Chapter 12: Strength
Charlie frowned; Ginny and Harry lay next to each other on the bed. They couldn't find a way to remove to curse.
Charlie slammed his fist on the bedside table, "We don't have much time! The second the Death Eater that did this' Stunning spell wears off they're back on their feet. That gives us about two hours to do this."
Bill was leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, thinking, "Harry and Ginny could both throw off the Imperius curse… although from what I heard Ginny only did it once…"
Ron and Hermione stared at him. "When did she ever get the chance?" Ron asked.
"When you guys were off destroying Horcruxes, before Moody died, he gave lessons to all the, uh, younger members of the Order. Ginny could throw off the Imperius curse, but she only did it once. Neither Luna, Neville, George, or I could do even that." Fred informed them with an odd mixture of pride and disappointment.
His eyes shadowed over and everybody knew that he was thinking of what had happened to Luna and Neville.
"Speaking of Neville… where is he? I mean he was at the fight… wasn't he?" Ron asked.
"Um, yeah. But you know, he was never himself after Luna… you know… his parents were one thing but when he lost his wife, too. He kind of… went a little crazy when we were fighting the Death Eaters. So we made him leave, by then we had things under control… but he was really wild. He probably would have killed himself. He's probably at St. Mungo's visiting Luna," Charlie finished the story a little sadly.
"Back to the problem at hand…" George urged.
They thought (Ron noticed how they had seemed to do a lot of this boring past time lately).
"I have an idea!" Hermione said proudly. "They could both throw off the Imperius curse… even though Ginny only did it once I'm sure she would have been able to under the urgency of the situation… so the only reason they couldn't have is if the Death Eaters weakened them somehow. So we need to give them extra strength so they can throw it off!"
"Okay… that's a good idea…" Bill started. "But we would need a lot of strength to help them out of this stupor."
"Yes, the strengthening spell is alerium. So we need to add the annexation. So the spell would be… hold on, I need to look through some of my books," Hermione hurried off to her bedroom.
"Well… I guess she's taking care of things…" Fred said, slightly uneasy. "Is this the only way to fix this?"
"They either have to break the spell themselves, the Death Eater has to stop casting it, or the Death Eater has to be killed… or stopped… I don't know, I'm not an expert," Charlie answered. "If this doesn't work, we're going to have to figure out which Death Eater did this, and kill them."
Nobody looked like they liked this idea very much. They heard footsteps rushing down the hall and Hermione came bursting into the room.
"Alo-alere-alui-altumium!" She cried without so much as a hello.
The effect was terrifying. Harry started squirming in his bed wheezing and his face was turning a bright red, as if he was suffocating, Ginny just lie there getting paler and paler. Everybody in the room started panicking, but nobody moved to help them.
Suddenly Harry gasped and opened his eyes as if he had just come up for air after nearly drowning in water. He sat there in a daze his chest heaving in fresh lungful after lungful of oxygen. He had broken through. He looked over at Ginny and his eyes turned into a wild, panicked, rolling fit. He put his hand on Ginny's arm and the Order couldn't see what he was doing but they felt energy rush through Harry into Ginny.
"Excess… alo-alere-alui-altumium," Hermione mumbled.
Harry fainted. Ginny opened her bleary eyes, the color returning slightly to her face, and she, too, fainted.