Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any of the characters, places, names, plots, historical incidents in the magical world, ghosts, objects or anything else that the genius J. K. Rowling has come up with. But do try not to steal my plot. Ask nicely and I might let you.
Harry Potter and the Light of Life
Chapter IV: Nightly Encounter.
The following weeks of September went by in a blur, the mornings grew darker and the evening stole more and more of the afternoon. The new Gryffindor Quidditch team were now training three times a week. Harry had returned to his normal position as Seeker and Ginny Weasley, who had played Seeker while he was banned by Umbridge, was now one of the three new Chasers. The two others were Natalie McDonald, a third year student with natural talents for flying, and surprisingly enough, Seamus Finnigan. They had kept Andrew Kirke and Jack Sloper as Beaters, not being able to finding anyone better suited for the positions.
The Daily Prophet, who had turned out to be a truthful and enlighting newspaper after Cornelius Fudge had started to listen to Albus Dumbledore, reported to the students every day of You-Know-Who's latest attacks as they drank their morning tea in the Great Hall. Rita Skeeter was again writing for The Prophet, she was finally freed from Hermione's ban. But the ban had certainly done her good; she had not offended anyone who didn't deserve it, yet.
Lord Voldemort had not made an open attack since the 1st of September; he seemed more interested in gathering followers at the moment. Which left Harry to think about other things, such as Quidditch, homework and the DA.
The DA had started up again in the second week after start of term and Harry had witnessed its member's rise to new heights. Now that he had Dom, the new teacher, to help him, the job involved much less work for him. Dom found the spells and helped Harry teach the rest of the DA. They were advancing much faster than they ever had, even though they only had one meeting a week.
When Harry had asked Leia to join the DA, mentioning that Neville had become much better in the defence club, she had actually refused. Not rudely, but she had still refused. Harry had thought that anyone who had had their friends killed by Death Eaters would want to learn how to fight them, but Leia had not even seemed remotely interested.
Maybe that was because she still was as bad in Transfiguration, Charms and Defence Against the Dark Arts as she had been on her first day, Harry didn't really know. He hadn't gotten to know her any better, being to busy with other things. Since she didn't speak much when he, Ron, Hermione and her studied together, it was still he, Ron and Hermione who were best friends, Leia was just someone hanging around with Hermione.
But still, Leia was such a big part of his life that when something happened to her, he noticed it. After Hermione had told them, they understood why Leia had been nearly totally silent for a few days. The little boy with the puffskein, Benedict, and the girl Anabella, who had lived in the hospital wing up to that point, had been removed from the castle, adopted away to a wizarding family.
And so, Harry and Ron watched while Leia dug herself into the same amounts of homework as Hermione had done during their third year. But even if she seemed to work twice as hard as any of them, she didn't even have as good grades as Harry and Ron, if you looked away from her O (Outstanding) in Potions. Leia had mostly P's (Poor) and a few A's (Acceptable). There was nothing wrong with her essays, as McGonagall had told her a week ago, they were nearly at the same level as Ms. Granger's, but since her pot plant still hadn't done anything else than too hoot once, (while the rest of the class had turned logs into dogs), McGonagall had no choice but to fail her.
Draco Malfoy had been rarely quiet the first week, but that had ceased when his father had been freed from Azkaban. He had then picked up his old hobby, and again started throwing remarks after Harry, whenever The Boy Who Lived was in hearing range.
Harry was sitting in the Great Hall in the first week of October, as he could see the Slytherin making his way over. Malfoy was, as usual flanked by the dunderheads Crabbe and Goyle. Harry eyed them warily as he and Ron got up from their seats.
"I see Pottyhead has gotten himself a new girl in his gang," drawled Malfoy. "Have you and Weasel finally realised that Granger is no more interesting than a flobberworm? Or might I say a bookworm?"
"You wouldn't know interesting if had been right under your nose, Malfoy," spat Ron, "take a look at your own friends." Draco didn't seem to know what he should say to that, but he came up with something in the end.
"Found someone who is as mad as you now Potter? I hear she has the same habit as you with saying strange things in Divination. Why don't you get married?" Harry was glad that neither Hermione nor Leia was here now to hear what was being said about them.
"Shut up, Malfoy! I bet you're real happy now that you daddy is out if prison! Just know this, you are on the losing side," Harry said, barely controlling his temper.
"Are you saying you want me to believe that you should ever have a chance against the Dark Lord, Potter?" spat Malfoy. "All you want is fame, Potter, too bad the Prophet is not helping you anymore!"
Harry suddenly remembered all the things The Daily Prophet had written about him last school year, about him being insane. He had forgotten all about it. Malfoy's insult didn't even sting. Was Malfoy losing his touch? He had yet to say a thing that really hurt. He told Draco just that.
"Oh, so you want me to start talking about your parents now? Or maybe Sirius Black!"
That did it for Harry.
"DON'T YOU EVEN DARE MENTIONING HIS NAME!" he screamed, stepping towards Malfoy, every intention to make him take that back, no matter if he stayed in detention until Christmas. Most of the Great Hall was now watching.
Luckily, or unluckily, Professor McGonagall rushed to them at that moment, no doubt having witnessed their argument from the staff table
"Mr. Potter and Mr. Malfoy! What do you think you are doing?" She said, looking sternly at them all. "Oh no, Mr. Weasley, you stay right here, and that goes for you two also," she said pointing a long finger at Crabbe and Goyle. "Now, who would like to tell me what is going on?"
No one said anything.
"I see," said McGonagall, "then 20 points will be taken from each from your houses. And if I hear you two," she looked at Harry and Malfoy, "as much as even raising voices towards each others again, I can assure you the consequences will be more terrible than either of you can imagine."
After that, she made sure Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle went back to the Slytherin table, before she took one last stern glance at Harry and Ron and left them there.
"I truly hate Draco Malfoy," Ron said as they walked to class. "I strongly dislike Snape, I have not one positive thing to say about Trelawney, and I could have easily let Umbridge alone with Fluffy, but I hate Malfoy more than I think I can ever express." Harry couldn't agree more.
OOO
As always, the last thing Harry did before he went to bed was casting the bloody Silencing Charms. After that horrible Quidditch practice, he was angry with everyone and everything. It was still over a month till they met Slytherin in the first mach of the year, but with the way things were going now, Harry thought Gryffindor had about as good chances of beating the Slytherins as The Chudley Cannons had on winning the series. Which was the same as no chance at all.
At last he managed to free his mind of the anger. In the warm sheets, no doubt warmed up by a house-elf, he drifted of into sleep after a while. But his troubles didn't end there.
The dream he was having, he had had so many times before that he knew when he would wake up. As always it started with Sirius' body falling. Harry could see his godfather's look of complete astonishment as his body arched backwards. Playing in slow motion, Harry saw fear enter the grey eyes, before realisation seemed to hit Sirius. The fall seemed to last for an eternity and Harry could do nothing but to watch it every time. Then he slowly fell through the veil, until all of his body had disappeared. Harry could hear his own voice bellowing.
"SIRIUS! SIRIUS!"
But as on the night in the Department of Mysteries, his godfather never responded. The veil just fluttered, and then stood still, before Harry woke with a start in his bed, sweating and panting. Another nightmare.
As many, many times before, Harry slipped into his dressing gown and walked down in the common room. The lights were out, as always, and Harry slipped into the chair he used to sit in. It couldn't be near morning yet, for it was still dark outside. Harry looked deep into the fire, where Sirius' head once had been. What would he have given for a glimpse of it now?
"It's not your fault," he whispered to himself, repeating the mantra he had developed over many similar nights. "It's not your fault, it's not your fault..." But even if he wanted to believe himself, and everyone else kept telling him that it wasn't his fault, still some deep place inside of his chest, the guilt threatened to take over. It had been his fault. It had been his fault that his godfather and his father's best friend had died.
But Harry suddenly became aware that he wasn't alone. Someone had just said hello.
He turned around so fast that he fell of the chair, down on the floor, losing his glasses in the process.
"Sorry for frightening you, Harry, I didn't mean to. Here are you glasses."
Harry knew the voice, but could only see the dark form that gave him his glasses. As soon as he had placed them back on, he could see that she was also clad like him, dressing gown over a pair of pyjamas.
"What are you doing here, Leia?" Harry asked, sitting down in the armchair again.
"Can't sleep," said Leia. "Just like you. I know what you are doing here."
"How?" asked Harry accusingly.
"I have heard you say 'It's not my fault, Sirius,' so many times. It's not hard to figure out what you are thinking. You're not the only one who feels guilty you know. I usually also come down here every night."
"What?" stammered Harry. "Why should you feel guilty for Sirius? Have you been down here when I have been here? I haven't seen you once."
"I have not had a whole night's sleep for the last month," admitted Leia. "But it's not because of Sirius."
"Why then?" asked Harry.
"Can't you guess that?" said Leia.
"No, why shou-...oh. What happened at the orphanage," Harry stuttered, still a bit surprised that someone knew of his nightmares.
"Damien, you know, the other boy," Harry nodded, "well, he said something that changed everything. He loves book, you know, very smart and all that. When the attack started, he was sitting reading in the book where he had my predictions written down. So he just grabbed it and ran. A few days after we came here, he showed me a prediction in the book that I had made months earlier. I think you can guess what it said." Harry did.
"That the orphanage would be attacked."
"Yes. Not in those very words, but afterwards it seemed clear as daylight. If we had figured out, we could have saved them all. So many lives. So many..."
"I feel the same about Sirius," said Harry, before he realised he was talking about things he rarely talked to anyone about. But now that he started, he didn't want to stop. "If I only had known it was a trap, I would never had gone to London. He would never have died."
"When thinking back, we are all philosophers," said Leia. Harry suspected it was a quote from a book.
"I keep thinking," Leia continued, "'What if we hadn't split up, what if Marie hadn't turned first around that corner? What if I had only been smart enough to see what was going to happen?' But no. And they will never come back, never. It was my fault, I know that. And don't come with that mantra you keep repeating every night; I know you don't believe it yourself. I know how you feel, Harry."
And for the first time in his life, Harry looked at someone, and felt a connection. Leia knew how if felt to be him. She could say those words, 'I know how you feel,' and Harry could believe her, could believe her. It didn't feel like when Lupin had said the same words, or when Hermione had tried to comfort him once. He knew they had no idea what was going through his mind. But what Leia just had said, was exactly how he felt. When she had said the words, he had felt a strange kind of comfort. 'I know how you feel.' When she said it, it felt real. She didn't judge him, or say that he should stop feeling like he did. She just knew.
"I sadly see you do," Harry answered, astonished at what had happened. Leia felt like a friend now, like Ron and Hermione, just that it hadn't happened over years, it had happened in the space of a sentence.
"What...what happened that night?" Harry asked, when they had sat in silence for a while. Leia had never spoken about the attack to them; she hadn't mentioned it since the first day, when Harry had asked her
"I have never been so afraid in my whole life," she started with. "Damien says that there first were many cracks in the air of people Apparating." That sounded like the Death Eaters Harry knew.
"I wouldn't know though," Leia continued with, "I was putting Benedict to bed. Then people started screaming. I took Benedict in my arms and ran into Damien and Willow in the hall. They told me You-Know-Who was here. Then we ran. I don't know how, but we managed to avoid the Death Eaters for a while. Neither of us could defend our selves, you know how lousy I am with a wand. We found Anabella hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. Then we met another group who had managed to stay alive. Marie, Billy and Juliette were there. And then they came." The look on her face told Harry that them were the Death Eaters.
"A woman was leading the attack." Harry thought of Bellatrix Lestrange at once. Another reason to hate her.
"We ran and ran and ran, but there was no way we could out run them. Billy fell in the stairs. We heard his screams. Juliette had me pinned to the wall, she wouldn't let me go back and help him. "There is nothing you can do," she said. That was the last thing she ever said to me."
"We ran again, hearing explosions coming from other parts of the house, and screams, so many screams. Then Marie turned a corner, and a green curse hit her. It was the Avada Kedavra. Juliette ran to her body, and the same curse hit her. We bolted the other way, and straight into the arms of someone who was not a Death Eater, even if he looked as he could have been one. It was Snape, but I didn't know that then. He hid with us in one of the bedrooms. After a few minutes, Dumbledore came in. He seemed to know where we were. He made a Portkey out of a pillow, and then the two women came and joined us. The fighting was still going on in the house. We Portkeyed to an abandoned house, I think it was the Shrieking Shack. We walked in a tunnel till we were on the grounds here. You know the rest."
Leia wasn't crying, like Cho had done whenever someone mentioned Cedric. She just looked straight into the flames, her eyes clouded over with emotions. But she didn't cry.
"I am sorry for your loss," said Harry, in barely a whisper.
"And I am sorry for yours," said Leia. "You were our hero you know, at the orphanage. We all looked up to you. You were just like us in some ways, you didn't have any parents, and you had grown up without them. We all wanted to be you, especially in your fourth year, when you were in The Triwizard Tournament. I remember Juliette saying she was going to meet you once and make you fall madly in love with her."
Harry was speechless. He was someone's hero?
"Now that I think about it," said Leia, "I would gladly never have met you, if I that had helped Juliette stay alive. I would rather have stayed in the orphanage, no education, no nothing, rather than to be here, with all my new stuff and The Boy Who Lived, if that could only make her come back." Now Leia cried, but they were just silent tears, dripping down on her lap. Harry found himself also nearly crying. He could have also exchanged everything he had, his life, his broom, if it only had made his parents and Sirius return. But he knew they never would. Never ever.
"How did you end up at the orphanage in the first place?" wondered Harry. She was born at the end of the first war too, had Voldemort killed her parents too?
"That's a long story," said Leia, wiping away her tears, "but don't feel sorry for me about that. I don't know much about myself. My parents are both dead. At first the nurses didn't even know my real name."
"Why not?" asked Harry.
"My parent's never told anybody, they weren't very sociable, to put it that way. I was only a couple of months when they died. No one knew what I was called. A witch at St. Mungo's nicknamed me Leia. Apparently she had seen some sort of muggle film with a girl called Leia in it. She said to Mrs. Spot I had reminded her of the girl in the film."
"What is your real name then?" asked Harry, his curiosity taking over.
"Never mind, I don't use it."
Had Harry touched a subject she didn't want to speak about? It certainly seemed so to him. Then, he was never too happy to talk about his parents either.
Leia yawned then, and Harry saw how tired she looked. She was still very thin, and the shadows on her face made her look even thinner. Like a skeleton. Harry was reminded of his godfather. Leia had the same grey, fathomless eyes and she was just as thin as Sirius after he had been in Azkaban. She had the same black hair also.
"I am going back to bed," Leia said, getting up. "Are you staying here?"
"No, I should get some sleep," said Harry, "its Quidditch training tomorrow."
"Sweet dreams," Leia said as she disappeared up to the girls' dormitories.
"You wish," Harry thought, before he also went back to bed.
A/N: Finally, the story gets better. But don't worry, this will last for a while. I got a whole lot of horrible (and enjoyable) things Harry has to go through. Just you wait...Really sorry about any spelling mistakes, I hope there are not too many, though I am sure there is.
