Chapter Three: The Plot Falls Apart Completely
“Oh, do stop that!” said Harry. “Why does everyone seem to have the idea that I know absolutely nothing about sex? I have read Mills & Boon novels, you know!”
The lizard sniffed. “Well, pardon me for trying to advance the plot!”
“Mills & Boon, Harry?” asked Hermione. “I always had you figured as a Bunty reader myself.”
“I like Spot the Dog,” said Ron quietly.
“Oh, me too!” said Sirius. “The one where he lost his ball made me cry until he found it again.”
“I find them a bit intellectual myself,” muttered James. “I like watching paint dry.”
Remus groaned and banged his head on the table. “No wonder I have to sneak off to the library for my secret book club with Severus. There’s no one else I can have that deep level of discussion about intellectual books like Casino Royale and Five Get Into a Fix. If I end up falling in love with him and having a protracted affair over decades (while all my friends die and get locked up) that eventually ends in heartbreak when for reasons he can’t tell me he has to apparently betray us all for the greater good and I end up in a loveless marriage with a woman (Merlin forbid!) and we both die tragically before we can be reconciled in truth … I’ll blame all of you for not listening!”
“You know, literary criticism aside,” said Hermione, “the lizard’s escaped.”
“Don’t worry,” said James, reaching under the table, “we’ve already got another spineless vertebrate to hand. I’ve just found Peter.”
In his embarrassment at being caught on his knees under the table, Peter’s face had turned a shade of pink akin to a ripe raspberry. “I was just tying my shoelace.”
“Don’t let Remus get you down, love,” Sirius told Hermione, a hand on her knee. “He can change his moods as much as my estranged baby cousin changes her hair, and she’s a Metamorphmagus!”
Hermione frowned, brushing Sirius’ hand away and not looking particularly perturbed by Peter’s appearance. “Before that lizard disappeared, did he say that he was trying to advance the plot?”
Ron looked baffled. “I didn’t know we had a plot.”
Pursing her lips, Hermione shook her head. “Maybe that’s why we’re here. Perhaps the Green Flame Torch brought us here so that we could find a plot!”
“You know,” said Ginny, who had been sitting on Neville’s lap for the last ten minutes, “I seem to remember Dumbledore muttering something about that when he shoved us into the Room of Requirement back in the future. Then we turned up here in the seventies.”
“Oh, has he been brought back from the dead again?” asked Hermione. “We should have buried him in a tomb with a revolving door.”
“Dumbledore’s dead?” asked Remus, startled from his daydream of Snape bringing the kama sutra to their next book club. “Do you think we should warn him? How did he die?”
“Snape killed him,” said Harry before Hermione could stop him from fucking up the timeline any more than he had already.
“Quick!” said James, who had about as much of an understanding of temporal paradoxes as his future son. “We’ve got to warn him!”
Hermione grabbed his arm with a surprisingly strong grip. Hefting all those books around had given her the muscles of a seasoned Beater. “We can’t, don’t you see? That would change history completely and undoubtedly lead to a Trousers of Time effect and that’s isn’t good for the cosmos! Time may be a ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff but stuff can kill you! Well, not you because Voldemort takes care of … oh, wait, forget I said that … but if you change the past, I mean, your future then we might cease to exist! If you warn Dumbledore about Snape then he’ll never take him on as Potions master following Voldemort’s first and frankly pathetic defeat (sorry, Harry, but for all that it made you famous it really didn’t work long term, did it?) and then who’ll save Harry in his first Quidditch match and every other time Snape’s saved his life since? Not to mention there was something decidedly strange about that ‘murder’ on the Astronomy Tower, particularly as I swear I saw Colonel Mustard in the library earlier with some lead piping and Trelawney was muttering something about all the answers being ‘in the cards’ and specifically ‘in the three cards in that little envelope thing in the middle’. Anyway, my point is that we can’t warn Dumbledore because without Snape where’s Harry going to get his ridiculously-inflated sense of righteous anger and hard-doneby-ness from?”
She sat back, took a deep breath and looked at the rest of them. They weren’t paying any attention. A man on the other side of the pub had just put two ferrets down his trousers.
