(CoS) CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Let Me Fall
"Remind me," said Ron a few minutes later when they were safely in the hallway. They had all started to transition back to their normal selves. "Did I miss the part where we decided we were going to use this whole Polyjuice Potion thing to flirt our way into answers about our dads?"
"Ron," scolded Harry immediately, shaking his head. "She didn't even prompt him to tell her about her dad. And we'd already gotten the answers we needed." He turned his gaze pointedly on her at that point and added rather darkly, "You didn't have to be quite such a good actress about it, though."
"A good actress?" she repeated, laughing. "Hardly! I thought I might throw up all over him at any given moment."
Harry laughed at that, looking strangely relieved by her words. His expression softened suddenly, and he said with even more relief, "You're back."
He was referring to her appearance, she realized. "You are, too."
He reached into his robes for his glasses, putting them back on. "It was nice while it lasted," he muttered. "The 20/20 vision, I mean."
"The glasses suit you," she assured him. "A glasses-less Harry is like… I don't know… Dumbledore without his wand."
It was a lame analogy, but Harry seemed touched—perhaps a little more touched than she had intended.
When they got back to Myrtle's bathroom, they were surprised to find that Hermione was exactly where they had left her—and with no change.
"She's changed into a cat," Fred explained to them in a hushed voice on the far side of the restroom from Hermione. "At least, something like a cat." He scanned Ellie carefully and added, "How'd it go?"
Ellie hesitated. She wanted to fill him in on what Draco had said about her dad, but she preferred to do it one-on-one. Then again, Harry and Ron had already witnessed the whole thing, hadn't they?
"I'll take her to the hospital wing," said Ron, pushing past them and over toward the stall Hermione was hiding in. "C'mon, 'Mione—longer you wait, the worse it could get."
Hermione reluctantly emerged from the stall at that. They all watched with wide eyes as she and Ron slinked away.
"Draco isn't the Heir, and he doesn't know who is," Ellie told the twins once it was just them and Harry. "But he also said something… about me."
"About you?" Fred repeated, sounding confused. "To Pansy-you?"
"She's concerningly good at flirting with Malfoy," Harry explained grimly to Fred. "Better than the real Pansy, I suspect. Really loosened his lips."
Ellie tried not to cringe at the words Harry had chosen; Fred looked to be feeling about the same degree of disgust. "Forget the flirting," she said impatiently. "He said that there had been a mix-up with my dad—that his father told him they got the wrong guy."
"Right," said Fred a little too quickly, clearly not wanting to reveal anything about Sirius in front of Harry. "Well, you've heard it before, right? Come on, then—we'd better get going."
Ellie understood why Fred was so worried about her sharing the truth about Sirius. She knew it was for her own good, and that he didn't want her to get hurt if the word got out.
But she couldn't lie to Harry anymore. She just couldn't.
She came to him in the common room a few days after Christmas, seizing a rare opportunity where he wasn't with Ron and Hermione and she wasn't with Fred and George. When she asked him whether he wanted to take a walk with her, he gave her a surprisingly quick "yes."
"Look," she said as soon as they had slipped out of the portrait hole and were out of earshot of any passers-by. "There's something I've known for a few weeks now that I haven't told you, Harry, and I don't like that."
He looked vaguely amused. "I know—I let you borrow my cloak, remember?"
"Oh—right." She tried not to blush. "Look… it's really serious. Not in a, you know, make-fun-of-me-for-flirting-with-Draco way. In a real, if-you-tell-anyone-I-might-end-up-dead kind of way."
He held her gaze, green eyes filled with a mixture of concern for her and concern for what she was asking. "You once told me not to share my secrets with you if it meant you couldn't tell the twins."
"I know." She bit her lip. "If you want, you can do the same. But I can't let you tell Ron and Hermione, Harry. Not until I've figured more of this out for myself."
He considered her words for a moment, looking hesitant. It was clear that he had never kept anything from them before. When he finally did speak, his words surprised her: "You can tell me. I'll keep your secret, Ellie."
In another guy, she might have taken this as a sign that he wasn't as trustworthy a friend to Ron and Hermione as she was to the twins. In this situation, though, with this guy, she got the feeling that it was really just a sign of the strength of her own relationship with Harry.
"I found out who my father is," she explained. "His name is Sirius Black, and according to a book I found in the restricted section, he was friends with your father, too—until he betrayed him."
Harry froze in his tracks, then took several steps back from her, stiffening. "You… what?"
"I don't think it's true, though," she said quickly. "I read something else in the same book—something about Hagrid having been responsible for the last time the Chamber opened. And when I talked to Hagrid, it turned out it wasn't true, at all. I think the same thing happened with him."
Harry seemed to be struggling to keep up. "I don't understand. What did Sirius do to betray my father?"
She explained to him all she had read about Sirius Black, hoping that it would end with him coming to the same conclusions she had come to: that it had all been some sort of great misunderstanding.
He didn't, though. He looked angry.
He looked like he didn't want anything to do with her.
New Year's Eve was painful.
Harry had barely spoken to her since she told him about Sirius and Hagrid. Ron and Hermione treated her like a ticking time bomb, worried that she might do something crazy and impulsive like flirt her way into learning more secrets from Draco. And Fred and George, whom she had told about her conversation with Harry, hadn't quite forgiven her for her stupidity.
She had been stupid, hadn't she? She'd upset Harry and lost a friend in the process. She should have listened to the twins.
"Any resolutions, anyone?" Dean asked them all in the common room that evening as they gathered around the fireplace, sipping hot chocolate. His gaze turned pointedly toward Ellie as he asked, "About relationships, perhaps? Ellie?"
"Oh, sod off, Dean," snapped Harry, surprising Ellie and, in all likelihood, everyone else in the room, too.
"Actually," Ellie said, rising suddenly to her feet, "I do have something to say. It's not a resolution, though. It's… an announcement."
They all glanced up at her, looking some mixture of interested and concerned.
"The Weasleys are having an impromptu New Years Day concert," she announced. "Just one, original song. Tomorrow, in the east courtyard."
She let her gaze wander to Fred and George, who looked intrigued; she'd given them no hint that this was coming and, in fact, hadn't even been writing anything.
"What's it called?" asked Ron.
"Let Me Fall."
"This is for anyone who tires to take control of others," she said the next day as she faced a good twenty or so people in her and Fred's favourite courtyard. "Even if they think they're just protecting them."
The Weasleys had pulled an overnighter the night before, cramming all the songwriting into a matter of hours. The lyrics had poured out of Ellie easy enough, but the slow complex rhythm and composition of the instrumentals didn't come quite so easily to her, and had required the help of all three of the other Weasleys.
Still, they had done it. And as she sang the lyrics from the bottom of her heart—"Let me rise; let me fall; let me breathe—I wanna lose control, I'm not afraid to lose it all. Let me break, let me crawl—'cause I'll get back up again if you let me fall."
When they finished playing, Harry finally approached her.
"I'm sorry, Ellie." His voice was full of pain. "Can we talk? Alone?"
Her eyes trailed over to Fred, whose brown eyes seemed to be filled with the same pain as Harry's—though, in all likelihood, for entirely different reasons.
"Yeah," Ellie told Harry, looking away from Fred. "I'd like that."
Another Instant Star song, also called "Let Me Fall," if you want to check it out! Hope you enjoyed this chapter. Do you think it was a mistake for Ellie to tell Harry about Sirius? It's surely going to have some long-term effects for the Prisoner of Azkaban, isn't it? But we have a long way to go before then, and a pivotal chapter next time. I'll give you a hint: the title is "Tom Riddle's Diary." Make sure not to miss it, and don't forget to leave a review!
