AN: Welcome back everyone! This chapter was SO MUCH EASIER to write than the last one, you have no idea! I had so much fun with this chapter, now that we're starting to move into the Cannon-Pre-Golden-Trio side of the HP cannon. Now then, SHOUT OUT TIME!
ULTIMATE SHOUTOUT GOES TO MY SUPERMEGAFOXYAWESOMEHOT BETA CiciWeezil! Check her out because soon, very soon, she's going to be posting this amazing Big Hero 6 and Meet The Robinsons crossover fic that I'm beta-ing for her and let me just say that if you think this fic is good, you'll be blown away by hers! She's one of the best people ever and if you're reading this, CiciWeezil, HELLO AND HUGS! *hugs*
MEGA SHOUT OUTS GO TO: attlantica, ZambleTheZombie, and Applejax XD ! YOU THREE ARE MY FAVORITE PEOPLE!
Reply time:
attlantica: THE WAIT IS OVER!
ZambleTheZombie: Yes, I did mean to leave everyone at a cliffie. I'll take the hippogriff companion idea into consideration.
Applejax XD : Let's just say stuff happens…
Shout outs for favoriting go to: Khrystaline and Saddarkjoker! HUGS AND CAKE BECAUSE YOU'RE AWESOME!
Shout outs for following go to: Jaymorie, Khrystaline, Sing97, shinoyami, and sillystring-roxs-the-earth! YOU GET HUGS AND COOKIES! FOLLOWER COOKIES!
So, let's get on with the chapter!
Fred and George were worried; they hadn't seen Arden since she left them after the Quidditch match the previous day. She missed all of her classes, but, as luck would have it, McGonagall had canceled Transfiguration but assigned them a two-foot essay on the benefits of transfiguring a toothpick into a sewing needle. It was almost time for dinner, and Arden hadn't even sent them a note of if she was alive. Fred, out of the twins, was taking it the hardest. He had decided it was time for drastic measures.
"I DON'T BLOODY KNOW WHERE VANISHED OBJECTS GO! I JUST WANT TO SEE MY FRIEND!" Fred yelled at the brass knocker that guarded the entrance to Ravenclaw Tower.
George had to hold Fred back from blasting the door open with his emotionally enraged magic. George pulled Fred away from the door, "Fred, calm down."
"I can't bloody well calm down, George! Something's wrong, I can feel it!"
"Freddie, she's probably fine. What could have happened in one day? She probably just found a good book and spent the entire day trying to finish it."
"Into nonbeing," The twins heard a female voice say. They turned around to be met with both of Arden's roommates answering the knocker's riddle. What were their names again? Fred mused, something like Cherry? No, Ah, that was it!
"Oy, Chang and Edgecomb, wait!" Fred called out, successfully catching their attention.
The two girls faced the twins, confusion written plain as day on their expressions. "Can we help you?" Chang asked.
George cut Fred off before he could answer, "Have either of you seen Arden today?"
Edgecomb shook her head, "We thought she was with the two of you, but then again she wasn't in classes."
Fred snapped, "Well she's obviously not with us!"
The girls, offended by Fred's aggressive actions, walked into their common room, slamming the door behind them. They were concerned, obviously, but not enough to be angry about it.
The twins stood in tense silence, completely worried for their friend. What could have happened to cause her to disappear, and her roommates didn't seem in the least concerned about her. The silence was broken by the soft jingle of a bell and a loud, "Mraow". George felt something soft and warm brush against his legs. He and Fred looked down and met the hazel eyes of Mercutio. The chocolate tortoise shell cat had a note tied to his tail with a red ribbon. Fred, hurriedly, undid the ribbon and read the missive.
His expression changed from one of curiosity to one of pure shock, "She's in the hospital wing."
Arden winced as Madame Pomfrey proded one of her bruised ribs with her wand. "Quit squirming!" the matron chided, playfully flicking the eleven year-old on her forehead. Arden had been in bad shape when she was brought into the hospital wing; a broken arm, cracked skull, and numerous bruises coating her skin. She had bruised her ribs, femurs, tibias, and even her back seriously; nothing that Madame Pomfrey couldn't handle, but it would be painful. Arden would be confined to the hospital wing for at least three days.
Suddenly, the hospital wing doors were burst open and two blurs of red attacked Arden in hugs.
"Fred? George? You two got my note I take it?" Arden commented, hugging her friends. The two gingers looked at each other and simultaneously hit the back of the brunette's head.
"Don't you dare ever scare us like that again!" they exclaimed together.
Madame Pomfrey tutted and smacked the back of the boys' heads in retaliation, "Don't hit an injured person, and don't yell in my hospital wing! Patients need quiet!"
The boys frowned, rubbing the back of their heads as they muttered about evil medi-witches.
Lee ran in, panting from the effort to keep up with them, "Couldn't wait for us, could you?" the third Gryffindor of their group called out to the trio. He walked to the side of Arden's bed that was unoccupied, "Alright there, Arden?"
Arden smirked, "You won't be getting rid of me that easy."
Madame Pomfrey scolded Lee as well before telling them that they had half an hour with Arden before they needed to go back to their dorms. She left the room to ask Professor Snape if he had a stronger potion for Arden's bone bruises. She, apparently, was lucky not to have broken more than her arm.
Arden's boys (let's be honest, they are her boys. She has them wrapped around her little finger) demanded to know exactly what happened. So, Arden, embarrassed, recalled everything from the time she left Grandpa Albus' office (not mentioning she was in his office, of course. She said she was in the library) to her waking up in the hospital wing. They, of course, laughed at her forgetting that stairs seemed to exist in Hogwarts. But, when she pretended to cry, they panicked and swore to bring her ice cream and cookies from the kitchens every day. Mercutio, while the boys were flustered, jumped onto Arden's lap and snuggled into her tummy. She started petting him with her non-broken arm and laughed at her boys, indicating to them that she wasn't crying. Before they could retaliate, Madame Pomfrey returned and kicked them out, telling them that they could visit her the next day.
Fred and George each hugged the brunette witch, while Lee just patted her head. Fred, as always, lingered just noticeably longer than his twin, confusing Arden to no end. She, as always, disregarded it because it probably held no meaning…right? She tried to reason out the possible causes for Fred's behavior as Madame Pomfrey poured a seemingly endless stream of potions down her throat and onto various bandages for her black and blue flesh.
Weeks after Arden had left the hospital wing, it was finally time for the Halloween Feast. From end to end on the house tables was more sweets and food than Arden had ever seen in her short eleven years of life. Classes were taxing, and her responsibilities in aiding her boys on an endless amount of prank-pulling fun tired her brain. The sugar and treats of the Halloween Feast were exactly what she needed to recharge.
After the feast, George, Lee, and Fred pulled Arden away from her trek to Ravenclaw Tower.
"What do you want now?" Arden whined, stomping her foot childishly, "I want to go to bed!"
Lee laughed, "Calm down, love. We have a very good reason for this."
Fred tossed his arm around Arden's shoulder, as had become his habit, "We've heard a rumor that there's a secret room hidden somewhere in Hogwarts that turns into whatever you want or need, and it just so happens to be on the seventh floor." Arden nodded, she had read about it time and time again in Hogwarts: A History. It was her favorite passage in the book.
George gave a half smile as he followed his brother's lead and tossed his arm around Arden's unoccupied shoulder, leaning a bit of his weight on her side, "We want to find it, and seeing as how you've read that book about Hogwarts…" he trailed off, leaving her to fill in the blank.
Arden sighed and conceded, she had been curious about the Room of Requirement anyway. It could have more books than she had ever dreamed of, and maybe it would be a great place to practice some extra Transfiguration! She had really begun to enjoy the subject, not just because Minnie was teaching it, she had discovered that she had a bit of a talent for it. She wanted to go even further than the syllabus, recreationally of course. "Alright, let's do it!"
Arden, George, Lee, and Fred his behind a tapestry on the fifth floor as they waited for Filch to turn down one of the many corridors and away from them. With baited breath, Arden felt Fred clutch one of her hands nervously. Her breathing, as if on cue, hitched and she chanced a glance up to look at Fred's face. His warm brown gaze locked her sharp amber one in a sort of hypnotic trance; they couldn't look away as they unconsciously analyzed each other's souls. The entire world melted away, it was just the two of them in the universe; no one else existed. Days, months, years, passed and they didn't so much as blink.
"Let's go," Lee whispered, snapping Arden out of Fred's hypnotic gaze. Fred jumped, blushed, shook his head to clear out some of the cobwebs, and followed his brother and Lee out from behind the tapestry.
Arden remained behind, frozen in place. What was that? Was that some sort of magic that she had never encountered before? She had read so many books on all sorts of magic, and she had never once read anything about that. Was Fred a veela or a vampire? How could he hypnotize her like that? No, she shook her head, if Fred, of all people, had a power of those levels at his disposal, he would be using it all the time for pranks of all sorts. Was that some part of an elaborate prank? No, they wouldn't dare pull something like that on her, they knew better. But, now that she had taken the obvious answers into account, what was that?
Lee pulled back the tapestry, "Arden, you coming?"
Arden shook her head before answering, "Yeah, sorry, got lost in my own head for a moment there." She followed him out and down the hall.
The foursome ran back down the second floor to room 234-00, Filch's office to be exact, and slammed the door shut and locked it behind them. They leaned against it, panting and terrified.
"You just had to set off that dung bomb, didn't you?" Arden chided Lee.
"What, I was excited!" he retorted breathlessly.
They had made it up to the sixth floor, successfully avoiding both Filch and Mrs. Norris, Filch's horrid cat, before Lee decided, in a high of adrenaline, to set off a dung bomb in the middle of the sixth floor corridor. Mrs. Norris saw them and ran to notify her master. They just hoped that he wouldn't check his own room for students breaking curfew.
The twins recovered first and started riffling through the caretaker's drawers, looking for cool stuff to nick, their expressions unnaturally serious.
Arden and Lee looked over their ginger friends' shoulders and watched as they went through each drawer quickly, but carefully. After they reached the seventh drawer of Filch's desk, marked "Confiscated and Highly Dangerous", they came across a yellowed, old, folded piece of parchment. It was sitting alone in this large drawer. The twins communicated silently, nodded, and handed it off to Arden simply telling her, "Find out what it does."
Arden stepped back from the boys and turned the parchment over and over again in her hands. She eventually pulled out her wand and started poking at it, wondering what it did. The drawer said confiscated, so it had to be fun and magical, because Filch hated magic (Arden thought that he was a squib). It also was "highly dangerous", so it had to be extremely useful. So fun and useful, and confiscated by Filch all aimed to prank-pulling items, so that meant that the person, or persons, who used this parchment must have been pranksters like themselves. Arden wondered how to make it do something. Maybe there was a spell of some sort?
Fred took Arden's arm and tugged her towards the door, "We should go, Filch could be back any moment."
"What about this?" Arden held up the parchment.
"Figure it out on your own, please? We've got our hands full of awesome Zonko's stuff!" George pleaded.
Arden sighed and nodded, so much for the Room of Requirement.
That night, Arden snuck down to the common room, greeted those in her house who were a bit more eccentric and chose to stay in the common room until ungodly hours of the night reading or working on personal projects, sat in her favorite spot on the beanbag by the fire, and stared at the parchment. She had brought her charms book and one of her more advanced spell books that she bought for a bit of extra practice to try and figure this mystery out. She knew that her mind would not let her sleep until it was solved.
Arden sat there for hours, paging through her books and eventually decided to look at the problem from a more analytical angle. She had moved over to the couch when she got a bit too warm for her liking. Let's see, she mused, hanging upside down on the couch, her legs hooked over the back and her head hanging off the seat causing her hair to fall down in graceful dark chocolate waves to pool on the floor. She liked this position because it caused more blood-flow to the brain, causing her to focus more on her head than the rest of her body. This parchment was more than likely used by pranksters for some reason or another. It was very carefully folded and rather thick as well, leading Arden to believe that its purpose was for more than simple prank pulling; it was something better. Whoever designed this was a genius, an analytical genius. Arden had borrowed her housemate's quill and ink to try to write on it, but the ink wouldn't stay, it just ran off onto the carpet. Arden was sure that the parchment wasn't just simple parchment, it had some magical property, she was sure of it. So, a thick, folded, piece of old parchment that was charmed to not be written on, and was most likely owned by some sort of genius prankster, or pranksters…What would a prankster need? Then it hit Arden like an angered giant crashing through the forest. They would need to know where their victim(s) were! Of course, how could she have not seen it before! It was a map; a magical map! Now she just needed to figure out how to open it.
Trial and error was bloody murder, but, after a sleepless night, she had finally gotten it. Thankfully, it was the weekend, so she could sleep as soon as she showed the boys how the map worked and what it did. Arden ran up the stairs to where she knew Gryffindor Tower was located. She stopped in front of the portrait of the Fat Lady, waiting for someone to come out. She nearly passed out asleep waiting, but almost an hour later, she was shaken awake by none other than Charlie Weasley.
"Oy, Aria right?" Charlie asked, shaking her shoulder.
Arden, blearily opened her eyes and said, "No, Arden. Can you do me a favor and get Fred, George, and Lee?"
Charlie nodded, "'Course, be right back." He disappeared into the portrait hole, but this time, Arden didn't have to wait nearly as long.
"Arden!" her boys tackled her in a hug.
"Did you figure it out?" Lee asked, causing Fred to smack the back of his head.
"Idiot, she's exhausted, of course she did!" Fred wrapped her up in a bear hug, "You're the best!"
George stole her from his twin, "The absolute smartest witch in history!"
Arden laughed, a bit more awake with all the energy the twins were smothering her in, "Come on, we'll go down to the courtyard and I'll explain it to you!"
"So this shows everyone in the castle and Hogsmeade and where they are all day every day?" Lee asked, trying to get the gist of what was going on.
"Exactly, but some parts of the castle aren't on here. I think that's either because the map makers, Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs, didn't know about it, or because it reappears and disappears and changes to meet someone's needs," Arden explained, tapping the map with her wand, "Mischief Managed." She tried to hand it back to the twins, who pushed it back towards her.
George said, "You keep it."
Arden was confused, "What? Why? You two are the main prank-pullers in this relationship!"
Fred shook his head, "Be that as it may, you're the brains behind our operation. We come up with ideas, you make them work."
George nodded and continued, "You're the one who is behind the scenes, pulling the strings and not getting caught, we're the ones out there doing it. This map will just make your job easier, we have no need for it."
Arden was shocked at the level of thought that the boys went into in such a short span of time. Maybe she was rubbing off on them. If so, good, she needs to do that more often. She put the map back in her pocket, resolving to only use it if necessary…like getting into the Restricted Section of the library, or discovering more shortcuts and pathways in and out of the castle.
AN:
Well that's the chapter! If you would please leave a review, that'd be absolutely amazing!
Well, see you all in the next chapter!