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It'd been nearly a week since The Nargle Incident, and the library was dim, cool, and mostly devoid of Ravenclaws. The vast majority of them, after all, were still licking their wounds, and those that weren't were avoiding the other three Houses' fury over the utter mountain of educational materials liberated they'd stolen and stashed away.
The library itself had changed drastically in layout. A gold and silver globe nearly six feet large floated in a dark, starry patch at the center of the largest study area, tables that had once been isolated in rows now spiraling around it much more cozily. Copper borders lay across the silver land in a way that only vaguely matched a Muggle map in some areas. North America, for one, looked quite odd: instead of three massive, continent-spanning nations, there were dozens of smaller ones.
Right now, though, Hermione couldn't appreciate the results of the twins' hard work. At her new favorite table, at an angle where afternoon sunlight glittered best in the dozens of tiny diamonds of Caribbean wizarding islands, she finished reading Sirius' letter and set it precisely aside, hands delicate and unshaking on the cheap parchment.
"So..." Harry said, head ducked like he thought she'd start yelling at him, "... will you help?"
"Let me get this straight," Hermione said, and his shoulders tensed. Curse the rest of the school and the Dursleys twice, and the ghost of whatever idiot came up with the Triwizard Tournament. "Snuffles is going to Floo-call the common room."
"... Yes?"
"In the middle of the night, after curfew."
"I guess?"
"And you want me to help make sure it's empty then."
"If you wouldn't mind--"
"Of course I don't mind," Hermione said crisply. "Emptying the common room is not the problem here. But--" Wait. He really didn't see it? "... Hold on. Come with me, I need to check something."
He trailed after her as she stormed up to Gryffindor Tower. Fortunately the weather was decent enough that there weren't too many people inside to cast glares at him on the way, and the common room itself only had a seventh-year reading on the window seat. The fire was banked low in deference to the sunshine and open windows, just sullen embers in the gaping hearth that -- in retrospect -- had always seemed too large for the room.
"I cannot believe I never noticed," Hermione huffed, catching Harry and the seventh-year sharing a wearily amused look out of the corner of her eye as she searched the mantel. "I can believe everybody else, most wizards are completely incapable of logic, but--" There was a small jar, burgundy blushed with apple green to make it stand out against the reds and golds of the entire rest of the common room, and it was half-full of a shimmering powder. "Aha. I've been so foolish." And, scooping out a small amount with two fingers, she cast the powder into the banked fire. "The Burrow!"
The fire flared and turned green, and Hermione leapt right in.
She somehow still felt mildly surprised to land in a heap on Molly Weasley's kitchen floor.
"Hermione Granger! What in Merlin's name are you doing here?!"
"Testing a theory, Mrs. Weasley!" Hermione threw another fingerful of Floo powder onto the fire. "Hufflepuff!"
This time, at least, she didn't fall on her face when she hit golden Persian carpet. Well then.
"I," Hermione declared imperiously to the two upperclassmen she'd interrupted, half-dressed on a couch, "have discovered a security breach."
"Granger, you are the security breach!" the girl snapped, buttoning her underrobes frantically closed over a teal-green lace bra. "How did you get in here?!"
"I used the Floo," she replied. They'd seen her do it, what did they think she'd done? Not an ounce of common sense. "I could probably use it from my common room, but I went to the Burrow first just to see."
"... But why?"
"Because for all that the lot of you hate Harry right now and are still being jerks to him, you've got the lowest chance of harboring people who'd actually murder him, so."
The girl blinked at her. "Not what I meant, though thanks for the... vote of confidence. I think. Why did you leave the school in the first place?"
"To see if I could leave and get back. Which I can. Which is utterly terrifying, please keep up, because need I remind you that my best friend has fully-trained adult witches and wizards who want him dead? And me, for that matter, what with the whole obvious Nazi-style ideology. Nevermind what a Nazi is."
"I know what a Nazi is, Granger," the boy muttered.
"Good, then you can agree having open access to your common room as soon as they think of it is bad." She huffed, putting her hands on her hips. "So I hope to God-- Merlin-- that one of you knows how to lock this thing after I leave, because I am going straight back to Gryffindor and then to Professor McGonagall." She found their own Floo powder pot -- yellow glaze blushed with burgundy, as apple-like as Gryffindor's had been, which suggested a certain continuity of design in place; how Ravenclaw would manage to put blue in the mix, Hermione could not fathom -- she threw more into the hearth and then paused, foot halfway into the fire. She glanced over her shoulder. "You should call Professor Sprout before locking the grate, by the way. Just a suggestion." And she threw herself into the whirling passage back to Gryffindor.
It occurred to her on the way that, if the Weasley twins had figured this out, it would explain how they managed to get pranks into the other dorms, and she was going to murder them both for not thinking any further than that.