Chapter 312: The Aerial Sandbox and The Granger Fracture

If anyone had ever dared to accuse Orion Malfoy of being easily distracted by shiny new concepts, he would have vehemently, aggressively denied it.

He was an engineer of reality. He was an architect of long-term macro-strategy. He was a disciplined Slytherin whose cognitive architecture was governed by an impenetrable vault of Mind Arts. It took a monumental, reality-shattering phenomenon to genuinely derail his focus.

And, admittedly... unassisted, broomless, multi-vector flight was a very big phenomenon.

For the past four days, Orion had spent nearly seventy percent of his waking hours hovering between six and twenty feet above the marble floor of the grand ballroom.

He had thoroughly moved past basic propulsion and was now treating the cavernous space like an aerial sandbox. He spent an entire afternoon practicing dramatic, mid-air action poses that would have made comic book heroes proud. He spent hours floating cross-legged in the center of the room, meditating in complete sensory isolation while suspended twelve feet in the air.

He even spent a rather disorienting forty-five minutes attempting to hang completely upside down from the ceiling rafters, using two upward-tethered anklets while crossing his arms casually. It had felt extraordinarily bizarre at first—his blood rushing to his head—but once he got the hang of the gyroscopic balancing, it was immensely satisfying.

He was, quite simply, having the time of his life.

The reactions from his domestic audience had been predictably varied.

Bellatrix had wandered into the ballroom on Tuesday afternoon, caught sight of her godson casually drifting ten feet off the ground without a broom, a wand, or a single trailing wisp of dark smoke, and had completely frozen. For a woman who worshipped the Dark Lord’s every magical feat, seeing a thirteen-year-old boy execute silent, frictionless levitation without the grotesque, billowing black miasma that Voldemort relied upon had left her utterly flabbergasted.

Narcissa, on the other hand, had merely paused in the doorway with a tea tray, watched her son execute a tight, aerial bank near the chandelier, and sighed with pure, deadpan maternal practicality: "Do take care not to fall and break your neck, Orion."

It was glorious.

It was so intoxicating, in fact, that Orion had completely, utterly neglected the final logistical preparations for the Gringotts heist.

"Ahem," Sparkle’s interface had finally manifested directly in his face on Friday evening, blocking his view of the ceiling as he hovered in a lazy circle. "While I am thoroughly impressed that you have unlocked creative mode, boss... I feel obligated to remind you that Dolores Umbridge has been tied to a chair in the manor’s cellar for nearly two weeks."

Orion decelerated, drifting slowly toward the floor.

"A forged leave of absence only buys you so much time," Sparkle lectured, her digital waveform pulsing with warning red. "The Ministry is inefficient, yes, but eventually someone in Fudge’s office is going to notice that the Senior Undersecretary hasn’t filed a single piece of paperwork or attended a single morning briefing. People are going to start asking questions."

Orion touched down lightly on the marble, releasing the four levitation tethers with an exhausted sigh.

"I know," Orion admitted, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I know. The problem is, I’m currently drawing a mental blank on the final subterranean extraction route. I’ve been staring at the blueprints so long my thoughts are stagnating. I need a change of pace. A change of scenery."

He made his way back up to his bedroom, mentally preparing to suggest to his Reflection Clone that they should swap places for a few days when the synchronization occurred. A week of sitting in quiet lectures at Hogwarts seemed, bizarrely, like a restful vacation.

At precisely ten o’clock, the mahogany door of the Vanishing Cabinet clicked open.

His clone stepped out into the bedroom, carrying its satchel. But before Orion could even open his mouth to pitch the swap, the duplicate raised a hand.

"I know what you’re about to say," the clone spoke first, its tone dry and remarkably urgent. "You want to swap places tomorrow. And I completely, one hundred percent agree with you."

Orion raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. "You agree?"

"Yep," the clone sighed, tossing the bag onto the desk. "Because you actually need to be at Hogwarts tomorrow. In person."

"What for?"

"You’ll see the exact details in the memory sync in a second," the clone explained, crossing its arms. "But long story short: Hermione Granger is back."

Orion frowned slightly. "She returned from her medical leave?"

"Yes. And she is in absolute, catastrophic disarray," the clone reported grimly. "She arrived yesterday morning, and she is already drowning in stress. She has weeks of academic backlog across her absurd, Time-Turner-bloated schedule, and her psychological state is completely frayed. The Dementor trauma from Hogsmeade is clearly lingering, and Potter alone is entirely ill-equipped to handle her. He’s walking on eggshells and keeping his distance because every time he tries to help, she bites his head off."

The clone’s expression shifted into a grimace of dark amusement.

"And then... dinner happened."

"What happened at dinner?" Orion pressed.

"Cormac McLaggen happened," the clone recounted. "That loud-mouthed, arrogant blowhard of a Gryffindor fourth-year was holding court near the end of their table. He was openly, loudly mocking the younger students who panicked during the Hogsmeade attack, boasting about how real men wouldn’t have needed rescue from the Aurors. He didn’t name Granger or Edgecombe directly, but the implication was glaringly obvious."

The clone shook its head.

"Granger completely snapped. She stood up, marched down the aisle, and slammed her fist straight into McLaggen’s nose before anyone could draw a wand. Broke it clean. Guess if not Draco, someone was bound to get punched by Granger this year."

Orion blinked. A right hook? Hermione Granger?

"And then?"

"And then the adrenaline crashed," the clone finished softly. "She looked at her bloody knuckles, looked at the entire Great Hall staring at her in horror, panicked, burst into tears, and fled the hall. She is completely unraveling, Orion."

Orion stood silently, processing the intelligence with rapid, clinical precision.

This is a massive divergence, Orion analyzed.

In the canon timeline, Hermione Granger had reached a breaking point with her schedule, but it was a gradual, manageable exhaustion that led to her voluntarily dropping Muggle Studies and Divination at the end of the year to relieve the strain, but it was not this bad.

This Hermione, however, had nearly been kissed by a Dementor in a dark alley. She had experienced the cold, suffocating touch of soul-death at fourteen years old, surrounded by war, and was now attempting to bury that profound psychological trauma beneath an impossible mountain of academic perfection.

She was drowning, and rather than letting go of an anchor, she was clutching more stones to her chest.

Why? Orion wondered. Why is she refusing to drop the extra subjects? Is it pride? Or is she terrified that admitting weakness makes the trauma real?

"I see," Orion murmured softly, looking at his duplicate.

He didn’t need to debate it any further. An unstable, emotionally fractured Granger wandering around with an unrestricted temporal artifact in her pocket was a catastrophic, ticking liability for the entire castle.

Orion raised his hand, channeling his intent.

"Sync," Orion commanded.

The clone dissolved instantly into a rush of silver light, collapsing back into his core.

The sensory data flooded his consciousness. The sudden, visceral image of McLaggen’s bloody nose, the terrified, haunted look in Hermione’s tear-filled brown eyes as she fled the hall, and the suffocating tension hanging over the Gryffindor table settled into his mind with razor-sharp clarity.

Orion opened his eyes, his indigo gaze hard and resolved.

"Yes," Orion whispered to the empty room, smoothing down the front of his robes. "I should go to school tomorrow."

He walked toward his bed, preparing to sleep.

"I need to have a very serious talk with Miss Granger."