"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts." -the Counting Crows
Films About Ghosts
Chapter 11: Truth and Lies
Ariane managed to avoid Tuyet and Daphne after dinner. She had gone upstairs and fetched her black winter cloak, and though she probably looked very stupid creeping along in the shadows along the hallway with her hood up and her face hidden, the practical garment hid her distinctive hair. In fact, she was just congratulating herself on getting to the base of the clock tower without anyone noticing when she nearly ran over Draco Malfoy.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, quickly pushing her hood back. "I didn't expect to see you here," she said, when he looked at her oddly.
"Yeah," he said in a silky voice that sent a chill down her spine. "I know."
Tuyet's voice spoke inside her head. "Look, I'm telling you this because I really don't want to see you get shredded by the end of your first week. You should stay away from anything Malfoy if you want to grow old."
Ariane smiled politely despite the fact that Draco was staring her down. "I really should be going."
"Why?" he asked, leaning a hand against the wall and looking supremely unconcerned.
"Because I have somewhere to go," she told him, making to walk by and double back to the clock once he was gone. Draco blocked her.
"Where? It's eight o'clock," he said, still sounding silky and casual. "Are you meeting someone?"
"I was going for a walk." She tried to get by again and he got in her way again. This time he met her eyes, and she saw that his gray eyes were stormy. The beginnings of irritation forming in her mind, Ariane made to push him aside; he caught her arm and held it none too gently.
"Walking with Potter?" he snarled.
Ariane blinked at him. "I wasn't planning on it, but if you'd like me to—" Draco snorted in a very unlovely way. Ariane was beginning to wonder what had ever made him attractive to her. "Just let me get about my business, Draco," she told him coldly.
He laughed softly and moved so that she could walk past. "Just remember that nobody who slights Draco Malfoy doesn't regret it."
"Then I have nothing to regret." To offset the chill of her words, she rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment.
Draco walked away just as the clock in the tower struck eight. She pulled her hood up again and walked past the clock tower and around the corner outside, which led to a long covered bridge. Ariane loitered at the entrance for a few minutes and then went back inside, stubbing her toe on the edge of the dais in the twilight. Muttering darkly at her own stupidity, she lit her wand and held her hand over it to block out all but a thin scrap of light.
Ariane grumbled a few swearwords to herself as she found the staircase to the inner parts of the gigantic clock and climbed them. It was a bit like climbing into a living creature: the clock's gears ticked, the hands creaked as they moved to 8:05, and various cogs and rods groaned and clicked like a pulse. She couldn't hear anything but the clock and her own nervous heartbeat, and she had to commend Harry for his choice of meeting places. There was no way that they could be overheard.
"Ariane?"
She jumped a foot, but it was only Harry, looking odd and shadowy in the semi-darkness. "Hi," she said once she had a hold on her self once more, seating herself on a cog that didn't appear to be moving.
Harry nodded and sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, making sure that he was close enough so that they could talk without shouting. "So," he began after an awkward pause. "How did you know the horse's name?"
"Because it's my memory," Ariane confessed. "I was riding the horse, and one of the two men was my brother."
"But how did it get inside my head?" Harry asked, looking troubled.
She bit her lip, trying to figure out how to tell him what she had to while avoiding the whole necromancy business. "When I arrived at Hogwarts, I was having some memory problems. Sometimes I couldn't remember who I was, or where I was, or even—" she laughed a bit to show him how silly it was "—what year it was. Dumbledore thought that if someone read my mind, I would remember everything that I'd forgotten."
"Like Legilimency?" Harry asked.
Ariane was impressed that he'd thought of that so quickly. "Yes. Professor Snape read my mind and it helped things to start coming back, but ever since I've been seeing people's memories when I touch them, sometimes." Harry gave her a quizzical look, so she hurried on. "One of the first was one of Draco Malfoy's, and another was one of yours."
"What did you see?" he asked suspiciously. "When you saw my memory?"
"Something to do with a glass ball and a boy with a broken nose," she replied. "It didn't make sense to me."
Harry went a little paler in the dim light. "Go on." He wasn't laughing or trying to get away yet, so Ariane guessed that he believed her so far.
"Anyway, it seems that it's started happening in reverse—my memories are leaking into other people's heads. I don't know how I'm supposed to control it—I don't even know if it can be controlled." Ariane shrugged and pulled off her cloak. It was warm in the clock tower.
The silence stretched for a moment, then Harry spoke. "Last year I had lessons where I was supposed to learn to defend myself from Legilimency. I wasn't too good, because Snape cracked open my thoughts about a hundred times. My friend Ron thought that it was starting to make my mind—I don't know how to put it."
"It was making you more open-minded?" Ariane asked with a smile.
"Exactly. And you've gotten your head peered inside once. And now we're picking up each other's thoughts."
"Looks like it."
Harry frowned. "But you must be more sensitive than I am, because I've never seen another person's memories besides yours."
Ariane thought about it, the clock ticking around her. "I suppose—well, this is a bit stupid really, but I think that since you were fighting it off when it happened to you, maybe it took longer for your mind to open." She shrugged as Harry shook his head. "It's just a theory."
"No, it's brilliant," he said. "That must be it." They sat with their own private thoughts for a few more minutes, and then Harry asked something completely out of the blue: "Was the man who owned the flying horse called Godric Gryffindor?"
He could read the answer on her stricken face.
"How could that be?" he asked. When she didn't answer, he added "and the other man was called Salazar—he couldn't be Salazar Slytherin?"
Ariane nodded, her mouth very dry.
"But how is that possible? Unless there's two people alive now called Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin...but...are they the actual Gryffindor and Slytherin?" Though his words weren't clear, Ariane understood what he was asking.
"They are," she whispered. She couldn't lie to him, not when he was staring her down like that.
The silence wasn't thoughtful now—it was shocked. It didn't last long though. Ariane broke it, trying to avoid Harry's gaze. "Look," she began, "This seems impossible and all that, but I think I actually sort of died about a thousand years ago, but Salazar brought me back to life again." She reached into her pockets and withdrew Madam Pince's playing cards. Rifling through them, she pulled out the queen of spades and tossed it to him. "That's not a relative, that's me."
Harry studied it, peering closely from Ariane to the card and back again. "Why? Not to be rude, but why would he?"
"He was my brother." Harry swore and Ariane went pink, anger stirring within her. "Look, I don't know what people today think about him, but he's not a monster, all right? He was a good person and he didn't have anything against Muggles until after I died, and even then he wasn't crusading for their extermination! Stop looking at me like that!" For Harry was looking at her as though he'd just realized something. "What?"
"When we first met, in that Potions class, you didn't know who I was," he said quietly, "even though every witch and wizard alive today knows my name."
Ariane tried to remember this and couldn't. She only came up with a vaguely unpleasant first impression of Harry. "Why are you so famous?"
He looked down at his ragged trainers, the wand light reflecting off his round glasses and hiding his eyes. "When I was a baby, Voldemort killed my parents and then tried to kill me, and the curse rebounded and nearly killed him."
"I'm sorry," Ariane told him.
"Why?" he asked defensively. "Everybody was really happy when Voldemort went away, and they never really stopped to feel sad about my mum or dad. They ended up being a means to an end."
"I'm sorry because I know what it's like to not know your parents, and if you don't want any pity then I take it back," she snapped. Her memory flared unexpectedly, and for a moment her ears were filled with the screams of a woman being burnt to death. Harry's face changed, shifting from irritation to horror and then to guilt, and Ariane suddenly felt too responsible for her thoughts. "Sorry," she muttered again. "If you saw."
"I did, and I guess now I should say that I'm sorry."
"I suppose that you should."
"Sorry, then."
"Apology accepted."
Harry nodded, still a bit shaken. "How did you end up at Hogwarts?" he asked slowly. "I mean, why now? If Slytherin brought you back to life, shouldn't you have come back to life then?"
"I don't know what happened. Maybe he made a mistake," she offered, still shocked by how quickly her story had come out. Ariane had thought that if it ever did slip out, it would be if a close friend noticed something odd about her behavior or found some incriminating document. She had never thought that the first person her own age to know would be a boy that she knew only at a distance. "He wasn't perfect."
"So you're Salazar Slytherin's little sister. And you're supposed to be dead."
Ariane pulled her collar to one side so that he could see the thick white scar just beneath her collarbone. "Shot with an arrow. Punctured my lung, or at least that's what the Healer seemed to think. If you still don't think I'm telling the truth, ask me anything." Harry raised his eyebrows at her. "Look, if you really don't believe me you could always sample my thoughts."
He shuddered. "No thanks, I'm having enough trouble with my own." Harry thought for a moment. "What does Godric Gryffindor's sword look like?"
"Silver, with rubies. It was a wedding present, and he never used it except to cut the bread."
Harry smiled a bit to himself, and Ariane was at a loss why this tidbit of information would strike him as funny until a thought invaded her head.
The basilisk, both eyes gouged out and dripping, snapped at her, its long teeth closing on her arm as she shoved a silver sword up through its brains. A fang pierced her arm just as the basilisk began to thrash in its death throes, and she felt cold as the poison began to work its way through her blood.
The drippy stone chamber looked oddly familiar as it spun around her.
Ariane opened her eyes. Had the basilisk been in her tomb?
BONG!
The clock struck half-past, deafening Ariane, who had unwittingly seated herself with her back against the bell. She clapped her hands to her ears and screwed up her eyes to try and disperse the pain in her head to the rest of her body. The vibrations of the bell knocked her to the ground, and through her fringe Ariane saw that the noise had knocked a few other creatures senseless as well. Several dazed sparrows and a fat beetle were lying scattered nearby. The sparrows recovered quickly and flew off peeping indignantly, but the beetle didn't get a chance. Harry pounced on it, then recoiled. Though Ariane's ears were still ringing too loudly for her to hear his gasp and swearing, she could read his lips and body language well enough to tell that it had bitten him.
The beetle made its escape, flying off into the gears of the clock until it had disappeared. Harry whipped out his wand and silently cried 'Accio!' but apparently the charm wasn't going to work on the beetle. Ariane tried to see where it had gone, but turning her head made the noise in her ears get louder.
Ariane stuck her little finger in her ear and wiggled it around, trying to ignore the annoying whistling that was penetrating her abused eardrums. "What was that about?" Her voice sounded funny, as though she were talking into a glass.
"Rita Skeeter," Harry said in disgust. "It seems that her writing ban has expired."
"Who?" Ariane asked.
"Rita Skeeter—she's a reporter for the Daily Prophet. That's our newspaper," Harry elaborated when Ariane looked blank. When she raised her eyebrows, still not understanding, he continued. "A newspaper is a sort of thing that they send to everyone who pays for it, to keep them updated on what's going on now."
"Where do they get all the paper from?" Ariane asked. She'd only seen paper once or twice in her whole life. "And how do they make enough copies for everyone? They must write very quickly."
It was Harry's turn to look quizzical. "Didn't you lot have printing presses when you were alive?"
"No—what are those?"
"Look, I don't have time to explain right now. We have to find that beetle." And he began to climb into the workings of the clock, which were ticking and lurching unsafely.
"Harry, stop, you'll get caught and ground to a pulp." Ariane clambered after him, trying to keep her hair and skirt out of the gears. "Why is a beetle so important?"
"It's not a beetle, it's a woman named Rita Skeeter and if we don't catch her she'll go and put a big article in the Daily Prophet about how you're a medieval witch and everybody will know about your brain-reading thing." Harry's voice was muffled by the clicks and bangs of the gears as the quarter hour approached. "You really don't want that."
"That's for sure," Ariane said, taking a different direction from him so that they would cover more area. She scanned the wheels and gears for the beetle, and then crouched down to peer at the rough wooden floor, lighting her wand so that her search would be easier. There was no sign of the beetle, and judging by the silence from Harry he hadn't had any luck either. Kneeling so that she could keep her head well out of reach of the turning gears, Ariane crawled towards the face of the clock.
Then she heard footsteps.
Holding her breath, Ariane drew her knees up under her and breathed "Nox."
As her light went out, the wooden platform shook with the footsteps of someone much heavier than she was.
Two someones.
A pair of very big, flat feet shuffled by, closely followed by a pair of bigger feet. Two people held a short conversation that seemed to consist mainly of grunt-like noises, and then the feet began to shuffle back to the staircase, agonizingly slowly. Ariane's knees ached from her cramped position and one of her feet was tingling painfully. As the boat-sized shoes began their loud descent of the stairs, Ariane exhaled and stood up to relieve her joints.
Later she would wonder where her wits had gone begging.
The clock ticked, the gears turned, and a large amount of hair at the top of Ariane's head snagged in the teeth of the wheels. She gasped in pain, and then clapped her hands over her mouth. Tick. The loud steps on the stairs had halted—they had probably heard her. Tick. As her hair pulled tighter, Ariane balanced on the balls of her feet, still a bit hunched over, so that she wouldn't be hanging by the hairs on the tender top of her head. Tick. If something didn't happen very soon, however, she was about to be dangled by the top of her head or be left with a large bald spot. Tears of pain were streaming down her cheeks. Tick.
Think of a spell, she urged herself. A spell to get out of places like this. Her brain drew a blank. Tick. Harry abruptly appeared around the large wheel in front of her, apparently about to berate her for making noise. When he saw that she was biting down on her hands to stop herself from screaming, his eyes rounded. "Do something!" she mouthed, a small squeak emerging from her mouth.
"Abscido!" Harry whispered, and Ariane sat down hard on the floor, not caring if anyone heard as she massaged the top of her head. The hairs that had been caught in the wheel were now only four or five inches long, and the scalp beneath them was tender and felt a bit bloody.
"What did you—" she began to ask, meaning to find out the spell, as it had seemed very useful. Harry clapped a hand over her mouth as the floor shook once more with the footsteps of the two gorilla-sized humans. He didn't let go right away, apparently not trusting her to keep her mouth shut. Their minds took advantage of this close contact to share memories.
"They might've run straight through to the hall," said a rough voice. Ariane was hiding under a desk, her heart beating so fast that it was painful.
"Check under the desks," said another.
Abruptly, Ariane realized that she was not the one experiencing the memory. It was Harry's. She'd never been able to tell them apart before, it had always been the context that had tipped her off.
She—Harry saw the knees of the dark robed man—a Death Eater—bend. She—he poked his wand out and yelled "STUPEFY!"
The scene switched.
"I will not even consider it!" Salazar shouted, his long black hair tangled and half in his eyes. He looked quite frightening. "What makes you think that I would give up my only flesh and blood to the son of a tanner?"
"She loves him, you dumb bastard!" Godric roared back. "I can see it and he's not even in my house!"
"She does not!" Salazar replied. "I can assure you that the only person she loves is me, just as the only one I love is her."
The bigger man looked irritated by this statement. Ariane watched from the crack in the door as Godric ran a hand over his neat beard in frustration. She could tell that he was about to ram Salazar's stubborn head into a wall. "Why would you make the one person you love an old maid?" he demanded. "Why would you chain her to you?"
"I'm not imprisoning her, if that's what you're insinuating," Salazar snapped. "She's free to do whatever she likes—"
"But not to marry someone she loves?"
"SHE DOES NOT LOVE HIM!"
"Salazar, you pig-headed fool, she came to me so that I would ask you because she was too afraid to do it herself. How is it possible, if you love each other so much, that she is frightened of you?"
That shot some of the wind from Salazar's sails. "Ariane was afraid of me?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, and the fact that she would rather approach me than you speaks volumes, as she has mistrusted me since the day we met."
Her brother went red with rage. "You're lying! Laramy the tanner's son does not love my sister and she does not love him, and if you insist on pressing this matter any further, my friend, then you will leave my house and never set foot in it again."
Godric would not stop pressing, Ariane knew it before he even spoke. "If you think that she'll stop loving you after you get married, you're wrong. You'll just have to get used to sharing her love with Laramy."
"I'd prefer to find a cold place in hell first." Salazar's tone was flat and dangerous, and his wand was out. Instinctively Ariane backed away from the door in case it blasted off its hinges. As she retreated down the hall, she heard him add, "With luck, I won't have to take the trouble."
Harry shook her shoulders lightly. "Hey, snap out of it."
"Thanks," she said. "For that and the whole hair thing."
"Yeah, that looked a bit painful."
Ariane punched his shoulder lightly. "Very dry," she told him sarcastically. "If you don't mind, I've had quite enough adventures for tonight." She crawled into the open platform and stood up, stretching out her back and rubbing her crown gently. Bending to collect her cloak, she noticed something. Quickly she searched her pockets, swore, and began hunting around on the ground.
"What is it?" Harry asked, collecting his own cloak (which was silvery and looked as though it was woven of Demiguise hair).
"I don't believe it—I've lost the playing cards that Madam Pince loaned me."
Harry stood very still. "You mean the ones with all the Founders and you on them?"
"Yes—she's going to kill me, Harry, they were only a loan!"
"I know, you said that, but I wonder..." he trailed off, scanned the platform, and muttered, "Rita! She must have taken them."
Ariane was beginning to think that Rita Skeeter was an imaginary friend of Harry's that he blamed for things going wrong. "Look, it's dark and we're both tired. Let's just sleep on this and talk again sometime tomorrow—have you got Care of Magical Creatures on Thursday afternoons?" Harry nodded, looking as though he didn't think they ought to just accept the missing cards. "Fine, we'll talk then, once I've fixed my hair and gotten rid of this pounding headache."
"I don't know if that's a good idea...Rita can write some nasty things."
"She can't bother me," Ariane said, "at least not more than she has already, what with me getting stuck in clocks and things trying to find her. And how does she go about writing for newspapers if she's an insect?" She was beginning to babble with fatigue.
"She's not really a beetle, she's an Animagus," Harry explained patiently.
"I'll put that on my list of things to find out about," Ariane promised tartly, pulling her cloak on and starting off down the stairs. "Right after who killed me and what happened to all my family and friends. Good night."
Author's Note: Just a few hellos to reviewers.
Mockingbird-Love your fic, love your reviews, now I'm taking a leaf out of your book and giving greetings to those who review XD
Purplereader- Thanks for your support and staunch defense, lol.'
Rebecca- Sorry to have triggered your gag reflex, but thanks for the notes on my writing style.
Also, big hugs to katy, Timra, and Nestle.
Films About Ghosts
Chapter 11: Truth and Lies
Ariane managed to avoid Tuyet and Daphne after dinner. She had gone upstairs and fetched her black winter cloak, and though she probably looked very stupid creeping along in the shadows along the hallway with her hood up and her face hidden, the practical garment hid her distinctive hair. In fact, she was just congratulating herself on getting to the base of the clock tower without anyone noticing when she nearly ran over Draco Malfoy.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, quickly pushing her hood back. "I didn't expect to see you here," she said, when he looked at her oddly.
"Yeah," he said in a silky voice that sent a chill down her spine. "I know."
Tuyet's voice spoke inside her head. "Look, I'm telling you this because I really don't want to see you get shredded by the end of your first week. You should stay away from anything Malfoy if you want to grow old."
Ariane smiled politely despite the fact that Draco was staring her down. "I really should be going."
"Why?" he asked, leaning a hand against the wall and looking supremely unconcerned.
"Because I have somewhere to go," she told him, making to walk by and double back to the clock once he was gone. Draco blocked her.
"Where? It's eight o'clock," he said, still sounding silky and casual. "Are you meeting someone?"
"I was going for a walk." She tried to get by again and he got in her way again. This time he met her eyes, and she saw that his gray eyes were stormy. The beginnings of irritation forming in her mind, Ariane made to push him aside; he caught her arm and held it none too gently.
"Walking with Potter?" he snarled.
Ariane blinked at him. "I wasn't planning on it, but if you'd like me to—" Draco snorted in a very unlovely way. Ariane was beginning to wonder what had ever made him attractive to her. "Just let me get about my business, Draco," she told him coldly.
He laughed softly and moved so that she could walk past. "Just remember that nobody who slights Draco Malfoy doesn't regret it."
"Then I have nothing to regret." To offset the chill of her words, she rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment.
Draco walked away just as the clock in the tower struck eight. She pulled her hood up again and walked past the clock tower and around the corner outside, which led to a long covered bridge. Ariane loitered at the entrance for a few minutes and then went back inside, stubbing her toe on the edge of the dais in the twilight. Muttering darkly at her own stupidity, she lit her wand and held her hand over it to block out all but a thin scrap of light.
Ariane grumbled a few swearwords to herself as she found the staircase to the inner parts of the gigantic clock and climbed them. It was a bit like climbing into a living creature: the clock's gears ticked, the hands creaked as they moved to 8:05, and various cogs and rods groaned and clicked like a pulse. She couldn't hear anything but the clock and her own nervous heartbeat, and she had to commend Harry for his choice of meeting places. There was no way that they could be overheard.
"Ariane?"
She jumped a foot, but it was only Harry, looking odd and shadowy in the semi-darkness. "Hi," she said once she had a hold on her self once more, seating herself on a cog that didn't appear to be moving.
Harry nodded and sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, making sure that he was close enough so that they could talk without shouting. "So," he began after an awkward pause. "How did you know the horse's name?"
"Because it's my memory," Ariane confessed. "I was riding the horse, and one of the two men was my brother."
"But how did it get inside my head?" Harry asked, looking troubled.
She bit her lip, trying to figure out how to tell him what she had to while avoiding the whole necromancy business. "When I arrived at Hogwarts, I was having some memory problems. Sometimes I couldn't remember who I was, or where I was, or even—" she laughed a bit to show him how silly it was "—what year it was. Dumbledore thought that if someone read my mind, I would remember everything that I'd forgotten."
"Like Legilimency?" Harry asked.
Ariane was impressed that he'd thought of that so quickly. "Yes. Professor Snape read my mind and it helped things to start coming back, but ever since I've been seeing people's memories when I touch them, sometimes." Harry gave her a quizzical look, so she hurried on. "One of the first was one of Draco Malfoy's, and another was one of yours."
"What did you see?" he asked suspiciously. "When you saw my memory?"
"Something to do with a glass ball and a boy with a broken nose," she replied. "It didn't make sense to me."
Harry went a little paler in the dim light. "Go on." He wasn't laughing or trying to get away yet, so Ariane guessed that he believed her so far.
"Anyway, it seems that it's started happening in reverse—my memories are leaking into other people's heads. I don't know how I'm supposed to control it—I don't even know if it can be controlled." Ariane shrugged and pulled off her cloak. It was warm in the clock tower.
The silence stretched for a moment, then Harry spoke. "Last year I had lessons where I was supposed to learn to defend myself from Legilimency. I wasn't too good, because Snape cracked open my thoughts about a hundred times. My friend Ron thought that it was starting to make my mind—I don't know how to put it."
"It was making you more open-minded?" Ariane asked with a smile.
"Exactly. And you've gotten your head peered inside once. And now we're picking up each other's thoughts."
"Looks like it."
Harry frowned. "But you must be more sensitive than I am, because I've never seen another person's memories besides yours."
Ariane thought about it, the clock ticking around her. "I suppose—well, this is a bit stupid really, but I think that since you were fighting it off when it happened to you, maybe it took longer for your mind to open." She shrugged as Harry shook his head. "It's just a theory."
"No, it's brilliant," he said. "That must be it." They sat with their own private thoughts for a few more minutes, and then Harry asked something completely out of the blue: "Was the man who owned the flying horse called Godric Gryffindor?"
He could read the answer on her stricken face.
"How could that be?" he asked. When she didn't answer, he added "and the other man was called Salazar—he couldn't be Salazar Slytherin?"
Ariane nodded, her mouth very dry.
"But how is that possible? Unless there's two people alive now called Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin...but...are they the actual Gryffindor and Slytherin?" Though his words weren't clear, Ariane understood what he was asking.
"They are," she whispered. She couldn't lie to him, not when he was staring her down like that.
The silence wasn't thoughtful now—it was shocked. It didn't last long though. Ariane broke it, trying to avoid Harry's gaze. "Look," she began, "This seems impossible and all that, but I think I actually sort of died about a thousand years ago, but Salazar brought me back to life again." She reached into her pockets and withdrew Madam Pince's playing cards. Rifling through them, she pulled out the queen of spades and tossed it to him. "That's not a relative, that's me."
Harry studied it, peering closely from Ariane to the card and back again. "Why? Not to be rude, but why would he?"
"He was my brother." Harry swore and Ariane went pink, anger stirring within her. "Look, I don't know what people today think about him, but he's not a monster, all right? He was a good person and he didn't have anything against Muggles until after I died, and even then he wasn't crusading for their extermination! Stop looking at me like that!" For Harry was looking at her as though he'd just realized something. "What?"
"When we first met, in that Potions class, you didn't know who I was," he said quietly, "even though every witch and wizard alive today knows my name."
Ariane tried to remember this and couldn't. She only came up with a vaguely unpleasant first impression of Harry. "Why are you so famous?"
He looked down at his ragged trainers, the wand light reflecting off his round glasses and hiding his eyes. "When I was a baby, Voldemort killed my parents and then tried to kill me, and the curse rebounded and nearly killed him."
"I'm sorry," Ariane told him.
"Why?" he asked defensively. "Everybody was really happy when Voldemort went away, and they never really stopped to feel sad about my mum or dad. They ended up being a means to an end."
"I'm sorry because I know what it's like to not know your parents, and if you don't want any pity then I take it back," she snapped. Her memory flared unexpectedly, and for a moment her ears were filled with the screams of a woman being burnt to death. Harry's face changed, shifting from irritation to horror and then to guilt, and Ariane suddenly felt too responsible for her thoughts. "Sorry," she muttered again. "If you saw."
"I did, and I guess now I should say that I'm sorry."
"I suppose that you should."
"Sorry, then."
"Apology accepted."
Harry nodded, still a bit shaken. "How did you end up at Hogwarts?" he asked slowly. "I mean, why now? If Slytherin brought you back to life, shouldn't you have come back to life then?"
"I don't know what happened. Maybe he made a mistake," she offered, still shocked by how quickly her story had come out. Ariane had thought that if it ever did slip out, it would be if a close friend noticed something odd about her behavior or found some incriminating document. She had never thought that the first person her own age to know would be a boy that she knew only at a distance. "He wasn't perfect."
"So you're Salazar Slytherin's little sister. And you're supposed to be dead."
Ariane pulled her collar to one side so that he could see the thick white scar just beneath her collarbone. "Shot with an arrow. Punctured my lung, or at least that's what the Healer seemed to think. If you still don't think I'm telling the truth, ask me anything." Harry raised his eyebrows at her. "Look, if you really don't believe me you could always sample my thoughts."
He shuddered. "No thanks, I'm having enough trouble with my own." Harry thought for a moment. "What does Godric Gryffindor's sword look like?"
"Silver, with rubies. It was a wedding present, and he never used it except to cut the bread."
Harry smiled a bit to himself, and Ariane was at a loss why this tidbit of information would strike him as funny until a thought invaded her head.
The basilisk, both eyes gouged out and dripping, snapped at her, its long teeth closing on her arm as she shoved a silver sword up through its brains. A fang pierced her arm just as the basilisk began to thrash in its death throes, and she felt cold as the poison began to work its way through her blood.
The drippy stone chamber looked oddly familiar as it spun around her.
Ariane opened her eyes. Had the basilisk been in her tomb?
BONG!
The clock struck half-past, deafening Ariane, who had unwittingly seated herself with her back against the bell. She clapped her hands to her ears and screwed up her eyes to try and disperse the pain in her head to the rest of her body. The vibrations of the bell knocked her to the ground, and through her fringe Ariane saw that the noise had knocked a few other creatures senseless as well. Several dazed sparrows and a fat beetle were lying scattered nearby. The sparrows recovered quickly and flew off peeping indignantly, but the beetle didn't get a chance. Harry pounced on it, then recoiled. Though Ariane's ears were still ringing too loudly for her to hear his gasp and swearing, she could read his lips and body language well enough to tell that it had bitten him.
The beetle made its escape, flying off into the gears of the clock until it had disappeared. Harry whipped out his wand and silently cried 'Accio!' but apparently the charm wasn't going to work on the beetle. Ariane tried to see where it had gone, but turning her head made the noise in her ears get louder.
Ariane stuck her little finger in her ear and wiggled it around, trying to ignore the annoying whistling that was penetrating her abused eardrums. "What was that about?" Her voice sounded funny, as though she were talking into a glass.
"Rita Skeeter," Harry said in disgust. "It seems that her writing ban has expired."
"Who?" Ariane asked.
"Rita Skeeter—she's a reporter for the Daily Prophet. That's our newspaper," Harry elaborated when Ariane looked blank. When she raised her eyebrows, still not understanding, he continued. "A newspaper is a sort of thing that they send to everyone who pays for it, to keep them updated on what's going on now."
"Where do they get all the paper from?" Ariane asked. She'd only seen paper once or twice in her whole life. "And how do they make enough copies for everyone? They must write very quickly."
It was Harry's turn to look quizzical. "Didn't you lot have printing presses when you were alive?"
"No—what are those?"
"Look, I don't have time to explain right now. We have to find that beetle." And he began to climb into the workings of the clock, which were ticking and lurching unsafely.
"Harry, stop, you'll get caught and ground to a pulp." Ariane clambered after him, trying to keep her hair and skirt out of the gears. "Why is a beetle so important?"
"It's not a beetle, it's a woman named Rita Skeeter and if we don't catch her she'll go and put a big article in the Daily Prophet about how you're a medieval witch and everybody will know about your brain-reading thing." Harry's voice was muffled by the clicks and bangs of the gears as the quarter hour approached. "You really don't want that."
"That's for sure," Ariane said, taking a different direction from him so that they would cover more area. She scanned the wheels and gears for the beetle, and then crouched down to peer at the rough wooden floor, lighting her wand so that her search would be easier. There was no sign of the beetle, and judging by the silence from Harry he hadn't had any luck either. Kneeling so that she could keep her head well out of reach of the turning gears, Ariane crawled towards the face of the clock.
Then she heard footsteps.
Holding her breath, Ariane drew her knees up under her and breathed "Nox."
As her light went out, the wooden platform shook with the footsteps of someone much heavier than she was.
Two someones.
A pair of very big, flat feet shuffled by, closely followed by a pair of bigger feet. Two people held a short conversation that seemed to consist mainly of grunt-like noises, and then the feet began to shuffle back to the staircase, agonizingly slowly. Ariane's knees ached from her cramped position and one of her feet was tingling painfully. As the boat-sized shoes began their loud descent of the stairs, Ariane exhaled and stood up to relieve her joints.
Later she would wonder where her wits had gone begging.
The clock ticked, the gears turned, and a large amount of hair at the top of Ariane's head snagged in the teeth of the wheels. She gasped in pain, and then clapped her hands over her mouth. Tick. The loud steps on the stairs had halted—they had probably heard her. Tick. As her hair pulled tighter, Ariane balanced on the balls of her feet, still a bit hunched over, so that she wouldn't be hanging by the hairs on the tender top of her head. Tick. If something didn't happen very soon, however, she was about to be dangled by the top of her head or be left with a large bald spot. Tears of pain were streaming down her cheeks. Tick.
Think of a spell, she urged herself. A spell to get out of places like this. Her brain drew a blank. Tick. Harry abruptly appeared around the large wheel in front of her, apparently about to berate her for making noise. When he saw that she was biting down on her hands to stop herself from screaming, his eyes rounded. "Do something!" she mouthed, a small squeak emerging from her mouth.
"Abscido!" Harry whispered, and Ariane sat down hard on the floor, not caring if anyone heard as she massaged the top of her head. The hairs that had been caught in the wheel were now only four or five inches long, and the scalp beneath them was tender and felt a bit bloody.
"What did you—" she began to ask, meaning to find out the spell, as it had seemed very useful. Harry clapped a hand over her mouth as the floor shook once more with the footsteps of the two gorilla-sized humans. He didn't let go right away, apparently not trusting her to keep her mouth shut. Their minds took advantage of this close contact to share memories.
"They might've run straight through to the hall," said a rough voice. Ariane was hiding under a desk, her heart beating so fast that it was painful.
"Check under the desks," said another.
Abruptly, Ariane realized that she was not the one experiencing the memory. It was Harry's. She'd never been able to tell them apart before, it had always been the context that had tipped her off.
She—Harry saw the knees of the dark robed man—a Death Eater—bend. She—he poked his wand out and yelled "STUPEFY!"
The scene switched.
"I will not even consider it!" Salazar shouted, his long black hair tangled and half in his eyes. He looked quite frightening. "What makes you think that I would give up my only flesh and blood to the son of a tanner?"
"She loves him, you dumb bastard!" Godric roared back. "I can see it and he's not even in my house!"
"She does not!" Salazar replied. "I can assure you that the only person she loves is me, just as the only one I love is her."
The bigger man looked irritated by this statement. Ariane watched from the crack in the door as Godric ran a hand over his neat beard in frustration. She could tell that he was about to ram Salazar's stubborn head into a wall. "Why would you make the one person you love an old maid?" he demanded. "Why would you chain her to you?"
"I'm not imprisoning her, if that's what you're insinuating," Salazar snapped. "She's free to do whatever she likes—"
"But not to marry someone she loves?"
"SHE DOES NOT LOVE HIM!"
"Salazar, you pig-headed fool, she came to me so that I would ask you because she was too afraid to do it herself. How is it possible, if you love each other so much, that she is frightened of you?"
That shot some of the wind from Salazar's sails. "Ariane was afraid of me?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, and the fact that she would rather approach me than you speaks volumes, as she has mistrusted me since the day we met."
Her brother went red with rage. "You're lying! Laramy the tanner's son does not love my sister and she does not love him, and if you insist on pressing this matter any further, my friend, then you will leave my house and never set foot in it again."
Godric would not stop pressing, Ariane knew it before he even spoke. "If you think that she'll stop loving you after you get married, you're wrong. You'll just have to get used to sharing her love with Laramy."
"I'd prefer to find a cold place in hell first." Salazar's tone was flat and dangerous, and his wand was out. Instinctively Ariane backed away from the door in case it blasted off its hinges. As she retreated down the hall, she heard him add, "With luck, I won't have to take the trouble."
Harry shook her shoulders lightly. "Hey, snap out of it."
"Thanks," she said. "For that and the whole hair thing."
"Yeah, that looked a bit painful."
Ariane punched his shoulder lightly. "Very dry," she told him sarcastically. "If you don't mind, I've had quite enough adventures for tonight." She crawled into the open platform and stood up, stretching out her back and rubbing her crown gently. Bending to collect her cloak, she noticed something. Quickly she searched her pockets, swore, and began hunting around on the ground.
"What is it?" Harry asked, collecting his own cloak (which was silvery and looked as though it was woven of Demiguise hair).
"I don't believe it—I've lost the playing cards that Madam Pince loaned me."
Harry stood very still. "You mean the ones with all the Founders and you on them?"
"Yes—she's going to kill me, Harry, they were only a loan!"
"I know, you said that, but I wonder..." he trailed off, scanned the platform, and muttered, "Rita! She must have taken them."
Ariane was beginning to think that Rita Skeeter was an imaginary friend of Harry's that he blamed for things going wrong. "Look, it's dark and we're both tired. Let's just sleep on this and talk again sometime tomorrow—have you got Care of Magical Creatures on Thursday afternoons?" Harry nodded, looking as though he didn't think they ought to just accept the missing cards. "Fine, we'll talk then, once I've fixed my hair and gotten rid of this pounding headache."
"I don't know if that's a good idea...Rita can write some nasty things."
"She can't bother me," Ariane said, "at least not more than she has already, what with me getting stuck in clocks and things trying to find her. And how does she go about writing for newspapers if she's an insect?" She was beginning to babble with fatigue.
"She's not really a beetle, she's an Animagus," Harry explained patiently.
"I'll put that on my list of things to find out about," Ariane promised tartly, pulling her cloak on and starting off down the stairs. "Right after who killed me and what happened to all my family and friends. Good night."
Author's Note: Just a few hellos to reviewers.
Mockingbird-Love your fic, love your reviews, now I'm taking a leaf out of your book and giving greetings to those who review XD
Purplereader- Thanks for your support and staunch defense, lol.'
Rebecca- Sorry to have triggered your gag reflex, but thanks for the notes on my writing style.
Also, big hugs to katy, Timra, and Nestle.