Disclaimer: The characters and the Harry Potter universe belong to J.K. Rowling, not me. This story is intended as a work of tribute, and I make no money from it.
To the best of my efforts the story is canon-compliant; Tracey never appears in the books, but she did exist in J.K. Rowling's notes as one of the Slytherin girls in Harry's year.
A Study In Green
-oOo-
Tracey's world has been reduced to a narrow path: she is ducking and slicing and throwing a curse, and there is no time left for anything other than fighting.
Cursing and dodging and hexing, suddenly she has to throw herself out of the way of Bellatrix Lestrange who is blasting through people, rather than taking the long way round. When Tracey scrambles back on her feet she hits Carrow straight in the chest with a burning hex, feeling a savage satisfaction as her enemy staggers backwards screaming. Take that, you pervert: that's for looking up the skirts of the girls you were torturing, she thinks, before Carrow's brother Amycus comes for her and Tracey barely manages to slip away from his grasp.
There is no time to hesitate, to stop and think; the lethal dance goes on and every moment is a separate world, complete in itself. There is only now, and now, and another now. Breathing hurts; Tracey vaguely remembers being hit in the ribs earlier. She narrowly avoids another stunner, this time from a Death Eater who wasn't even aiming for her.
There are people everywhere, crammed into the corridors, and she weaves through them searching for weak spots, using her size to her advantage. She can sneak through where older, sturdier fighters wouldn't fit. As she squeezes past Neville Longbottom, a stray hex slices his arm open and sprays drops of blood everywhere. Tracey hastily wipes away the red from her lips and draws a deep breath and dodges a curse, and there is no time-
When Tracey was a little girl, there always seemed to be too much time. She would lock herself into the bathroom and sit in the avocado bathtub, looking at the tap. Slowly, a drop would form and then fall, and the small, tinny sound it made when it landed would echo in the tub. Sometimes, the tiny droplets from the impact would splash up and tickle her on the knee, making her laugh. No one else knew she could make the drops of water fall at will, or keep them hanging from the tap, growing bigger and bigger. Time seemed to stand still when she was in the bathroom, stretching out to last forever, and the sound of her mother's key turning in the front door in the evening always took her by surprise.
Tracey couldn't remember anything before the council flat with the avocado bathroom suite, and the black mould growing around the window in the bedroom. She slept in the bottom part of the bunk bed, surrounded by pink curtains made from old, dyed sheets; her mum said they were just like those Sleeping Beauty had in the film. Tracey knew they weren't; not really, but they both pretended not to notice.
That was before everything else, when there were only the two of them.
One evening Kevin turned up at their door in the flat, with a book for Tracey and a bouquet of wilted petrol station flowers. Her mum introduced him, rather nervously. By the time Tracey had decided that he had kind eyes, it had already been settled that they were moving in with him.
Soon after, Joshua and Samuel were born; somehow it happened so fast that Tracey couldn't quite remember afterwards how they had gone from two to five. They all lived in an actual house, although it was pretty small and filled up quickly with screaming and squealing and shouting children. If Tracey tried to lock herself into the loo, it would only be a few minutes before someone started banging on the door. There was no time to watch the swell and fall of drops of water in this house.
Kevin had no magic at all, and her mum was nervous about what the neighbours would say if they saw her creating things where there had been none. Besides, Josh and San were so young they mightn't understand that they mustn't tell anyone. Before, mum used to show Tracey how her wand could make flowers bloom in a dank corner. She would change her hair clips into butterflies fluttering around the room, before they settled down in her hair. Tracey would laugh and ask for more, and more. Now, the wand, which was a lovely slender thing that seemed to be more real than anything surrounding it, had been locked into the top drawer in mum's and Kevin's room. Tracey knew exactly where it was kept. The air around the drawer seemed slightly different: more alive, more real.
Tracey took to leaving the house to get some peace from Sam and Josh pestering her to read them stories. If it wasn't that, she would be asked to come and dry the dishes, or pick up the laundry if you please. If she managed to escape her mother, Kevin would call her over to show her some incredibly boring book about insects or animals. He was always very kind, but his kindness was so very undemanding that Tracey didn't ever consider it the gift it was intended to be. Instead, she would roam the streets and the little bit of forest where the creek ran through and you could find bluebells in the spring.
Her face was different to the others; her skin was darker, and her hair hung in thick corkscrew curls, very unlike her brothers' wispy blond mops. Her brothers couldn't see the peculiar thickness to the air next to mum's side of the bed, and when they went to Benidorm for two weeks their skin got very red in the sun while hers got a lovely deep tan.
Tracey wasn't stupid; she knew it was because of her father, who she barely remembered anymore. When the other children at school kept asking why her dad wouldn't come along to pick her up like the other dads did, she stopped talking about him. They didn't understand.
After Kevin came along, it got better. He would wait for her at the school gates, and she could keep dad for herself, not to be spoken of out loud. On her eighth birthday, her mum told her that her dad was a wizard, and gave Tracey a photo of him. It was unlike any other photo she'd ever seen; dad moved and waved and tilted his head upwards to look at her beneath the funny hat he was wearing. Ralston Anderson had been written on the back of the photo, in her mum's careful handwriting. Tracey would let her fingers follow the curves of the name, tracing it out again and again.
The Sorting Hat abruptly cut off the noise from the Great Hall as it was placed on her head, and all Tracey could think of was that she mustn't show anyone that she was afraid.
"What have we here? That haughty look wouldn't look amiss on a princess, but you're not as hard as you think you are. You will be, girl, never fret; you will be. Your house will see to that," the Sorting Hat whispered in Tracey's ears, before proclaiming her a "SLYTHERIN!" so loudly it seemed to echo back from the walls. On wobbly legs she stumbled to the Slytherin table, sliding in next to Millicent Bulstrode. She swallowed an ill-timed giggle thinking that Kevin would have said that Millicent was built like a brick outhouse, as she was towering over Tracey. There was some snickering among the older students as Justin Finch-Fletchley was sorted into Hufflepuff; mostly they just watched, eyes sharp and quick, whispering comments when they recognised someone, and she did her best to imitate them.
After Professor Snape left them in their dormitory, Tracey didn't quite know what to do with herself after stowing her belongings in the chest of drawers next to her canopied bed. She was older now and she knew she was no princess, no matter what her bed looked like. Her mum had dredged up half-forgotten prejudices from the wizarding world to prepare her daughter for what awaited her at Hogwarts, and she had made sure Tracey understood that she wasn't a pure-blood witch in the eyes of those who cared about such things, since she was a Muggle-born herself.
Aimlessly, Tracey looked around the strange room and shivered suddenly, feeling the walls closing in on her with their centuries of stone having little regard for children. It took her by surprise when one of the other girls approached her.
"You're Tracey, aren't you?" the pug-nosed girl the others called Pansy asked her. Tracey shrugged. On the train, the girl had been speaking loudly about Paris and travelling during the summer. When Tracey had tried to squeeze past her in the packed corridor on the way to the loo Pansy pulled her robes out of the way with an irritated sigh, and Tracey had resolved to stay out of her way in the future.
"We're going down to the common room. Want to come?" Pansy asked, and Tracey shrugged again. Undeterred, Pansy stretched out her hand to Tracey. The offered palm was warm and slightly sticky to the touch, but that didn't matter; Tracey grabbed on to it and fell headlong into the thrill of belonging.
Later, she realised that all the girls in her year had known instantly that she was a half-blood from a family with very little money. It didn't matter. That first year, it seemed as if once you were in Slytherin you belonged. Worn robes, that Draco would have ridiculed if a Weasley had the temerity to turn up in them, attracted no comments. While Daphne may extol the virtues of her impeccable pure-blood lineage until Millie brusquely told her to shut up unless she wanted her ears boxed, no one asked Tracey why her dad never was around to pick her up from the Hogwarts Express, or why she never talked about spending time with him during the holidays. Somehow, everyone knew that her father was a pure-blood wizard from the Caribbean, and that was all. Much, much later, she figured out that it must have been Snape who confirmed the rumour; who else could it have been?
The summer in third year she spent a whole month in Pansy's home, outside Manchester. It was odd, being waited on by the Parkinson house-elves, sitting at a dining table that was longer than her entire house. Tracey minded her manners anxiously, watching the others to see which fork they picked before touching anything, hiding her uncertainty behind the aloof look on her face. She was rewarded when she said her goodbyes as Mrs Parkinson kissed her on both cheeks and asked her to come back soon, and Mr Parkinson weighed back on his heels and told her she must come back to set him straight about politics, eh Tracey? It made her blush, but she was pleased too.
As she grew older and learnt Slytherin ways of listening to what was really being said beneath all the words, things changed. She still belonged, but as the years went on, cracks started to appear where once they all had seemed welded together against the rest of the school.
Snape steadily grew more distant. When Tracey started at Hogwarts, he was frequently seen in their common room. For such a cantankerous man, it was remarkable how his presence had seemed to serve to make the Slytherins aware that they had to pull together. Wisely, Snape never explicitly encouraged them to do so; the first-years made it a matter of pride to embrace the weary cynicism that served their elders so well, and any pat lectures would have fallen flat.
Nevertheless, as Snape directed his attention elsewhere, the Slytherin common room changed gradually, until invisible battle lines were drawn and pure-blood ancestry rose to prominence.
All that time, Tracey watched from the side lines, increasingly disillusioned of her own place in the proceedings but yet, unquestionably, part of it. She could have disparaged Draco as a spoilt little boy who wouldn't be remotely as cocky if his resolve really was tested, or acknowledged that while Pansy may have brains, she was becoming increasingly reluctant to use them, but as usual Tracey kept her conclusions to herself, hidden behind her imperturbable face.
The summer between her fifth and sixth year, she took the Daily Prophet every day; it was expensive, but she had a summer job at the chipper for the second year in a row. Too many things seemed to be happening at once in her world, the real world, and it was maddening to be stuck here waiting for something to change, yet fearing the storm that was approaching.
Kevin got The Sun every evening and usually left it on the kitchen table to be fought over by the boys. This summer, Tracey had been discomfited to notice that Samuel was old enough to look with interest at the Page 3 girl.
One evening, as she was glancing over his shoulder on her way to scrub the grease off in the shower, she spotted pictures of the family that had been killed when the Brockdale Bridge collapsed somewhere in the Midlands. Tracey tore the paper from under Sam's nose, despite his outraged shouts, and thundered up the stairs to barricade the door to her room with a chair, diving into the middle drawer where she kept her wand and other magical items under lock and key.
Her hands were shaking as she pulled out the Daily Prophet from that morning, when all hell seemed to have broken loose in the wizarding world. BRITAIN AT WAR – SCRIMGEOUR VOWS TO FIGHT ON was plastered all over the front page. She turned to page three, and saw the headline: FUDGE RESIGNS OVER BROCKLEHURST DEBACLE – MUGGLE CASUALTIES RISE. Carefully, she smoothed out the creased pages of the Muggle newspaper, to examine the unmoving, smiling faces of the Dixon family. Three of them had been killed when their car was dragged down with the collapsing bridge; only baby Jonathan and the mother had survived. Tracey ignored Sam's increasingly loud attempts to get her to open the door. She was still staring at the picture of the Dixons when he tired of rattling the door handle and walked off. Samantha, 12, had died in the wreckage. Tim, 8, had held on until an ambulance got there, but died at the hospital a few hours later.
Children were so soft, she thought, remembering the feeling of Joshua clinging on to her like an octopus; all wiry energy and softness and demands for her to tell him stories of Power Rangers and Pokémon and Batman. There wasn't really a choice: not after that.
She could see all the little betrayals to come, stretching indefinitely into the future like pearls on a string. On the Hogwarts Express, the weight of her treachery hung over her shoulders as she settled in with her friends and overheard Pansy whispering to Daphne that something was up with Draco this year. More than anything she wanted to say a proper farewell to those who had been her kin, but she knew she mustn't betray that anything was different now. Finding refuge in her usual manner, Tracey made her sarcastic quips like always and no one seemed to find anything amiss.
They all seemed to be on edge this year, her sixth at Hogwarts. Even Snape was more irritable than usual, if that was even possible, as he exhorted them to comport themselves in a manner befitting Slytherin House when addressing them in the common room after the Sorting.
It was weeks before Tracey found a way to speak to Dumbledore without raising any suspicions. Quick as an adder she drew her wand and hit an unsuspecting Gryffindor fourth-year straight in the back with a stinging hex, right in front of the Headmaster. She had spotted him coming down the corridor and held her time, until she was certain Dumbledore was almost right behind her.
"Don't let me catch you ogling me again, I'm much too good for the likes of you!" she told the Gryffindor, tossing her hair back and looking down her nose at him with obvious disdain. He looked outraged and was fumbling for his wand, before Dumbledore intervened and assigned Tracey a detention, looking at her in a way that suggested she hadn't fooled him for a moment.
It had to be him. She trusted Snape to defend every single one of his Slytherins to the hilt, but she had no idea whose side he really was on. Sufficiently well versed in intrigue by now, she rather suspected that his persona was a little too calculated to arouse suspicion in Gryffindors who never, ever seemed to look beyond the obvious, but then that could be a double bluff. She was better off going straight to Dumbledore; at least she knew which side he was on, despite his blatant favouritism.
That night, she trudged up the stairs to the Headmaster's office, after commiserations from her dorm mates and Draco's jeering "Off to see your Gryffindor stud, Tracey?" She'd thrown him a feeble "Just because you're not getting any, Malfoy…" which had made him smirk in appreciation. If she hadn't had so much on her mind, she would have come up with something better.
"Dolly mixture," she mumbled resentfully at the gargoyle; it hardly seemed fitting for what she was about to do.
"Miss Davis. Do come in," the Headmaster bid her, and she found it difficult to disguise her wonder at the circular office, crammed full with delicately spinning instruments, more books than even Granger would go through in her lifetime and portraits of former headmasters lining every available space on the walls above waist-level. "Sit down, please. I assume there is no need to deliver a suitable lecture on resolving your differences with your fellow students with words rather than hexes?" Dumbledore asked her calmly, and she steeled herself. When there were only the two of them in the room, this man was suddenly an intimidating prospect.
Tracey had to restrain herself from squirming under his impossibly sharp eyes; she wasn't fool enough to be taken in by the gentle demeanour that hid everything important about him. The fact that, while she trusted him to oppose He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to the utmost of his powers, she didn't entirely trust him to place her on equal footing with Potter or his other pet Gryffindors, did nothing to put her on her ease.
"I want to fight against He-Who- Vo- Voldemort," Tracey said in a rush, realising at the last moment that refusing to use his real name was unlikely impress his most implacable enemy.
"Do you, Miss Davis?" The Headmaster pinned her down under his gaze. "Do you have much experience fighting Dark wizards, my dear?"
"You know I don't, sir," she told him sullenly. "But I will have before this is over, one way or the other."
"May I enquire as to what has prompted this realisation? I hardly dare think that my exhortations of the importance of standing together, or fall separately to the threat facing us, may have influenced you?" Dumbledore asked her airily, as if he was asking her about the weather. Her dislike of the Headmaster rose to the surface again: she would bet anything that he wouldn't treat Harry bloody Potter this way.
"The children," she said baldly, not bothering to hide the dislike on her face. "V- Voldemort has killed children, and unless he is stopped he'll do it again." She thought of her brothers, and felt sick to the stomach. For all intents and purposes they were Muggle, despite being born to a Muggle-born witch, and would be defenceless if anyone ever came after them. Her mum barely ever did magic anymore; even Tracey wasn't that good at Defence Against the Dark Arts, and she had class three times a week. She resolved to study as much as she possibly could this year; it would help to have Snape teaching DADA, although frankly anything would be an improvement on Umbridge.
"I see," Dumbledore replied, and she thought she saw a brief flash of something – was it pity? - in his eyes, before he straightened imperceptibly in his chair. Only much later did it occur to her that it could have been sorrow. As Dumbledore moved, his sleeve fell down and his blackened hand was visible briefly, and Tracey had to force herself to look away from it. It reminded her of Draco's Hand of Glory, which she always had been afraid would escape one night and crawl around in the darkness of the Slytherin quarters, until Blaise had taken pity on her and sworn on his mother's life that Draco kept it securely locked up in case anyone nicked it.
Dumbledore gave her a second detention, which he used to give her a notebook charmed to pass on any useful information she came across, and thus her career as a spy begun. Tracey didn't fool herself into believing that she was making any valuable contribution to the war effort, but she dutifully passed on all the little tit-bits of gossip, and any deductions she made from it, that came her way. The notebook was charmed to look like Transfiguration notes to anyone else, and she had no idea who was on the receiving end. Nevertheless, she reported the dark shadow she had spotted on Draco's left arm under his white shirt, and Pansy's boasts that her mother very soon would get the better of those bastards at the Ministry who were trying to shut her business down.
The shadows lurking in the corners of the Slytherin common room rose up to engulf the whole castle towards the end of Tracey's sixth year at Hogwarts, and Dumbledore fell to Snape's hand.
She had never believed Dumbledore was invincible, the way the Gryffindors seemed to. Nevertheless, it was a crushing blow when the resistance against Voldemort was left leaderless, if you didn't count Harry Potter. Having gone to school with Potter for six years, Tracey thought his chief recommendation was his extraordinary luck; if he had any powers beyond the ordinary, he had mostly managed to hide them. As the school descended into a small hell on earth, she tried very hard not to remember that their only hope, The-Boy-Who-Lived whose name was furtively scrabbled on the walls everywhere in the castle, was the same scrawny boy she used to have Double Potions with who never quite got the hang of Trans-Species Transformation.
After Dumbledore had died Tracey had no idea if anyone was still reading, but she continued to make careful little notes as what once had been a school slowly turned into a battleground. She took to disguising herself as she sneaked around the castle; as long as she was acting like a good Slytherin no one would ask any awkward questions about her family, not when she was a confirmed half-blood. Still, she couldn't bear to do nothing. In an uneasy compromise, she moved like a shadow in the halls, dodging Dumbledore's Army on one side and the Carrows and their followers on the other, honing her skills by throwing curses on the latter when she was sure she wouldn't be spotted.
When they were roused in the middle of the night by Slughorn, who looked more rattled than she ever had seen him, and ordered to go to the Great Hall immediately, Tracey didn't waste any time. After jotting down what was happening in her notebook she got dressed, quickly and efficiently. She only paused to unobtrusively fill her pockets with potions, and to carefully fasten the heart pendant necklace her mum gave her on her seventeenth birthday around her neck. Lastly, she hid the notebook under her mattress; one way or another, if she didn't come back after tonight she would have no more use for it.
Tracey followed the other Slytherins as they left the Great Hall to be evacuated to Hogsmeade, mindful of what the consequences may be for her family should she take a public stance against Voldemort. It was easy to slip away in the confusion of the Entrance Hall, where all hell seemed to have broken loose; Tracey slipped into a nearby alcove to cast one of her disguising charms, and emerged unrecognisable, with a Transfigured scarf with black and yellow stripes. As the teachers ordered the forces defending the castle into position, she made sure to stick with the Gryffindors. They struck her as less likely to pay attention to students from humdrum Hufflepuff than the Ravenclaws.
The defenders had descended from their position on top of the Gryffindor Tower when Voldemort's forces started attacking from the air. After that the fighting was a confused stream of disjointed movements, until everything went black.
Disorientated, she regained consciousness. The voices currently debating what to do with her were irritatingly familiar.
"We'd better bring her in to the Great Hall, Madam Pomfrey's got a team looking after the wounded," someone said, and Tracey felt her wand gently being pulled out of her hand. Quick as a flash she grabbed on to it and sat up, recognising the faces looking down on her.
"For fuck's sake, Finnigan, I'm not dead yet!"
He looked entirely unapologetic and snuck a meaningful glance at his companion, Alicia Spinnet, who probably thought the way she was angling her wand at Tracey was discreet. Gryffindors, Tracey thought with exasperation. "I'm on your side, you idiots," she informed them curtly, and once she was sure no one would hex her, she checked herself over for injuries. After taking a second or so to close her mouth, which was hanging open in surprise, Alicia gave her a hand. The light from her wand was welcome in the darkness.
"Michael Corner swore blind 'the curly Slytherin' helped him get away from the Carrows a few weeks ago. Guess he wasn't barmy, then," Finnigan said pensively. He must have recognised her; Tracey rubbed her palm wearily over her face and felt her own nose, realising that the charm she'd put on to disguise herself must had worn off. "V- Voldemort has given Harry an hour- make that half an hour by now – to hand himself over, or he will kill everyone. Harry won't, of course. Are you sure you're still on our side?" Finnigan asked her conversationally.
"Yes," Tracey said, giving him a look of pure disdain. She was exhausted and dirty and frightened, but she channelled every last bit of energy she had left into her haughty expression which wouldn't have disgraced Marie-Antoinette as she set out for the guillotine. Finnigan seemed to get the message.
"Good on you," he said evenly. "Want to give us a hand with the rest?" He gestured to the bodies lying motionless around them; Tracey was startled to realise that the three of them were alone on the lawn, apart from the fallen.
As she stood with the others facing the onslaught of Voldemort's forces, Tracey deliberately decided not to cast another charm to disguise herself.
This is it, this is it, this is it, kept ringing in her head, and she was suddenly determined to fight and die as Tracey Davis. She no longer believed that a puny sixth-year charm would stand up to a victorious Dark Lord.
As she staggered at the sight of a lifeless Harry Potter dangling in Hagrid's arms, defeat appeared all but inevitable.
She took some comfort in standing shoulder to shoulder with her friends; she had laughed with delight when she spotted Blaise Zabini and Miles Bletchley in the scrum to get out of the Great Hall at Voldemort's approach. There had been no tearful reunions; they had simply nodded to each other, in mute acknowledgement of their separate journeys to this particular moment in time, and got on with it. The time for asking questions was over; Voldemort had made it clear that no one in the castle would be spared, and for the first time since she was eleven it didn't seem to matter which house you had been sorted into.
And now the fight is upon them again. The giants are raining death and destruction from the air, and defenders and attackers alike are being driven back into the school. Reinforcements seem to be coming, but Tracey can't see which side they're fighting for. Even as she sees Slughorn leading them on she still isn't entirely sure which side he has picked in the end. Then there isn't even time to look up any longer.
The world has been reduced to running and throwing curses, and throwing herself out of the way. Eventually she runs out of space, and finds herself next to Blaise. They stand back to back, protecting each other, in the Great Hall, where they were carried on the wave of the other fighters pouring into Hogwarts. It's almost a relief not to have time to think anymore, just do until she falls-
And then, impossibly, Harry Potter's voice rings out and everything she thought she knew is turned on its head.
When the sun has gone up over the still smoking ruins of Hogwarts and the bodies have been brought in, there is nothing in this world that could keep her from going home. She knows now, will always know, what the aftermath of battle tastes like and how the smell of death will linger in the air. Most of the other survivors will tarry at Hogwarts; either in sorrow, or slightly drunk from adrenaline and the heady sensation of emerging victorious, against all hope. Or both.
The sun shines hesitatingly, as if it isn't sure of its welcome. Tracey turns her face up to it as she steps out of the Entrance Hall, closing her eyes and revelling in the fact that she's still alive, still standing. Someone bumps into her. Before she is even aware of reaching for her wand, she has whipped it out and is pointing it at the interloper.
It's Percy Weasley; she'd recognise the Weasley red anywhere, and even with his hair half singed off the former Head Boy is unmistakable. His eyes are different, she notices as she stares into them over her outstretched wand, which is hovering just a few inches from the tip of his. His eyes are black holes, fathomless; she wonders what her own look like now. Slowly, without taking her eyes off him, Tracey pulls her wand back and holds her hands up.
"Sorry, I wasn't looking," she says, aiming for apologetic and only falling short due to the exhaustion even she can hear creeping into her voice. Weasley doesn't allow his wand to drop and maintains his stony glare. Tracey wants to laugh or cry or scream in frustration, or maybe all three at once. She falls back on her mainstay for holding her own: cutting remarks.
"I was on your side, you short-sighted git!" she spits. "You didn't think Snape was the only Slytherin who fought against Voldemort, did you?"
Weasley has no response to that; clearly that was exactly what he thought. Fed up, she pushes his wand out of her face and continues down the stairs, feeling his eyes burning a hole in her back.
Tracey trudges halfway up to the Apparition point at the main gates before she realises that you can Apparate from anywhere now that the wards are down. She almost Splinches herself, before arriving home in the middle of Sunday breakfast. Her mum spills her tea and Joshua knocks his cornflakes all over the kitchen table, and Tracey scares the life out of them in her bloody clothes and with her face covered in ash.
Years later, Kevin will tell her that it was the stench that unnerved him the most; the sweet, cloying smell of death that clung to her skin as she grabbed on to the cup of tea proffered to her with shaking hands, as if someone might snatch it from her.
Six weeks after the battle Professor McGonagall calls to their house. She sits down among piles of laundry left haphazardly wherever they fit in the small sitting room. McGonagall's back is very straight as she gazes around, wearing a look of benign interest. Tracey is waiting to hear what she has come to say; she has been expecting someone from the wizarding world to turn up eventually. After a desultory conversation about the current state of affairs in the wizarding world, McGonagall seems to get to the point.
"Miss Davis, you fought with considerable courage in the war, and I commend your valour."
Tracey bends her head in a sharp nod, keeping her face impassive.
"We have to overcome considerable challenges in order to reopen Hogwarts in September."
Tracey's head jerks up; she didn't expect the school to be restored so soon.
"As I'm sure you understand, it will necessarily be a work in progress. We do feel, however, that offering the students the opportunity of concluding their education is more important than the state of the buildings," McGonagall continues in her usual dry manner, and Tracey's head is spinning at the thought of returning to Hogwarts. She went back for the funerals, of course, but other than that her world since the battle has been a Muggle semi-d with too many people and not enough space to think. She's not sure if she is ready – will ever be ready - to return.
"To help some of the students with the transition after the war, it has been suggested that some of the older students will step in to act as mentors. Ideally, it would be students that the younger children look up to. The other teachers and I agree that you would be an excellent choice, Miss Davis. You would-"
It's obvious which students she is referring to, and why Tracey would be such a fantastic mentor.
Clearly, McGonagall has realised that she will have to come up with a strategy to contain students who fought each other in pitched battles, whose friends and families were killed by the other side, without re-enacting the Battle of Hogwarts. Tracey was never within an ass's roar of becoming as much as prefect before; she never even made it onto Umbridge's Inquisitorial Squad. But by virtue of fighting on the winning side, she has suddenly become a member of the very small constituency McGonagall apparently plans to rely on to subdue the defeated Slytherins. Snape may be a hero, but he is dead, and after two years with Slughorn Tracey has no illusions about his ability to control Slytherin House.
Suddenly she explodes. Since the war ended Tracey has been overpowered by fits of rage more often than she likes to remember. She knows very well that she is being unreasonable when she throws a hissy fit over Sam crunching his Coco Pops too loudly. This is different; it is a righteous anger swelling in her chest that rapidly boils over.
"If you think I'll be your pet Slytherin, you can fuck off back to Hogwarts!" she spits in McGonagall's face, barely restraining herself from shouting. McGonagall flinches, but remains silent; the only sound within the room is Tracey's rapid breathing. Further afield, the muffled noise of her brothers fighting in the kitchen and Kevin singing along to the radio as he is washing the car in the driveway reminds her that there's more to life than magic.
"How many of them died because Dumbledore believed some houses are more equal than others?" Tracey asks McGonagall belligerently. "Vincent Crabbe? Rachel Levine? Andreas Vaisey? Nerys Jones?" She throws the names out, one after one; she is a Slytherin and she remembers her own, even if she stood against them at the end. "I didn't fight because I wanted a fucking pat on the head! Don't you dare think I'm an honorary Gryffindor now," she rages; she couldn't stop now even if she tried. "Don't you bloody dare think I did this for any of your reasons! I didn't to it to get a Prefect badge and a fucking 'Attagirl'!" Tracey is running out of coherent words, but she is still full to the brim with anger, looking around with wild eyes. The only inanimate thing she can find to take her anger out on is the laundry.
McGonagall watches in silence as Tracey takes out her frustrations on an innocent pile of towels, beating them into submission. Finally, she looks up; she is still a seething mess on the inside but now she can bottle it up again. Tracey suddenly notices that McGonagall looks older than she remembers, and it occurs to her that too many Gryffindors also fell last year. It doesn't change anything that she said, but she feels an unwelcome stab of pity for the new Headmistress of Hogwarts.
"I'm not saying that you're not right, Miss Davis," McGonagall says, her burr slightly more pronounced than usual, "but I would still ask that you consider my request. If only for the sake of the students who will return to Slytherin House this September." McGonagall gets up to leave, but stops in the doorway and turns back towards Tracey.
"I realise that my timing is a little off," she says, almost sounding embarrassed, "but I also came to tell you that Miss Granger has located an American psychiatrist who also is a witch. She's offering counselling to any students who were present at the battle, free of charge. I will leave her card here." She places something on the bookshelf, and leaves without another word. Outside, Kevin sings a horrible rendition of 'Torn' which would make Natalie Imbruglia shelve her singing career immediately and Tracey is left alone in the parlour, staring at the card and a battered heap of towels.
A little less than three months later Tracey is standing on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, warily scanning the crowd for friends and foes.
"Don't look so happy about going back," someone says in her ear. She swirls around to spot Blaise Zabini, who is looking very dapper in his Muggle suit, and smiles despite herself.
"I'm not. A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do, and all that," Tracey says by way of explanation, and he seems to understand. She spots a head that could only belong to Hermione Granger bobbing past and hastily looks away, only to see Pansy Parkinson on the other side instead. Pansy looks at her with disgust and sweeps up onto the train in the same grand manner as on that first train ride, so many years ago. Tracey shrugs; maybe some things will never change.
The sound of the whistle makes all the remaining students scramble on to the train, with parents and friends on the platform shouting last minute advice and admonitions. The Hogwarts Express pulls out from King's Cross, slow at first and then quicker and quicker as it accelerates. They are on their way.
_.o-0 THE END 0-o._
Like it, hate it, love it? I'd be chuffed if you let me know what you think!