A smile twisted onto his lips. "Oh but darling brother....you expect me to be so merciful..."
On that fateful night of Halloween, Dumbledore makes a fatal mistake; the wrong boy-who-lived is named. Soon after, Harry James Potter was thrown in Azkaba...
Neville Longbottom walked into the Hogwarts Library that evening, followed by a dreamy Luna Lovegood who wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to their surroundings. He was very nervous. He knew exactly of whom Harry's group consisted of; the whole school did.
He knew the others were dangerous but Malfoy was the one he was worried about. Malfoy had a reputation of bullying Gryffindors and getting them in trouble while he got off scot free. However, Neville was willing to give him a chance.
After all, Potter had been very kind. In Gryffindor, Neville's housemates always referred to him as the most slippery snake. He taunted the Gryffindors with Malfoy and yet no one really knew what happened around him. Fred and George wouldn't touch a single member of Potter's group while it was well-known that Krum liked to hang out with them. Potter kept his actions in the shadows, making the Gryffindors very suspicious of him.
"Hey Longbottom!" Harry said, bounding over.
"H-hey," he responded.
"We're over in the back. We always go there; keeps the nosy ones out of our business."
They wove their way through an extensive network of nearly identical-looking shelves and Neville found himself very lost very soon. And then, as if by magic (he wouldn't have been surprised it magic was involved), they stumbled out into a room.
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On plump round cushions sat six of the seven; Draco was sprawled across a couch. As Neville and Harry walked in, Draco was dramatically saying that,
"Ugh! Sprout is the devil's flaming daughter herself! How am I supposed to do that four-foot essay on Chinese Chomping Cabbage?! There isn't even an ounce of information in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi! And four feet! Four! I'm not kidding you, Pansy, it's going to take until the end of our lives!!!"
Neville blinked. He had not expected Draco to be so pleasantly humorous.
"Er...actually, the information is found in Goshawk's Guide to Herbology," he ventured.
"Thank you!" Draco said, suddenly changing into his cheerful self. "You're a lifesaver, Longbottom!"
Neville looked a little overwhelmed at the fact that a Malfoy had complimented him.
Being too lazy to actually walk over to the other end of the room, Draco summoned said book and began to flip through the pages.
"See? I told you Draco was different in private; we all are."
Then, two red streaks darted into the room and fireworks sailed into the air, filling the room with white, rose-scented smoke. Out of the blue -or should I say, white- the faces of the Devil Twins emerged, each sporting an identical cackle.
