Chapter 20: James
They all knew the reason she was being so quiet and it had nothing to do with the fact that she was tromping through what was essentially a battlefield pretending to let her mum shield her from all the bodies lying on the ground. It hadn't even been an hour yet but it still felt weird being there without Alex. It wasn't like they hadn't spent time apart before, well there'd been the odd hours here and there, anyway, this time felt permanent and it made her feel all weird and off balance.
She heard the adults talking all the time and they always said keeping busy was the best way to deal with things like this so she wouldn't think about how her big sister was off to Hogwarts and instead she'd concentrate on how jealous Alex was going to be when she found out James had been allowed to walk through the tomb everyone had been fussing about.
Uncle D had taken them to see enough muggle movies and she'd certainly read enough books that the tomb wasn't anything like what she had imagined it to be. There wasn't any treasure stashed in hidden rooms (at least they hadn't found any yet) and there were no torches lighting the way to the centre burial chamber. There weren't really any exciting traps, even if Draco was moaning about nearly being beheaded.
When she'd first arrived, fresh from platform 9 ¾ the quiet had been the creepiest thing. She might just be a kid but she knew that there was supposed to be sound in the world and that the absence of it was almost as creepy as the bodies she had to walk passed. Her dad had agreed with her so she didn't feel silly saying it out loud.
Everyone was there by the time they arrived, every one that mattered anyway. Ron and Daphne were helping Draco identify the bodies as best they could using personal items they'd found in the tents while Stephanie and the twins were checking the edges of the camps, resetting the spells and wards that would keep the locals from venturing into the camp.
Emmy and Abby were talking to Luna and a man James didn't know about whatever they'd found in the tomb because it seemed to be confusing everybody. She saw Ginny solemnly taking photographs so they wouldn't have to constantly relive memories and she saw Hermione tearfully engaged in conversation with the Minister of Magic. Sirius was off with Ruby using his dog nose to try and follow the different people who had come out of the tombs. James didn't know how much luck he would have, they'd turned up in Britain too fast to have used any muggle form of transport.
'We don't have long,' Dad warned. 'The Ministry officials will be here soon so we need you to tell us as much as you can.'
And that was the reason they'd brought her here. Not because they thought she was strong and that she could help but because she could feel something, sense something, about magic that even her parents couldn't. She wondered if this had happened sooner would they have even brought her along or would they just have taken Alex?
Well, it didn't matter because she was here now and she would do what she could to help. She didn't like the way the dreams made her feel and she didn't like the sick twisting sadness that Bea felt every time she didn't have a book or something new to distract her. She nodded her head to tell her dad she understood and closed her eyes. After a moment she opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out.
She was impressed no one told her she looked silly. If any of her cousins has been around she'd never have heard the end of it but she could feel things better this way. Feeling magic wasn't just about the literal touch of it, it was more than that, more than she could really explain.
The air had weight, that was her first thought. She didn't think much about air normally but she suspected that was because it didn't normally feel so heavy. It felt like being in the middle of summer on a hot day right after a huge thunderstorm. That wet heavy feeling the air got, that was the closest she could get to describing how it felt to stand in the middle of the camp and feel the air pressing on her.
It didn't feel warm and sticky, though, it felt cold and dark, like, 'Like a dementor,' she announced. 'That's what it feels like!'
'What?' her dad asked, startled by her sudden exclamation.
'The air, Dad!' James explained. 'It feels kind of heavy like when a dementor is near but without the feeling like you'll never be happy again.'
Her dad frowned down at her, 'Why and how do you know what a dementor feels like?'
'That time we went on holiday to the sea,' James told him and she hoped he didn't hear the unspoken "duh" she mentally added. Where else did he think she'd felt a dementor? Wasn't like they were particularly common anymore, not since Voldemort died and they scattered.
'Oh,' he grunted. 'Right.' She gathered by the way he was shifting his feet he was remembering how unpleasant that whole stumbling across a dementor thing had been for all of them. Which was weird because James always thought of it as the first time she'd successfully (albeit accidentally) cast a very powerful spell. They'd been shaken up, sure, but how many five year olds could claim to have cast a patronus charm without a wand. And yeah, she'd never been able to do it again but that still had to count for something, right?
'Can you tell us anything about it?' Mum asked. 'What the feeling means to you?'
James just gave her a look that quite clearly expressed she was a human being and therefore could not possibly give motivations to a weird feeling she had, let alone describe it to someone who couldn't feel it. It was just there and weirdly heavy, that had to be enough of an explanation because it was all she could give right then.
Inside the tomb there was a lingering sense of sadness and wrongness but nothing she didn't get from spending two seconds in a room with Bea. The feeling got stronger the closer she got to the inner chamber but it didn't change and it didn't suddenly give her all the answers. If anything it just gave her more questions. She followed the sad feeling along a path that led her directly to a glass fronted case in the wall and something about the feeling made her think it was where Bea had been trapped.
She didn't like to think of anyone being stuck in a box for as long as Bea had been – however long that was – but she pushed the thought aside and was able to identify the box that had once held Crazy Man and Old Guy as well. It was weird being able to pick where they had spent a long time sleeping just on the feel of the air around it. She wondered if Fawkes felt things this way because neither of her parents had ever come close to it. She'd have to find some way to meet with the phoenix who had helped make her dad what he was because he was about the only one she could think of who might have the answer.
They didn't spend much time in the tomb, there wasn't much James could tell them and so her dad took her back out not two minutes after they went in. Her mum stayed behind to try and help make sense of the chamber but James wasn't sorry to turn her back on the place. It gave her the creeps and she didn't want to spend a second more than she had to in there.
The Ministry officials were arriving when they stepped out of the temple and James knew if she didn't melt into the background they'd send her home. She took advantage of Kingsley calling her dad over to slip away to the edges of the camp. The heavy feeling wasn't so bad there and she could breathe a little easier. She found a good spot on the tree line that let her see what was happening in the camp and stayed quiet to catch what she could.
'Spying, Little Prongs?' the words were a whisper against her ear and the only thing that stopped her from shrieking her surprise was years of being startled and pranked by half her family.
She turned around to glare at Sirius who was back in human form. 'I didn't want to be sent home.'
Sirius nodded like he understood what she was saying beyond the simple words and she glanced over his shoulder to see Ruby slipping out of the trees. 'Anything?' Ruby asked.
'The Ministry is here,' Sirius answered his wife. James didn't think that was what she was asking but she also guessed it kind of answered a lot of questions she hadn't yet asked.
'Do you want to take the kid home?' Ruby asked, throwing James a wink that said she wasn't being rude but that she wasn't sure it would look good to the Ministry if they spotted James. James didn't think she wanted them finding Sirius there either. She'd never understood exactly what happened there, she knew that Sirius had been arrested once for murders he hadn't committed and that he'd been cleared but she didn't understand how he could now work for the Ministry or why it was that if he worked for them he couldn't be found there.
Adults were unnecessarily complicated. Like really complicated.
'Nah, we'll stick around,' Sirius shook his head making James smile. 'Tiny Prongs can take me home if we get bored of spying.'
The thing she liked most about Sirius (beside the fact that he was possibly the coolest guy she'd ever met) was that he never treated her like an ordinary kid. Some of the other adults in her life tried to treat her like she couldn't just go wherever she wanted in a lick of flames. They treated her like she wasn't stronger, faster and more powerful than the other kids. Sirius didn't. Ruby made it sound like Sirius would be the one that had to take her home but Sirius knew that of the two of them, she was the more likely to take him home.
He also wasn't about to stop her from lurking sneakily behind trees so she could learn everything she wanted to about the Ministry and what they would do about all the deaths.
James didn't even know how much the Ministry knew about the creepy people and what they'd been doing. She was beginning to realise she didn't know a lot of things. And that was going to have to change; Alex wasn't going to be around anymore, she was going to have to do all the sneaking for both of them.
She wanted to have something exciting to tell her sister when she next came home, something that would be just as exciting as everything that was probably happening to her at Hogwarts.
Oh merlin, she was so jealous. Her turn to go to Hogwarts was still years and years away; she'd have to make do in the meantime by sticking her nose in her parents business. She'd been ding it for years so she didn't think it would be particularly hard. It probably helped that they were letting her help them.
She was going to take advantage of that.
'What are they going to do?' she asked Sirius in a whisper as he settled against the tree beside her. Ruby was already walking back toward the main camp.
'Make a lot of fuss and generally nothing,' Sirius told her with a cheeky grin.
She snorted. 'Dad says that's what the old Ministry did, made everything worse than it was.'
Sirius nodded. 'Voldemort had a lot of control over the old Ministry even when most people didn't realise it. Kingsley's not so bad, he and Hermione have worked really hard to make the Ministry what it should have been.'
'Ron says it's still mostly full of useless people.'
'That may be true,' Sirius conceded. 'But the Ministry isn't just people fighting bad guys, there are plenty of people who work for the Ministry who have nothing to do with Law Enforcement but impact on the things we do every day.'
'I know that,' James said quietly, 'I just don't really understand what they do. Everyone I know spends their days kicking butt and complaining about paperwork. Even Uncle D.'
'What do you and Alex get up to when your parents aren't around?' Sirius asked, confusing her with the sudden change of topic.
'Uh sometimes we draw or we play Quidditch,' she answered hesitantly.
'And the other times?'
James winced. 'We train with Dad's training dummy, the one he has in the garden shed.'
'I don't think knowing what those other Ministry workers do is going to make much difference to how you view the world, kiddo. You're just like your dad.'
'Am I supposed to be offended?' James asked because she didn't feel offended.
Sirius just laughed. James thought about pouting but she didn't think it would get her anywhere so she turned her attention to what was happening in the camp. There were plenty of people from the Chinese Ministry and the British one and it didn't look like they were doing much of anything. Unless you counted arguing but James didn't think you could count it unless you were good at it. These people didn't seem very good at it and they also seemed to be having the same argument over and over again.
It looked like they were having translation issues. There was a pretty Chinese girl with a thick Irish accent acting as translator but it didn't seem to be helping. She seemed to be just as frustrated as everyone else by what was happening but it didn't seem to matter what she said, the two Ministries just kept arguing.
She'd never seen Kingsley argue with anyone like he was arguing now. It didn't fit the image of the cool and calm man who had helped her dad fight Voldemort. Eventually, he stepped aside and let Hermione take over.
'What do you think they're arguing about?'
'Whose fault this mess is probably.'
'Well that's stupid,' James huffed. 'Obviously it Gringott's fault for being so greedy.'
Sirius barked a laugh. 'It's not as simple as that.'
'We're not going to learn anything from watching are we?'
'Probably not,' Sirius admitted.
'Can we go get lunch? With everybody?'
Lunch turned out to be a picnic in the middle of Sirius' back garden that consisted of all sorts of random things he'd found in his kitchen and every body turned out to be all of the kids scooped up from their various homes and babysitters and the adults that had somehow avoided going to China and getting tied up with the Ministry.
Mrs Weasley brought dessert. That was pretty much reason enough to enjoy the picnic.
'Do I even want to know what my children are up to?' she asked James as she cut a nice big slice of chocolate cake.
'Last I saw they were arguing with the Chinese Ministry,' James told her. 'But Bill's over there looking like death if you want to fuss.'
Mrs Weasley narrowed her eyes. 'You've gotten to be very cheeky, young lady.'
'I know,' James sighed heavily. 'I'm trying to get a lid on that.'
She could tell by the look on her face that Mrs Weasley didn't intend to laugh but she did anyway. She handed James her slice of cake and told her to run along. She didn't stick around to see if she was going to get another lecture. Bill and Fleur were on the ground on the picnic blanket playing with the babies. Arty appeared to be poking Scorpios just because he could and James figured she could get in on the fun.
She dropped down on the blanket – cake carefully balanced on the plate – and announced with the bluntness of the child she sometimes forgot she was. 'When are you going to have another baby?'
'I think we have enough babies in this family at the moment,' Fleur practically cooed, tickling Arty's fat baby belly.
'Its not safe right now,' Bill told her but the way he was looking at Fleur playing with the baby suggested he didn't believe what was coming out of his mouth. Sometimes being a kid let her see things people didn't want her to.
She supposed she could use that more often, it was how they'd gotten to know so much about Crazy Man, after all. Nobody expected a kid to put up much of a fight or ask the right questions. She was very good at asking questions, it was an art she and Alex had been working on all their lives. Most people expected questions from kids what they didn't expect was the questions to have a purpose. She'd gotten her parents and friends to tell her lots of things that way.
'What's it like?' James asked, tugging Scorpios into her lap so that he was lying on his back on her legs staring up at her with his little fist flying all over the place.
'What's what like?' Bill was still watching Fleur play with Arty.
'Being a curse breaker?' James clarified. 'I bet you see lots of cool things. And scary things! What's the scariest thing you've ever seen?'
She pummelled him with questions about how he became a curse breaker, what made him decide he wanted to be one and what kind of treasure he found when he was working in Egypt. She asked the questions fast enough and in such a random fashion that by the time she started asking about the tomb in China he was answering questions before he realised it.
The problem was, she didn't know how it helped them to know that he'd pulled a number of vases from concealed shelves in the wall or that he'd found a lot of gold buried under six feet of dirt at the entrance to the tomb.
She'd have to write to Alex to tell her what she found, maybe if they worked together or if her sister used the big library at Hogwarts they'd be able to solve it.
Maybe Alex being at Hogwarts wouldn't be such a bad thing.