Dark of the Soul

Chapter 4: Civil Disobedience

To sooth his irritation with Hermione, Ron slouched down into his seat at the Gryffindor table and focused all his attention on a pile of spiced chicken legs that appeared in the serving dish in front of him. He ripped the chicken flesh from the bone and barely chewed before swallowing and pacified himself with happy thoughts of his fist connecting with any of several faces from Slytherin House.

"Ron, slow down, you´re going to make yourself sick," Hermione scolded lightly.

Ron grunted. His irritation renewed. One, Hermione refused come with him to the showers and scrub his back, especially since she was a prefect and had access to a good bath. Two, when he had entered the dining hall she clung to his arm to keep him away from the Slytherin table. Malfoy had held up one hand, thumb and forefinger extended to make an "L".

"Loser!" Malfoy mouthed silently. Crabbe and Goyle sniggered. It didn´t seem to occur to them that Slytherin was the one who lost the Quidditch match.

Hermione, on purpose, picked a spot at the Gryffindor table so their backs would be toward Slytherin. Ron grunted again. Bloody no fun Hermione was.

"Quit sulking, it´s very unattractive," she said and daintily selected food from the bowls and placed them in her plate.

"It´s not." Ron rather liked sulking, at least at the moment. Hermione ruined what could have been a good fight and was now trying to spoil a perfectly good sulk.

"It is," Hermione insisted.

"Not."

"Is!" She glared at Ron.

"This is a stupid argument," he said over a mouthful of food.

"We´re not arguing, we´re just contradicting each other."

"No.

"Yes!" Hermione threw her arms up in frustration. "You have no proof that Slytherin tried to hurt Ginny."

"I believe Harry when he tells me something like that. He wouldn´t go making it up now, would he? And since when did you start believing the Slytherins over us?"

Hermione got that superior expression on her face. "I won´t honor that ridiculous statement with an answer. You can be so thick sometimes, Ron Weasley."

Ron piled a huge helping of meat pie on his plate. Women! He looked up from his plate of food to take a breath and noted Harry still wasn´t around; he shouldn´t be beating himself up over Ginny´s injury. Ron felt bad for his sister, but these things happened during a Quidditch game and anyone who played understood the danger. And she had the best of care. Madam Pomfrey wouldn´t let anything happen to her. He heard the dinning room door thump open, but didn´t bother to look up as he shoved a large spoonful of meat pie in his mouth. Quidditch always made him wicked hungry. It was then he noticed that all the Gryffindor students at the table had stopped eating. Seamus had an odd expectant smile on his face. He and everyone else seemed to be staring toward the door. Hermione, too.

Nearly Headless Nick´s head popped up through the boiled potatoes, startling Ron. "I do say! Young Potter is looking very angry." He floated up and away.

Ron wrinkled his eyebrows, then looked up. Angry was an understatement. Harry looked furious.

His mouth dropped open. "Whoa."

Harry hadn´t bothered to change from his Quidditch uniform, but that wasn´t what surprised Ron. He had never seen Harry this riled up. Ever. His fists were clenched, eyebrows a dark slash over his eyes, a thunderous expression in his eyes, his scar stood out red on his forehead.

"Oh, no, this cannot be good," whispered Hermione. She turned to Ron and held on to his arm. "Don´t even think about it."

Ron ignored her, quickly chewed and swallowed his food and stood up as Harry stopped briefly at the table. "Alright there, Harry? Ready for a bit of head thumping?"

Harry nodded. "That´s about it." And the slight grin that tugged at his mouth wasn´t pleasant. He kept going toward the Slytherin table. Ron hesitated only a moment and followed, as did Seamus and Neville.

Hermione tried to pull Ron back to the table. "You´ll get expelled."

"Hermione," he said, "sometimes there´s just things a guy´s gotta do."

Hermione plunked back down on the bench. "What an idiot."

The three boys joined Harry standing by the Slytherin table.

"So how´s your Weasley girlfriend, Potter? She doesn´t catch a Bludger well, does she?"

"That Bludger was no accident," Harry said. "Ginny won´t say anything but I know she hiding something to protect someone."

"Now why would she do that?" Goyle said with a too-innocent look on his fat face. Crabbe and Malfoy smirked.

Ron didn´t hear that last bit, having instead focused on one particular word. "Girlfriend? Ginny? Harry?" he said aloud to no one in particular. Seamus shrugged. What seemed odd to Ron was that Harry wasn´t denying anything. Most of the time, Harry seemed to merely humor the younger girl´s idolizing, and he was pleasant to her, but that was all.

"Harry," Ron said and nudged his friend with his elbow. "What´s Malfoy talking about?"

"If you even look at her wrong," Harry was saying, "you´re going to be playing Quidditch with two broken arms."

"Threatening me, Potter?" Malfoy spat

"No." Harry stepped closer, his body stiff almost as if posed for a strike. "Not threats."

Malfoy sneered and leaned back in his chair. "Relax, Scarhead. The way I see it you should thank me, after all, I gave you yet another opportunity to be the big hero. Otherwise, how´re you going to get any girls to look at you, eh? Even one like that Weasley slag." He flicked a chicken bone at Harry´s chest and it bounced off and fell to the floor.

Ron saw red. No one called his little sister names. "Take it back, Malfoy!"

For a moment the entire hall was silent, as if everyone held his or her breaths. Only the professors eating at the head table seemed oblivious, except for Sirius, the current DADA teacher, he had a keen eye on Harry.

Harry suddenly stepped close to Malfoy and kicked his chair out from under him. Malfoy went flying back, thunked against the floor and was up just as fast as if spring-loaded.

"That was a mistake!" he hissed and launched himself at Harry.

It was Slytherin Vs. Gryffindor again, but this time it wasn´t a Quidditch match.

They rolled and punched; first Harry had the upper hand, then Malfoy. Crabbe and Goyle piled on top. Ron and Seamus followed. Ron felt a knee on the side of his head, or it could have been a punch; he wasn´t sure which in the mass of bodies. What surprised Ron the most was that Harry was a smashing good fighter, maybe he had practice from all that thumping he´d endured from Dudley for all those years. Whatever it was, he was getting some good punches in. Malfoy was going to have a shiner in the morning.

During the tussle, a table overturned. A bowl of mashed potatoes got launched onto the Ravenclaw table, spattering a half dozen Ravenclaw student. Indignant, one third year boy stood and began chucking chicken legs as fast as he could. One chicken leg accidentally pinged off the head of a Hufflepuff student.

"Hey!" the Hufflepuff student said and returned fire with a plate of bangers. Some students had their wands with them and magicked food into the air, most were contented to hurl whatever they could get their hands on.

Ron didn´t realize what was happening around him until a magicked bowl of meatpie, launched from the Hufflepuff table, turned upside down and landed down on his head. It looked like a gangly, too big hat. Meat pie dribbled down into his eyes. He licked at a juicy piece of meat oozing over his nose. The Slytherin student he was about to punch started snickering, then laughing. Ron smiled, lowered his fist, and soon he gave in to laughter. It was right difficult to punch someone when they were laughing.

Ron found Harry and Malfoy much more interested in throwing food at each other than throwing punches. Malfoy was in commando mode, using a big fork to launch bangers dipped in mash. Harry held a big plate in one hand and a long, cupped serving spoon in another that he used to launch bread rolls. He had a metal tureen over his head, the handle under his chin. He looked like a knight with a sword and shield. Peeves, having heard the commotion, couldn´t resist a food fight and he flew across the tables scooping up food and throwing it, all the while cackling with glee.

"THAT´S ENOUGH!" Albus Dumbledore´s voice roared over the dining hall.

Peeves dropped the food and disappeared quickly before someone blamed him for the whole thing. Filch was standing in the doorway looking as though a dung beetle had crawled up his nose. Even Mrs. Norris had a disgusted look on her whiskered face.

And suddenly everything in the air just stopped, then gently settled back to where it had originated. The students, who seemed to have forgotten the professors up at the head table, ceased. Not a word. Not a giggle. Not a sound was to be heard.

Hermione crawled out from under the table and surveyed the disaster. Food everywhere. Even the ghosts looked horrified, except the Bloody Baron who seemed to delight in the chaos.

"This is bad," Hermione whispered. "This is worse than expelled." And to Hermione there were very few things that were worse than being expelled.