"Thanks for asking if we could come, Harry."
Harry smiled at Hermione as she bounced along beside him, bright-eyed, on the way to their Defense lesson with Ted Tonks in the ballroom. "Well, your parents were the ones who said yes, and you were the ones who asked your parents. I didn't do so much, really."
"Ruddy Malfoys would haven't let us come if you hadn't asked," Ron pointed out, and looked around the ballroom with interest as they stepped inside.
Harry supposed that was true, especially given the way that Draco still sniffed when he caught sight of Harry's best friends. Ted, however, smiled fiercely at them and nodded around the large ballroom. It was a pretty blue room with green glass panels on the walls, large and entirely empty.
"We've got a good training ground here," Ted said. "Plenty of room to run and dodge. And even make weapons out of the walls." He spun around and abruptly pointed to Hermione, who was looking as if she wanted parchment and a quill to write things down. "How could you make weapons out of the walls?"
"I suppose—you could Levitate the panels and hide behind one?"
"Interesting thought." Ted snapped around to face Ron. "What about you?"
"You could fling the panels at people?"
"If you managed to Levitate them, yes, you could. Keep the weight of the panels in mind, though. What about you, Draco?"
"I would bring the chandelier down on someone's heads."
Hermione and Ron looked up a little nervously at the white gold chandelier over their heads, which supported maybe a hundred pounds of candles. Harry couldn't blame them. He'd looked at it like that himself, the first time he had to spend more than a few minutes in here.
"Yes, but I asked you to consider the walls as weapons."
"The chandelier makes a better one," Draco said, and folded his arms. If he'd had a peacock's tail, Harry thought with amusement, it would have been flared out behind him with indignation.
One afternoon he'd made the mistake of telling Draco Harry thought he would probably be a peacock Animagus, and Draco hadn't spoken to him for a day, which was astonishingly long for Draco to keep his mouth shut.
"And you, Harry?"
"I'd shatter the glass into pieces and make it fly at people."
Hermione gave Harry a startled look, as if she hadn't thought he would be so violent, but Ted grinned and nodded. "That's what I was thinking myself, although the others were interesting suggestions. More defense-oriented than offense-oriented, though, you two," he told Hermione and Ron, and then looked at Draco. "And I do want you to keep in mind that the chandelier would be even harder to manipulate than the panels on the walls, thanks to its weight."
"I wouldn't try to float it! I would just cut through its chain and drop it."
"And could you count on your enemies to stay where they were? It's still an interesting idea, Draco, but it needs work." Ted drew his wand and turned to Harry, who promptly drew his own in response. "And now I'll show you a sequence Harry and I have been working on—"
"Henry—"
Ted ignored Draco. Just like Healer Letham, he called Harry by the name Harry still preferred. "Get ready, Harry."
"Wait!" Hermione's voice rose into a panicked little squeak. "I thought we were just—going to be taking notes and discussing the theoretical parts of Defense class! We can't perform magic during the summer!"
"You can't," Draco said, looking down his nose in a way that Harry knew would more or less mean an instant fight, so he immediately flung himself in between them (verbally, anyway).
"Most of the time, we can't either, Hermione," he said, glancing at Draco and frowning when his brother started to open his mouth again. Draco shut it and rolled his eyes. "But Mr. Tonks used to be a Shadowfollower, one of the Ministry's secret soldiers. They still grant him some privileges."
"Yes, like training young warriors during the summer." Ted still had his wand out, and Harry hadn't exactly put his away, either, although he'd lowered it. Ted stung him with a hex for that forgetfulness. "Come on, now, Harry. Let's show them what you've been practicing."
Harry breathed slowly out, and nodded. He did kind of what to show Ron and Hermione what he'd been doing. Draco knew, but he'd only watched Harry and Ted practice the individual spells, not the whole thing.
"Ready," Harry said, and then dodged abruptly to the side as Ted flung a Blasting Curse at him.
Ron and Hermione gasped, but their voices dimmed in Harry's mind as he spun and dodged the other spells Ted was flinging at him—not serious battle curses, but all ones that would do heavy damage if they landed. Meanwhile, Harry Transfigured the stone beneath Ted's feet to mud, set up shields that the curses destroyed sometimes but also sometimes rebounded off, and wove Ted's robe around his feet to trip him up.
....
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