What Would Broz Do

Midnight Filching

"You sure about this, Harry?" Ron asked for the umpteenth time.

Harry nodded. "I saw them back in my second year, when I got pulled into his office for trailing mud up from the quidditch pitch."

"Yeah, but it was locked, right?" Ron reminded him.

Harry frowned at that. "Probably Fred and George's fault... but he's a squib, so I doubt there's magic involved. And Fred and George taught me how to pick locks, last year."

"Did they really?" Ron interrupted, sounding very impressed.

Harry smirked. "Was dead useful when the Dursleys locked away all my things over the summer – it's how I managed to get everything back out. So-" he got back on track, "we'll sneak in tonight."

At just past eleven, Harry and Ron slipped out of the Gryffindor dormitory they shared with Seamus, Dean, and Neville, and crept down the stairs.

"Bollocks!" Ron hissed softly. "Granger's still up!"

Harry rolled his eyes. Granger was always nagging about this or fretting about that, though ever since the run in with the troll she had at least given Harry and Ron a bit of leeway, in so far as she generally just avoided them. Even so, he doubted she would let them sneak out at this time of night without saying a word, and given what they planned it wouldn't do to have any witnesses, even if she did remain reluctantly silent.

"Lisa mentioned they've got a test tomorrow in Runes," Harry whispered.

"Yeah, but Granger's with us at that time, isn't she," Ron whispered back, voice grumpy. "We're going to find out what she's playing at – even Percy was never in two places at once."

"Felt like it, sometimes." Harry murmured. Ron gave a soft grunt of agreement.

"Right then, the usual?" Harry continued, focusing on their current predicament. Ron shrugged, but took out his wand anyway.

In a moment, the tips of two wands were peeking out from beneath the invisibility cloak, all but invisible themselves in the darkened common room.

Somnius. Molliare. Harry hit Hermione with a weak sleeping spell while Ron cast a cushioning charm on the table just a moment before Hermione's head hit with a dull thud. Even so, the boys winced.

"Should only last five minutes – just so she thinks she dozed off. Come on!" Harry moved Ron into action.

They traveled through the castle silently, well versed by now at sneaking around Hogwarts at night. Though Harry realized that the days of the cloak being able to cover the pair of them were numbered, and made note that they would need to learn the disillusionment charm before too long if Ron was going to continue coming along – which, without a doubt, he was.

Thick as thieves, they descended down the fourth floor staircase, past dozing portraits and suits of armor whose heads kept jerking up as if they were trying to keep from nodding off themselves. At last, they arrived at their target.

"Alohomora," Harry whispered, and to his delight the door opened, as it had a week ago – though that had been during the day, not almost midnight, so he hadn't been completely sure it would work.

"Really silly, letting a squib into Hogwarts," Ron said smugly, his voice raising above a whisper now that they were alone, twirling his wand as he and Harry got out from under the cloak.

Harry nodded, though stayed silent. It was a shame that Fred and George had taken their map back, but he couldn't really blame them. Making a copy of his own would be dead useful, and he would have to look into doing exactly that unless tonight's mission solved the problem for him.

"Be back in thirty minutes," Harry replied, handing Ron the cloak and fishing in his robes for the set of picklocks he had bought off of Ron's brothers before the end of last term.

Ron didn't respond, and Harry only heard the faintest of footsteps departing Filch's office. Ron's silencing charms weren't perfect, but they were getting better. Now, to focus on his own mission – the seven great big ugly – but utterly mundane – locks that protected Filch's filing cabinet, that apparently held such great treasures as magic maps of the Hogwarts Grounds.

"Alohomora."Nothing happened. Harry shrugged – it had been worth a try. Scrutinizing the first lock for a moment, Harry's fingers danced over his ring of picks, selecting a thin iron rod with a dogleg at its tip. Here goes nothing.

With five down and two to go, the three short raps hit Filch's door before it burst open. Harry turned around, wand at the ready, but as expected nobody was there.

"Got him," Ron wheezed from nowhere. "Bloody bugger almost caught me though – I swear, when does he ever sleep? How close are you?"

"I'd be closer if you were quiet," Harry grumbled, fiddling with lock number six. "He's not going to trace it back to us, is he?" It was always the wrinkle to otherwise brilliant nighttime outings – Dumbledore, at least, knew that Harry had an invisibility cloak. If too many mysterious things happened at night and nobody ever saw the culprit, they would eventually be caught by their own brilliance.

"Nah," Ron removed the cloak with a flourish, and though his face was flushed with exertion, his hair was a bright platinum blond. "I took off the cloak long enough that he saw the back of me, and then I silenced him and used the jelly legs," Ron said proudly. "Knocked over a statue too, so he'll be fuming about that once he gets free."

Lock six, open. "Hmmm," Harry grunted noncommittally. "Wait," he turned around, looking genuinely impressed. "You can cast the bombarding hex? Since when?"

"Err, not quite," Ron looked abashed. "I just pushed the bloody thing over."

Harry snorted. Ron shrugged. "It worked, dinnit? You're not using any magic tonight either."

Harry grunted at that, selecting a tiny silver pick covered in odd burrs.

"Anyway," Ron continued as if recounting some great epic of a bygone time. "So I heaved over the statue and cast a tickling charm at the portrait of Odric the Odd – he likes that, thought it was a good idea to keep him happy, like – and then snuck into the kitchens. With any luck, if anyone finds out they'll assume Malfoy went for a midnight snackums." He finished with a gleeful snicker.

"Might have picked up some treacle tart, while I was there," Ron added.

Anything else Ron might have wanted to say was cut off as the final lock popped open, and the chains wrapped around the cabinet coiled back to the wall, as if a swarm of snakes going back into their nests. Ron and Harry exchanged looks of rapturous joy.

"Right then, let's have a look," Harry whispered.

They opened the top drawer as if they were discovering the holy grail. And what a sight greeted them! Like many elements of the wizarding world, the inside of the cabinet dwarfed the outside – there were fanged frizbees and boxes of gobstones, comics and books with names like All You Ever Wanted To Know About Jinxes But Didn't Have The Stomach To Ask Because The Other Guy Jinxed Yours First. There were stacks of chocolate frog cards and stacks of fuzzy things that Ron told Harry not to touch because they were exploding eyebrows. There was a wand that when Harry picked it up turned into a rubber chicken. A girl's mirror that pulled silly faces. Enough bags of Bertie Bott's Every Flavored Beans that they might very well manage to have every flavor between them.

And that was just the boring stuff: there were files upon files upon files with names and numbers scribbled on them, which meant very little until they saw one so thick that it would have taken up the the entire first drawer had the interior been of regular size.

Fred and George Weasley, 1989

"This is the best day of my life," Ron's awestruck voice hissed next to Harry's ear.

Harry nodded, but Ron's voice woke him from his enthrallment at their winnings.

"Right – trunks out." Both Ron and Harry took their school trunks out of their pockets – their previous contents currently sitting in piles om both their beds. Harry unshrunk both trunks – as well as a third they had "borrowed" for the evening from Neville Longbottom – and looked at the filing cabinet once more, this time in disappointment.

Ron read his thoughts. "We won't be able to take all of it," he murmured. "We should have thought about this – we need to figure out how the interior enlargement enchantment works."

Harry nodded. "Shrinking charms on the lot?"

Ron thought it over for a minute, then shook his head. "Too difficult," he admitted. "S'one thing to shrink a trunk, but to shrink every single thing – no time." He looked out towards the door, as if to indicate that a teacher could walk by at any minute. Unlikely, but not impossible; and if they were caught now they'd never see sunlight again until the end of term.

"Right," Harry said at last, voice full of grim determination. "You take the loot, I'll take the papers. In a flash, Ron was moving sweets and joke toys into his trunk, everything from a crate of chocolate frogs (which he did shrink) to a book of poems that promised to make the unsuspecting reader babble incomprehensibly for up to a quarter-hour. Meanwhile, Harry nimbly plucked out the file on Fred and George, before scanning back to his own year. There he took out a file marked Draco Malfoy and another labeled Theodore Nott. Then, with another glance, he removed Harry Potter and Ron Weasley. He looked again. Shrugging, he grabbed every file marked 1991 and shoved the lot into his trunk, which was rapidly filling up with paper Harry couldn't wait to take the time to read. It was with great sadness that he left every other student's file behind, jumping instead to the drawer marked CONFISCATED AND HIGHLY DANGEROUS. Without even looking – that strategy had worked wonders for the twins, afterall – he removed everything he could until both his and Neville's trunks were in danger of overflowing.

"Harry! We have to go!" Ron, who had long since finished with his trunk, was standing guard at the door to Filch's office and had turned around, waving frantically. "It's the cat!"

Which meant, Harry assumed, that Filch was finally free and not too far behind. Quickly, he grabbed the chains and reapplied the locks around the filing cabinet. Perhaps it was a good thing after all that they could only take a fraction of the treasure – how long would it be before Filch realized now that there was stuff missing at all, when it appeared for all intents and purposes as much a mess as it had been before they'd made off with the best parts of it? As the seventh lock snapped back into place, Harry turned around, whispered the silencing charm on both trunks and shoved them into his pockets, and dove beneath the invisibility cloak, where Ron was waiting. They were out of the office, door closed, not a moment too soon, as Filch rounded the corner, face venomous.

"When I catch the little brat who did this, Mrs. Norris, I'll have them flogged," he was whispering to himself. "Not even Dumbledore will stop me this time, mark my words." Grinning to one another – though they couldn't see it in the darkness – the two boys snuck back through the castle and back to the Gryffindor Common Room, which was now completely abandoned – Granger having apparently decided that her 'nap' was a sign that she really ought to go to bed.

"That. Was. Brilliant!" Ron whooped before Harry hushed him. The pair tread quietly back into their rooms, then with the speed of the well-versed, emptied Neville's trunk and returned it to its unaware owner, everything back where it belonged. That left an enormous stack of material on their own bunks, and no clear way how to get rid of it...

"We'll talk to your brothers in the morning," Harry said at last as they discussed the dilemma behind the curtains of Harry's bed, which he had silenced. "I think we probably would have needed to go through them anyway – no way we could have sold off this lot by ourselves," he added, pointing to Ron's trunk that was filled to the brim with who knows how many galleons worth of goodies.

"They'll want a cut, probably quite a big one if we don't want to get caught," Ron warned, between bites of treacle tart.

Harry shrugged. "We'll offer them fifty-fifty. And the next time we do anything that's successful beyond our wildest dreams, I'm going to have three trunks on standby just in case."

"Just think of it," Ron added dreamily. "Between the pair of us and your cloak, we can do things even Fred and George never dared. We're going to be filthy rich before we even sit our OWLs."

"We'll see," Harry chuckled, arranging his books at the foot of his bed and thinking how on earth he was going to keep all the paperwork he had run away with safe and secret, half of which was now precariously stacked underneath his bed, having been removed from Neville's trunk. He needed a solution, and quickly – but that could wait until tomorrow.

Not any longer than that though – he certainly wasn't going to have someone notice and have it taken away before he had a chance to sort through it for any Marauder-esque treasures. If the house-elves...

That was it! "Dobby!" Harry yelled, interrupting Ron's fantasies about the new broom he was going to buy, as the small ugly elf with enormous eyes, long ears, and mismatched fluorescent socks, one yellow with pink stars and the other orange with blue lightning bolts, popped onto the bed.

"Mister Harry Potter is calling Dobby-"

"Shh," Harry interrupted him, knowing Dobby could go on for ages when in the mood. "I have a very important mission that I need your help with, right away."

Somehow, Dobby managed to puff up while still dancing from foot to foot, great tears of happiness springing into his eyes.

"What can Dobby be doing f-"

"Everything under my bed... and in my trunk too. I need it to be kept someplace safe. Someplace nobody else can get to it. That I can look at when I need to. I ne-"

"Dobby knows just the place, Mister Harry," the elf shrieked as if it had won The Daily Prophet's annual drawing grand prize. "Just the place! A secret room only Dobby and the other house-elves are knowing about. Dobby will move everything and show Mr. Harry the room tomorrow!"

"I knew you were the best man for the job!" Harry indulged him.

Dobby nodded frantically and then disappeared, taking Harry's newest treasures with him.

"That was easy," Ron remarked.

"Sometimes it is," Harry replied, deadpan.

"Right. Well," Ron went on, stifling a yawn. "I'm off to bed, then. Tomorrow we can get back to the boring business of figuring out why Sirius Black wants to kill you," he finished cheerily.

Author's Note:

In canon, at the beginning of CoS, Harry is impressed when Fred and George pick the lock on Harry's door at Privet Drive 'the muggle way'. Then, by the end of term (summer of PoA), he picks the lock on the cupboard under the stairs himself, to retrieve his homework when the Dursleys are outside. Clearly some time during the year, he learned a thing or two. Harry, books 1-3, is a gloriously devious and proactive little shit, blithely sneaking this way and that, telling two-faced lies to everyone from Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, Lockhart... and getting away with it. It's only later Rowling wrote him to be totally dependent on Hermione for literally everything, from the names of his own classmates (Hermione informs him in OOTP who *Theodore Nott is!) or how a bloody quidditch ball is designed.