It was well past Midsummer, Ally was disheartened to realize, and she was no closer to finding anything out about her birth parents than she had been at the end of term. "Hey Mike," she greeted her brother who seemed really, really, really upset over something. And she had a feeling it wasn't because of the Muggle calculus he'd been poring over for fun. "What's wrong, bro?"
"Ally," he said hesitantly, "Mark just got back from his doctor appointment. Als, according to the doc, he won't have any vision left by the start of the school year." Mark Weasley was one of their cousins, but also so much more. His mother had been a Muggle that had abandoned him and his brother, Jamaal, when she had found out about the, ahem, family secret. Jamaal had only been a few months old at the time, and Mark only a year older. Because Percy was often too caught up in work to remember that he had a family, the boys' upbringing had largely been left up to his youngest brother and his wife.
It had been Hermione that Mark had gone to three years before when his vision started becoming fuzzy. It was Hermione who had taken time out of the work schedule that the Ministry provided all Aurors to take Mark to the doctor. And it had been Hermione that had explained to the rest of the Weasleys what glaucoma was.
Ally knew she'd been aware that Mark had had an appointment that day, but it had apparently slipped her mind. Because Mark was the only other family member in Slytherin, she'd often felt closer to him than anyone else in her family. "There's no hope that the doctors were wrong?" she asked, hoping like hell that there was but knowing that there wasn't.
"They aren't," Mark Weasley said quietly, as he came into the tree house. The tree house was exactly that: a miniature house that happened to reside in a tree. The Three Weasels, as their trio was called, had long since claimed it as their place. The tree house was a place where they could go to get away from their siblings or their parents or annoying males (Ally had found that one out the summer before when Chase Creevey had decided that she was a "fascinating study in womanhood.") "Als, I know you well enough to know that you're probably looking like you want to kill the doctor. Please don't. You know as well as I do that it was bound to happen." Mark knew that his best friends were taking it this badly because they weren't people who liked to be told they couldn't change something. However, just because he was helping them to cope didn't mean that he was handling it well himself—because he wasn't.
"Actually," Ally corrected gently, "I'm not looking like I want to kill something. However, I can name another member of the Trio that is."
"I am not!" her older brother protested. Watching the black-haired teenage witch, he gulped. Her bright green eyes were flashing with an unearthly power, and the look on her face reminded him strongly of their grandmother when she was absolutely pissed off.
"Alright," he said slowly, "I am. But, Als, that so does not mean that you can turn all that power you possess against me. Understand?"
"Understand," she agreed, eyes returning back to normal.
It was at times like this that Ally wondered how she could have not known she was adopted. Not only was she the only member of her family to not have red hair, there was the small matter of the little amount of power she possessed. Well, okay, she had to admit it wasn't so little. At age eight she'd accidentally turned herself into a puppy. By age ten, she could use glamour to become just another red-headed Weasley. And now, three days before her fifteenth birthday, she could perform spells that not even the great Auror Harry Potter could. For instance, she could obscure Hogwarts from wizard and witch eyes as well as Muggle eyes. As Dumbledore himself had once pointed out, it took a very powerful magical gift to accomplish that.
When summer vacation was over, the Trio would go back to Hogwarts. Mark and Ally would go to Slytherin, where they would be co-prefects. Mike would go back to Gryffindor with the rest of the family. He too would be a prefect that year, much to McGonagall's dismay.
Even if the Trio still didn't know how the hell the new DADA professor figured into the puzzle that was Ally's biological family, it was still going to be a wonderful year. All things considered, having two Weasleys for prefects in Slytherin, Mike and Solar Weasley, Fred and Angelina's oldest daughter, in Gryffindor, and Cat Finnigan, Seamus's daughter and another good friend, for one of the Ravenclaw prefects was certain to make for an interesting year. After all, their group wasn't nicknamed the Hell-Raisers for nothing.