It was a few days after the initial meeting with Hermione that the two inhabitants in the Room of Requirement lay in a bout of unrest, unsurprisingly so with the mysteries surrounding Hogwarts growing ever thicker. Umbridge was unyielding in her position as the crabbiest High Inquisitor ever, though admittedly Jake had no other Inquisitor to compare her to and it was possible that all of them were equally annoying.

Rumors circulated the school about her position amongst the teachers and their careers, some students worrying she would start sacking people. (Because they were all British and Jake genuinely didn't realize that meant firing. In fact, he had to endure Danny's teasing when wondering out loud if it meant Umbridge was actually putting people in sacks; which, to be honest, he wouldn't put past her.)

As it was, Danny had just gotten off a phone call with his sister (who really was just an older version of Haley - it was incredible how similar his and Jake's lives were, when you got down to it) while Jake had munched on some poptarts due to skipping breakfast in favor of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling angrily for an hour or so, courtesy of the cursed (figuratively, of course) object that had been lying under his bed for the past week and a half.

The poptarts were stale as always, and the orange juice they had swiped from the kitchens tasted a bit like dust and plastic after sitting on the counter for God knows how long. The luggages the two boys had brought with them were still rather full of clothes, since they had somehow never gotten around to moving them all into the closets provided for them. Jake's curtain had a small hole in it from when he had accidentally ripped it with his claws, and the mini fridge was almost depleted of sodas.

Home sweet home, right?

Jake paced around the room, using his tongue to try and dislodge a piece of poptart stuck in his teeth. Danny was waiting for him on his bed, a concerned look in his eye and a certain book in his hands.

"Seriously, Jake," Danny said for the millionth time that day, "we can just burn it."

"I fucking know," Jake ground out, "but we need to know why Umbridge had it with her. And what's inside it."

"What's inside it is Huntsclan junk." Danny narrowed his eyes. "Which you clearly don't want to look at."

Jake side-eyed the book in Danny's hands, glanced up to meet the halfa's eyes once, then dove.

Danny yelped and tried to jump away, but Jake managed to snatch the book up and flop onto his bed. "Jake," Danny said in a warning tone.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Jake muttered, hesitating only a moment before opening the tome up. The Huntsclan's logo on the inside sent a shiver down his spine, exaggerated as Danny sat down next to him with his much cooler body temperature.

"Let me at least read with you," the ghost suggested.

Jake's lips twisted into a warm smile. "'Aight."

The book started off with a table of contents, sorted into different sections for what looked, surprisingly, like history lessons. Jake expected it to be more along the lines of a training manual for new recruits ( recruits as a term used loosely, considering most members were stolen at birth and raised to be killers), but seeing the dates and titles marking the different chapters, it looked more like a collection of different Huntsclan tales throughout the centuries.

The Pixie Mania, 1643
Salem Massacre, 1693
Goblins Take Hostages, 1702
The Changeling Myth, 1766
The Heroics of Edward the Explosive, 1832
The Huntsclan Mark Purge, 1899

The dates went all the way up to the 1980's, the titles of which all had to do with villainizing the magicals the Huntsclan were slaughtering, or "fighting against for freedom and purity." A quick peek into a random page detailed the gruesome murder of a rock giant which had been "terrorizing the villages," despite rock giants being famously gentle and shy.

"We captured the great beast with a weighted iron-and-sphynx net," the passage read. "We had the trainees begin the cleansing process; burning its feet, its eyes, and scratching at its weaker rock links with an iron knife. We then had the more seasoned members come up to the creature and tear off its rocks making up its body one by one, stopping its unearthly screeching by taking off its mouth first, until there was nothing-"

Danny slammed the book shut. "Jake."

He felt sick, and his hands shook. What felt like a rock ( fuck) was lodged in his throat, and the edges of his vision were blurring. The taste of ash lay on his tongue. Danny, though sitting right near him, looked like he was many feet away.

"Bad idea," Jake managed to choke out.

"Yeah."

"I need to keep reading."

"Are you shitting me?"

"I'm fine." Deep breaths. In and out. Just like Sun taught him. In and out. In and out. In and-

"Jesus, dude, you turned totally white," Danny said. "I can't let you keep looking at this."

"The Salem Witch Trials," Jake insisted. "There was something about Salem."

"And? "

"It's a bit of a gap in our history," he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. His stomach slowly stopped churning. "Like, we know what happened, sort of - humans caught some witches practicing magic in broad daylight, and it lead to them killing a bunch of nonmagicals out of fear. But we know the Huntsclan was there, though we don't know why. It's missing from our files, there's like this huge conspiracy-"

"We came here to find out why Umbridge had the book, not for you to get another panic attack trying to read it," Danny said firmly. "Or… or like, I don't know, a flashback, I don't know, Jake. You said you dealt with the Huntsclan a lot, and you wanting to look at this stuff with no regard for your own health isn't good. Trust me."

Jake let out a breath and lay down on his back, staring up at the ceiling of his room. He remembered waking up the day after the incident in Hong Kong with the taste of blood in his mouth and the ashy scent of the Dark Dragon all around him. And seeing Rose… seeing Rose was nice, getting to talk to her again made him happy, especially now that she had her family, but the uniform she wore to the fight and the way she fought twisted his stomach and reminded him too much of the nights he'd be hiding a family of faeries from the Huntsclan's murderous hands.

He looked back at the book. They pulled the rocks from its body one by one.

Umbridge having the book was what worried him the most. The Huntsclan had been gone for about a year now, destroyed to the point where the only legacy they had left were their old bases and a few of their files the Council had burned to ashes. It was policy not to leave anything they had behind, to get rid of any trace of their existence, something that a few groups had argued against. After all, having that information would make it easier to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Jake was just glad he never had to see those dragonskin cloaks again.

But if their history was supposed to be burned, and the wizards hadn't even been a part of the magical empire as Jake knew it for so long, how the hell did Umbridge get her hands on their stuff? And how much of it? His stomach dropped when he thought about the toad owning any of their weapons or tech.

Danny was holding his hand, Jake realized belatedly. The ghost had set the book on the nightstand in favor of rubbing soothing circles into the back of his hand, icy eyes seemingly staring into space. Jake let himself relax just a little, his eyes shifting back to the book-

"Hey, Casper," he said sharply, "what's that piece of paper sticking out of it?"

Danny started, tightening his grip a bit on Jake's hand before looking at the book; sure enough, a small piece of parchment stuck out from between the pages, presumably moved while they had been looking through it. After a quick moment's hesitation, Danny pulled the book towards him with his free hand and opened it to the page the paper was stuck between. Keeping his arm leaning on the page so that Jake couldn't read the words, he unfolded the piece of paper and skimmed through it, confusion furrowing his eyebrows. "Think you can make any sense of this?" he asked, handing it over to Jake.

Jake sat up and accepted the paper. The handwriting was slightly familiar, though he couldn't quite put his finger on who it was exactly. On it was just a few lines of words:

Soulflesh and moldavite (XX) gem- sphynx?
Res. "Tantalizing Allure of SF & effects on Magic Energy"
Aiydah - the ancients, Diana's Hunt (see Drakaina?)
Wizards (vs. Sorcerers) & Draconic history (Res. Gerwidge)

"Okay, cool cool cool cool cool," Jake gritted out.

"What does it mean?"

Jake pointed at the last two lines. "That's about dragons. And. The Huntsclan."

"Diana's Hunt?"

"It's a code term they used to refer to themselves a while back. I'm sure they used it in this book."

Danny frowned. "Diana was Roman the goddess of the hunt, but the way they're using her name isn't at all what she stood for."

Of course the nerd would be into fucking mythology as well. Jake snorted. "It's the Huntsclan. They never do anything accurately."

"Drakaina is Greek," Danny pointed out, yet again cementing the fact he had probably read Percy Jackson in middle school. "A female dragon or something, right?"

Jake shrugged. "Something like that. It sounds a lot like…" he trailed off.

Danny squeezed his hand. "Like what?"

Jake pointed at the word Aiydah. "This looks like a word in Draconic. The old language, like when the Ancients were still around - Gramps made me study some of it as part of our history course. Aiydah sounds like the name of the first shapeshifting dragon, but it's spelled phonetically. It's not the right alphabet and definitely not the right spelling but I don't know what else it could be, especially paired with the word Drakaina, which is what some dragons think could be a link to that first documentation of a dragon who can shapeshift. A lot of our history is linked with the Greeks, but I'm pretty sure we came somewhere from Asia originally."

"Back up," Danny spluttered. "Ancients?"

"The Ancients," Jake began, struggling to remember the history lessons, "were the original dragons. Huge, like way bigger than us, and only had a dragon form. They went extinct centuries ago. The last of them gave the first chi, or powers, to, uh, Aiydah" - the name didn't quite fit right, but he couldn't quite remember the exact way to pronounce it and it was tricky to do so with a human tongue - "who used her powers to keep the Draconic lineage going. That's why we have human forms, to blend in." Jake tapped the words Diana's Hunt. "There's, like, a whole thing that the Huntsclan was the one to wipe out the Ancients, but the story varies from culture to culture. It's kinda our origin story but also something you'd tell your kids before bed. I don't know which parts are actually true and which are fairy tales because there are so many different interpretations and a lot of it's been lost to time."

Danny was silent for a moment. "You think Umbridge was researching what - how dragons who can shapeshift came to be? And that the Huntsclan had something to do with it?"

"That or whoever wrote this note," Jake amended. "Plus, it's not that far a fetch she'd want to learn about the power we have. Our chis hold a lot of it, it's why the Council is still ruling after so many years without a lot of pushback."

"And soulflesh?" Danny asked.

"No idea."

Danny peered down at the words again. "Moldavite - that's the gemstone Fu Dog asked you to look at, right? And sphynx hair can slow chi energy?"

"Yeah, these are definitely for the wards." Jake rubbed his eyes. "Umbridge is digging into shit she'd be better off without."

Danny took the paper and slipped it back between the pages he had taken it out of. "We have a lead, at least." He tapped the book. "What are we doing about this?"

Jake wanted to burn it. He wanted nothing more than to make it a pile of ash on the floor, to forget it ever existed, to never see that logo again. His mouth betrayed him: "Let's keep it for a little while, hide it somewhere. I still wanna find out just how much info Umbridge has been getting her hands on."

Herbology wasn't something Jake or Danny were particularly interested in, but the teacher, Pomona Sprout, had at least acted decently enough towards them that the boys enjoyed sitting in her class.

They sat by two chairs in the back amongst the nicer smelling flora, though judging by Jake's facial expressions, his sensitive nose picked up on the scents a little too much despite the pleasant aromas. Danny himself never really cared for floral scents; it tickled his nose too much, and Jazz dragging them into every Bath and Body Works they had at the Amity Park mall had ruined the chance of him ever enjoying anything strongly scented. As it was, the colors and bustle around him from the plants and students distracted him enough to make the experience bearable.

"Many plants have medical properties, and their uses have spanned many centuries, considered to be one of the oldest forms of medication," Sprout was saying as she held up a particularly vividly colored flower. "It can help cure many ailments, from small aches and pains to full-blown illnesses such as dragon pox."

Whatever the fuck that is, Danny thought, raking his brain for anything Jake might have mentioned on dragon pox and if it could affect him, since he was, well. A dragon. The only thing he could think of was dragon flu, which was, according to Jake, practically just a nastier version of the normal flu and involved lots of singed clothing. (Yeah, nights at Hogwarts sometimes got boring enough that they decided to describe their worst cases of sickness, of all things.)

Either way, evidently it struck a chord within the second year students, if the sudden surprised muttering by a small group of Ravenclaws was anything to go by.

"Mixing magic and flora is a highly effective method to combat various wounds and illnesses as well," Sprout continued. "Putting them in potions can further enhance the effects. Muggles themselves use plants to treat each other. It's in every culture."

Danny had to hold in a snort at that. The wizards really thought themselves so far removed from those without magic, it was almost funny. They were both human, and Jake had shown him that it was entirely possible to live a normal life among "muggles" instead of hiding away and acting like it was the Middle Ages with their If You Even Think About Using Electronics In Here You'll Literally Die, Seriously Dude Trust Me mentality.

The kids were set on grinding up the petals of some flower for its oils (that didn't sound right to Danny, but he didn't know enough about plant oil to dispute it) and Sprout took the time to write the homework on the board; overall it didn't look like anything particularly interesting was going to happen, so Danny turned to Jake for conversation. "Recognize anything?"

"Nah," Jake said with the expression of someone who had just been forced to swallow a lemon whole, "but I don't really pay any attention to Gee's rambling about plants. Maybe you can make tea out of some of this but the smell is so strong I can't fuckin' tell any of it apart."

"You look like you're in pain," Danny pointed out.

"Thank-" Jake suddenly scrunched up his nose and turned his head into his arm to sneeze.

"Bless you," Danny snickered, the dragon glaring daggers at the kids who had whipped their heads around to stare.

"What, ain't y'all ever seen someone with allergies?" Jake snapped at them, and when they turned back around, he said to Danny, "I swear it wasn't this bad last time we sat here."

"It's about to get worse," Danny said, watching Sprout, who was making her way over to the two of them. Jake followed his gaze and groaned.

"Everything all right, Mr. Long?" Sprout asked pleasantly, her outfit and wispy grey hair screaming kind grandma but her firm voice making Danny glad he never had to worry about getting graded by her.

"Peachy," Jake said, trying to grin and failing miserably as it looked more like he was just baring his teeth at her. His eyes were slightly red and teary eyed.

"We had a few new flora shipped in today, I wouldn't be surprised if it produced some mild allergic reactions," the professor said, having the decency to look apologetic. "Do you want to step out?"

"M'fine," Jake waved her off. "Swear."

Sprout nodded but made no move to leave. Danny involuntarily started to bounce his leg up and down as she stared at Jake expectantly.

"Is something wrong?" Jake asked stiffly.

She unfroze. "Actually," Sprout said with an undertone of excitement, "I was wondering if either of you wanted to do a small demonstration to the class. Since you're here. We'll be delving into several different recipes for plant treatments over the week and no doubt the students will appreciate a lesson in Draconic culture. Or, ah, ghosts as well," she added as an afterthought. "Though I'll admit I don't know what cures people such as yourself would have," she admitted to Danny.

Because they were dead, right. Why have cures for illnesses if you were already dead? "I don't know a whole lot about it, anyway," Danny said, "but Jake would be happy to help."

"I'd be happy to what ?" Jake's facial expression went through the five stages of grief in just a few moments. "No, I mean - I'm not that well versed in it, I don't know a whole lot, I'm sure Danny would understand more since he's older and all-"

"Nah, I'm kinda dumb," Danny cut in cheerfully. "Besides, you were just telling me the other day about the stuff you use to help speed up your healing, what you put in tea-"

Jake stared at him and Danny stared right back, leaving the two in a staring contest where the dragon tried to communicate something with his eyes along the lines of I'm not fucking getting up and sneezing all over the class, asshole, and Danny countered with You're getting up there to do your job or so help me Ancients.

Finally, Jake looked to the sky for a moment as if praying for peace. "Fine, yeah, okay, I'd be happy to say some stuff," he said, not sounding happy at all, and lifted himself off the chair as slowly as possible, then spent fifteen or so seconds dramatically cracking his back.

Sprout led him to the front of the classroom (Greenhouse classroom? Greenroom? Classhouse? Whatever) and took a few moments to introduce him as the "dragon representative, here to spread his knowledge, please be nice," as if everyone in the school didn't already know about their existence, especially after the pranks they had pulled. It was all worth it to see Jake squirm uncomfortably under the students' gazes, though, barely taller than Sprout herself and looking like he was trying to hold in another sneeze. He met Danny's eyes for a moment and shot him a glare that said I'm going to kill you again for this, Fenton, a look Danny had often seen directed at him throughout his fifteen years of existence.

"Are there any plants important to Draconic culture, specifically for healing?" Sprout asked him excitedly. "I know your kind come from all around the globe, so practices vary a lot."

"Uh, yeah, sure," Jake began, eloquent as always. "I mean, I kinda get a mix of a couple different cultures since my Dragon Master's Chinese and my healer's Korean, but I live in New York so a bunch of our supplies are still American-made."

"Your healer?"

"Sun Park," Jake elaborated. "She takes care of a lot of the medicine stuff because that's like her whole deal, she's super pacifist. Both she and a couple other family members taught me a lot about first aid." He ran a hand through his hair. "We already have a pretty fast healing rate, but magical shi- uh, stuff definitely helps, yeah. My granddad's a big fan of tea leaves because that already has a lot of good medicinal properties even without magic, but maybe he does put stuff in there to help, I don't know. It's good for sore throats and repairing damage caused by fire breathing."

A student raised her hand. "You can hurt yourself by fire breathing?"

"If you do it too much, yeah," Jake said, looking a little relieved at the question, more in his element. Danny held in a snicker; of course that would be his expertise, his friend constantly looked about two seconds from committing arson. "And it's worse in human form, we're not meant to take fire like that. The fire breathing glands are pretty close to the vocal cords, so overusing them can cause some raspiness and really damage your voice, plus it makes your throat sore, and honey tea is really good for that."

The vocal cords thing was interesting, Danny mused. He thought back to the times Jake had practiced his fire breathing in the sparring room and remembered the low growls or purrs he'd sometimes do to "warm up," as he put it (and of course Danny made fun of it for him anyway, because he was an asshole and what were friends for?). If the stuff in his throat that allowed him to breathe fire wasn't all magic, no doubt it would have given him a weird biology in his throat.

Oh, jeez, what did that do to his larynx? Were the glands in it, since that was where the vocal cords were held, or just squashed up next to it? And what about his airways? Danny doubted the design would be flawed enough as to let smoke into his lungs, but there hadn't exactly been any smoke whenever he watched Jake breathe fire, only on impact with other objects, which could easily be attributed to a combustion reaction. And maybe it did cut off his oxygen, since Jake couldn't hold it forever - in fact, it looked more like he was letting out an enormous breath, inflating his throat shortly and letting it glow with what Danny had assumed to be either chi energy or literal fucking fire before letting loose a torrent of flames.

Jake was a shapeshifter, sure, he had a human body - but it wasn't really human, not completely, if he had stuff like fire breathing glands and naturally enhanced senses and tougher skin and don't even get him started on the teeth and ears and eyes because holy shit, dude, you have fangs , and they retract ? What are you, fucking Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon? Alright, sorry, don't hit me, I was joking-!

"We use yarrow a lot in our mixtures to heal wounds," Jake was saying. "You apply it like a gauze mixed with some other stuff, it speeds up the healing process by a bunch. Oh, and goldenrod for inflammation. That's more effective, but way more expensive and I live in capitalist America, so. We tend to save."

Danny had always been interested in chemistry, and admittedly, after his death he had also gotten into a bit of biology as well. How could he not, when the very foundation of what he was had been altered on a molecular level? At first, he hadn't even known if his cells used cellular respiration anymore due to him not needing oxygen. (They didn't, at least not in the same way they used to. Ectoplasm worked just fine as an energy converter, it turned out.)

A little wave of excitement made its way into his chest. What about wizards? How did their biological makeup differ from muggles? Holy shit, if he could get someone who couldn't do magic out here - not like they'd let him, but if he could - then he'd be able to compare their bodies and capabilities. Did wizards have different, say, metabolisms due to them expending energy on magic? Danny's metabolism had gone way up since his death, but his appetite had diminished. Ectoplasm used up a lot of energy and ate up his nutrients pretty quickly while it stayed in his human body, so he had to eat a lot to replenish it, but sugary foods tended to do more while anything else tasted relatively bland. He was still figuring out the specifics.

But back to wizards - were they even human, compared to muggles?

Before Danny went into a complete nerd shutdown, he turned his attention to the various plants around the room again. The smell didn't bother him as much anymore, and he could stand to appreciate the various vibrant colors he sat amongst.

Danny leaned back. Jake was still talking, red in the face as he rambled on about some more tea his grandpa liked to make. Evidently he really didn't know too much about healing, just normal first aid and whatever his healer Sun did to him. Sprout looked a little disappointed at the fact that Jake didn't seem to know what the fuck he was talking about, but when she sent him back to his seat, he just seemed relieved not to be up there anymore.

"I hate you," Jake hissed as he flopped back down on his chair. Danny laughed and lightly punched him in the arm.

Jake leaned his head back against the chair and pouted, sticking his lip out and causing one of his longer canines to protrude a bit. The sun was shining through the glass of the greenhouse, starting to set due to winter quickly approaching - Tucker would have called it golden hour, like the video game nut ever actually went outside to take pictures. The light filtered through the thinner leaves and threw vibrant colors onto Jake's still blushing face.

The dragon gave Danny a side eye. "What's up?"

"Hm?" Danny blinked and forced himself to look forward again, if only for a moment. "Nothing."

Jake shrugged and yawned, then laid his forehead against Danny's shoulder for a moment or two before righting himself again. "We can leave in just a bit if ya want."

Something in Danny's heart had clenched when Jake took his head off his shoulder, and it came back when he looked at the halfa expectantly, eyes turning the color of molten gold in the light of the setting sun. Danny didn't realize he had been staring until Jake rolled his eyes and waved his hand in front of his face, saying, "Yo, Earth to Casper? Helloooo? Anybody in there?"

"Yeah, let's go," Danny said finally and moved to stand along with Jake. He stretched out his arms a little while Jake moved past to leave the greenhouse, shooting a quick wave goodbye to Sprout as he did so. As he caught up to Jake, the shorter boy gave him a half grin, saying something about the defense club meeting Hermione had invited them to in just a few days. Danny found himself nodding along, that odd clench in his chest back, and as the two walked back to the castle, a wave of peace and contentment waved over the halfa.

He really felt… safe, he supposed was the word. Safe, and comfortable, and happy to talk to Jake and walk with him. It had been a while since he'd really felt like he could be himself around someone, not feeling the need to hide or hold back anything. Fondness bubbled up in his chest in place of the tightness, giving him the impression of being truly alive, alive like he never really felt as often anymore.

Jake's hand swung by his, and the sudden thought of grabbing it overtook Danny, which was strange for two reasons: one, he had never had the urge to just grab someone's hand like that; two, Jake was a very touchy person and honestly probably wouldn't mind Danny taking his hand anyway, but it still felt like a weird thing to do, especially when he was in the midst of talking about… tea, again. Danny had to hold down another laugh.

"It's just, Gramps makes me make him so much fucking tea, " Jake was saying as they reached the entrance to the castle and passed into candlelit stone hallways. "I swear he's got like an entire cupboard filled with just tea, and the maniac makes me sort them by flavor too, and it's not like I hate tea or anything but it's getting a little creepy… So excuse me if the only real plant magical healing properties or whatever is from tea, 'least I wasn't going on about essential oils or something, God, could you imagine…"

He's so animated when he talks, Danny thought, it's impossible not to pay attention to him. Jake waved his hands around and rolled his eyes while talking so much he reminded Danny a little of a cartoon character, occasionally running his hands through his hair in the habit Danny had come to associate with both nerves and excitement. And it's all messy now… no wonder he puts so much gel on, when he touches it that much he'd definitely need extra product to keep it in place. It doesn't look bad though, it's kinda cute when it's all messy and-

Danny stopped in his tracks (metaphorically speaking, because his legs kept carrying him to wherever the fuck Jake was going, neither of them really aiming for the boring Room of Requirement at this point) and thought with horror, Oh no. Oh, Ancients no. Fuck. Shit. Fuck shit. Noooo not again. Fuck.

stay safe! chapter 12 will include a big chunk of the DA as well as some other exciting stuff and i'm super pumped to get it written! :)