Finally got a new chapter completed. Enjoy :)
67. Sabotage
Her feeling of pure happiness didn't last long, as the very next day, Luna was dragged off the Hogwarts Express by a group of Death Eaters. "They're going to kill her," Callie declared, panicking. "Bloody hell, they're going to kill her."
"No, they're not," Astoria argued. "I told you, they don't want to spill any pure blood. Worst case scenario, they'll bring her to Azkaban."
Callie was positive this was her fault. It was too much of a coincidence that Luna had been taken the very day after her interrogation of Snape. But the more logical side of her said, No, he would've had you locked up in Azkaban if he knew what you'd done. On top of that, Neville and Ginny were sure that the kidnapping had nothing to do with anything that was going on inside Hogwarts, but with Mr. Lovegood and his pro-Harry articles in the Quibbler.
In any event, the whole thing had left everybody extremely on edge. Callie had been planning on returning to her own home and spending the Christmas break alone, but she felt that Neville was liable to end up standing guard outside her house until it was time to go back to school. So despite the feeling of disconnect that remained between them, she'd agreed to stay with him at his gran's.
"Where's Bela?" he asked when they got off the train.
Callie froze; she hadn't thought about how she would explain the bat's absence. After a moment of struggling to come up with an excuse, she decided to simply be honest. "He's dead," she replied despondently.
Neville came to a stop and gave her a heartbroken look. "Bloody hell," he exclaimed. "I'm sorry." After a pause, he asked, "What happened?"
With a sigh, she explained, "I came back to the dormitory one day and... well..."
They were both quiet until they came out from the wall between platforms nine and ten. And then Neville asked, "Do you think it was one of the Carrows that did it?"
Callie pondered the idea and replied, "I thought it was one of my roommates. They'd have had plenty of opportunity."
Neville got a pensive look on his face and said, "It's happened before. A third year in Gryffindor made the mistake of questioning Alecto in Muggle Studies, and the next day she found her cat with its throat cut."
"Christ, really?" Shaking her head to herself, she explained, "Bela looked like he'd been hit with the Killing Curse. No blood or anything." Now that she thought about it, maybe it was one of the Carrows. It seemed unlikely that any of her roommates would've been capable of performing such advanced Dark Magic.
When they got to his house, she remarked, "I'm surprised they let us go home this year. Has anyone considered the possibility that we could all just run now that we're out?"
"We talked about it," Neville replied. "But nobody was in favor."
"Why not?"
"Because it felt wrong, taking off and leaving the rest of the school in the hands of Snape and the Carrows. Especially the underclassmen. We've talked to some first-years, and they're terrified."
She thought about the eleven-year-old kids who had probably been excited to come to Hogwarts for the first time, but ended up in what felt more like a prison than an actual school. And they were so helpless, having next to no knowledge of magic, and no doubt being too intimidated to even think about standing up to the Carrows. She suddenly felt very guilty for having suggested not going back. "What must you think of me?" she asked, her voice heavy with shame.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you all are so damn noble, and my first thought was getting off the train and fleeing." She turned her back on him and stood looking out the window with her arms crossed. "You're a Gryffindor. You value courage and honor and I don't have either."
He gave it a moment of thought and said, "So what, you think I look down on you or something because you're afraid?"
"Well if you don't, then you should. All I ever talked about was wanting to join in the fight against You Know Who, and now look what I've become." She could remember telling her mum, Fight or flight - I'm a fighter.
No, she was a bloody coward, and a fraud.
Coming up behind her, he said in a soft voice, "I know it's not the same for you. You don't have any allies in your house, but we all do."
She scoffed and replied, "What difference does that make?"
"It makes a hell of a lot of difference. You're more vulnerable than we are. Why do you think I wanted you in Gryffindor Tower instead of in the dungeons with the others?" After a pause, he went on, "I don't blame you for leaving the D.A. And I wouldn't blame you for leaving Britain either, if that's what you want."
She was quiet for a moment, then turned to face him. "But you wouldn't come with me, would you?"
He hesitated, looking a bit pained as he replied, "I can't."
Of course not, she thought. "Always the knight in shining armor." With a sigh, she moved to the sofa and said, "Well, tell me about the D.A. What have I missed?"
"Where do I start?" he asked, joining her. "I guess... after you left we all kind of sat around wondering what would be our next move. Like I said, the dormitory became the place where we'd hold meetings, but it was hard for the Ravenclaws and the Hufflepuffs to keep going back and forth without getting caught. So each house mostly kept to their own common room to practice spells, and we only met once every couple of weeks."
It occurred to her that she should've let them have Puffy. He still could've transported them to Neville's dormitory to make it easier to meet.
He continued, "So aside from that, we pretty much went on as normal. And then Ginny came to me about the Sword of Gryffindor. We got Luna in on it too, but no one else knew what we were going to do."
Callie furrowed her brow and asked, "You didn't tell them?"
"No. Ginny said it was too important, getting the Sword to Harry, and she didn't want anyone blathering about it."
Rolling her eyes, she replied, "Well thank God somebody had the sense to keep quiet."
"Didn't really matter in the end anyway," Neville remarked, shrugging. "But after that, the three of us kind of became co-leaders of the group. We were the only ones who had actually done battle, so the rest already looked to us for guidance. And Ginny's good at getting people to listen."
"Hmph. Perhaps she can teach me how to do that some time," Callie said bitterly.
With a guilty expression, Neville said, "Sorry. It helped that she was more... permissive than you were. Especially after the Sword thing. When nothing really came of it, we started taking more risks. Have you seen the graffiti on the walls?"
"Yeah." Some of their slogans included Long Live the Chosen One, Muggleborn Power, and of course, Dumbledore's Army, Still Recruiting. Plus a few good Fuck the Carrows sprinkled here and there. "And the little doll hanging from a noose in the Great Hall?" Which had looked suspiciously like Snape.
"Yeah," Neville said with a smirk. "Susan made it. We've started challenging Alecto in Muggle Studies, too. That one essay on muggle women sucking up magic through sex? We all refused to do it."
"And what did Carrow do?"
"What else? She and her brother took us to the dungeons to Cruciate us." Callie drew in a breath, her eyes widening at the thought that her friends had all been tortured like she had. But Neville explained, "Don't worry, we got around it - thanks to you."
"What do you mean?" she asked, furrowing her brow.
"The Sister Slayer," he replied. "The two were stupid enough to bring us all at once - me, Seamus, Lavender, Parvati, and Katie. Five of us and two of them. They couldn't keep their eyes on all of us at once, so when Amycus went to Cruciate Katie, Parvati did the Sister Slayer behind his back, and he turned it on Alecto instead." With a grin, he went on, "You should've seen the look on her face. She was yelling at him, hit him with a Knockback Jinx. Then she tried to Cruciate Katie, but turned it on the bloke. They started rowing with each other and ended up letting us go."
Callie was amazed. "I don't believe it," she said. "And they never figured it out?"
"Nope. You said it was an unknown spell, and they're not too bright as it is. We also got Alecto with the Voice of Torment one day in class. Seamus did it under the table so she wouldn't see. But all of a sudden she got this terrified look on her face and started panicking, asked us if we heard it too. We all played dumb and looked at her like she was insane. And then she bolted out of the room and never came back."
She couldn't help but smile at her friends' deliciously wicked trick, but then her face fell at the idea that she should've been there, challenging the Carrows right along with them. They were all so bold, so brave, unwilling to bow down to the siblings' intimidation tactics.
But they'd had each other for protection when they were brought down to the dungeons, she reminded herself. Neville was right, she had no allies down there to come to her rescue if the Carrows decided to attack her again. And that thought made her feel so completely alone, just as she had during her early years at Hogwarts.
After a moment of silence, Neville said, "You think we're being too reckless, right?"
Sighing, she replied, "I would've thought so, but..." she shrugged "...it seems to be working out all right for you." Once again, there was a strange feeling of resentment that nobody else had been hurt the way she had. It wasn't as though she wanted anybody to be tortured or blinded, but why had she gotten it so much worse than the rest?
Because I was an easy target, she thought. They couldn't have used that fake note from Slughorn on any of the others, and as the only Slytherin in the D.A., they'd known that she would come alone. Not to mention the fact that she lived in the dungeons. Who else would've willingly gone down there?
She spent the next several days thinking over all that had occurred since the start of term. Her biggest concern, of course, was Luna, and whether she was dead or in Azkaban. But the question appeared to be answered when Neville announced that he'd gotten a message through his D.A. coin. "Look at the numbers on the side," he said, showing it to her. "Twelve, twenty-one, fourteen, one. They correspond to the letters in her name."
Callie took the coin and studied it with a questioning expression. "Are you sure about this?" she asked, skeptical. "I mean, maybe you're reading them wrong. Or maybe it's a coincidence and they don't mean anything. This may not even be from her."
"That'd be one hell of a coincidence," he argued. "And if anybody else wanted to send a message, they could've used a Patronus. Or called - some of them have phones." He took the coin back and stared at it, saying, "She always had it on her. It would've been her only way to contact us. I've got to phone Ginny and see if she got it, too."
The redhead had gotten the message, and she agreed with Neville that it had to have come from Luna. But while the two Gryffindors breathed a sigh of relief that their friend was - apparently - alive, Callie reminded them that that meant she was most likely in Azkaban. "Bloody hell, she could die in there," the Slytherin said, worry all over her face. "She isn't built for that place. She's so... small. And I know she's smart, but she has an innocence about her. It's almost childlike."
"She's tougher than she looks," Neville countered. "Believe me. I really think she'll be all right." He seemed so confident that the tiny, soft-spoken girl was strong enough to withstand whatever treatment she may receive while locked up. And a week or so later, they received a second message. "Nine, thirteen, fifteen, eleven," he read.
"'I'm OK,'" Callie translated, dropping her head into her hand. After that it was impossible not to believe that the messages really were coming from Luna, and the Slytherin allowed herself to have a little bit of hope that the girl would be all right.
On the morning that they were to return to school, she stood at the window staring down at the passersby and thinking, Last chance. If you want to flee, then now is the time. But how could she? Luna was in Azkaban, for God's sake. If she could handle that, then Callie ought to be able to handle Hogwarts. It's time to stop being a coward, she told herself. You're better than this. And you're smarter than the Carrows.
It also helped that she felt significantly more secure knowing the truth about Snape. The Carrows were in charge of discipline, but he was in charge of the Carrows. If anybody could prevent them from doing too much harm to the students, it was the headmaster - who was also the Dark Lord's second in command. Surely the siblings would follow his orders.
He couldn't do anything to prevent Professor Burbage's death, though, she reminded herself. The D.A. still wasn't completely in the clear. If the choice was to either save a student, or risk blowing his cover, what would he do? Let's not try and find out, she thought.
Upon returning to Hogwarts, she pondered whether to rejoin her comrades. She'd been safe so far; the Carrows hadn't touched her since she'd left the D.A. Though she still felt like a complete traitor, it seemed to be a terrible idea to put herself back in that situation. Quite honestly, she was still afraid that the siblings might come after her again if she openly tried to resist them, and this time, Snape might not show up to stop them from killing her.
But there had to be something she could do to help the others. After all, she did have an advantage that they didn't - she had disassociated from them, and she'd made herself look weak and non-threatening. The Carrows had a dozen known members of the D.A. to occupy their attention, and they hadn't been paying her any mind.
Of course, Luna's capture hadn't done anything to scare the others off. In fact, their response was to plaster Quibbler articles all over the school. Callie had made a huge display of tearing down the ones that were hung up outside the Dark Arts classroom, and had actually earned a "Good job, Warbeck" from Amycus.
"Sucking up to the bloke now, are you?" Lavender spat at her as they made their way into class.
The Slytherin didn't respond, but Neville gave his housemate a "Shut up, Lav," as he watched Callie take her seat at the back of the room, away from the others.
"Always jumping to the snake's defense," Hannah said, shaking her head with a pissy look on her face.
"You don't have to do that, Neville," Callie informed him. "Save your heroic efforts for when the Carrows decide to Cruciate them."
"What is that, some kind of a threat?" Seamus asked.
"No, it's a warning."
That was the day that Carrow had started them practicing the Killing Curse. Their intended victims were field mice, and the only person who could actually do it by the end of the lesson was Theo Nott. All of the D.A. had refused to even try, Malfoy gave it only a half-hearted attempt, and Crabbe and Goyle were simply incapable - as was Callie. After class, Hannah gave her a disgusted look and said, "I can't believe you actually tried it, you psychopath."
But the Slytherin had a perfectly good reason for wanting to learn the curse. They were in the middle of a war - it might be necessary at some point. Just another tool to have in my back pocket, she thought. And how ironic it would be if she one day took out Carrow with the very curse that he himself had taught her.
Their second lesson was almost the same as the first. The D.A. remained in their seats when the bloke called them up to the front of the room, Malfoy's heart clearly wasn't in it, Crabbe and Goyle's faces turned red from the strain of trying to work the curse, and Nott struck his mouse dead with the same kind of indifference he might have had pulling a petal off a flower. The only difference was that Callie, on her second try, became one of the only two people who Carrow declared to be "not utterly useless." But her D.A. classmates had gasped, and one of the Patil twins muttered, "Heartless bitch," when she walked back to her seat.
From then on, she'd been getting rather rough treatment from the D.A. Every time one of them passed, they shot her a dirty look, and Lisa Turpin had performed a hex that left the word "Judas" on her forehead. You weren't even there in the beginning, you twit, she thought bitterly, as Professor Flitwick removed the mark. She couldn't help but smirk when the little man promised that his student would be properly punished.
Then she received a package one morning in the Great Hall, which turned out to contain a venomous serpent. "Fucking hell, now they're trying to kill me," she muttered to herself. Despite the harassment, she was doing what she could to try and help them. Upon returning to the castle, she had ordered Puffy to start transporting the D.A. to meetings again.
But her big move came in February, and it was possibly the riskiest thing any of them had done so far, aside from the attempt to steal the Sword. "Now listen, Puffy. I don't want any of the others to know about this. Not even Neville."
"Yes, Mistress," he replied with a bow.
"And if either of the Carrows should happen to see you, just tell them that you're there to clean. Play along and get out of there. Don't bother trying to get them."
"Yes, Mistress."
She had summoned the elf to her dungeon, into which she had entered for the first time since Crabbe and Goyle's attack. Though she'd trembled as she set foot in there, she took a breath and forced herself to continue. I need a place to be alone, she told herself. This is too important to be scared off by the memory of what they did. And so, in the middle of the night, she sat and waited for Puffy to return from his task, grasping her wand and keeping her eye on the door, ready to strike if anyone entered.
When the elf appeared before her, she asked, "Did you get them?"
"Yes, Mistress. They were both fast asleep." From his tattered bedsheet toga, he pulled out Amycus and Alecto's wands and handed them to her.
"I suppose the hard part is over," she remarked. "So long as they don't wake up before you go back."
She got right to business, wanting to get this done as quickly as possible. Puffy watched as she cut through the wood at the base of Amycus's wand. When it was open, she removed a small piece of the dragon heartstring core, then fused the ends back together and mended the wood. "It's not going to work as well now," she explained to the elf. "Not with the core destroyed." She did the same with the sister's wand, then said, "Now put them back exactly where you found them. Come back here so I know you're all right, and then you can return to your quarters."
It had worked exactly as she'd planned. The siblings never knew that their wands had been tampered with, but they'd found themselves inexplicably unable to perform more advanced magic - including the Cruciatus Curse. However, they'd replaced such torture with non-magical forms of punishment. Susan Bones, for instance, had two fingers broken when Alecto took a yardstick to her hands, and Terry Boot had his lip busted open from Amycus punching him.
As Callie contemplated her next move, she had taken to working in the hospital wing again. It was then that she found out the members of the D.A. weren't the only ones receiving the Carrows' abuse. Almost every day, people were coming in with cuts or bruises, or the effects of simpler hexes that the siblings could manage with their shoddy wands.
And then she'd heard rumors of students being locked up in the dungeons. Christ, no! she thought, going back to her own horrifying experience of being trapped for a night in the depths of the castle. It seemed the Carrows had made it their own personal torture chamber, hidden from view of the other teachers.
That was when Callie had gotten the idea to flush out the snakes. She had scoured the library in search of a spell to reverse the Unbreakable Charms on the windows in the underwater Slytherin common room. And when she had finally found it, her housemates, the Carrows, Slughorn, and Snape had woken up in the middle of the night to the dungeons being completely flooded.
It was pure chaos as everybody gathered in the Great Hall, soaking wet. "Amycus, Alecto," Snape shouted, "get down there and fix those leaks before the entire castle is drowned!" He shoved two handfuls of gillyweed at them, and they reluctantly made off.
All the other teachers and Madam Pomfrey arrived, the latter going around and making sure everybody was all right. "Those windows are unbreakable," McGonagall declared. "There's never been an incident like this."
Though nobody could explain what exactly had happened, Callie could tell from the sidelong glances that Snape suspected she was somehow involved. Slughorn, on the other hand, seemed to think she was the hero of the night. "The girl was brilliant!" he announced to his colleagues, his voice filled with pride. "When I arrived in the common room, she was holding the water at bay with some sort of Barrier Charm, and urging the others to get up to the ground floor. Then she grabbed two youngsters who couldn't swim and dragged them to safety."
All of that had happened after Puffy had broken the windows and Disapparated, just as Callie had ordered.
Most classes were canceled during the next couple of weeks, since the teachers - including the Carrows - were working to repair the damage in the dungeons. "Would've been nice if the wankers had drowned," she overheard Seamus say a few days after the flood. Yes, that would've been a nice bonus, but at least they didn't have a chance to hurt anyone while they were occupied with repairs.
It was also quite satisfying to hear Professor McGonagall scold the siblings for their terrible wandwork. Snape, too, had given them a scowl as if disgusted by their incompetence.
Unfortunately, they'd come up with a way around not being able to Cruciate people. Amycus had tasked the seventh-years with practicing the curse on students who'd been given detention. Of course, the only people who were both willing and able to do so were Crabbe and Goyle, and they were quite happy to show off their special skill for the Carrows. They had even started patrolling the castle to look for wrongdoers, just so they could turn them in and get to torture them.
But then something strange happened at the end of March; the two boys had gone off for the Hogsmeade weekend and never came back. Many were rather excited by the idea that they might be lying dead somewhere, and there were questions of why the teachers bothered searching for them around the village. Several days later, they were finally found in the Forbidden Forest and brought to the hospital wing. Callie took great pleasure in seeing how roughed up they were, having encountered many a magical creature deep in the woods.
She overheard them telling Snape, Slughorn, and Pomfrey that they had been chased into the forest by a half dozen figures they'd assumed to be Death Eaters. "They had on hoods and masks, just like the ones Father and the others wear," Goyle described. "We tried to tell them, 'We're on your side! We're on your side!' But they just kept hexing us and chasing us. They disappeared after a while, but then we got lost."
As Callie would later find out, these masked and hooded figures were none other than Neville, Ginny, and a few others in disguise. They'd attacked the Slytherin boys just outside the village limits, drove them deep into the forest, and left them to fend for the themselves.
"Wandering in circles for days with no food or shelter," Madam Pomfrey remarked when she and Callie were alone. "Dodging acromantulas and centaurs and whatever else is in there." Callie was a bit surprised by the sympathetic way in which the matron spoke of her housemates' ordeal. But then she muttered, "Not good enough," and brought a supply tray over to the boys' bedsides.
Handing them each a vial of potion, she said, "These'll cure whatever ails you." After they'd both taken their doses, she added, "Although there are a few unfortunate side effects. But after all you two have been through, I'm sure you can handle it."
"'Side effects?" Callie whispered when the woman rejoined her.
"Some minor skin irritation," Pomfrey explained. "You'll see."
Within minutes, the boys were writhing in agony as angry red blisters broke out all over their bodies. Cocking a brow, Callie asked, "Everywhere?"
"Oh, yes. Nary an inch of them won't be affected."
One day she was going to have to properly thank the woman, but for now, the Slytherin girl simply sat back with a devilish grin on her face, delighting in the screams of the boys who'd assaulted her.