Dawn got the rest of her computer working over the next week. She still hadn't figured out how to recharge her battery with magic, but she and Hermione did get the portable generator they'd obtained running, using magic to spin it instead of the noisy—and smelly—gasoline engine, so she could plug her computer into it and charge the battery that way. That also let Dawn get her printer working, so now her professors were getting printed essays from her. There were a couple of raised eyebrows the first time that happened, but for the most part they accepted them…largely because it was generally agreed in the staff room that Dawn had the worst handwriting of any student above the first year, and they had all pretty much given up on trying to get her to spell colour with a 'u.'
Dawn had also set up accounts on her computer for Hermione and Ginny. Hermione had a little experience with computers—her parents had one, and she had used it during her visits home—but Ginny was a complete neophyte, with no computer experience at all. Neither of them could type, so they kept writing their essays on parchment with quill pens. Hermione did become quite adept at using the computer to search the internet for material that was useful in their Muggle Studies classes.
Dawn set up email accounts for both of them, and Ginny got added to a mailing list that had been set up to let all the Slayers from around the world exchange messages with each other, and also to the Slayer Chat Network.
Willow and Kennedy stayed at Hogwarts for another couple of weeks. Ginny spent at least an hour working out with Kennedy every day, and improved rapidly. She was able to hold her own with the older Slayer when it came time for them to leave. Now their workout sessions took place to music supplied by Dawn's iPod, amplified by a sonorus spell.
Willow had also charmed Dawn's cell phone before she left. It was now possible for her to make and receive calls with it. A similarly charmed phone had been dispatched to Buffy, along with a Portkey that could bring her to Hogwarts. The spell enabled the phone even if it was outside an area covered by regular cellular service. Hedwig was delivering them, since the package was too heavy for Yanka to carry so far.
Dawn woke up one Saturday morning, a month after Willow and Kennedy had left, to see the grounds covered in white. It was the first snow she had seen since the Christmas when she was twelve. Everyone ran outside after breakfast, and a huge snowball fight ensued between the various houses. Dawn found that she was a favourite target of many of the Slytherins, and mixed in with the snowballs that came her way were several that turned out to have solid ice cores. Too many snowballs were flying in all directions to pin down who the ice ones were coming from…even though Dawn had a pretty good idea, based on the smirk on Malfoy's face.
Dawn wasn't the only one getting hit by iceballs. Several other Gryffindors were getting them thrown their way as well. Malfoy suddenly found himself buried under a barrage of snowballs thrown at him.
Harry wanted to go visit Hagrid after lunch. Ron and Hermione, and Ginny and Dean came along with them. They found him behind his hut, throwing bails of hay into the paddock.
"What are you doing?" asked Harry.
"Puttin' out fodder for tha Trivets," said Hagrid. "In case they decide to stay fer tha winter."
"Where do they go, if they don't stay?" asked Hermione.
"This here herd usually winters in the Tasmanian Trivet Reserve," said Hagrid. "But they don' always go south fer tha winter."
"Why would they stay here, if they could go some place warm?" asked Dawn.
"Yer'd have to ask the Trivets tha'," said Hagrid. "They don' explain themselves ta me."
"Maybe they like playing in the snow," said Ron. He scooped up a handful, packed it into a ball and threw it at his sister. Ginny saw it coming and ducked, so the snowball sailed over her, and hit Hermione instead.
"Oh, you're in for it now Ronald Weasley!" Hermione threw a snowball back at him. Dawn and Ginny joined in, pelting Ron with more snowballs, until Harry and Dean came to his defense. It became a snowball fight between the boys and the girls. It was hardly a fair fight: Ginny could throw with deadly accuracy. Hagrid wisely backed away, letting the kids go at it.
Harry and Ron realized they had no hope of winning the snowball fight. They exchanged a look, and both of them knew what the other was thinking. They roared and charged at the girls. Ron tackled Hermione, and Harry tried to tackle Dawn. He wound up planted face first in the snow with Dawn sitting astride his back, and his arm twisted up behind his back. Ron and Hermione were rolling together in the snow with neither one of them managing to pin the other. Dean had been a little slower in switching his mode of combat. He charged at Ginny, and suffered a fate similar to the one Harry had suffered at Dawn's hand.
"Do you give up?" asked Dawn.
"Yes!" said Harry. "I surrender!"
"Okay," Dawn let go of Harry and got to her feet. She turned to look at Ron and Hermione, who were still rolling in the snow. She didn't see Harry grab a handful of snow as he got to his feet. She felt him pull at the collar of her cloak, and then she shrieked as she felt the ice cold snow against her spine.
Dawn spun around and saw that Harry was already running. "Oh, you are so dead Mister!" she yelled as she chased after him.
Harry's longer legs kept him ahead of Dawn for the first couple of hundred yards, but he wasn't in the habit of running a couple of miles every other day the way she did. He felt his strength flagging, and Dawn started to gain on him.
Dawn tackled Harry from behind and they fell into a snowbank. They rolled together through the snow. This time Dawn wasn't trying to pin Harry. She pulled open his cloak, and shoved a double handful of snow up under his sweater. He howled as the snow came in contact with his skin.
Harry saw that Dawn was reaching for more snow, so he did the only thing he could think of to defend himself. He reached a hand up behind her neck, and pulled her face toward his for a kiss. She tried to pull away for a moment, but she stopped, and suddenly she was kissing him back. The trickle of cold from the snow still melting against his skin vanished from his mind as he held her.
They were snapped out of the kiss by more snow hitting their heads. Dawn rolled off Harry and they both sat up, and looked at their friends gathering more snow.
"Oh, damn!" said Ron. "I hoped it would take more than one shot to get their attention." His cloak was covered with snow, and he had more snow in his hair. Hermione was just as covered with snow as he was.
"So why did you need our attention so badly?" asked Harry.
"We thought it might be a good idea to break you apart before you froze together," said Ginny. She alone seemed to be fairly snow free.
Ron and Hermione pulled Harry and Dawn to their feet. "Come on mate," said Ron. "Let's go find someplace warm to snog the girls." Hermione pushed him into the snow bank he'd just pulled Harry out of.
Dawn sat meditating with Harry in a quiet corner of the Gryffindor common room. They weren't doing it as often now as they had over the summer (they had better things to do with each other when they had a little quiet time alone together) but they were still getting in a couple of sessions a week. She felt her cell phone vibrate against the small of her back.
Dawn looked around to make sure that no one was paying attention. That she had a working phone was being kept a secret…largely because she didn't want all the kids with Muggle relatives asking to borrow it to make calls home.
The coast was clear so Dawn reached around and pulled her phone out of her belt. She checked the display and saw it was Buffy calling. She pressed the 'Talk' button. "Hi Buffy."
"Hi Dawn, how are you doing?"
"Doing good. It snowed here last night, so we had a big snowball fight this morning."
"Sorry I missed it," said Buffy. "I haven't seen snow since that Christmas in Sunnydale."
"Me neither," said Dawn. "It's colder than I remembered it being…especially when someone shoves a handful of it down your back."
"I bet," said Buffy. "Anyway, I called to let you know that everything's set for Christmas. Giles and I are back in England, and Xander and the gang are coming over from Cleveland. They're arriving Wednesday."
"That's great!" said Dawn. "And you're going to pick me up at the train station next Saturday, right?"
"Four o'clock," said Buffy. "Can't wait to see you again."
"Me too," said Dawn. "Any progress on the Knights, or the other thing?" They tended to be circumspect when talking about the Key over the phone. You never really knew if someone else might be listening in.
"Giles' friend Robson thinks he might have a lead," said Buffy. "Nothing concrete. How about you guys? Find anything in the library there?"
"Not much that we didn't already know," said Dawn. "Professor Lupin wrote us a note to get access to the restricted section. We found a couple of books that talk about it, but they're pretty much all ancient history. Very little about what it can do. Mostly just stuff we already knew about. There is one new bit of information we found though: the Knights and the Monks were once the same organization. They had a falling out sometime around the start of the eleventh century about just what they should do with it. Something happened that made most of them decide that it needed to be destroyed, but another group wanted to preserve and study it more. The group that wanted to keep it managed to steal it before the others could destroy it, and they became the Monks, and the Knights spent the next thousand years looking for it."
"Hmm," said Buffy. "That's interesting. I'll tell Giles. Maybe that will shake something loose."
They kept talking for a few minutes, exchanging news before they hung up. Dawn saw that Harry was looking at her. "So, you're going to see all your old friends at Christmas?"
"A lot of them anyway," said Dawn. "It'll be nice. You're going to the Weasley's?"
"That's the plan," said Harry. "Of course we've had that plan before, and it didn't work out."
The Hogwarts Express pulled to a stop at Platform nine and three quarters at precisely four o'clock on the next Saturday afternoon. Dawn joined all the other students getting off the train and scanned the platform for anyone she knew.
"Xander!" Dawn ran across the platform and nearly jumped into his arms, hugging him tightly. "God, it's good to see you!"
Xander held her tightly. "You too, Dawnmiester."
Dawn let go of Xander and stepped back a bit. She looked around and finally noticed her sister smiling at her. "Hi Buffy." She got a much less enthusiastic hug.
"Hey Dawn. So you missed Xander more than me?"
"I just saw you a couple of months ago, but it been like forever since I've seen Xander." She looked around a bit more and saw that Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were there, along with the Grangers. They were busy hugging their own returning children. Mrs. Weasley had a hug for Harry too.
Xander got introduced to all of Dawn's friends, and they joined the queue of people exiting the platform.
"So, where's Giles?" asked Dawn.
"He stayed back at the house," said Buffy. "He was afraid the others would demolish it in his absence."
"Wait a minute," said Dawn. "That means that you must have driven!"
"It wasn't that bad, really," said Xander. "I only had to remind her which side of the road she was supposed to be on six or seven times."
"Xander!" Buffy whacked his shoulder. "It was only once."
"And of course I only saw half the near misses," said Xander. "During the time I had my eye open anyway."
Harry stood behind Dawn and Xander, listening to them joke together, and watching the way she had her arm wrapped around his waist, and tried not to feel jealous. So what if the guy was older, and taller, and had a wicked cool looking eye patch? Dawn had talked about Xander a lot over the past months, and Harry knew that she thought of him as a big brother. Him feeling jealous of Xander would be as silly as Dawn feeling jealous of his relationship with Hermione. He knew they were just friends, really there was nothing for him to be jealous about. "And if you keep telling yourself that, maybe you'll start to believe it," he muttered to himself.
Dawn looked back toward him. "You say something?"
Harry hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. "What? No, not really."
Dawn disengaged from Xander, and stepped back to wrap her arm around Harry. It made him feel better. Not only because he liked being this close to Dawn, but the look Xander was giving him was definitely more of a 'big brother glaring at sister's boyfriend' look than a 'jealous boyfriend' look. You'd think that only having one eye to glare with would lessen the impact of it, but it didn't. It made it more intense, more concentrated.
"Oh, don't worry about Xander," said Dawn. "He's a big teddy bear."
"I don't know," said Harry. "Some of your stories make him sound like a very dangerous teddy bear."
"Only to evil things, and you're not one of those," said Buffy.
Harry noticed that Buffy's eyes kept moving around. "Looking for something?" he asked.
"Your bodyguards, and anyone they'd be protecting you from," said Buffy. "I kinda expected to see Moody and Tonks."
"Tonks could be anyone here," said Harry. "She's a Metamorphmagus. She can look like anyone she wants to."
"What about Moody?"
"He may be around," said Harry. "Strange as it seems, he is capable of being very inconspicuous. He does have an invisibility cloak after all. Or he may not. There'll be lots of official protection around here today too. Mad-Eye Moody is officially retired as an Auror."
They made their way out through King's Cross station, until they got to the place where they had to go their separate ways to reach their cars. Harry paused to give Dawn a goodbye kiss, and couldn't help noticing that Xander glared at him much the same way as Ron glared at Dean when he saw him give Ginny a goodbye kiss. "So, I guess I'll see you again in a couple of weeks when we go back to school."
"Don't worry," said Buffy. "You'll be seeing her sooner than that."
Dawn turned to look at her sister. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that I was talking with Mrs. Weasley while we were waiting for your train, and she invited us to come visit them at the Burrow next weekend. Apparently it's not too far from Giles' place."
