September 2. After an entire summer of going wild, the students were still sluggish. The afterglow of the holidays clearly hadn't faded; everyone needed time to readjust to school life.
Skyl returned from his morning run to find students already eating breakfast in the Great Hall. One person yawned, and the yawn spread like contagion until half the table was doing it too.
"Morning." Percy sat down beside Skyl, downed half a glass of orange juice first, then finally started chewing on his fried-egg toast.
Skyl picked out two croissants. They hadn't been out of the oven long—still crisp on the outside, rich with the smell of wheat.
Besides the four House tables, there was also a separate small table placed near the entrance. It had no seats, only food and drinks—meant for the construction crew. The Great Hall couldn't hold everyone for meals. Adult wizards wearing silver badges moved briskly, grabbed their breakfast, and left without lingering.
Owls swept in through the doors, circled briefly above the hall, then began dropping parcels and letters.
On the first day back, aside from a few doting parents sending supplies, the main deliveries were newspapers and magazines. Traditional print media still held an absolute advantage in the wizarding world.
Percy received a copy of the Daily Prophet.
He tossed it aside without even glancing at it and said to Skyl, "I bet today's headline is Lockhart again."
Skyl casually picked the paper up, then grinned. "Ding ding ding—congratulations, you're right! Thank you for taking part in today's no-prize quiz."
Percy sighed. "That shameless bastard, Gilderoy Lockhart… Mum used to like him so much. The day his true colours were exposed, she sat on the sofa in the Burrow's sitting room knitting and crying at the same time. The pattern she knitted came out an absolute disaster."
"Mrs. Weasley is very kind," Skyl said. "How long was she upset?"
"About seventeen hours," Percy shrugged, "or, if you prefer, two scarves, one wool sock, and a sweater collar. Middle-aged women are like that. Sometimes I suspect their hearts are already dead. Mum turned around and fell for another fashionable male wizard right away."
"Classic." Skyl gave him a thumbs-up, then handed the paper back. "Read it. Today's news is actually interesting."
Percy spoke lazily, his mouth full of omelette, words muffled. "How could it be? Probably another piece about him wandering around in misery. Where'd he sleep this time—on a park bench or in a cardboard box?"
"Neither a bench nor a cardboard box," Skyl said, tapping the huge headline on the front page. "A prison."
All around them, students—and even professors—began gasping. Even the old bat Snape couldn't help leaning back slightly.
Percy's eyes snapped to the headline:
Breaking News: Gilderoy Lockhart to Face Muggle Court Trial
The photo showed Lockhart being yanked out of a cardboard shack by armed personnel.
Percy tried to speak, but the sentence surged up his throat and got blocked by the omelette. The air he'd sucked in went the wrong way, food crumbs hitching a ride into his lungs. He coughed hard, then sprayed it out, splattering the table in front of him. A sixth-year girl sitting opposite Percy screamed; the front of her robes looked like a battlefield.
"Sorry—sorry!" Percy clutched the paper tightly. "Everyone! Lockhart is going to be tried by Muggles!" He shouted it loud enough for half the hall to hear.
"Pretty slow for a prefect, aren't you? Everyone already knows."
"Only a few seconds before me—shut up." Percy sat down again, rattled, and began reading word for word. "On the night of September 1, the infamous magical leak Gilderoy Lockhart was arrested in London by a group of Muggle law enforcement personnel, and is now facing prosecution on over two thousand charges. The Muggle organisation taking responsibility for the incident—Human Union… abbreviated HUMANs—has, through the Prime Minister's office fireplace, conveyed a message to Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge. The contents are currently sealed by the Ministry of Magic; this reporter has no way of knowing them. Our paper will continue to follow developments."
"Have to admit, those journalists move fast," someone muttered. "He got arrested last night and they already have a write-up this morning."
"Lockhart has countless people watching his every move," someone else said. "And the Daily Prophet headquarters is in London."
"Poor sod Lockhart. Merlin's ghost played one hell of a joke on him. Honestly, now I hope he makes it through."
"Yeah, really unfortunate. What did he even do wrong?"
"Who knows? Maybe he made a wish on a shooting star."
"Wow—then I'm making a wish too!"
Even after they left the Great Hall, people were still talking about Lockhart's arrest. Skyl walked with his roommates into the Charms classroom, and Percy's mouth never stopped.
"Since the Statute of Secrecy was enacted, no wizard has ever faced a public trial like this. Merlin's socks—I can't believe it's the twentieth century and Muggles are still playing the 'execute a wizard' game. Why isn't the Ministry doing anything?"
"If you've ever been to the Ministry, you'd know how 'efficient' they are," Skyl joked. "If Fudge's office needs a box of bananas, by the time it survives the dozen approval steps and finally arrives, it'll have already sprouted into a banana tree. But Lockhart's crimes really are hard to define. Strictly speaking, what he did was maliciously cast a Memory Charm on other wizards. That can be big or small—if he gets forgiveness from the victims, he can pay some money and walk. Unless someone points the finger and says all the world's magical abnormalities were caused by Lockhart, he's not going to Azkaban."
"But the Muggles slapped two thousand charges on him."
"Most of those are invented on the spot. The Muggle lawyers worked themselves to death memorising law books, only to have the statutes turn into Lockhart's autobiography—so they poured all their time and energy into fabricating charges for this guy."
"Two thousand charges? That's some grudge!"
Laughter rippled around the corridor.
The tiny, amiable Charms professor, Flitwick, trotted into the classroom on short legs. He climbed onto a stack of books and looked over the class. When he spotted Skyl, he blinked in surprise.
"Oh! Skyl—why are you here attending lessons?"
"Because I missed you, Professor. Our wonderful teacher—your classes always leave people with so much to gain."
Flitwick's face reddened from being buttered up, and he told everyone to open their textbooks.
"Well then," he said, resigned, "I suppose I can only teach from Gilderoy Lockhart's biographies now. Let's turn to Chapter Two of Gadding with Ghouls. Here, Gilderoy camps in the wilderness with a ghoul and uses a small charm to drive away mosquitoes and flies. I think it's perfect for you to learn…"
Over the following week, Skyl didn't miss a single class. He watched the professors cope with this special situation—using Lockhart's autobiographies as teaching material.
To be blunt, the results were a total disaster. The worst-hit were the subjects that demanded strong theory, like Transfiguration, Potions, Divination, and so on. Without detailed textbooks, relying on a professor's memory alone simply couldn't sustain the teaching workload.
The younger students didn't even know the most basic technical terms. Explaining everything from scratch, bit by bit, was basically torture.
Professor McGonagall hurriedly produced handouts for all seven years, working herself so hard her cheeks looked hollow. Snape, meanwhile, had evolved from an old bat into a vampire—dark circles heavy enough to match a punk band's—and his classroom insults sounded like he was performing death metal. Professor Trelawney might actually have been happy; her Divination teaching was nonsense half the time anyway, and whether there was a book or not never stopped her from predicting a student's death.
The most pitiful was Professor Binns, the History of Magic teacher. He was a ghost, and he'd always taught by reading straight off the page. Now he stared at Lockhart's autobiography in a daze, like he'd suddenly developed dementia. He'd read two sentences, stop, mutter, "Something's off," then start again from the beginning. An entire class would pass with no progress, and everyone would be forced to repeatedly hear stories from Lockhart's childhood.
History of Magic was already dull. Now it was hell difficulty—pale, empty, and utterly lifeless. Students would slip into infant-like sleep in under three minutes, sprawled all over the classroom like soldiers felled by bullets.
What's going on? My writing skill has actually regressed—Impossible! My three updates, my three updates… can I really not do it anymore?
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