Ella's grumpiness the following Saturday is not only because of her impending detention, but because they haven't made any progress in their search. It isn't anyone's fault, really, other than their professors for dishing out an extensive amount of homework. It's the last leg of their first year education before the spring holidays are upon them and they are thrown into revision before their exams, so she can't say she's surprised, but it leaves them with time to do little else. She half-considered ignoring their impending tests in favour of their search, but Torian put a quick stop to that.
"Don't be ridiculous," he'd said. "Try that and I will tell your brother what you're doing."
That had promptly put a stop to it.
Now they aren't able to use their weekend for what they want to do, two thirds of their little trio heading for detention. An owl had dropped slips of paper off at breakfast that morning, both in McGonagall's handwriting, informing them of where they would be serving their detention. Yeoreum is to report to the Quidditch pitch whereas Ella is expected at the Defence Against the Dark Arts office at nine-thirty and no later.
"They aren't going to make me deal with one of those, what do you call them? Bogies?" Ella asks.
"Boggart," Torian corrects automatically. "And they wouldn't do that, surely. That isn't on our curriculum until our third year."
Despite the reassurances, Ella heads upstairs to the DADA office after breakfast with the slightest hint of fear coursing through her veins. She would like to believe that the school wouldn't force them to do anything dangerous, but this is Hogwarts, and she's heard the horror stories of the Forbidden Forest. She may not be heading to the forest, but who knows what horrors the DADA office holds? Perhaps not boggarts, but imps, grindylows, devil's snare, something that could take her out for good.
Instead, she opens the door to Harry Potter and a stack of textbooks.
"Oh, Ella, hello," Harry says, setting the textbooks down on his desk. "You're doing detention with me today."
"That's fine with me," she says. "As long as you aren't sending me into the lake or something."
Harry grimaces. "No, I wouldn't wish that on anyone." He shivers. "All you'll be doing is removing graffiti from these textbooks." He gestures to the pile. "I'll be in here doing a bit of spring cleaning."
Ella raises her eyebrows as she goes to sit behind the desk. She knows the ink-removal spell, but she'll have to go page by page. What a hassle. "Spring cleaning? In the Defence Against the Dark Arts office? Moving in here permanently, Professor?"
Harry is quiet for a moment, turning to the shelves and rifling through them. "I'm still deciding. Either way, this place has a whole bunch of different things left by the Defence Against the Dark Arts professors over the years. Some of them have just… got to go."
"How many professors have there been?" Ella asks, looking around the office.
"One every year since, I don't know, the 1940s?"
Ella stops her mumbling mid-spell. "A new one every year?"
Harry nods, using his wand to levitate some cat figurines into a nearby rubbish bin. "Voldemort wanted the position after leaving Hogwarts, but Dumbledore wouldn't give it to him. It hasn't been officially confirmed, but it's believed that he jinxed the position so that no professor would stay more than a year. Hopefully since he's dead for good this time the jinx has been lifted."
"And then you can stay," Ella says, as though that settles that.
Harry turns to look at her, an amused tilt on his lips. "You want me to stay that badly?"
"So what if I do? You're a good teacher. Perhaps I haven't had any others, but I have it on good authority that you're one of the best around," she says.
"What good authority?"
"Dennis and —" She catches herself. Mentioning Colin outside of herself, Yeoreum, and Torian is something she hasn't been able to bring herself to do yet. With Harry, it had been about to come so naturally. She doesn't know how to think about that."
"And Colin," Harry finishes for her, and when she looks at him, he has a sad smile on his face. "Did they talk about Dumbledore's Army to you?"
Ella nods, focusing her gaze back on the vandalised textbooks. "They were excited about what they were learning. Even though they couldn't properly show me the spells, they'd teach me how to hold a wand while casting them and they'd talk about what each spell does. I loved it, but it always made me want to be a part of it. The DA."
"Consider yourself an honorary member, then," Harry says.
Things become silent after that, both of them tending to their tasks, but the air inside the office now feels suffocating. A weight presses down against Ella's head and chest and she forces herself to get through her detention as quickly as possible so she can be free of it. Her throat is dry and she is reminded of when she was called up to McGonagall's office.
It's Harry who finally breaks the silence. "Hey, Ella…"
She looks up at him expectantly. He's no longer looking at the shelves, but when she meets his gaze, he seems to falter, flexing his fingers and fidgeting. "About… Hogwarts. And, er… and Colin."
Her hand grips her wand, fingers clutching so tightly that the wood digs into her palm. "Yes?"
"It's okay to be angry." He says it in a rush, almost breathless, as if it's something he's been holding in.
Ella frowns. "What do you mean?"
"It's okay to be emotional. About Colin's death, I mean," Harry clarifies, and she notes that he struggles to mention Colin without faltering. "Losing someone when you're so young is hard and you should be able to process that as you see fit. And yeah, maybe lashing out and kicking someone isn't the best way to deal with it, but… I get it."
"If this is your way of telling me not to kick Veront, I —"
"It's not that," Harry quickly says, then adds, "though you probably shouldn't do that, either. I just mean that whatever you're feeling is valid. I've been there."
Another pause. She doesn't know what to say, so she stares. She can't see her own face, but whatever Harry can see makes him hesitate, and he scratches the back of his neck. He sighs.
"And… if part of your anger is directed at me, then I understand."
That gets her attention. Some of the tension in her body eases away from surprise, and all she can say is, "What? Why would it be?"
"Well… I — it's not a secret that Colin admired me." Harry's words are stilted, as if admitting it is difficult somehow. "Sometimes I wonder… I wonder if he would've gotten so involved in the fighting if I hadn't been 'the Chosen One' and all," he says, using quotation marks.
Ella thinks. She sits and thinks back to Colin's disposition over the years, of his eagerness to tell her all about Harry Potter and his amazing feats despite being only a year older than him. He had photos and would always come home with stories to tell. His letters were full of the newest of Harry's exploits and how much he admired him. Even when times were tough, when they had to seal their house away from the world to protect themselves, Colin had faith that Harry would save the Wizarding World. It's easy to see why someone would think Colin fought for Harry's sake.
But there were other things. Things like Colin trying to recreate butterbeer in their kitchen over the holidays because 'it's amazing, El, you have to try it!' and exploding snap that her brothers would play in their living room while their father reminded them not to burn the house down. He would tell her about his classmates, of the fiery and brave Ginny Weasley and the intelligent and otherworldly Luna Lovegood who he admired. She remembers the light in his eyes as he described the creatures he'd seen and how Hagrid was an expert on all of them.
Colin admired Harry, that is indisputable, but he isn't the only thing he loved.
"He would have," Ella says, and when Harry gives her a confused look, she continues. "He would've fought regardless of how he felt about you or whether you even existed. Colin… Colin loved Hogwarts. He loved the Wizarding World. Fighting to protect it would have just been natural for him. It was natural for him. None of that has anything to do with you. The only person I blame is that Voldy guy and whoever — whoever… fired the last spell."
Harry's eyes grow wide from behind the round rims of his glasses, but the relief is obvious in the way his shoulders drop slightly. "I suppose that's true."
He resumes cleaning the shelf and Ella should spell away some more ink, but instead she finds herself asking, "How do you do it? How do you… keep going after losing so many people. How do you get over it?"
While Harry is looking at her, his expression is far away. "You don't. Not really. You keep moving because life doesn't stop and sometimes it feels like… like you're walking through sand and mud at the same time. And after witnessing so much death, well, you unfortunately get used to it. It still hurts just as much, but the time you spend in the mud and sand becomes shorter."
His hands move to the back of the shelf he's currently working on. He pulls out an empty glass enclosure that Ella can only assumes belonged to some sort of magical marine animal. She doesn't see anything particularly interesting about it, but Harry carries it as though it's precious.
"There used to be a grindylow in this tank," is all he says.
It isn't until an hour before dinner that Ella is finally allowed to leave, several textbooks now ink-free, and she returns to Gryffindor Tower without much fanfare. The same cannot be said for Yeoreum, who stumbles in with windblown hair and dirt all over her legs. Both Ella and Torian look at each other, wondering who is going to ask about her appearance, but she answers their unasked questions without prompting.
"I had to help Madam Hooch clean the entire Quidditch pitch," she says, flopping onto the couch beside them. "And you know how it rained during the Gryffindor VS Hufflepuff match last weekend? Yeah. The grounds have not recovered."
"Was Madam Hooch that harsh on you?" Ella asks.
"No." Yeoreum's voice becomes muffles as she buries her face in a cushion. "It was just a lot of work. Though," she lifts her head, "I did see what punishment Veront got."
Ella perks up at that. "Oh? What?"
"Assisting Professor Hagrid with caring for his magical creatures," Yeoreum says with a grin. "Including feeding them, letting them slobber over him, and picking up their poop. All that fun stuff."
Torian covers his mouth as he snorts. "I bet he loved that."
"His posh pureblood ass looked haggard as hell," Yeoreum says gleefully, sitting back up. "It's what he deserves." She turns to Ella. "What did you have to do?"
"Clean all of the textbooks students had drawn in with ink," Ella says. "Not as arduous as cleaning a whole field, but definitely monotonous."
"Really? What type of stuff was drawn in there?"
Ella is about to answer when something catches her attention from the corner of her eye. Dennis is standing to the side of the common room, waving her over with a small smile. Confused as to why he can't simply come over and speak to her normally, she excuses herself and heads his way. There isn't anyone else around in their corner (not that there are real corners in such a circular tower, but her point remains) and that is enough to cause concern.
"What is it?" she asks.
Dennis doesn't answer at first, running a hand through his hair and looking away. Then he says, "I'm staying at Hogwarts for the Easter holidays."
The mundanity of the statement catches her off guard. "You called me over here just for that?" Then what he said fully catches up with her and her brow furrows. "Wait, why?"
"It's just… I have OWLs coming up in June, and that'll come in the blink of an eye. I have to study two years worth of material instead of just one and honestly I feel like spontaneously combusting the more I think about it, so my only option is to be completely prepared," he says.
"Okay," she says slowly. She doesn't doubt how hard OWLs are, but her main question still hasn't been answered. "What does that have to do with staying home?"
Dennis clasps his hands together, fingers tapping against each other. "I can't concentrate at home. And, well, if I want to practise spells I can't do it at home anyway because of the law, but even if I just did bookwork… With the way things are at home, I wouldn't get anything done."
He finally looks at her properly and she sees in his eyes what he was hiding form her: guilt. And suddenly she understands.
Home hasn't been the same since Colin left their lives. That's to be expected, of course, but it's how things have changed that matters. Mentioning Colin's name in front of their mother is asking for trouble. They're forbidden about talking about Hogwarts or magic and they're walking on eggshells whenever they're all in the same room together. Studying under those conditions would be near impossible.
She isn't going home without him, though.
"Then I'm staying, too."
Dennis appears taken aback, though she can't tell whether it's because of what she's said or how firmly she said it. "Wait, you don't have to. I was just telling you in advance."
"I know," she says, "but I want to stay. I… I don't want to go back there by myself."
Her mind wanders back to winter break, their bleak Christmas with their mother frantically searching for Colin's camera, as if she checked on his belongings regularly despite not allowing anyone into his room. She probably did. Likely still does. The thought of going through that all over again is a haunting one.
"Alright, yeah, I can understand that," Dennis says. "Are you sure you won't be bored, though?"
"I'm sure. I have exams too, you know. And besides, I'll get to explore the castle more without so many people around."
And, if she's lucky, find that stone.
Dennis finally cracks a smile, albeit a small one. "Fair enough." The smile disappears. "I'll… write to mum and dad and tell them we won't be coming home for Easter."
She shakes her head. "I'll write my own letter. I think it'll be better in the long run if we both send them a letter. Hear it in our own words and all that."
"That… is very reasonable." He pauses for a moment. "Dad will understand, won't he?"
"He will."
"And mum…"
"We can't think about that," Ella says despite the guilt gnawing at the back of her mind, telling her she's a bad daughter to leave her parents in this situation, her father caring for their grieving mother all by himself. "We're doing what's best for us."
A sad smile is all Dennis can seem to muster. "Yeah. We are."
hello everyone! we're not going to talk about how i wrote this chapter then completely forgot it was finished for like a month.
