Chapter 113
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Criminal Minds or any of their characters. I do however own this story, I wrote it and I do NOT give permission for anyone to post it anywhere else. If you want to share it post a link.
A/N: I'm aware that Hermione didn't visit the Weasley's before second year in the actual book but in this story she did.
Before Harry could possibly have got the reply to his last letter, Spencer received another one. Obviously, Harry was trying to make up for not being able to write while he was locked up even though Spencer had forgiven him immediately as he would find out in the next day or two when he received Spencer's letter. Or maybe he just had something he wanted advice on or wanted to make sure he passed on because he was worried he wouldn't be able to later. Spencer opened the letter eagerly.
Saturday 24/8/92
Dear Spencer
The Weasleys' house is unlike anywhere I've ever stayed or seen. It's a funny twisted house clearly held up by magic. Another example of wizards using magic to overcome the lack of common sense. The house looks like it was built one room at a time. Need another room next to the nursery, just add one. Never mind that there's nothing under half of the new room to hold it up, magic will do that. The house is five floors high and every floor is a different shape. I think that the rooms change size too. The lounge seems cozy when there's only one or two people in it but there's easily room for nine when we're all there, and the kitchen's the same. The table is a bit of a squeeze for nine people and all the serving platters but when I got up for a drink the other night you'd never have fit more than six people around it. There is no telephone or electricity and I don't think that there is proper plumbing, the water appears at the tap and disappears from the drain, everything is done by magic, one of the kitchen cupboards keeps things in stasis so when you open it there's a pot of hot soup, next to raw meat and fresh bread at room temperature and cold milk and pumpkin juice, the stove has no controls, Mrs Weasley taps her wand on it and tells it what she wants it to do and the laundry hampers spit out your clothes clean and folded about an hour after you drop them in. It would be kind of embarrassing when it spits out your underwear while the girls are in the room. The lamps are magic too and seem to turn off and on depending on what you want them to do. You don't need a wand or a spell which I suppose makes sense, it would be stupid to have lights in the house that nobody under the age of eleven could turn on an off.
Mrs Weasley is a large, loud, mothering woman, though I find myself wondering sometimes if that's what she wants me to see, she's certainly more tolerant than her Howlers made her seem. In spite of refusing to believe Ron and the twins about me being locked in my room without food, she's made a big fuss about me being too thin and uncared for and is trying to stuff me with food at every opportunity but I don't think she's told anyone who can do anything about it. I don't think Mrs Thomas or Mrs Finnegan have told anyone either and they had far more reason to believe me than Mrs Weasley did, or if they did nothing seems to have come of it yet. Sometimes I wonder whether all these people are pretending to care for me more than they do or whether they have tried reporting the abuse or at least the neglect and lack of food and someone is interfering with the reports so that it isn't investigated. If that is the case then maybe some of my primary school teachers tried at first too, before they decided or were persuaded that I was just a lazy trouble maker not worth their attention. Problem is I can't think why anyone would interfere like that. Dumbledore seems insistent that I stay at the Dursleys whether he's the person behind the magical draining wards or not but would he really go that far? It is possible that it's not him. Even if he had nothing to do with the new wards he did place me there as a baby and he is the type that would refuse to listen to my complaints because he's one of those people who couldn't admit that he was wrong. If it's not him who else would do it. Voldemort's Death Eaters have the motivation to make me miserable but I'd have thought that they're more the sort of wizards that would want to torture me personally not by proxy like this. They could have set the wards to keep me weak so Voldemort could finish me off more easily if he comes back though. Voldemort will want to kill me but I doubt he'd thank the Death Eater that arranged for me to be a weaker target, he'd think that it shows a lack of faith in his abilities. Surely all the Death Eaters would have known that his ego was too huge to tolerate that.
Mrs Thomas probably knows the most about how I was treated by the Dursleys and I think if hasn't reported it it's because she knows how important it is to me that the people watching don't know where I spent the summer and after a whole year of eating school meals I wasn't injured or underweight when she met me. The other thing is that after a year at Hogwarts and most of the summer eating Mrs Thomas' and Mrs Finnegan's cooking and the extra growth from the month in time dilation, I'm really not that thin and scrawny, not compared to what I looked like when she met me last summer, so I don't know why Mrs Weasley is making such a fuss now when nobody did back then. Mrs Thomas and Mrs Finnegan didn't make a fuss about how much I ate while I was with them, only that I had extra while I was stuck at the Dursleys. It's not like I don't eat properly, it's just that I eat like a regular person. Ron eats nearly as much as Dudley for all that Ron's so thin, (slender not scrawny) and the twins have better manners but they still eat a lot. It's odd, Ron's the only one in the family with atrocious table manners and his parents rarely try to correct him unless he sprays half eaten food all over them or the platters in the middle while they still have food on them. The others just try to make sure the platters aren't in front of Ron but I think that's because he'd eat the lot if you let him. I wonder why Mrs Weasley never tries to correct his manners. She's not the sort of woman to give up like Petunia did with Dudley and she doesn't indulge him in any other way. She doesn't correct Ginny, the youngest for anything either, in fact Mrs Weasley's favouritism for her daughter almost makes me understand Ron's need to demand attention. But then again, Ron is the only one with friends staying with them, I haven't heard anything about the others having friends over earlier in the summer either. Maybe it's an end of first year thing so Mr and Mrs Weasley can get to know their children's best friends.
It makes me uneasy that this is the one place other than the Dursleys that Dumbledore's happy for me to visit, and I don't understand it. I'm very suspicious about why, but so far I there's been nothing unusual that I can tell. Mrs Weasley obviously admires Dumbledore and I think she would believe whatever he said and probably follow his smallest suggestion possibly without realising that she was being manipulated. So, I can guarantee I won't hear or learn anything Dumbledore doesn't want me to know from being here but is that enough of a reason to let me come here when I'm not allowed to go anywhere else? Or does he think that just being around people who admire and trust him would make me admire and trust him too? It doesn't it just makes me not trust them either. Hermione also arrived the day after I did which makes me think that picking me up was a lot more planned than the Weasley's want me to think.
On a happier subject, I'm enjoying staying with Ron more than I thought I would. He's far more relaxed and easier to spend time with here at home and there's nobody else to be jealous of when it comes to me, he totally disregards my friendship with Hermione and the twins. I cant figure whether he thinks they're unimportant or he thinks that I'm only friends with them because of my friendship with him instead of the other way around. For the first time ever I have no homework and no chores to do, even with the Thomas' and the Finnegan's we were expected to help out and I wouldn't mind helping here either but I'm never asked to and even Ron seems to get less chores than his siblings because he has friends over which seems unfair. Ron and I spend most of the day playing quidditch which is a little unfair on Hermione who doesn't like to fly and sits alone reading at the edge of the field we use to play on, but when we try to spend time with her, she nags us about doing our summer homework and harps on about extra studying and she refused to believe I'd really done mine until she saw it. She's still pissed at me that I won't let her read through it all unless she promises not to even pick up a quill while she's reading it. Well, I guess I kind of deserve her being a little pissed off with me. I told her that if she wrote corrections all over my essays so I had to write them out again I'd do the same to hers. She scoffed that I wouldn't be able to find any mistakes to correct in her essays anyway and I said I could always just tear them up instead if she wrecked mine. Ron hasn't started his homework so she's busy nagging him now she's seen the pile of completed homework scrolls and watched me lock them back into my trunk where she can't get them. If her personality has been influenced by someone then it hasn't worn off over the summer or she's already been spelled again somehow. Mr Weasley picked her up from her house on the way home from work so it probably hasn't worn off.
I wouldn't mind reading ahead but we haven't got our books for next year yet and the twon's virtually destroyed theirs so there's no point borrowing them. Hermione'd get pissed off with me if I was studying muggle schoolbooks or reading too far ahead of first year stuff. It's like she thinks that she's the only one allowed to read extra things. I think she wants me to reread my first year textbooks like I need remedial studying. She could be spending time with Ron's little sister but Ginny spends most of her time in her room and squeaks every time she sees me. Ron and the twins think it's hilarious but I feel really uncomfortable. I don't know what to do or say. I don't want to make things more difficult for her, she deserves to feel comfortable in her own home.
The twins play quidditch with us some but they also spend a lot of time in their room, making loud explosions every now and again, and coloured smoke belches from their widow at fairly regular intervals. I don't know what they're doing but they refuse to talk about it or let me in, and their mother yells at them about it every time but she rarely goes up to see what they're doing or drags them downstairs and even when she does it doesn't stop them for long.
I've had a great summer on the whole, I'm sorry that you haven't. I hope you had at least some good times with your Mum and that you have a great school year.
I miss being able to email you but it doesn't work here. Even if I had my own computer they don't have an internet connection or electricity and I'm not allowed to go into town to see if there's a library. There is some sort muggle town near here, you can kind of see a church steeple from Ron's window, his room is on the sixth floor so it's probably quite a bit of a walk, but he's never been there, never wanted to go. The twins have of course, they told me they snuck away last summer and explored it but without money or knowing anyone or anything about nonmagical entertainments they soon became bored. I offered to go with them again if they could get me out of Molly's overbearing attention but they were too hesitant, I don't think they will. I've come to realise that they're not as impulsive in their risk taking as I've always thought. They like to be seen as rebellious but here at home it's only ever rebellion within the limits their mother will accept. More evidence that they probably had their mother's permission to 'steal the car and come to rescue me'.
We went to Diagon Alley to buy our Hogwarts supplies today. I got lost in the floo system on the way. I'd read about it in the introductory book Mr Blott encouraged me to buy which helped a lot more than Mrs Weasley's instructions but I sneezed as I said the name and came out in Knockturn Alley instead of Diagon Alley, though I'm fairly sure even with the sneeze that's not what I said. I'm okay, I didn't even get a chance to look around much before I ran into Hagrid. After that, Ron and Hermione stuck close to me all day so I wasn't able to buy half the things I wanted to keep under the radar. I barely got free of them to go down to my vault. Mrs Weasley offered to get my money out for me while we stopped and had something to eat. It was eleven o'clock and we'd had a full English breakfast, I wasn't hungry but Ron immediately started whining for food. I told her my uncle said never to give anyone my key card and asked isn't my vault key sort of the same. She backed off but she kept a close eye on me in the bank and made me share a cart which was kind of embarrassing because my vault is so full and theirs is almost empty. There couldn't have been twenty Galleon in it and a pile of sickles and knuts. Did I tell you the conversion rates? She has about 1,000 pound in the vault so they're not broke but it doesn't look like much. Anyhow I have my books and Hermione was already feverishly reading hers, and I learned about a different part of the Alley where the second hand shops are. There is an interesting looking second hand book shop but Ron dragged Hermione and me away from it. I'll have to try to get back there some time. We're currently sitting in the Leaky Cauldron waiting for Hermione's dad to pick her and her mum up. She was supposed to stay for the rest of the summer but after Mrs Granger watched Mr Weasley get in a punch up in the book shop with Draco Malfoy's dad, she changed her mind and insisted that Hermione come home. Mrs Weasley had to floo back to the Burrow and get her things.
I'll tell you more about the fight later I want to get this into the muggle post before we leave London, there's a stationary shop that sells stamps across the road and a letterbox just up the street a bit. I just need to talk Mr Weasley into letting me go and post it before Mrs Weasley comes back. Otherwise, Mrs Granger might post it for me on their way home but I'd rather Hermione not see your address and I don't know how to explain that to Mrs Granger, or even how to get her on her own to ask.
Your Friend Always
Harry.
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
Stay safe everyone. Please stay safe.