Chapter 1
Necessary Introductions to the Personae Dramatis
"Jessica!" A short, blonde figure tackled the dark-haired girl waiting at Platform 9 ¾ in an enveloping hug.
The girl staggered backwards, then reciprocated the embrace. "Amber! I was just looking for you! What took you so long!"
"Well, I couldn't find my cauldron, and then one of my robes ripped. Took me forever to get it fixed, not being able to use magic outside of school and all." She sighed as they waited. "How was your summer?"
Jessica Rainey rolled her eyes. "Uneventful. I am so glad to be going back to Hogwarts. I seriously thought the summer would never end."
Her best friend Amber Papineau nodded. "Me too. And all the talk about You-Know-Who coming back? Seriously depressing. I'd feel so much safer around Dumbledore...Have you been reading the Prophet?
"Yeah, I can't help it. Rachel has been going around the house fuming at every issue. She's louder than a Howler when she gets mad! And then when Hermione would come over..." Jessica shook her head in exasperation at her younger sister and her roommate. "I'm just glad that Hermione was off with the Weasleys most of the summer, and that they're both in Gryffindor and we don't have to put up with it at school."
"Well can you really blame them? I mean, Harry is a really good friend, especially to Hermione, and the Prophet has done nothing but attack him since the end of the Tournament in June. Besides, the girls were victimized just as much at the beginning of the summer, what with Hermione's "love triangle…" and then they had to make up Rachel and Cho's supposed catfight over Cedric…"
"Yeah, but believe me, they got their revenge. And anyway, couldn't that Skeeter lady have come up with a better story than Cedric for Rach? She can't stand him."
Amber's face fell. "You mean couldn't."
As a Ravenclaw prefect, Amber had spent a good deal of time with the Hufflepuff, and perhaps knew him a little better than Jessica. His death had affected her perhaps a bit more than the others, and Jessica was immediately sorry she brought it up. She put her arm around her friend. "It's gonna be so weird going back, after everything that's happened..."
Suddenly the clock struck 10:30 and the girls parted, gathering their things. "You go first? I have to wait for Rachel anyway. She's off somewhere looking for Hermione." Jessica looked at Amber, the less clumsy of the two.
Amber nodded, and, after looking around the platform to check for staring Muggles, she headed straight through the brick wall separating the wizarding world from the Muggle one.
After Jessica had met up with Rachel, their parents, and the Grangers, the group entered the magical part of the train station. Jessica's and Rachel's parents, Ron and Norma Rainey, were American wizards who worked for the wizarding government. Ron was a lower-level Potions manufacturer, and Norma was a secretary for the American Department of Wizard-Muggle Relations. Norma, a pureblood American witch, had gone to the American wizarding school, but Ron and his brother, both Muggle-born, had gone to Hogwarts. The girls had each been invited to Hogwarts, first Jessica, then Rachel a year later. The family enjoyed the girls' enrollment at Hogwarts, as the British school of witchcraft and wizardry was much more prestigious than the American one, and magic made the distance easily manageable.
Hermione and Rachel spotted their best friend's family, accompanied by several well-known Aurors and a great black dog, and swallowed their friends Harry and Ron in excited, chattery hugs while the boys reciprocated, amused. Mr. Weasley shook Ronald Rainey's hand, then Mr. Granger's, and the three mothers hugged one another warmly and chatted about their summers. Harry, Ron, Rachel, and Hermione talked about their upcoming year, the horrid Daily Prophet articles, and Ron's and Hermione's recent appointment as the Gryffindor fifth-year prefects. Jessica hovered close to her parents, scanning the room for Amber, who finally appeared, walking toward them. The clock was nearing eleven, so the students said goodbye to their families and boarded the Hogwarts Express.
Amber, Hermione, and Ron all took their leave as prefects and left the rest to find compartments with their friends. Harry and Rachel found one with Ginny, Neville, and a girl Jessica didn't know, leaving her to find one for herself. She walked down the aisle, searching for an empty one…four seventh-year Slytherins, no thanks. Next to that, some first and second years. Suddenly, the train lurched forward, and she had no time to look any more. She stumbled into a seemingly empty compartment, and made to sit down. She didn't land on the seat though.
"Oi, look what we have here," an unmistakably Weasley-twin voice said in her ear, very close to her ear in fact. She leapt up the split second she realized she was sitting in the lap of George Weasley, her Quidditch rival and prank-war nemesis. She blushed to the roots of her hair.
"I--uh, I'm sorry," she stammered, then glared at him and his laughing companions: his brother Fred and their friend Lee Jordan.
"Not at all," he said with a smirk. "You're more than welcome to join us!"
"No thanks," she said, feeling that this was even worse than the possibility of being in a compartment with a Slytherin. Despite the fact that the twins' brother was one of Jessica's sister's best friends, she could not deny that as the new Ravenclaw Quidditch captain and co-beater with Amber opposite the twins, she had shared too many years of prank-filled rivalry with them to ever look upon them as friends. She quickly exited the compartment, tripping a bit as she went, then with no small effort found a compartment with a couple of boys on her Quidditch team to sit in. Sitting down in a huff by the window, she tried to wait for Amber in silence, making small talk occasionally with the two chasers she was sitting with. It was going to be a long trip.
Meanwhile, Amber arrived at the prefect's compartment with Ron and Hermione and immediately wished that she could go back two years in time and refuse her appointment as prefect. She hated these meetings, these formalities…things that kept the prefects away from appropriately throttling Slytherins or bullying first-years. Amber looked down and realized that she was gripping her purse altogether too tightly for comfort, and immediately loosened. Upon hearing the train's loud whistle, she determinedly shook her head and turned her thoughts to more pressing matters. Such as the scent of dungbombs entering the compartment. Amber volunteered to go find the culprits.
She had finally reached her seventh year at Hogwarts, and it had been a long journey indeed. Her dad, John, had once been a wizard, but had abandoned that life upon Voldemort's first rise to power in order to protect his young daughter. Several years later, he had met and married the pretty Muggle woman, Jenelle Wingers. After that, they had lived as Muggles in London and had added two more children to the family. Amber had lived in blissful ignorance of the wizarding world until that fateful day the June of her tenth year. Upon receiving the letter from Hogwarts, she had begged her father to let her go until he finally capitulated. Her parents seldom accompanied her to the train station, and she missed them fiercely already. It was hard to believe it was her seventh year already, and with it, NEWTs and a career choice were looming ahead.
In the meantime, however, her biggest worry was finding the source of the dungbombs. She came around a corner and found her greatest trial as a prefect, the number-one-Gryffindor-point-remover Fred Weasley snickering slightly at a couple of second-year Hufflepuffs. She sneaked up behind him and grabbed him by the ear.
However, rather than protest, he spun her around and gathered her in his arms, whispering in her ear, "Blimey, couldn't wait to get your hands on me, now could you?"
Amber rolled her eyes and ducked away. "Well, Fred, I wasn't aware that it was possible for a house to start the year with negative points, but you managed to prove me wrong. Ten points from Gryffindor," she replied coolly.
He patted her on the head and said, "Maybe we can find a broom closet when we get to the castle and you can take off even more. How does that sound?"
"That sounds wonderful," she replied sweetly, "Because you just lost Gryffindor another five points." Taking a page from Fred's book, she patted him on the cheek and walked away.
Spotting Hermione and Ron in a compartment on her way back, she assumed the prefect meeting was finally over. She walked down the aisle until she saw Jessica sitting in a compartment with two of their Quidditch teammates and best friends, Chasers Richard Bradley and Christian Chambers. She walked into the compartment, giving Bradley and Chambers hugs in turn and sitting down beside Jessica.
Bradley was first to strike a conversation. "Did you get tickets to any of the Puddlemere games this summer?"
"Actually, I did manage to make it to one," said Amber, blushing slightly.
Chambers was quick to respond. "Get to see your beloved Oliver this summer, did you?" he asked, smirking.
"You twit, he's not my beloved. You know as well as anyone that Oliver and I split when he graduated from Hogwarts." She blushed again and added in an undertone, "But yes, I did say hello." She immediately sank into her reverie again, admitting to herself that though she and Oliver Wood had broken up over a year ago, she wasn't completely over him. The two of them had been exchanging letters that sometimes made her wish, deep down inside, that she could have him by her side again.
Her thoughts were broken by the more insensitive of their companions. "What about you, Jess?" Chambers asked his new Quidditch captain, who was currently daydreaming the conversation away, staring out the window with a surly look. "Did you see Adrian Pucey at all? Or did you manage to hop over to the Weasleys' to see that handsome former Head Boy of yours?"
Amber rolled her eyes and Jessica just glared at him. After her disastrous relationship with the bad-boy Slytherin Chaser, Percy Weasley had been quick to step in and claim her, intelligent, well-kept, and most importantly, rule-abiding, as the perfect companion for an ambitious Head Boy. She was only fifteen when he graduated, however, and as he needed someone older and more permanent to plan out his life with, the relationship ended. Perhaps he wasn't the ideal mate for the free-spirited Jessica, but she admitted that she missed him, or maybe it was just a relationship in general that she missed. Chambers had a point, though. It wasn't exactly planned, but Jessica had managed to see her ambitious ex over the course of the previous school year. He had shown up at the Yule Ball as Barty Crouch's representative, and though she and Amber had attended with good-looking Durmstrang boys, he had asked her for a dance. Other than that, their correspondence had been minimal at best.
Suddenly, one of the older prefects stuck her head in the compartment. "Amber, we're almost to the castle. We should be rounding up the first years."
Amber nodded and gathered her things. The others did the same, and soon, the castle was coming into view in the moonlit world outside the window.
Another year at Hogwarts had begun.
A/N: This fic was co-written and beta'ed by my friend and fellow story character, Amber. I know it's usually lame to write oneself into a fanfiction, but this time we'll make it work. I promise. A different take on an unoriginal idea. Also, note that while I'm aware of the fact that Roger Davies is still the Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain in Book 5, I say, for the purpose of this fic, that he graduated at the end of Book 4. Cause I want to be Captain, dangit! Ahem. Reviews welcome, and in fact, appreciated. Flamers ignored.