Disclaimed
Author's note: Thank you reviewers!
The Basement
By Marz
Chapter 8: Visitors and Cat Fights
They finally let me go to bed after I put my head on the table and began to snore. I was faking it at first, but I must have really fallen asleep. When I woke up it was afternoon. I wasn't in the main part of the hospital wing anymore. They'd moved me to a smaller room. I went straight to the door and found it locked. There weren't any windows.
I hammered on the door with my fists. I'd split open the knuckles on my left hand before Madam Pomfrey arrived. She was carrying a tea tray and she gave me a very disapproving glance.
"Mr. Potter it would benefit you to learn some patience. I'm not at your beck-and-call." The hospital matron looked concerned despite her tone, and when she saw my hand she looked out right worried. She set the tea tray down on the bedside table.
"What have you done to yourself now?" She waved a wand and my hand healed instantly.
"I don't like be locked up. I was locked up for two months there and now here…"
I was surprised to find my voice shaking. She looked at me with pity and I felt sick. I'm not a weak person and I was not going to let some thing stupid like that shake me.
"Never mind," I said. "I was just being stupid. Did they get the tests back yet? Can I start classes again soon?"
Madam Pomfrey looked at me with even more pity and I wanted very badly to yell at her.
"I'm afraid they came back with bad news. You have been under the influence of the Imperious Curse Mr. Potter, and until the Headmaster can prove you are free of its control, you will have to remain separated from your classmates. Its for their safety and your own."
I felt dizzy for a second and sat back down on the bed.
"How long till they know if I'm cured of the curse?"
"They'll be back to do more tests tomorrow morning. The Headmaster has sent you some of your clothing and schoolbooks, so that you have an opportunity to catch up. Look in the wardrobe in the corner. I will be back at seven o'clock with your dinner."
I noticed then, that she was standing rather far away from me.
"What's the imperious curse," I asked. "Is it contagious?"
"No Mr. Potter. It is not contagious. The Imperious Curse is an old, dark spell. It allows the caster to control the victim like a puppet. Once under the curse you have no will of your own, and if the caster wishes, the victim will not even recall being placed under the curse to begin with. The victim can be ordered to forget and he will. You understand now why you can't go wandering about? Black could have ordered you to kill one of your friends and you might not even know it. I will be back with your dinner at seven. Please don't over exert yourself. You've been under a great deal of stress and you'll need plenty of rest to recover."
She turned and swept out of the room, without giving me a chance for questions. The door swung shut behind her. My stomach twisted in knots and my brain seemed to flip upside down when that happened. No you aren't doing this again, I told myself. It's just a stupid door and there's plenty of air and Madam Pomfrey is right outside, and you aren't going to suffocate.
I tried to take my mind off it. I went and looked in the wardrobe. To my surprise my own clothes were inside. They must have found my school trunk on Magnolia Crescent. I wish they had told me. I was worried I'd lost the only pictures I had of my parents. I picked out a shirt and some trousers and pulled off my pajama shirt. I started to pull off the pants.
"Hey! Stop!" shouted a voice in the corner.
I over balanced and fell down, one leg free of the pajamas. With a swirling snap of fabric two people and a large cat appeared in front of me. The girl with the bushy brown hair, who was staring at me and blushing furiously, was Hermione Granger. The tall, freckled boy with the red hair, who was blushing as he watched Hermione watch me, was Ron Weasley. I didn't know the cat.
I found my voice first. "It's not a bloody peep show! Turn around!"
Hermione whirled to face the wall and I scrambled into my clothes.
"Alright," I said, "Done."
Hermione turned around, but everyone just looked at the floor.
"Sorry Harry," she said in a small voice, folding up the invisibility cloak as she spoke. "We were just going to make sure you weren't under a spell before we said anything. You shouldn't get changed so fast. We'd have had a chance to say something sooner."
I laughed nervously at that, and after a second the others joined in.
"Are you alright then?" asked Ron as it died away.
"I think so," I said. I noticed they didn't want to come to close to me either. Well the cat did. It immediately sauntered over and started rubbing cat hair off on my leg. "Are you guys alright?" I asked.
"Yes we're fine," answered Ron.
We stared at each other for a few silent minutes before Hermione made an odd squeaking sound and rushed me. Her arms were around my neck and she was crying all over me.
"We thought you were dead! I thought he'd killed you!" My shirt was getting soaked and my face was burning up. I looked to Ron for help but he was staring at the floor. Some best friend! I patted her on the back.
"Well…er…here I am, not dead."
After five minute of promising not to die, I managed to pull Hermione off of me. The three of us sat down on my bed, and I finally found out what happened in my absence.
"We thought you were dead when Black showed up at the school with your wand," Ron began.
"I was on my way back from detention with Snape, it was almost two weeks ago. I was walking up to Gryffindor tower when I heard someone behind me on the steps. Before I could turn around a binding curse hit me in the back. I landed face down at the top of the steps, tied up. I couldn't even yell for help. Then someone rolls me over with their foot, and I look up and its Sirius Black looking down at me. He had your wand. He went through all my pockets, it was weird, then he picked me up by my neck and held me against the wall. He said 'tell me the password to get past the fat lady.' I shook my head no. I wasn't going to let him in there to kill everyone. Then he started squeezing my throat."
As Ron spoke he looked excited rather then frightened, so I assumed the story had a happy ending.
"Then he turned and cast a disarming charm. Hermione had snuck up behind him, I hadn't even seen her, but then he had her wand too. But then, you won't believe what she did Harry. It was completely nutters. Hermione tackled him!"
I looked at her. Hermione usually wasn't much for fighting. She was looking at the floor and blushing again.
"They both went down the staircase. I thought she'd broke her neck or something, but then she got up and kicked him right in the face! She was shrieking like a banshee the whole time. And then Black kicked her and she fell over and he started to stand up, but then she was on him again, and she was really beating the snot out of him, and I guess McGonagall heard her because she came running down the hall, and I don't know if Black saw her coming or just couldn't take anymore from Hermione but he turned and ran for it."
Ron stopped for air and looked at Hermione as if she had recently been declared captain of the Chudley Cannons Quidditch team. I suppose I should have mentioned he was obsessed with that particular team and had posters of them covering every square inch of wall space in his room. Anyway, Hermione was horribly embarrassed by the attention, and Ron seemed to have forgotten I was also in the room.
"Well really," Hermione said. "It wasn't all that exciting." She said, waving her hand as if trying to fan the attention away. When that failed to work she brought me back into the conversation. "So how did you get away Harry? McGonagall told me you brought back my wand. How did you beat Black?"
"I didn't exactly beat him. He let me go."
They turned in surprise, and stared at me.
"He let you go?" Ron said.
I nodded. "He wanted me to believe some crazy story about Voldemort having spies at Hogwarts, and when I said I did, he let me go. So now everything is fine."
They knew I was lying to them. I could see it on their faces, but they seemed almost afraid to question me further. I couldn't tell them about Blacks crazy idea about Scabbers yet though. I could see Scabbers wasn't in Ron's pocket. When he had the rat with him always put it in the right chest pocket of his robe, and it looked like he had a half stuffed bra on or something. I figured the rat was sitting in the dorm room, being a rat, but I wanted to make sure before I said anything. I tried changing the subject.
"So how are the new classes going?"
Hermione launched into a long explanation of Arithmancy class. I nodded not really listening until she said "and Ron was slashed by a hippogriff in Hagrid's class."
There were explanations and exclamations, and I learned that Hagrid was now the Care of Magical Creatures Professor, and that one should never say "Who cares about these stupid freakish horses when Harry's been kidnapped!" in front of a hippogriff. Needless to mention, they were removed from the lesson plan. We talked about potions, charms, transfigurations, and Divinations class, where the teacher had predicted that my gruesome corpse would be found floating in the lake.
"Of course Defense is going to be your favorite class this year," said Ron.
"Why?" I asked.
"Well, the Professor did save your life."
"What? When? How?"
Ron's face lit up as he launched into another story. Maybe I should mention here, that Ron is very attention starved at home, being the sixth son in a family of nine people. Almost anything that will make you look at him will make him happy.
"Professor Lupin was sitting at the head table talking to Professor Flitwick at dinner last night. He stood up all of a sudden, knocked a platter of beef off the table so everyone was looking at him. He turned his head like he was trying to hear something and then he jumped straight over the table and ran out the door. Everyone was running after him, but by the time we got to the front doors he was already at the gate. There were dementors everywhere. We couldn't even see you. Professor Lupin shot this silvery stuff at them and they backed off, but they didn't go away. He kicked open the gate and ran out there, and a second later he was back carrying you. You looked dead. Your head was lolling around, and your eyes were half open and you weren't moving at all. He ran past us toward the hospital wing, but then Dumbledore arrived and he sent us all back to the hall."
He paused for a gulp of air.
"Me and Hermione…"
"Hermione and I." Hermione said, cutting him off.
"What?" Ron asked.
"The proper way to say that is 'Hermione and I'. It's basic grammar…"
"I can't believe you!" Ron declared.
They argued and I just basked in it. Even if I couldn't go back to classes, at least my friends were still normal. While they shouted at each other about the intricacies of the English language I looked at the tea tray Madam Pomfrey had left on the table. There was a cup of milk, which was now unappetizingly warm and a dish of stew witch was unappetizingly cold. The cat jumped up on the bed next to me and meowed. He seemed to see some mysterious redeeming quality in the remains of my lunch, so I set the tray in front of him.
The cat caught Ron's attention then, and he applied the glare he usually saved for Malfoy.
"Watch your fingers around that one Harry," he said.
"I said I was sorry!" Hermione wailed. "Crookshanks didn't mean to."
"What did he do, shred your potions homework?" I asked.
"He ate Scabbers."
"What?"
My brain hurt then. This should have been simple. I find the rat. I test the rat. Black is nuts and the Ministry catches him, the end. This was getting too complicated.
"We went up to the dorm after lunch to get your invisibility cloak. They brought your trunk here after the Ministry inspected it. I went to check on Scabbers, because he's been sick. He usually sleeps on my pillow near the window, but all I found was blood and cat hair."
I swallowed. The cat looked up at me sadly.
"Are you sure he didn't get away?" I asked.
"Where could he have gone? There was gallons of blood." Ron seemed a bit hopeful though.
"Can't we check if Crookshanks ate him or not?"
"Check?" demanded Hermione. She and the cat gave me suspicious glares.
We were presented then, with a very unpleasant challenge. Hogwarts did not have an x-ray machine and even if it did we wouldn't know how to use it. That left us two options. And only one of them was possible. As we were not going to cut the cat open, we had to figure out how to retrieve a cat's lunch. When we couldn't think of any spell to help us, Ron left to seek expert advice. The locked door was no challenge for Hermione. She tapped the doorknob and it swung open. Ron pulled the cloak over his head and went in search of his twin brothers, Fred and George. He went to see them because they likely knew how to make a cat vomit. I think that says enough about them.
I don't think Crookshanks will ever for give me. Fred, George, and Ron returned a few minutes later with a little bag of catnip.
"Good to see you're not dead, Harry," said Fred.
"Mums been worried sick," said George.
"Ron tells us..."
"…you need our help…"
"…in the pursuit of justice."
It really scares me when they finish each other's sentences.
"We made this for Ms. Norris…" said Fred.
"…but your need, we suppose, is greater," finished George.
The caretaker's cat owes me one I suppose.
Crookshanks gobbled up the catnip, glaring at me the entire time. I think that cat knew what would happen. He walked towards me, and I backed into the door. I leapt aside just in time.
Something occurred to me then. I had no idea what a partially digested Scabbers would look like. There was lots of pink stuff and bones.
We were poking through the evidence with the spoon from my lunch tray when Madam Pomfrey and Professor Snape burst in. We had a few seconds to play "who looks more surprised"; the three students picking through a puddle of cat vomit, or the potions professor who stepped in it.
Fred and George had managed to sneak under the invisibility cloak without being spotted. I think they could have disappeared without it though. At least it wasn't lying around for Snape to notice.
The vein in Snape's temple was bulging like a psychotic earthworm. He looked at his boots and the soiled hem of his robe.
"I gave the cat a bit of my lunch. I don't think it agreed with him." That comment did not seem to help the situation.
Snape glared down at us, and before we could object he waved his wand and our evidence was gone.