Chapter Text
It was sheer chaos.
Absolute madness.
Hermione stood on the banks of the Black Lake, where McGonagall had herded the sixth- and seventh-year students. This was to be the thousandth year of Hogwarts and the board of governors had decreed that there should be some sort of celebration. The world hadn’t ended with Y2K as the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve, but this summer of 2000 was shaping up to be utterly unfathomable.
She shook her curls behind her shoulders and tried to project an air of authority that she still felt she sadly lacked. Sure, she’d finished her two-year transfiguration mastery in a single year. Of course, McGonagall had hired her to take her place as transfiguration teacher come the first of September. Yet she was still slightly mystified as to how, precisely, she’d been snookered into supervising this herd of cats as they tried to pull off a play about the founding of Hogwarts.
This was the cream of the crop. Those students who had actually read Hogwarts: A History and passed the written test Hermione had set out in order to weed out those who simply wanted to come and stare at her rather than get down to the serious business of history through theatre.
McGonagall had been busy over the previous year in creating this amphitheatre next to the beach. Carved into the curving hillside it was done in the Roman style. Graceful steep steps and seats with cushioning charms built-in slid up from the square stage. There were awnings that could be charmed to keep the sun off and sluice off the rain if need be. This was Scotland. It could very well need be.
The stage itself had two brand-new wings and had a three-story tall wall behind the stage.
Hermione hadn’t been part of any magical theatre productions and, at her interview with, as she insisted she be called now, Minnie Hermione had heard herself volunteering to supervise. It’ll only be sixteen- and seventeen-year-old witches and wizards she thought to herself, how hard could it be. She’d faced down Voldemort, how much harder could teenagers be?
A lot harder, it turned out.
Standing centre stage she watched as two boys nearly smashed the two Viking longboats into each other as they tried to shrink them down and return them to the wings. On stage right there was a girl who was waving her wand and changing the colour of her rival’s tunic every time they switched it back to the heathered grey it was supposed to be.
And then there was the final problem.
Draco Malfoy.
He was supposed to be helping her, but he’d slinked off just as the teenagers arrived and she hadn’t seen him in over an hour. She ground her teeth together. He was also apprenticing next year as some sort of art conservator for the paintings in the castle. Very few magicians had the necessary persnicketiness to work on a single eyebrow for a week or the magical fortitude to create moving paintings, but that was, apparently, what Malfoy was good at.
He should be here she grumbled to herself, swishing her wand to keep a boy who reminded her of a young Neville Longbottom from falling from the highest point of the seats. He understood this whole art and theatre thing that she wasn’t quite so familiar with. She remembered as they were studying in their eighth year together when there had been a long, drawn-out whisper-argument under Ms Pince’s watchful eye about the Louvre.
His pale cheeks had heated to a firm pink as his grey eyes had rolled against her ignorance of muggle art.
“Not even just muggle art,” he’d said callously. “Do you know how much magical art is locked up in that basement?”
She sighed and cast a sonorous so she could be heard over the excited chatter.
“Could everyone come down to the orchestra so we can divide up the parts?”
Somehow this announcement just made the teenagers louder as they swanned down to the pit and jostled each other for a moment before staring up at her on the proscenium.
Teenagers shouldn’t make her knees quake. She’d have to teach them come the fall anyway. She straightened out her back, opened her mouth to start speaking and was interrupted by a near cyclone that raced past her downstage and flung a spell towards the students that simulated rain.
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!” Draco was holding onto a staff and using it to stir the spell he’d cast, making it seem as though he was in the middle of a thunderstorm. His cloak whipped in the air behind him and he seemed remarkably in his element. “You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!”
Shaking his fist into the air he cleared the spell and the students gave a cheer. Flushed and happy he turned towards Hermione and seemed to shrink under her glare. “What?” he asked, raking a hand through his hair to lay it flat again.
“What do you think you’re doing, Malfoy?”
“Shakespeare,” he sounded totally cavalier and she started to count backwards from ten, tamping down her anger. “I thought you’d approve, Granger, since he was a muggle and all.”
“Shakespeare was a muggle?”
He grinned back ferally. “You didn’t know that, Granger? I mean, wizards keep trying to make him at least a squib. I think it’s just because they like his plays so much.”
Her eyes ran over their audience and she throttled her voice down to a stage whisper. “You’re not even in the right time period. That’s six hundred years late for what we’re trying to do here.”
“I know, Granger,” he whispered back, mirroring her intensity, “but they at least know Shakespeare and not the fiddle-faddle that McGonagall has insisted we put a play on about.”
“It’s about the founding of Hogwarts! Didn’t you read Hogwarts: A History or the script I slipped under your door this morning?” she hissed through clenched teeth.
“No.” The grey eyes were amused, but he turned, pointing his staff out towards the students. “Who are those who want to audition for the founders? Excellent.” He waved a wand at the wing. “Please line up behind the colour of your desired founder and we will listen to your prepared auditions.”
Turning back towards Granger he bowed towards the flat surface facing the stage in the stands where, ordinarily, an altar to Dionysus would sit. “Shall we?”
Malfoy had been insufferable all throughout auditions. He’d listened attentively, made notes on the students as actors and had behaved himself as the students fumbled the lines she’d written.
His hair ruffled in the breeze off the lake that had hit the stones they were sitting on for centuries before McGonagall had transfigured them into this configuration. Now he was standing, his eyes measuring her as the students shuffled off up to the castle in bunches, cloaks pulled tight against the evening’s chill.
A grin broke across his face. “This’ll be fun, Granger. Shall we compare notes over some mulled wine tonight in the Great Hall after dinner?”