Playing with Fire

Chapter 56

It was good to be back at Hogwarts. New faces of first-years who had their entire time at Hogwarts still in front of them always brightened her up a bit. Even though her husband managed to traumatize one of them during the first week. An eleven years old boy had been running through the corridors to get to class, and he had bumped into Hermione, hard. And of course, being his overprotective self, Barty decided to scare the boy. He had grabbed the boy by his collar and smashed him into the wall, the boy's feet dangling in the air.

"If you ever do that again, I will torture you into the hospital wing," Barty had growled.

The boy had been too terrified to say or do anything. So Hermione made the decision to grab her husband's arm so that he would let the boy go. He reluctantly did so.

"No running in the corridors," Hermione had scolded, though she sounded not nearly as aggressive as Barty had done. "Go on, off to class."

After that she had taken Barty's hand to take him away outside. After that, the next five weeks went by quite peacefully. There had been no visits from other Death Eaters, no tortures, no misbehaving students, and life at Hogwarts continued as if there never had been a war. Except for the fact that a lot of teachers had been replaced by new ones that Voldemort had chosen. Skye was also following classes again occasionally, and she was visibly improving in her magical skills. Hermione had to visit the hospital wing twice a week just to check if everything was going alright with the baby, only because Barty wanted to be absolutely certain that she and the baby were fine. When she was not in the hospital she was mostly in the library, which she now ran. Her passion and love for reading books was still very important to her and so she was now librarian. It was mainly an excuse for her to read as many books as possible and to make sure all the books were treated with respect by the students. Plus, she could now enter the forbidden section and explore that thoroughly.

Barty had brought Sarah Grey to the dungeons, where she was out of sight from everyone. Hermione never saw her. Not that she wanted to. Barty never spoke about her, and Hermione never asked about her. They had no reason to. Hermione believed Barty whenever he told her she was the only one on his mind every minute of the day.

At the end of October, however, tensions increased once more. Maybe students felt more at ease again, and maybe they thought it was safe to pull pranks, but they were very wrong. During dinner in the Great Hall, when they were all having soup as a starter, soft laughter sounded through the hall. It was onky when Hermione looked up that she saw in the corner of her eye that her hair had changed color. When she looked at Barty, she saw the same had happened to him. All the teachers who had touched their soup, about five of them, now had very bright blue hair. It was a clever prank, Hermione had to admit, since everything in the kitchens was tasted by the house-elves first before it was served. And apparently the house-elf was immune to this creation that colored hair. Someone had put a hair-coloring potion in the soup of the teacher's table without anyone noticing.

But even though Hermione could appreciate the cleverness, and even though she could laugh about it slightly, Barty definitely didn't share her sympathy. He wouldn't stand for such disrespectful behavior. The older students knew that, as they didn't smile a bit. But the younger ones clearly had no idea. Barty stood up, anger written all over his face, and the rest of the hall automatically stood up as well.

The laughter died very quickly after that. Some teachers who had been laughing also stopped immediately. Silence fell through the Great Hall.

"Whoever thought it funny to pull this prank can step forward now," Barty announced.

He looked ridiculous with blue hair, and Hermione couldn't take him seriously when she looked at him. She could barely suppress a snort. But the look on his face held such anger that she found it wiser to try her best to stop herself from laughing. And the students took that hint too luckily.