"You're late, Mr Weasley."
The speaker was Professor McGonagall. She was like an old, sturdy Scots pine: wherever she stood she looked impeccably dignified—and, of course, not in the least bit soft-hearted.
The red-haired boy had realised halfway there that he might end up late, and he put all the blame on Hogwarts Castle's moving staircases, which were forever sliding off to somewhere else for no good reason. Ron wanted to defend himself, but when he caught sight of the blond, pasty-faced boy standing behind Professor McGonagall, he suddenly felt he couldn't afford to lose face.
Draco Malfoy was wearing his signature expression—as if his father had bought a medieval jester's mask in Knockturn Alley for three Sickles and four Knuts, stuck it to his face with a Permanent Sticking Charm, and then his mother had scrubbed it in the toilet with Mrs Skower's All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover for six hours and fourteen minutes, until it had puffed up into a swollen, disgusting, malicious smirk.
Ron drew himself up. "Yes, I'm late, Professor McGonagall."
"Oh? Our Mr Weasley looks very sure of himself. So it was deliberate, was it?"
More anger gathered on Professor McGonagall's stern face; the hollow cheeks of her thin face trembled slightly.
Seeing his Head of House so furious, Ron lost his nerve and ducked his head.
"Well. Very well! Now then, listen carefully, both of you. Weasley, Malfoy, from now on you'll follow Mr Filch's instructions. I've asked him to give you work that will require you to pull together. And remember this in future: don't fool around in flying lessons. Especially you, Malfoy—students ought to treat each other with some friendliness."
Ron and Draco locked eyes for a moment, then turned away from each other with identical looks of contempt.
McGonagall shook her head helplessly. "Mr Filch, if you would come over, please."
Filch, old and ugly, walked in a way that made people think of a wind-up toy. His cat, Mrs Norris, was—as always—trailing behind him. Green light flashed in his clouded, spiteful eyes. There was not a single student in all of Hogwarts who liked him; that wasn't just because of his unfortunate appearance, but also his behaviour. He never missed a chance to torment rule-breakers to the fullest extent allowed by school regulations.
"Professor McGonagall," he said, bowing.
Ron watched the man bow to Professor McGonagall and thought, what a hypocrite.
"Come with me," Filch said. When he lifted his head to look at the two boys, his lips curled up high, almost as if they were out of his control.
The three of them made their way to the trophy room. Their detention this time was to clean the place from top to bottom, without using their wands. One person would do the mopping; the other would polish the trophies.
Filch fetched out a bucket, mop and rag. They were even dirtier than the trophies, making one suspect that anything cleaned with them might actually end up filthier than before.
When it came time to assign jobs, Malfoy immediately grabbed the trophy-polishing duty. Ron thought mopping the floor didn't sound bad; it didn't need to be done too carefully—you just had to run up and down in straight lines. But after a while he realised exactly what Draco had been plotting.
Filch didn't stay to stand over them the whole time. Once curfew hit, he still had to patrol the castle corridors to catch students wandering about at night. Carrying his old lantern and taking Mrs Norris with him, he went off.
Ron bent double, gripping the mop with both hands as he fought a stubborn stain on the floor. It had to be where some student had secretly used a bottle of Gamp's Exploding Fizzy Soda; the residue of the bubbles looked like a smear of dried green snot.
Just then Draco came over holding a little silver trophy, positioning himself right in front of Ron so that every time Ron bent over, it looked like he was bowing to him. Draco couldn't help the smug smile that spread across his face.
"Get out of my way, Malfoy!" Ron had already seen what he was up to; this rotten git had clearly been waiting for this moment back when the jobs were being handed out.
"Say 'please' to me. Otherwise I don't hear a word," Draco said gleefully. "You look just like a house-elf. If you Weasleys really are so poor you can't afford to eat, you can come to my house and work as servants. Oh—sorry. We don't need servants who are both lazy and stupid."
Ron was so angry his vision blurred. He wanted nothing more than to rip Draco's mouth clean off his face. But he swallowed his temper for the moment and gave the mop a sharp, vicious flick, splashing filthy, wet water all over the pale-faced boy's shoes.
"Disgusting!" Malfoy yelped, jumping back in revulsion. He left Ron alone after that.
Ron, however, was still fuming. A wicked idea suddenly struck him. He quietly picked off a bit of bubble-scum from the floor and smeared it onto the Slytherin Quidditch Cup for 1988. What he didn't know was that Malfoy, too, had quietly emptied a bottle of powerful glue onto the floor.
The two of them worked and sabotaged each other at the same time. From twenty past eight, more than two hours went by. Not only had they failed to finish their punishment, they had turned the trophy room into a complete shambles. Bits of mop head were stuck to the floor; several trophy handles had been snapped off; the glass display cases were smeared and streaked until they were almost pitch-black.
By the time Filch hurried back to inspect their work, the once-orderly trophy room looked like a seaside cottage after a hurricane had blown through.
He rounded on them in a fury. "Do you want me to go and fetch Professor McGonagall?"
Ron and Draco both turned their heads away, refusing to give in.
Filch took a few wheezing breaths, then, quite unexpectedly, had a fit of generosity. "It's late. I want you to help each other finish the work properly, and then you can go back."
Though the two boys couldn't stand the sight of each other, with Filch looming over them they had no choice but to pinch their noses—figuratively—and help the other one finish his task.
Ron rubbed at a trophy encrusted with green gunk again and again, and suddenly he noticed that the snake-shaped ornament coiled around the cup seemed to be giving off light. A moment later the snake slid along the surface of the trophy, leaving a line of writing in its wake:
The legend of the lamp genie points the way to the Tower of Tomes.
The letters dried and faded quickly, as if they had never appeared at all. Ron's heart was thudding wildly. He had no idea what the sentence meant, but it filled him with a simple, honest thrill—the feeling of having stumbled on the trail of hidden treasure.
He very carefully turned his head to look around. Malfoy was busy scraping the hardened glue off the floor with a scraper and hadn't seen a thing.
By the time they finally got the room cleaned up, it was almost midnight.
Filch stared at the exhausted, hungry red-haired boy for a while. Then he sent Draco back and said to Ron, "You, come with me."
Draco walked off humming tunelessly, grinning with schadenfreude.
Ron was full of resentment, convinced Filch was planning to torture him some more. To his surprise, the man led him instead to the Hogwarts kitchens and let him eat his fill of a proper midnight snack.
Ron had never known that the entrance to the kitchens was right next to the Hufflepuff common room. He had also never known that all their meals were prepared every day by a whole crowd of house-elves. Still, the thought of Draco going back to his dormitory to lie there hungry made Ron so delighted that he could have laughed aloud.
Filch sat there stone-faced and watched Ron wolf down food, asking the house-elves only for a few pieces of fried fish, which he fed slowly to Mrs Norris.
"Thank you, Mr Filch," Ron said.
"Hmph. If it weren't for your two brothers… never mind. Off you go."
Ron stumbled back into the dormitory and flopped onto his bed. What a long day, he thought—and what a strange one.
As he drifted off to sleep, his head was full of odd thoughts: the mysterious writing that had appeared on the trophy, and the white Russian wolfhound that followed Skyl everywhere. Ron couldn't have said why, but that dog frightened him a little; its cold, ghostly eyes would not leave his mind.
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