When Worlds Collide

Chapter 11 - Turnabout

The Weasleys hadn't been looking forward to Snape's arrival, and the expression of disdain on his face when he appeared had done nothing to reassure them. The children were seated at the dining table, whereas Snape preferred to stand the whole time - presumably to empress his authority, or something equally petty. He had dispensed the homework from Hogwarts' other teachers to them with the air of a child who had been sent on a trivial errand, before moving onto their potions lesson.

"You have half an hour to create this potion," Snape was saying. "Unfortunately, I cannot get you to make the potion the class did today because Longbottom again displayed his incompetence and so wasted the remaining ingredients when he spilled his potion all over them. Although," Snape added with a wry smile, "it was a small consolation to see his face erupt in the resulting purple boils."

"He would think so," Fred muttered out the corner of his mouth to George, while staring almost venomously at Snape.

"The Contego potion," Snape said a little louder, deliberately ignoring Fred's mutter, "will not make itself - your allocated half hour runs short." He gestured to the list of ingredients written on a conjured blackboard, prompting his class of three, who turned back the cauldrons that the professor had supplied.

Ginny wasn't sure if her potion was supposed to be spitting with angry red tongues of flame. Her brothers both had potions of gently simmering blue.

"It is beyond me what that potion is supposed to be, Miss Weasley," came the condescending voice of Professor Snape. "But it is clearly not the Contego potion. Rather than a guard against deceptive influence, it looks like something created to do nothing but inflict needless damage." With a swipe of his wand, the contents of Ginny's cauldron disappeared. "Next time, it would be more prudent to use the diced bat spleen as instructed."

Ginny groaned inwardly. She'd forgotten the bat spleen. She frowned in frustration. Why am I expected to do the same thing as them, she wondered angrily, frowning toward her brothers. They're three years ahead of me.

With her failed cauldron gone, and so with nothing more to do in the 'class', Ginny had time to muse quietly and try to think of some answers to the questions milling about her head.

"Well, we did ours wrong, too," George said by way of consolation to his sister, when Snape had left with the reassurance he would be back tomorrow. "Apparently they weren't supposed to get little bubbles in the middle."

"Now, dears," said Mrs Weasley. "It's good that the Professor is coming in to teach you - it's best to make the most of the situation, however unpleasant it is."

Ginny pushed back her chair and trod noisily up the stairs to her room, her brow furrowed in thought.

It didn't take long for her bedroom door to open again once she'd gone through it, and Fred and George appeared - she knew they would.

"What was that about?" Fred queried. "You looked like you were contemplating the universe."

"Something weird is going on," Ginny surmised as she clambered onto her bed to sit. "I'm a fourth year, you're a seventh - and yet we get assigned the same things."

"That's weird?" George said, a relieved grin spilling across his face. "I figure it's just lazy. Snape didn't want to come here in the first place, let alone teach two lessons simultaneously."

"But Professor Binns and the other teachers - who still only teach at Hogwarts - wouldn't assign the same thing just out of laziness, would they?"

"We have the same-?"

"Thoroughly research incidents of political coups by underage wizards?"

George consulted the homework assignments still clutched in his hand. "Well, blimey, so he has. It could have been a mistake though, right? I mean, Binns hardy seems, well...all there, sometimes."

"Even so, he pays loads of attention to the very boring things he does," said Fred. "So, not likely."

"And why are they different lessons?" Ginny asked as if talking to herself.

"How do you know they are?" said Fred. "I mean, Snape did admit the potion was different, but that was just because-"

"Do you really think he would leave all the ingredients in his supply - which would be much more than the class would need - out on his desk? And also, Neville sits near the back of the class - I've heard Parvarti talk about his potion accidents sometimes and she said so. Even if Snape, for some silly reason, did have his very last available potion ingredients of the lesson on his desk, Neville could never have been able to spill anything on it!"

The twins just looked blinkingly at their sister. These new and astute observations didn't answer any of the questions in their mind...only created a whole lot more.

~<>~

The Great Hall was lit with the usual, in the way of candles lightly bobbing in mid-air and un-natural light coming from nowhere in particular. The difference that first would have stood out to someone who knew the norm was the condition of the students. Jovial conversation no longer domineered the tables - instead they were cloaked in nervous and apprehensive whispers, and small sneaking curious glances were sent up to the staff table. The majority of the staff seemed none too pleased either - Professor Sprout and Madame Pomfrey muttered to each other in low tones, McGonagall was tight-lipped as she looked resolutely down to her plate, and Professor Snape's expression was, as always, unreadable - it was the general consensus now that his sour look was a natural state, after all.

Overlooking the Great Hall and its dining students sat the reason for the gathering's discomfort. Where Dumbledore would otherwise have sat, gazing down in all his serenity, another younger, harder face sat. His formal superior glance over the room had the air of someone who was the very embodiment of a cold hard winter. When he slowly stood to address the room following dessert, the students fell into a palpable nervous silence.

"Now that you are all sufficiently filled and therefore more likely to pay attention," Lucius Malfoy started, "let me state a few notices to you all. And I expect you all to listen - Albus Dumbledore always was too lenient in allowing disrespectful behaviour."

Professor McGonagall looked like she was trying extremely hard not to hex Lucius Malfoy with erupting incurable facial pus.

"You should find that, at this stage," continued Lucius, "the change in staff of this school will not reflect in..." here he paused as if trying to think of an appropriate term, "...many changes in its curriculum or its rules - merely, the rules that are already in place will be more strictly enforced. I - with Ministry backing, naturally - have seen fit to appoint you with a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. Although the instruction of Professor McGonagall may have been adequate, even with her need to maintain her other class also, I'm afraid she is not so...qualified, for the job, as the person I have now appointed. Indeed, I fail to see why Dumbledore had not done this earlier. Professor Snape will now teach Defence Against the Dark Arts."

A shocked murmuring broke out amongst the students at these words. Snape made Potions class notoriously nasty, but now it sounded like there were to be two classes with this effect.

"I do not feel that it would be prudent to expect him to also maintain his Potions classes," Lucius said, "so although he will be the official teacher of the class, he will be aided in these by a Hogwarts graduate particularly gifted in the area of Potions - Brian Zabini."

Blaise Zabini, a Slytherin fifth-year, sunk down a little under the surprised inquisitive stares of surrounding students. If he had known of his older sibling's new Hogwarts employment, he had apparently not told his housemates about it.

"And if my fellow staff members have nothing more to add," Lucius concluded with an air clearly saying that they weren't being invited to speak at all, "you may all quietly make your way back to your dormitories. There will be no loitering in the halls or venturing outside - if you are found doing this, it will result in detention. That is all," he finished loftily, before sitting down again.

There was a hesitant rustling as the students shifted, obviously unsure if energetic movement under the haughty eye of Lucius Malfoy would gain them a detention. The new headmaster however seemed uninterested in the students now, opting instead to mutter into the ear of Professor Snape - who had been relocated to sit on Lucius' left - so after a few moments the students bustled out of the Great Hall as quickly as they dared.

As Neville Longbottom, a Gryffindor 5^th year, clambered into bed later that night, his dorm mates Dean and Seamus still down in the Gryffindor Common Room, it struck him just how lonely the room felt without the lively conversation of Harry and Ron. Usually the room would be filled with the day's injustices involving Snape, and Divination nonsense. But now it only held a deathly silence, the dulled voices of those remaining downstairs drifted up to him as if from a distant world. He held his old worn blue and red stuffed fish to him, instinctively. He didn't like people to know he still cuddled a stuffed toy sometimes - after all, most 15-year-old boys leave that sort of thing in their early childhood - but this fish had been a gift to him from his parents when he was small, so he still kept it. One of its eyes had long since been lost, leaving a lone stray strand of string hanging from its head. One of the fins had obviously come off and been clumsily sewn back on a couple of times.

Heavy footsteps stomping up the stairs to his dormitory gave him plenty of warning to hide the fish under the covers, before Dean and Seamus loudly came through the door and made their way over to their beds.

"Hey there, Nev," Seamus said conversationally in his friendly Irish accent, but his voice was unusually sombre.

"We were just talking about the upcoming Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff," added Dean. "We have no way of knowing how well Gryffindor will do now that we've lost both our Beaters and now two Seekers!"

"Well, we'll have to get some good replacements in the tryouts this week, otherwise we'll have to forfeit!" Seamus exclaimed in horror.

"I hear that that fourth year, Rhys Castle, is trying out for the Seeker," Dean said. "Personally, I think he'd make a better Beater - he has the look for it."

Neville watched their relayed conversation in silence for a few minutes before interjecting, "Do you suppose they'll only be a temporary replacement?"

Dean and Seamus stilled for a moment, before resuming their bedtime routines.

"I expect so," said Seamus, with false bravado.

"I mean," supplied Dean, "surely Dumbledore will bring Harry back soon, and hopefully the Weasleys will then be allowed back in so we'll get our Beaters back."

"Yeah," said Seamus, and he clambered under his covers, still leaving his bed hangings open so he could see Dean and Neville. "What do you think about the other formidable change to Hogwarts?"

"Lucius Malfoy?" Neville questioned rhetorically, and his voice shook a little.

"Forget Quidditch tryouts," Dean said sourly as he too climbed into bed. "We may as well hand over the House Cup to Slytherin now, and get it over with."

"And we thought Snape was bad," commented Seamus. "I reckon we're about to see a whole lot worse."

"All he's done so far though is make Snape our Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher," Neville said quietly. "I wonder why he did that... I mean, Dumbledore had never given him the job, and why would Lucius want him teaching it?"

"Three guesses, Nev," Seamus said bitterly. "With Lucius in charge, I reckon we've become You-Know-Who's playground."

However lightly Seamus may have meant this statement, the ominous tone suggested that perhaps it wasn't only Harry who was seriously endangered.

~<>~

Harry wasn't sure how it happened, but in their shock at hearing this surprise revelation from Trina, he, Ron, Hermione and Draco had somehow made their way back into the room they'd come from, and he was relieved that neither Tony or Trina had pursued them.

'...tell them it's your fault they're here...' The words still echoed around Harry's head in terrible repetition.

"Harry..." Ron managed to get out between almost hyperventilating squeaky breaths, but the rest of the sentence was unfinished.

Hermione too looked quite startled, and Harry could almost see the workings in her head steaming, as she was trying to process what they'd just heard and come up with plausible explanations.

Draco looked nothing short of stunned, and beyond his superficial panic Harry shared this emotion. After all, neither of the girls had seemed malicious - it had been rather easy to trust that they were on Harry's side. Despite Tony's occasional similarities to Draco Malfoy, she had never seemed the type to betray them...

A seething self-hatred began to brew in Harry. Why did he take for granted they would help? After all, Harry and his friends - and Draco - had turned up in the middle of the night on the doorstep of strangers... why would he believe it to be genuine when the girls offered to bring them immediately back home at their own cost? He should have known...

"You don't suppose they work for- for You-Know-Who, do you?" stammered Ron, who seemed to have somewhat found his voice again.

Harry thought this concept strange, but he couldn't think of any other explanation. One look at Hermione told him that she couldn't either.

"Well they haven't done anything particularly threatening to us so far," Hermione reasoned. "Perhaps they're not dangerous."

"Then why did they go to such efforts to keep it a secret that it was them - or Tony - that brought us here in the first place?" Ron said, heatedly. "They can't be taking us home! Not when they could have just left us there!"

"Surely they don't work for Voldemort," said Harry quietly, as if trying to convince himself.

"And before you accuse me of anything," Draco added, "I'm as surprised as you about this. Although, I can think of a reason why they won't be working for You-Know-Who."

Harry's focus snapped to Draco. "Why?"

Draco looked at him as if Harry had just questioned the most obvious thing in the world. "They're muggles, Potter. You-Know-Who would kill them as soon as look at them. He certainly wouldn't initiate them as Death Eaters!"

"We don't really know for sure if they're muggles," Hermione justified.

Ron was indignant. "Have you seen them practice any form of magic, Hermione?"

"They could be squibs," Hermione defended herself. "They're not necessarily totally ignorant of the magical world. They've read our published story apparently, and would know the things that were mentioned in those, but if they're squibs they would know a lot more - things that maybe gave them a reason to part you, Harry, from Dumbledore and the other witches and wizards who protect you."

This theory was particularly unnerving to the boys.

"I should talk to them, then," surmised Harry. "If it was just a mistake, they should tell me readily, or otherwise they'll say something to give away their standing."

"Or they could just decide you're too close to knowing the truth, and set up other people to hex you into oblivion," Ron declared. "Or just kill you in a painful muggle way."

Hermione's face had still been tensed pensively. Now she spoke, "Then, I think there's just one of us who can talk to them." The room fell silent as they waited for her to continue. "Malfoy," she said, turning to him, and the Slytherin leaned his head back exasperatedly against the wall. "Oh, stop looking at me like that - I'm not saying you're working for You-Know-Who! But even you can't deny that you'd be more likely to be on his side than any of us. At least if you went in to talk to them, you'd have a much better chance of emerging unscathed than if Harry, Ron or I went."

"Plus," Ron added sourly, "Tony would be much less likely to kill the person she likes." It looked that since learning this fact of Tony's partiality, Ron's opinion of her had decreased dramatically.

Draco looked as though he would have dearly loved to say something to argue this theory, but Hermione appeared to be right - he couldn't deny he was the most appropriate candidate, considering their reasoning.

"Oh, fine," he said exasperatedly, and he huffily got up from his seat on the bed, indignantly flicking his white hair from his face. When he reached the door he looked back over his shoulder to see the others readying to follow close behind him, presumably to listen to the upcoming conversation. "All of you stay here," Draco commanded. "I'm not talking to a couple of maybe-murderers with three Gryffindors breathing over my shoulder. It doesn't do much to inspire confidence."

To be sure that they still weren't going to follow him into the hallway, he shut his door behind him. A few paces brought him to the door they had left in such a confused panic a few minutes ago. It wasn't completely closed - Draco could make out a thin sliver of wall past the door - but he didn't feel great about just pushing it open and marching on in. Especially since he now no longer knew where Tony and Trina stood. He raised his fist to knock, but then lowered it. Somehow knocking seemed unnecessary now. It would just be one more thing to make the situation more strained, and anyway, they'd know Harry or one of other others would soon come to ask questions. Draco listened intently for any more conversation snippets going on inside the room, or noise of any activity. There was none. Surely they wouldn't have gone to sleep already... no, the room's light was still on, after all. And they must still be in there - they wouldn't leave their room in a backpacker's hostel lit and unlocked.

Taking a big quivering breath, he slowly pushed the door open. Tony and Trina certainly didn't look dangerous at this time - or at least, not about to kill anybody, anyway. Tony was sitting on the bottom bunk looking positively dejected. At Draco's entrance, she groaned quietly and put her face in her hands. Trina was sitting on the bed opposite her, looking slightly regretful, but more apathetic - as if the worst had already been done, so there was no point in worrying about how the others could take it.

Draco didn't know what to say - he hadn't planned beyond just opening the door - so for a while they all sat in heavy silence, before Tony's muffled voice came beyond her hands, "That wasn't how I would have chosen for you to have found out."

Obviously she wasn't talking about the newly discovered partialities. Although that would normally have been the choice for conversation, it had since been far surpassed by the more disturbing confession.

"So..." Draco started hesitantly, "what was it exactly that we were meant to have found out? How is it your fault?"

"It was my computer-" began Tony.

"Your what?"

"On the Internet-"

"The what?"

"Oh, this is stupid!" she exclaimed, lowering her hands. "They sent you in here, didn't they, because they all figure that you'd be least likely to be done in by someone on the 'dark' side!"

"Well," Draco justified with a small shrug, "it does make sense."

"It's not very practical, considering you don't know what we're talking about!"

"Don't snap at me! I didn't have a choice! I was just sent in here!"

"We'll have to talk to you all," Trina interjected loudly. "We'll come in to explain it as best we can. You've obviously all jumped to the most stupid conclusion known to man."

Draco frowned as Tony herded him out of the room in front of her. "You have to walk in first," she muttered to him. "Knowing them and their paranoia, they'd think we're in there to kill them, otherwise."

As soon as the door opened and Draco walked through it, the interrogation started.

"What did-?"

However, when they saw that the Slytherin was closely followed by Tony and Trina, all speech was cut off, and the youths remained rigid in their seats. Draco crossed over to the bed and resumed his seat against the wall.

"Look," Trina said, holding her hands up. "No weapons of mass destruction in sight."

Harry, Ron and Hermione looked over at Tony, but she just rolled her eyes at them. "Look," she started, "I can imagine why you freaked out over...what you heard, but there's really no need to be so skittish. Now, I did try to explain to Draco, but since he didn't understand a word I was saying-"

"Only the muggle parts!" Draco interrupted defensively.

"-we've come in here to tell you all. I don't expect Ron to understand much either, but hopefully you two will," Trina finished, motioning to Harry and Hermione.

She looked at Tony, and it was obviously her cue to speak. Tony crossed the room to sit on the desk under the window, and she looked down at her slightly swinging feet for a while, apparently gathering her thoughts.

"Do you remember my computer?" she said to no one in particular. "When you first came to my room, it was the thing I refused to leave in there with you."

"She's just very protective of it," Trina said.

"Yes, I remember it," said Harry, matter-of-factly, still looking wary.

"Well," Tony continued, "I'd been using it shortly before you all showed up. I was surfing Internet sites on it-" (by this stage Draco and Ron's eyes had a rather glazed uncomprehending look to them) "-and I came across a rather odd one. It said some rubbish about clicking a...thing, to make all your doubts proved wrong or something..."

"It said, 'if you have the faith to voice the impossible and then click this icon here, the aforementioned impossibility will show itself as a concealed reality'," Trina spoke up, and Tony looked at her, impressed that she remembered it down to the last word. "And of course at that stage, we thought the world of Harry Potter was nothing more than a story - it wasn't real, to us."

"So we thought we'd try it, just to see what really happened," Tony continued. "We guessed either nothing at all would, or we'd get a subscription form to some mystical money-hungry site."

"But her computer recited some amateur poem, meant to be intimidating, and then you guys came."

Harry and Hermione clearly didn't know what to make of this, or even to believe them. It did sound awfully far-fetched.

"Why would we have deliberately taken you from Hogwarts?!" Trina asked, exasperated. "We don't have money to burn! It's not like we were just running out of ways to spend it so we decided, 'Hey, we'll bring some people over from the other side of the world just so we can spend money taking them back!'"

"Forgetting about the money thing, then," Harry said, "how could a computer bring us over? It's just not possible. How does your story explain that?"

Tony looked up with an expression of relief, perhaps now because her explanations had been cut mercifully short, since Harry had picked up on a crucial point. "Exactly!" she said. "It couldn't! Although I was panicking myself stupid initially, I've realised that it couldn't have been the actual site that brought you over - it had to have been whoever was behind it! And since Trina and I are only muggles - not squibs, as I'm sure you'd speculated - we couldn't have actively done it. So whoever put that site there was obviously the one who's responsible for this. If I hadn't clicked the...thing, icon, then there would have been another way that you came over here. I just didn't want to tell you this early on because it would invoke an all-out panic, and I didn't want you all wary of us before you even got a chance to see we're not creepy people."

Tony took a big breath after her long spiel, and looked at Harry carefully to see if he understood this.

"So we weren't pulled here toward someone bad at this end," said Ron, mulling over the words in his effort to comprehend, "but were pushed by someone back home?"

"Something like that," Hermione said. "That's what it sounds like. But why? Considering we haven't been approached by anyone magical, bad or otherwise, it could possibly have been a mistake that we ended up here."

"Not that my opinion is worth anything to you right now," Tony said, "but I think that site was a means of doing just this - invoking a panic so you'd turn against us, do something stupid, and make it easier for Mouldywart to win."

"Voldemort," Harry corrected.

"Whatever."

The room again fell into an uncomfortable silence, and the two host girls could tell that their story hadn't wholly been accepted yet.

"It's 1:30 in the morning," Trina said conclusively, and her voice was tired - tired of the confusion and the conflict. "Do what you want; I'm practically beyond caring. Go to bed, go to sleep, discuss this till it's ragged...do what you want. Tony and I are going, and hopefully in the morning you're feeling a little better."

She traipsed slowly out the door, Tony following.