, I figured. I tended to favour our left hand and Harry preferred using our right, so we subconsciously channelled our magic slightly differently based on our preferences.

We ended up spending the next half hour messing around with spells rather than getting ready for breakfast, and ended up having to rush up to the Great Hall. The Great Hall was buzzing when we eventually arrived, full of people shouting for our attention, to find out what had happened that night, wanting confirmation about the whispers about our stained hands and the rumours about the unicorn. We successfully ignored them all with the help of Draco, Blaise and Theodore, who held off the annoying hovering students. Eventually Professor Dumbledore had to dismiss everyone for class, because we almost couldn't get out of the hall at all.

Charles met us outside the large doors of the hall, pulling us aside with a shy grin. "Hey! Enjoying your minutes of fame?"

Harry pulled a face. "No. How do you deal with them, day in day out? It's horrible!"

We shuddered and Charles' grin widened. "Well, I've grown up dealing with them. I can't really imagine not, to be honest."

Shaking our head, we followed Charles to class. We received a lot of stares during Transfiguration. The Gryffindor's didn't seem to know how to treat us. Bored with the lesson, I tried to figure out what they might be feeling. Curiosity for a start – Gryffindor's loved gossip just as much as Hufflepuffs. Discomfort perhaps? They did pretty much disown us as one of their own, just before we did something so recklessly Gryffindor. Hum…

"Mr Potter!" Professor McGonagall was giving us her disapproving stare. "I understand you've just come back from the hospital wing, but could you please at least pretend to pay attention? Care to demonstrate the spell we are practising today?"

Harry frowned, glancing up at the board. We were working on changing rats into teacups today. The spell was remarkably simple, one we had been using for years, ever since Harry discovered Lily's old school books when we were seven. Harry waved his wand in the correct spell pattern, muttering the incantation under our breath. I almost groaned as our right hand shone silver around his wand. It was faint, and almost unnoticeable, but that didn't mean that everybody succeeded at failing to spot it. We both groaned when the Granger girl, who was sitting on our right, took in a sharp breath. Dam! She'd spotted it. Let the interrogation commence…

"Your hand!" She hissed once McGonagall had moved on. "It glowed."

"Well done. May we get on with our work now?" Harry asked with a large yawn. We'd spend the last week dreaming about monsters and fighting, waking up only to feel more tired than when we had drifted off to sleep. Needless to say, we weren't in the mood for a Granger interrogation. Granger sniffed.

"You do know that we aren't actually expected to successfully perform that spell until next lesson, right? All you did was prove to Professor McGonagall that you weren't listening to anything that she said this lesson. And why did your hand glow? It never has before." The bushy haired girl was in full flow, speaking also too fast to be understood. From our left, I heard Charles chuckle.

"Calm down Hermione. For a start, it's not exactly as if Harry and Percy needed to pay attention, given they can already cast the spell. And what's this non-sense about his hand glowing? Nobody else saw anything." Charles reasoned, sensing our annoyance at his know-it-all friend.

Hermione gave me a sharp look, narrowing her eyes. She grabbed our right hand, causing Harry to drop his wand in shock. Hermione gasped at the silver marking's on our hand. They were moving slightly, rippling over our palm like real waves. Charles lend in to see and let out a low whistle.

"What is that?" Hermione demanded. Harry sighed, and I restrained my urge to snap at her to shut up and leave us alone. But when Charles also gave us an expectant look we sighed, and Harry tried to explain a bit of what we knew.

"You know how when you found us we had unicorn blood coating our hands?" He started, directing the question at Charles. Charles nodded. "Yeah, well it didn't wash off. Now it forms these weird patterns on our skin that light up when we use magic. Right hand for me, left hand for Percy."

"Quiet over there!" McGonagall barked. "You're supposed to be working, not talking!"

"Yes Professor!" The three of us chorused.

Not wanting to answer any more questions, Harry and I tuned out Granger and Charles for a while, working on our charms for our Chess-board. We'd just about got the animation charm working. Our only problem now was trying to get the opposition to not kill you if you were playing on the board (for some reason our chess pieces were rather violent, something Harry liked to joke came from me for some reason… Just because I like fighting doesn't mean I'm violent!)

"Mr Potter. Mr Potter!"

We were startled out of our thoughts a while later by Professor McGonagall. The parchment we had been working on was a mess of the different spells we could use. Harry had been looking into spell creation for a while now, but the subject was vast, and we'd need several years before we could actually create a spell that both worked and wasn't dangerous. Shaking our head to clear our thoughts, Harry turned to our Transfiguration teacher.

"Sorry Professor, we were lost in our thoughts, how can we help you?"

A smile twitched at McGonagall's lips, almost ruining her strict teacher act she put on. "I was wondering how your Chess Board was coming along. I imagine you've almost completed it by now."

"Almost." Harry agreed, showing her our parchment. "There's just a slight complication with making it safe to play, as it can be a little too… enthusiastic sometimes…"

Professor McGonagall smiled and pointed to one of the spells we'd written down. "I'd suggest this one, though you may wish to double check that with Professor Flitwick. Oh! I've been meaning to tell you, Professor Dumbledore was wondering if you'd let him borrow it, once you've finished. He wanted to mark it himself, after hearing Professor Flitwick and me talk about it."

We shrugged. "Sure. Do you think we'll be able to get it back for the summer though? I was hoping to have a chess tournament with Charles using it."

Charles poked our side questioningly, and Harry shot him a look to tell him we'd talk to him later. Charles nodded, and we turned back to Professor McGonagall.

"I don't see why you wouldn't be able do. Good luck."

As soon as McGonagall had moved away Charles pounced on us, wanted to know what that was about.

"Peace!" Harry laughed. "We were given extra credit projects in Transfiguration and Charms. Since the product wasn't specified we decided to combine them and create a life-size chess board. It's going to be brilliant, just as soon as we can get the little kinks smoothed out. It's going to be amazing!"

The bell rang then, signalling the end of class. We all but ran out, excited about this new development with our project. It was lunch, so we started our hunt for Professor Flitwick. He was, rather predictably, in his classroom, preparing for the Seventh year class he had next. And by 'getting ready' I mean he was spelling chalk to write on the board (as he was too short) while he marked their essays. His head only just cleared the top of his desk. I sniggered quietly in our head, earning me a disapproving glare from Harry.

'Don't be rude Percy! It's not his fault he's part goblin...'

'I know, but still! I wasn't trying to be mean. It's just a funny image…' I pouted.

"Professor Flitwick?" Harry said, alerting the short Charms professor to our presence. He looked up with a warm smile, excitement lighting up his eyes.

"Ah! Mr Potter. Now, what is it I can be helping you with? Is your project coming along smoothly?" The half-goblin eagerly asked as he stood and moved round his desk to talk to us.

"Oh, yes, our project is coming along very well actually. We just had a slight problem to sort out…"

Harry proceeded to explain our problem to our professor, and then inquire about the spell McGonagall had picked up on as a possibility. This started a long debate about the affects using this charm might have if it reacted with the other charms we had used, but in the end we agreed that it shouldn't affect the command sequence we had charmed the pieces with.

Half of our lunch break had gone by the time we made it up to the Great Hall to eat. We skilfully avoided the never-ending questions from our peers by casting a 'notice-me-not' charm round ourselves. Draco, Blaise and Theo gave us hell in potions next, of course, for 'avoiding them' but Harry and I considered it worth it for the half hour of peace it gave us.

Potions was pretty normal. Our Godfather took great pleasure in deducting points from Gryffindor, and granting Slytherin's as many as possible. This was fun to watch, of course, but did lead to a greater rift between the two houses. Blaise and Theo loved to throw random potion ingredients into the cauldrons of unsuspecting Lions, which lead to them attempting to retaliate and then getting caught and loosing points… It was an ongoing cycle that never seemed to end.

Usually Harry rather enjoyed this banter between the two houses, but today Harry and I just kept our heads down, preferring to just make our potion. I'm positive that Draco noticed this shift from our normal behaviour, but he didn't comment on it. Our thoughts were solely based on what McGonagall had told us earlier. It hadn't been anything particularly noteworthy at the time, but the more we thought on it, the more it troubled us.

Why would the Headmaster want to see our project? It would make sense for him to be interested in some of the older year's projects, when the students had a better idea of what they were doing, and had put more planning into their work, but ours? We were just first years, our project had been a mere idea that struck us quite randomly, and the product itself wasn't exactly anything spectacular.

Or cauldron suddenly started fizzing, drawing our attention back to the present. We frowned. None of the ingredients we were using today should have this affect. It would require… something like boomslang skin, and no way, no matter how distracted we were, I know we didn't pick any of that up. I quickly quenched the flames with a water spell while Harry tried cast a shield round the soon-to-be-exploding cauldron. Then we ducked under the desk, pulling Draco down with us, only moments before it exploded.

A loud boom shook the room as the gloopy substance shot high up, coating ceiling a sickly green. Apparently Harry hadn't managed to complete his shield. Luckily the potion went straight up, and so avoided straying the rest of our classmates with the now acidic substance. Draco was safely shielded under the table, but a large glob landed on the back of our hand, making it sting something horrible. I hissed, pulling the hand close to our chest after flicking off the mixture. A large section of skin had been eaten away, leaving a raw bloody mess open to the air. For anyone considering messing around with potions – don't. When things go wrong, they go very badly wrong. As demonstrated, courtesy of moi.

Professor Snape stormed over, looking stressed after having to deal with our brother's exploding potion. "Harry and Percy! What on earth have you two managed to do now? And I thought you two were the only Potters that I didn't have to worry about in here…" He grumbled, inspecting the ruined potion. I blushed, staining our cheeks red and Draco let out a little amused snort.

"Sorry sir," I apologised. "We've been a bit distracted today. I think someone must have thrown something into our potion. For the cough potion to explode then it would have to take something such as boomslang skin. That isn't something we would have easily mixed up!"

Severus' face cleared. "Well then. It would appear one of your classmates has done something extremely dangerous."

I tilted our head to one side as Severus turned to the rest of the class sharply, his face thunderous.

"Who threw potion ingredients into Mr Potter's cauldron? Because whoever it was better own up right now!" He said. The scariest part was that he didn't yell, he didn't shout. He merely spoke the words, and the quiet fury was so unlike him that it scared the lights out of all of us.

There was a moment of silence, during which our godfather's wrath only grew. Just as he opened his mouth to say something else, Goyle raised his hand. The rest of the Slytherin's stared at the boy in shock and surprise. Severus pressed his lips together into a tight line for a moment as he glowered at the poor boy.

"I… I didn't mean to sir." Goyle offered. "It was an accident. I found it in my pile of ingredients and knew it wasn't part of the potion so… so I threw it behind me…"

Anyone who had met any member of the Goyle family knew that they weren't known or their brains. They made good followers, being made up of muscle and strength, and were good a following orders. Ask them to come up with a scheme by themselves and you'd get a completely blank look from them. That meant either somebody else had given Goyle the idea, or he had just acted without thinking. Given he was one of Draco's friends, and asked to protect him by Draco's father, my guess was that it had just been a thoughtless action.

Severus seemed to think this too and some of the fury on his face subsided. "My office, at the end of class."

Just as Professor Snape turned to walk away he caught sight of our hand. His eyes softened slightly. It wasn't something anybody would really notice, not if you didn't know him really well, but it was there. Shaking his head, our godfather gently reached for our hand.

"I suppose that you weren't planning on mentioning this were you?" He scolded, wincing as he inspected it. "Come with me, I'll get you a paste to put on it."

He led us to his office (a small room just off from classroom) and directed us to run our hand under cold water while he fetched the paste. Following his instructions, I turned on the tap in the little sink that stood in a corner of the room.

'Ready?' I asked Harry, trying to ready myself for the sting of pain I was knew this would cause.

'Ready as ever.' Harry replied, taking a deep breath and hardening his resolution. 'Do it.'

Closing our eyes, I cautiously put our hand under the stream of water. But the pain we were expecting never came. Instead the cool liquid seemed to soothe our wound, numbing the pain. I opened our eyes and we watched in amazement as the water rinsed the potion and other dirt out of the wound before the skin slowly began to regrow, and the damaged muscle knitted itself back together.

"I've got the –" Our godfather trailed off as he stared at our hand. "How are you doing that?"

We glanced up at him. "Doing what? We just did as you said, running it under the water, and it just started to heal. It's odd. Water hasn't ever had that affect before…"

A thoughtful expression passed over Severus' face. For a moment he didn't move and just stood there thinking. Then he shook himself. "Well, clearly you don't need this anymore, do you? And boys – don't mention this to anybody else, ok? It would be wise to keep such strange matters to yourself. If anything else happens, come tell me, but… just me? Just for now, until I can figure out what it is."

'But why?' I asked silently, knowing that speaking the words out loud wouldn't get us anywhere.

'It sounds reasonable…' Harry said. 'Just as Draco always says – we shouldn't advertise our strengths.'

We nodded at our godfather, who smiled at us. "Go on, go help Draco. If you have time this weekend, you can redo that potion."

"Thank you!" We grinned up at the tall greasy haired man we had come to love and admire. He gave us a small smile in return and waved his hand to dismiss us.

We returned to where Draco was working. His potion had survived ours exploding, purely due to the repelling charms he had placed round his cauldron. We usually did the same thing, but we'd forgotten. I showed Draco our newly healed hand and he smiled, easily moving over to let us help him.

We chatted for the remaining twenty minutes of the lesson on the most random of subjects. Quidditch was a popular theme, but so was school subjects and our extra curricula projects. Draco was working on a book of the spells we had learned in charms this year, and researching ways in which they could be enhanced or tiny alterations to change say, the colour of the result, to the power behind the spell. It took a bit of persuading, but he eventually agreed to allow Harry to read it when he was finished.

The lesson ended without any more problems, and we all rushed to get out. Well, the Gryffindors all but sprinted to get away from Professor Snape. We Snakes exited at a better pace, but were still eager to get back to our common room. We said goodbye to Draco, Theo and Blaise outside the classroom, eager to get to our project and finish it.

The spell that we had found to solve our problem turned out to be more complicated than we had first anticipated. It took a good hour to get the spell correctly cast a worker to the right standard. First it was too strong, and then the pieces refused to play properly. Then we hand to counter it and cast again. That time we didn't put enough power into the spell, and we were back to square one. Still, six recast spells and a lot of cursing later, we had our finished master piece.

Seemingly coincidently, Professor Dumbledore poked his head round the door a few minutes after we had finished, when we were having a mini game by ourselves. We spun around as the door creaked open, and beamed at the old man.

"We did it!" Harry exclaimed happily. "Took us a while, but we did it!"

"So you did, my boys, so you did." The headmaster smiled back at us, his eyes twinkling merrily. "Can I see how it works?"

"Of course!" Harry said. For the first time in our life, we had made something we could show off, so why shouldn't we? "Chessboard, reset!"

The pieces that had been destroyed during our game quickly repaired themselves and moved to their original positions on the board.

I watched as Dumbledore played. He was good. He had a set strategy that he kept to. Harry laughed as the old man pulled a face as the opposition moved in a way that he hadn't quite expected. He sent us a fake disapproving look, but it quickly melded into a smile when he saw the excitement in our eyes.

"You've done some beautiful spell work on this, Mr Potter." Dumbledore commented. "Is there any way to override the spells put into it?"

Harry laughed. "Why would that matter? It's a bit like muggle programming, I guess. To override our spells you have to first be able to spot what you want to change, and then know the language required to change it. So if you have the knowledge then I guess, yeah, there is a way of manipulating the spells, but why anyone would want to is a different matter."

"Indeed." Dumbledore's smile never faltered, but I did spot his eyes tighten just a little as Harry spoke. I don't think Harry noticed, too busy explaining our work to the headmaster, but I did. I couldn't tell you why I noticed, or why I even thought it was important, but I did.

Quickly moving on, Professor Dumbledore summoned Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick to see our finished master piece. I think they were suitably impressed by it, and marvelled at the spells woven into its making.

By the time we made it down to dinner we were both elated with the satisfaction of finally finishing our project. Draco noticed of course, and congratulated us before requesting help for his book. Harry didn't even hesitate to agree. I scowled jokingly at him.

'You know Harry, I'm starting to think that you're overloading us with school work to get out of my exercise routine.' I pouted.

'Darn, you're on to me!' He joked, before asking very seriously, 'You don't mind the work do you? Because we can cut down on reading time if there's anything you'd prefer to do.'

'It's fine!' I laughed. 'But I get more time in the holidays.'

'Ok…' It was Harry pouting this time.

Draco nudged us, breaking us out of our thoughts. "Come on, you've been distant all day. Talk a little!"

We laughed, but plunged into the ongoing conversation, placing our bets on the next Quidditch match and sharing gossip we'd picked up on during the day. It was nice to just relax without worrying about anything. We pushed all the thoughts that had been troubling us aside and just did what we did best: joked and offered our contributions to the discussion.

And for tonight, just for one night, we didn't think about homework or the problems going on in the Forbidden Forest, or about our nightmares or Dumbledore. We ignore all of that and just messed around with our year-mates, dancing to music (extremely badly), cracking jokes and teasing each other. And, for this one night, we let loose and had a good time because we could feel the storm building. And when it broke, something told us we weren't going to have a break for a good long while. Because this didn't just feel like a storm. It felt like a hurricane. A hurricane fast approaching.