"You promised you wouldn't hurt him." Edward's accusatory tones reached Amanda, who was, even now, even two days later, sitting in Edward's office with a grin on her face and an uncontrollable, bursting joy in her heart.

"I didn't hurt him!" Amanda giggled, putting her feet up on Edward's desk, so as to nudge his knickknacks and other items that called his desk home around with her big toes.

"Well," Edward said slowly, eyeing her bare feet on his desk with irritation (but not disgust; Amanda bathed every night and morning). "Considering what your usual level of violence is, and, I suppose, your IDEA of what constitutes violence is, I suppose that you really do believe that. But the fact of the matter is that you gave your cousin a slight bruising on his chest."

Mid-glee, mid-picking-up-a-pen-between-her-toes-in-an-attempt-to-write-with-it, Amanda froze, and all her good feelings left her in an instant. "What?"

Edward glanced at the two security guards flanking Amanda, before looking back to Amanda herself. "When you kicked your cousin, you left a-"

"NO!" Amanda shouted, literally falling - backwards - out of her chair, as panic and horror gripped her heart. "No, no, no...I didn't- I- I couldn't have..." How could she have DONE THIS?! How could she have caused such an imbalance? How could she, in all her years of faithful service, have done such a thing? how could she have made such a mistake? How could she have done it so terribly a disrespect when it had delivered to her the means of knowing, and possibly of amending, the results of a long-ago decision?

"Amanda!" Edward was down on the floor with her, by her side, though he was still, in his shock at her never-before-seen behavior, mindful enough not to lay a hand on her. "It was just a bruise, not even a terrible one. And I want you to know that what you're feeling right now is natural, normal, and-"

"Oh god..." Amanda moaned, as her thoughts jumped to Rue, and to the good and innocent life she had been living thanks only to Amanda's servicing of the balance. Now, now Amanda had FAILED IT, had created an imbalance, had disrespected and slighted it, and now Amanda could feel terror and shame as she realized that something terrible, something HORRIBLE, something corrupt and disgusting was going to happen to Rue, and it was all because of AMANDA, because SHE had harmed her cousin when she had had NO NEED TO HARM HIM! When he had already proven to her that he had changed his life, that he REGRETTED his behavior as a child, and that he felt SORRY for what she had gone through, and- and-

"I gather that this is not the best of times...?" an unfamiliar, soft voice filled Amanda's ears, ripping her violently from out of her storm of inner turmoil.

"We'll have to reschedule the meeting." Edward responded to the voice, looking past Amanda and up at its source. "I'm sorry, Dumbledore, but Amanda is-"

"I'm right here!" Amanda cried, lolling her head back and straining her eyes to see who Edward was talking to, to see who had come here to see HER, and wondering if it was not Dudley, returned to her so that she could hastily rectify her gross and horrific mistake.

But it wasn't Dudley, and nor was it anyone she recognized.

It was a very tall, very old man wearing a flowing blue gown of sorts, with a long, white beard that reached his waist, half-moon spectacles, and eyes that were a piercing, startling, MESMERIZING blue.

"Hello, my dear." the old man - Dumbledore, Edward had called him - spoke down to her.

"Hi." Amanda replied dazedly, still gazing into those blue eyes that were washing away all that she felt, and giving her a sense of...serenity, of calm, of... "Who are you? Why do you want to see me?" Then, "Can you take me to my cousin?"

"I believe I can accommodate you in answering the first two of your questions." Dumbledore nodded, his eyes now holding an incredible, beautiful twinkle that Amanda just could not look away from. "As for that last one...I'm certain arrangements could be made. After all, what do we have if we do not have family?"

"Take me to him! Now!" Amanda snapped, scrambling to her feet and facing the old man. "But answer my questions first!" she added quickly.

"I will answer any questions you may have." Dumbledore said patiently - and sounding not in the least bit threatened. "All I ask of you in return is that you listen to what I have to tell you."

A trade! Amanda didn't hesitate to nod her agreement, as she righted her chair before throwing herself back into it. She craned her head in her seat to look back at Dumbledore in earnest. "What do you have to tell me?"

After waving the guards out of the room (something he had never done before in all the time Amanda had known him), Edward resumed his seat behind the desk, looking, in the moment between Amanda's question, and the coming answer from Dumbledore, as if this spanning of time, this brief silence, was one upon which the beginning of the very apocalypse hinged.

Dumbledore peered at Amanda over his spectacles, drew in a breath, then...

"You're a witch, Amanda."

In the silence, Amanda looked straight ahead at Edward, then she swiveled her head back around to look at Dumbledore again.

"That's not nice." she said coldly - and very quietly - and her mind quickly began searching for a suitable insult to shoot back at the old man, for she was not going to let this go unpunished, was not going to let the balance go unsatisfied. Especially not in light of her very first imbalance made in the matter of her cousin. Maybe Amanda should be a little more heavy-handed than she usually would have been, with that in mind. She could give Dumbledore a few horrible disfigurements, perhaps, and then HE would be the one looking like some old witch, some old hag.

Yes, that would do, Amanda decided, with no small amount of satisfaction, as she rose from her chair and turned to fully face Dumbledore.

"Amanda, I meant it literally." said the old man, his expression and his tone still very calm and unconcerned as Amanda stepped towards him. "You possess great magical power."

Amanda stopped in her tracks, both because of his words, and because she was now looking into those strange eyes again, and she suddenly found herself unable, even UNWILLING, to do Dumbledore harm. "Magic?" she said curiously, somehow not even feeling concerned that she was NOT going to harm Dumbledore, and was therefore NOT going to satisfy the balance.

Dumbledore gave her a nod and a smile. "That's right. Your mother and father, Lily and James Potter, were magic, as well; they were witch and wizard."

"Okay." said Amanda, returning the smile. "How do I do magic?" This was actually really exciting, she thought. With magic, who knew what she could do? Who knew how many people she could kill? Who knew how much more easy it would become for her to serve the balance?

Certainly, with magic, her escape from this place and her return to Rue would be accomplished as easily as blinking!

She only needed to learn to use the magic from this Dumbledore, from this man who was most surely a wizard, as he said her father had been. As he said her mother had been a witch, like Amanda herself.

"I would like to say 'all in good time', but, unfortunately, we're running out of time, which is why I'm here before you now." said Dumbledore, his eyes holding an intense weariness for a brief few moments, before they brightened, and the twinkle returned to them. "There is much I have to tell you, but, I think, the most important matter to start with is that, as magic exists, so too does a magical community, hidden and isolated from the nonmagical world that you've lived in your whole life." As Dumbledore was saying all of this, he had withdrawn a thin piece of wood from his robes, used it to tap the air in front of him, and then suddenly there was a large, plush, purple armchair before him that had not been in the room a second ago, which he moved over to the side of Edward's desk with a lazy hand, then sat down in it.

"Please, sit." Dumbledore added to Amanda, gesturing to the chair she had vacated some moments ago, as if she had NOT vacated it - and certainly not for the REASONS she had done so.

Amanda took her seat, put her feet back up on the desk, then crossed her arms and looked intensely to Dumbledore. She was going to listen to him, and then he would answer her questions, and then, once she knew how to do magic, she would finally leave this place and go right to her Rue-

No, wait, she couldn't just head straight to Rue's house. Amanda needed to seek out her cousin, first, and apologize to him for hurting him when he had been so remorseful and had changed so much compared to his childhood. When he had been the first, and, at the time, the ONLY person to come and visit Amanda in her eleven years of living in this hospital.

And then, after that, she would go to Rue's house.

"Now, the magical world has been, for over a decade now, at war," Dumbledore began, his hands clasped on the desk, his blue eyes on Amanda. "and under the tyrannical reign of a man - a wizard - known as Lord Voldemort."

"I've dreamed about him!" Amanda said suddenly, the name sparking a feeling of excitement within her. "And the magical world, but I never knew they weren't just dreams."

"Well, you're quite right - they are NOT just dreams." Dumbledore inclined his head, smiling almost proudly at her. He leaned towards her, the smile leaving his face as he grew serious. That weariness was back in his eyes again. "I will be honest, even blunt with you, Amanda...I want you to come with me, and help myself and others in the fight against Voldemort, in the battle to retake the wizarding world, and free it from his cruel grasp."

Well, that was a no-brainer if Amanda had ever heard one. Going off to fight in some war she had no stake in, no training for, and would only keep her away from Rue...

"No." Amanda said simply. When Dumbledore did not look in the least bit surprised by her refusal, she shot a look at Edward. This had to be his doing. He had to be in on this, he had to have arranged this meeting, and he had to be- "You're a wizard, aren't you, Edward?"

Edward shook his head. "No, Amanda, I'm not. I'm a squib, which means a nonmagic person born of two magic parents."

"Amanda," Dumbledore said delicately, bringing her attention back to him. "I know of no way with which I can force you to participate in this war. I only hope that, after telling you your story, you will find the will, the motivation, to join me in this fight."

When Amanda said nothing, Dumbledore continued, "Shortly before your birth, a prophecy was made - a prophecy concerning both yourself and Lord Voldemort; in short, it says that, in the end, you and Voldemort will face each other, and that only the two of you have the capability to truly defeat the other - and he, believing himself to be fulfilling the terms of this prophecy, set out to kill you when you were a baby. But your parents and I hid you and the both of them from Voldemort using a very powerful enchantment. For a year, you lived. For a year, you were safe. Until, on Halloween, Voldemort came to you where you were hiding, acting on information given to him by one of his spies that he had in our ranks at the time." Dumbledore paused, and fixed Amanda with a very deliberate sort of look before going on. "Voldemort murdered your parents that night, Amanda. First your father, and then, with you watching, right there in the room, he murdered your mother. Then, he proceeded to try and murder you, his true goal all along: a one-year-old girl."

Rage...was all Amanda could feel, as those words were absorbed into her mind, and into her heart. But this was rage as she had never known before. It was not OUTRAGE, it was not even the RAGE that came from circumstances or events of the past. This was beyond even the need to bring balance, to correct an IMbalance she now knew to be that of her entire life, all of her years, all of her suffering, all of that which had sprung from Voldemort murdering her parents on that night, trying to kill her, Amanda, a CHILD, a BABY, and Amanda having done NOTHING to rectify it for all of these years she had lived (not even the fact that she now had this answer, this understanding of WHY she had had her life with the Dursleys as it had so been, mattered to her).

No, this rage, this was the urge to tear, to rip, to devour, and nothing and no one was going to stand in her way of this. Not even time and space. She was aware of her hands turning to fists, she was aware of standing from her chair, and she was aware of making for the door, intent, in that very moment, to find Voldemort and destroy him. Destroy him and TORTURE him, and then kill him. For all her life, for everything she had done, never had she been about sadism, about cruelity, but now, but concerning Voldemort...that was ALL she was about.

"Amanda!" Dumbledore's sharp voice called out from behind her. And she would not have stopped, if that had been all he said. If that had been it, alone and simple. But that was not all he said, that was not what he left it at, and that was not...so simple. "There's more."

And that was why Amanda stopped. Why she turned around, her entire being shaking with this need inside of her, with this rage and...with this pain, she realized as she lowered herself into her chair once more. Deep, swimming, horrible pain that, like her rage, was like nothing she had felt before.

Dumbledore stared at her for a long moment (and she stared right back at him through blurry vision), then he said, "On the night Voldemort tried to kill you, his curse rebounded. But he did not die that night. Instead he became...less than even a ghost. For eleven years, he stayed in exile. Powerless, with his former allies and servants imprisoned or reformed. For eleven years, the magical world knew peace. However, ten years ago, Voldemort acquired a magical item known as the Sorcerer's Stone, which allowed him to return to both a physical body and his former power again. Since then, we - myself, and members of an organization I founded known as the Order of the Phoenix - have fought against him and his forces, known as Death Eaters."

"Several years ago, Voldemort and his Death Eaters achieved total control over magical Britain, and, admittedly, since then the Order has been having increasingly less success in its efforts to liberate the magical world from Voldemort's rule." Dumbledore sighed and finished with, "And now, as of last September, it seems Voldemort has begun shifting his focus to the nonmagical community of Britain."

Nonmagical community. Those words pierced Amanda's heart like a bullet. RUE was the nonmagical community, and so was even Dudley and his family.

"Where is he?!" she demanded loudly.

"My dear, if we knew that, this war would have been over a long time ago." sighed Dumbledore. He gazed at her with his strange eyes for a moment. "I take it, then, that you have indeed found sufficient motivation to join the fight against Voldemort?"

'Damn right I have.' Amanda thought fiercely. Voldemort not ONLY threatened the life of Rue, but also the lives of hundreds of OTHER children. Who knew how many he had already killed, as he had tried to kill Amanda when SHE had been an infant? This monster, this child murderer, would meet his end at Amanda's hands, and only after many, many hours of torture, of agony, all inflicted upon him so that he could know and feel all that AMANDA had known and felt in her life, and all that he had caused the many children that were his victims to feel.

Amanda would force Voldemort to watch as those he loved and cared for the most were killed by her, as he had made her watch her mother die when Amanda had been an infant.

And then she would kill him.

Only that would satisfy the balance, would right the imbalance born of all these years Amanda had not stopped Voldemort from killing all those children, all these years she had not been PROTECTING THEM and SAVING THEM from him.

But...no, it was even more than THAT, she thought, as her mind went to the prophecy. She, Amanda, was more than that. All this time she had thought she had been serving the balance, but, according to the prophecy, she WAS the balance. She had been born and created by fate and destiny themselves as the other side of a coin, the other end of an equation, to mirror the side that was Voldemort.

Amanda WAS balance! Her sole reason for existing was TO BALANCE.

And Voldemort WAS imbalance, HIS sole purpose being to UNBALANCE. To kill children and cause children pain by murdering their parents in front of their very eyes...

Amanda was balance to Voldemort's imbalance, and she had to be the one to kill him, because she was THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD KILL HIM.

"Take me." Amanda said, getting to her feet. "Take me away with you. Now."

"While I admire your enthusiasm," Dumbledore said seriously, standing as well. "you will need training and experience before you can even have a hope of confronting, much less defeating, Lord Voldemort. I will take you to the headquarters of the Order, where you will get to know the place, and those who inhabit it, and then - I promise you it will be very soon - you will begin your training."

Amanda thought that she could not start soon enough. But she did not voice this as Dumbledore-

Took her ARM! Took her arm in HIS HAND!

And then it was not his hand holding her arm, it was another hand, another grip, bigger, harder, squeezing her frail little bones until they snapped-

Amanda's whole being lurched, and then she felt like she was being squeezed through a tube, and she could see and feel nothing, and she was no longer in the past, no longer THERE, but HERE, here and yet nowhere, and...

And then the world came back to her, and she was staggering into a polished wall in a wide, curved hallway lined with doors along the outer wall, and she suspected that the hallway went all the way around in a circle, which meant there was some big room in the center.

There WAS a pair of double doors set into the inner wall of the hallway, after all, so it made sense.

"What happened?" she demanded, rounding on Dumbledore with thoughts of just how she would hurt him for DARING to TOUCH HER, to GRAB HER LIKE THAT, like her uncle had always done, had always done and which had always preceeded some form of terrible pain.

"My apologies." Dumbledore said calmly, though also sincerely, as far as Amanda could tell. "I...admit I quite forgot...never mind. Ah, that was called Apparition, a magical means of moving instantaneously from one location to another."

"You'll teach me this?" she asked quickly, for having the ability to instantly move about the world - to go and visit Rue, or Dudley, or those famous landmarks and buildings she had seen in newspapers and glimpsed on television in her childhood at number four, and later at the hospital, that had so captured her wonder - would just be- be...incredible.

Dumbledore smiled. "Not me, no. But one of your other, shall we say, instructors, will, yes, be teaching you how to Apparate."

"Who?"

Dumbledore's smile widened, and he nodded to one of the doors along the corridor wall. "Why don't you come and meet her? I do believe that everyone is quite eager to meet you in return. In fact, you have something of a literal welcoming party waiting for you in the dining room - and just in time for dinner. Funny how these things tend to work out, isn't it?" he added, an amused twinkle in his eyes as he motioned her to the door.

Amanda approached the door with shock and wonder swirling about inside of her heart. Her head was swirling with thoughts, too. A PARTY? For HER? Would there be cake and ice cream? And presents? And...well, she supposed she did not have any friends, but...but this party of hers could at least be SIMILAR to all those parties she had watched Dudley have on his birthdays for all those many years, couldn't it? After all, HER birthday was...today! It was TODAY, she realized with a further jolt of shock.

Today was her twenty-second birthday!

She had never had a party on her birthday. She had never even tasted cake or ice cream before, but it always had looked so wonderfully delicious and she hoped she could have some of that too, finally!

Oh, Amanda hoped against hope that that would be so! Friends and ice cream and cake and balloons and streamers and those cute little pointed hats that she had always wondered if they could be used to stab somebody with...

Stepping through the door into the massive dining room chamber was like stepping into a dream, Amanda thought.

The ceiling was high, filled with floating candles of all different colors, and the ceiling itself was no ceiling, but a sky. An evening sky, splashed across with oranges and reds, and behind them the faint twinkling of many stars just becoming visible with the sun's downfall.

The dining table itself was an incredibly, almost IMPOSSIBLY long oval, with upwards of twenty, maybe even thirty, high-backed, cushioned dining room chairs all around it.

And yes, yes, Amanda saw, yes, as a grin came to her face, YES, there was a cake, chocolate and as impossibly large as the dining table, and there was a big banner hovering in mid-air with, "Happy Birthday Amanda" and, "Welcome to the WW/Order" below the birthday good wishes, the words of both lines shifting and changing colors like the candles and the flames OF the candles, casting light on the dining room, but not quite reaching the farthest edges of the chamber.

And all around the chamber, Amanda saw fluttering, glowing, multicolored butterflies! Or, at least, she THOUGHT they were butterflies. They looked not quite like the butterflies Amanda had always seen out her window back at number four or at the hospital.

And there were people, she saw them all. They were all there, all around the table, all looking at HER! So many people, so many...

Only a few came forward, a fact for which Amanda was grateful.

A man with thick, long, almost wild black hair and just as black eyes, and another man who was thin, wearing shabby clothing, and had light-brown hair, and a tall (or at least, taller than Amanda) woman with skinny limbs and long, bushy brown hair and chocolate colored eyes (GOD Amanda LOVED chocolate and this woman was so PRETTY!), and lastly, a man with sallow skin, greasy black hair, a big, hooked nose, and eyes as black as beetle shells.

They were all smiling at her. At AMANDA. Except the hook-nosed man, that is. He looked very, very...nervous. Afraid, almost. And certainly shocked about as much as Amanda was, though, she suspected, for different reasons than the reasons that SHE had for being shocked.

"Amanda." greeted the messy black-haired man first, his expression jovial and filled with laugh lines. "We've never met before, but I'm your godfather, Sirius Black. This here is Remus Lupin," Sirius gestured to the brown-haired man with a flourishing hand that, for some reason, made Amanda feel like giggling. "and this lovely and very much taken young lady is Hermione Granger," Another flourish, this time to the bushy-haired woman. "And THIS greasy tosser is Severus Snape, known behind his back as Snivellus." Sirius did not flourish his gesture to Snape, just gave an almost lazy flick of his pointer finger.

Amanda DID giggle - she couldn't help herself - on hearing "Snivellus".

Snivellus- Snape, that is, flushed and fidgeted and STARED at Amanda upon her giggling, and then he looked away. Then he seemed to not be able to KEEP looking away, and looked back at her again, a wobbly sort of smile on his lips that Amanda couldn't tell if it came from being nervous, embarrassed, or something else entirely.

"It's nice to meet you, godfather Sirius, Remus, H-Hermione," Amanda stammered the woman's name, felt a blush coming to her cheeks, remembered what her godfather had said about Hermione being taken already (how could he have even known Amanda was interested in other women when they had never even met before?), and hurriedly moved on to the last person she needed to greet. "and Sni- Severus."

"Nice to...meet you, as well." Snape replied, in almost a mutter, that odd, uncertain smile still appearing and disappearing on his face like a flickering candle.

"Don't mind old Snivelly's lack of manners." Sirius said loudly to Amanda, a grin on his face. "He always wanted to do your mum, so you see, you're really the next best thing in his eyes- Ow!" Sirius exclaimed, as Lupin cut him off by elbowing him, hard, in the ribs.

Amanda's giggling intensified, and she clapped her hands to her mouth, fighting not to double over in the throes of it all.

"Were it not Amanda's birthday, I'd curse you so terribly you'd be feeling it clear into next week, Black." Snape snapped at Sirius. "So consider yourself very, very lucky, you ill-mannered, immature bastard."

"You know, he SAID 'Amanda', but all I HEARD was 'Lily.'" Sirius quipped, earning him another elbow from Lupin.

"I'm sure Snape is perfectly aware of who Amanda is." Lupin said, in a firm, but reasonable tone of voice. "As are we all." he added, even more firmly, and Amanda thought there was some hidding meaning there, some conversation she had missed.

"Though, you have to admit, she's literally a dead ringer for Lily." said Sirius seriously, quietly. "Merlin, she really, really is...you could be twins, honestly. Lily was just a couple solid months younger than you when she-"

"When she was murdered by Voldemort." Amanda finished, her voice quivering with the sudden surge of all-powerful, ungodly rage she felt again at the very thought of that man, that monster, her giggle fit having gone away in the blink of an eye.

"Yes. That." Snape spoke slowly, enunciating those two words to draw them out for several seconds, his expression pained and haunted.

"Well," Dumbledore cut in a little too loudly from Amanda's side. She had forgotten he was even there, honestly. "this is your party, my dear. I suggest you enjoy it. Mingle, as they say."

Her PARTY! HER party! This was HERS, this was for HER, all of it, all of these people! Would the shock, would the giddiness, would the delight, NEVER wear off?

Amanda was certain it would, in fact, NEVER leave her.

Mingle...mingle...mingle...She repeated the word over and over again in her mind, each time feeling more and more like giggling again. It was just a...a FUNNY word. A...SILLY word, really. But, more seriously: MINGLE? Yes, she thought, she could do that.

She could do that, here, now...at HER PARTY!

And she would start with the people in front of her.

"Do you like chocolate?" she asked Snape, smiling at him from ear to ear.

"Not rea- yes." Snape changed his answer in mid-answer. He looked confused, then (possibly at himself), and he flushed again and gave another of his glances away from her. Then he glared at Sirius, when the latter opened his mouth to make some comment or other that probably wouldn't have been very nice.

"Good." Amanda said firmly, her green eyes sliding to her giant, chocolate cake. "Because I LOVE chocolate. I've never had a CAKE before, but I've had CHOCOLATE before, so...really, how different can chocolate CAKE be from plain CHOCOLATE?"

Hermione laughed, and Amanda did a Snape; she blushed and looked away from the object of her desire.

"Hopefully, it won't taste too different for you." said Lupin, an oddly forced smile on his face.

Amanda wondered why that was, but she didn't feel like asking him about it right now. Then again, this was her party, she was supposed to MINGLE (a lone giggle escaped her lips like a burp at the thought of that word again), and so wouldn't asking Lupin about that reaction of his be considered mingling?

"Why do you look like that at me?" she asked of Lupin, causing him to look surprised, then pained, then just sad and uncomfortable. They all looked that way now, Amanda noticed.

"Well...you've never...had a cake before." Lupin said haltingly. "That's...I mean..."

"It's...sad." Hermione said quietly. "None of us knew a thing about you up until an hour or so ago. Dumbledore only told us about you, about where you'd been all these years - in the hospital and all - just...an hour ago."

"Even him telling us THAT much seemed to take a hell of a lot out of the old bastard." Sirius said darkly. "He wouldn't tell us about how you even ended up in the hospital, or about your past, your life before then, or...or anything."

"But now that you're here, you can tell us yourself - if you want to, that is." Lupin added in an almost gentle voice.

Amanda was silent, giving the matter some serious thought. If she told them, these friends of her parents, her godfather, these people who could be her friends, who cared about her, of her past with the Dursleys, surely they would all get angry over it, and...and Amanda didn't WANT angry people at her party, her FIRST party ever, because that would RUIN the party.

And besides that, Amanda thought she had really had enough of pain and anger for one day.

"No." she stated, and then she strode past her greeters towards the dining table, so as to inspect the giant, eye-dazzling, chocolate cake in much more detail.

Behind her back, Amanda heard Sirius, her GODFATHER, say, "Great going, Moony. You went and scared her off. We have no idea what she's even been through, just that whatever it was, it was bad enough to land her in a hospital for over a decade. Next time we approach her, could you try a little harder to NOT make her remember whatever the hell it is that she's got in her past?"

"Since when did you become the sensitive one?" Amanda heard Lupin reply.

"Since I learned my goddaughter grew up in a nuthouse, that she's probably nuts, herself, and that she seems to have, just on first observation in the last five minutes or so, the mentality of a twelve-year-old rather than a twenty-two-year-old - and probably even less, if you want to factor in whatever mental disorders she has." said Sirius, so quietly Amanda almost didn't hear him.

If Lupin, Snape, Hermione, or even Dumbledore made any response to her godfather's words, Amanda didn't hear them, because she had now reached her enormous cake!

It was even bigger and prettier than it had seemed from a distance. It was like a sand castle or something (not that Amanda had ever built a sand castle before). It had green icing that said pretty much the same thing as the banner floating over her head: Happy Birthday, Amanda!

"Like it?" said a voice nearly in Amanda's ear.

Her heart pounding, Amanda spun around, and was met with the sight of two, red-headed twin men who looked only a year or two older than she was.

"I've never seen a cake like this before." Amanda admitted, feeling herself blush, and not knowing just WHY she was doing it. She hadn't blushed this much in her entire LIFE! In fact, not counting this party, she couldn't even REMEMBER the last time she had blushed - if she ever even had.

"I wouldn't imagine so." said the twin on the left, looking both serious and amused. "Dumbledore practically threatened to snap our wands if we did anything to your cake, courtesy of Fred and George Weasley - that's us, I'm Fred, he's George, by the way - and our grand enterprise, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, even if it HAS been back to mail order services since we were run out of our shop by the Death Eaters a couple years back...but I wasn't talking about the cake." Fred finished. He waved a theatrical hand at the dining hall in its entirety. "We, George and I, did all this."

"And we would've done a whole lot more, too, only, like with the cake, Dumbledore warned us not to do anything too flashy for your first magical experience." added George, grinning.

"You did all of this for me in an hour?" Amanda demanded, amazed.

"Mhm." said Fred absently, while examining his fingernails.

"Imagine what we could have done if Dumbledore had given us two." George put in, his grin widening, and a mysterious glint coming to his eyes.

"Trust me, Amanda, you really don't want to do that." said a new, but familiar voice. It was Hermione Granger, come over to talk to Amanda again, and this time she had another woman on her arm. A slender, dark-skinned, curvy woman who Amanda thought looked foreign. Chinese or Japanese or something like that (her only exposure to this sort of thing, to different nationalities, was through television, so she really just wasn't sure).

"Hello." said the foreign woman, smiling at Amanda almost radiantly. "I'm Padma, Padma Patil."

"Hello. I'm Amanda, Amanda Potter." Amanda mimicked, staring hard at Hermione and Padma's joined arms. Suddenly the party didn't really seem so great of a thing to Amanda. She felt a little...cold.

"I'm Hermione Granger." said Hermione, as if automatically. She blushed when both Amanda and Padma stared at her. "But you both already knew that! Ahem, Amanda, this is Padma, my wife. It'll be our five year anniversary in a couple of weeks."

Ah. This...THIS, Amanda knew about for CERTAIN from television. "Are you going anywhere for it?"

Hermione looked surprised at Amanda's knowledge, which just sent a flash of irritation through the latter woman, but she quickly recovered. "Yes, yes, in fact, we were thinking about Paris. I've been there a few times, but Padma hasn't been at all, and she's really been wanting to."

Inexplicably finding herself wanting to escape this conversation, Amanda cast around for Fred and George, the ones who actually made her feel like laughing and smiling, but they seemed to have disappeared into thin air (perhaps they had used the power of Apparition, she thought to herself). If they had, she thought she understood. She would have endured being squeezed into a tube of nothingness just to get away from Hermione and Padma at that moment.

Amanda DID escape from the pair - by turning right back around and going back over to the huddled grouping of Sirius, Lupin, Snape, and Dumbledore, who were now joined by a tall, broad-shouldered black man with a very serious looking face. As she approached them, she resigned herself to the fact that she would have to get used to people disappearing and reappearing all over the place now.

Maybe she could keep her head on a constant swivel, she thought. But no, that would just hurt her neck...

"Welcome back to the only group in this place worth talking with." Sirius said by way of greeting, his eyes sparkling at her almost like Dumbledore's, his handsome face shining with only joy. "Not including Snivellus here." he added, throwing a grin Snape's way.

Snape just scowled, and thrust his hands into his robe pockets. He was all anxious again, and Amanda knew it was because of her. That knowledge brought a smile to her face.

"Where are we?" Amanda questioned, because she wanted to know, and because, after all, she had fulfilled her end of the trade with Dumbledore, so now she was allowed to ask any questions she wanted - of anyone. At least, that was what she decreed. After all, she no longer SERVED the balance; she WAS the balance, and so she would decide what constituted balance, and when it would be achieved.

"A very old, very large manor that belonged to some old wizard who's dead now." Sirius answered easily. "You probably won't believe it, but we're all the way up in the mountains, and probably too many miles to count away from London."

"Did you kill him?" Amanda asked, feeling still more curious. Everyone in the group (except Dumbledore) looked at her in surprise, and even shock.

"Err, no." Sirius said slowly, looking...troubled. "Alexander Toschi was his name, and he was dead long before we made this place headquarters. New headquarters, that is - we lost our old one a few months back. Lost a lot of friends that night, too. Hannah Abbott, Dean Thomas, Ronald Weasley..."

"With you here now, everyone seems to think they won't be losing any more friends. Your emergence has given them hope; I have not seen so many of them smiling like this in many months now." said the tall black man to Amanda, his voice deep and smooth. He stuck out his hand, and Amanda recoiled. The man eyed her for a long moment, then lowered his hand. "My apologies, I am Kingsley Shacklebolt, former head of the Aurors. I say former because, since the magical world fell under Lord Voldemort's control, he has had no need for the Auror office. His Death Eaters suffice for him in the task of policing his world."

Amanda didn't reply to that. She wouldn't have known where to start, anyway.

"Who will be my instructors?" she fired off, looking to Sirius. "Dumbledore said I'm going to have to learn how to use magic to fight before I can join the war."

"Well..." Sirius ran a hand through his tangled mess of hair, and threw a small glare at Snape. "Snivellus here will be in charge of teaching you offensive and defensive magic, Hermione will teach you the combat applications of charms and transfiguration magic, and our own Lupin here will be teaching you how to combat the dark creatures Voldemort has under his command, such as Giants, Dementors, and Inferi. And, last but not least, you'll be learning Apparition and sensory magics from Cedric Diggory, one of our best and brightest." As Sirius finished, he nodded across the dining room at an extremely handsome young man with fair skin, blue eyes, and brown hair, who was sitting at the table on the far side of the room, and talking animatedly to a child who was seated beside him; a girl, who looked, to Amanda, to be around twelve or so, with long brown braids and matching brown eyes.

"Who's he talking to?" Amanda asked. She could not take her eyes off the girl, and it was because, seeing this child so near the age of her OWN child, she was reminded of Rue, and reminded that she needed to go and see her as soon as she possibly could (which, Amanda realized, would have to be AFTER she learned Apparition, because if she truly was in the mountains, and many miles from London, there was no way she could leave this place and make it to Rue's home in any small amount of time, and so Amanda resolved to master Apparition, and master it faster than any witch ever had).

"That's Kendra. She's a war orphan." Sirius explained, his expression turning dark (again - and Amanda didn't like it). "A couple months back, the Death Eaters took her right out of Hogwarts and threw her into battle against us. They used the threat of killing her mother to ensure her...cooperation...but we learned later that they'd killed the woman before even snatching Kendra up. It was Cedric who took her away from that battle, and kept her safe and hidden from the Death Eaters until they could make their way here. Since then, Cedric's sort of become her unofficial guardian, though I think Kendra sees him as even more than that; more like a father figure, or maybe even a father - plain. She never had one before, at any rate; it had only ever been her and her mother." Sirius added, shrugging.

Amanda nodded, and then found herself crossing the dining room and heading for Cedric and Kendra. Or rather, just Kendra, because Amanda was not being drawn over to them by some desire to make conversation, but by her aching, motherly longing for her own daughter.

Perhaps, Amanda thought, Kendra could sate it.

When Amanda reached the pair, Cedric rose to greet her, extending a hand out to her like Kingsley had done. And, just like with Kingsley, Amanda shrunk back from that reaching hand as if it were someone ELSE'S hand.

"Amanda, it's good to finally meet you." Cedric began in earnest, letting his hand drop - and Amanda's behavior go unquestioned along with it. "It's good to have you here with us. You know about the prophecy? About who you are and what you have to do?" he added, before Amanda could even think of a response to make, a grin coming over his face.

"I know all about it." Amanda settled for finally saying, not sure what to feel at the moment. Though, surely she should feel flattered, if anything?

"Wow." Cedric let out a breath. "So, this is really it. This is...merlin, sorry, but- wow. Very exciting times. And just when we'd all honestly gotten about ready to give up hope entirely, and let Voldemort just have whatever the hell he wants to have in this world."

Yes, being flattered would be just fine, Amanda decided, a smile growing on her lips.

"So you're here to save the world." Kendra said suddenly, surprising both Cedric and Amanda. Her eyes were filled with such shining awe and wonder that Amanda felt a bursting of pure emotion in her heart in response.

There were many things Amanda could have said to the girl, right then and right there, things that contained conviction, confidence, assurance, and all manner of certainties. However, in the end, Amanda decided on giving Kendra the truth as she now knew it, in light of a prophecy that had never foretold whether or not she would be the one to emerge triumphant from the war she was fated to wage against her opposite.

Kneeling before the girl to look her in the eyes, Amanda said...

"I hope so."