Walking With A Ghost
Chapter 8
I drifted awake this morning, and I felt pain. Urg, my leg was killing me! I had to get to St. Mungo's soon to get my knee back...I hauled myself out of bed and managed to limp into the shower, and do most of my morning routine, minus the whole attempting to co-ordinate my outfits, and keep up with trends thing. Pop culture was never my strong point, but luckily jeans and a t-shirt never went out of style. I collapsed on my bed in exaustion, and just laid there for about fifteen minutes until a knock banged on my door.
"It's open!" I hollered, and the door swung open to reveal...none other than Sirius Black! He still looked pretty tired, but was happy looking too.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty!" he chirped, stupid morning people...
"Shut up, go bug Lily." I murmered, and rolled over.
"Well, excuse me for being cheery! I just came to give you your wand, which I guarded with my life the whole time you were gone." I sat up, and took back my new rosewood wand, smiling. "And I didn't attempt to cast any spells, since your old wand would backfire antler-growing hexes whenever somebody else tried to use it."
I grinned in the memory of the third year day when Sirius grabbed my wand and tried out his Transfiguration homework with it. It certainly was a fun trip to the hospital wing, not being able to get through doorways and breaking valuables every which way...Filch had a field day since we left such a trail of destroyed property! "That was pretty cool, I only wish Snivellus could have grabbed it instead." we snickered, and I struggled to my feet.
"Are we going to St. Mungo's now? My leg is killing me." I complained, leaning on the wall, and I carefully hopped towards the door.
"Yeah, Lily said she wanted to heal you herself, but then said she didn't want to risk messing up. She wants to be a healer, you know." he remarked.
"Spetacular." I grunted, as I thumped slowly down the stairs, putting as little weight as possiable on my leg. Sirius was just walking behind me, not even noticing barely.
"Oh, this is pathetic to watch!" he finally said, drawing my attention back. He grabbed me around the waist, and threw my thin body over his shoulder, and carried me down the rest of the stairs despite my thumping on his strong back. Like I could have done any real damage even if I wanted to, I know some good jinxes, that's all. He finally set me down on a bench across from James and Lily.
"Morning." he greeted me, and Lily nodded, looking up for a moment from the Daily Prophet. The headline was about another Death Eater attack, this time a family in a suburb had been killed, I recognized the last name. It was the older sister of a Ravenclaw girl I knew, and her husband and children. Apparantely she had been an Auror, dedicated to tracking them down, and gotten in too deep. My skin crawled when I read the ages of the dead children, eight and five. I shuddered, and forced my attention back to my scrambled eggs. We all ate in silence, trying to ignore the growing threat of Lord Voldemort. I hated him, and everything he stood for, including my family. They were Dark for as long as time existed, just like Sirius' family. Today the Proctors were a dying breed, from too much in-breeding and running out of good pure-blood men and women to marry and carry on the heritage. I am an only child, with just about five first cousins. I sighed at the thought of my parents, and all my relatives. They all went to Hogwarts, or had graduated already. I don't stay in touch. I hardly know their names. From the look on Sirius's face, he was thinking the same thoughts as I was.
Unlike most, I call the Dark Lord by his proper name, I'm not afraid of it. If he ever come for me, I'll take as many of his followers, and if possiable, him too, down with me. I know what I believe in, though sometimes that might coincide a bit, that doesn't change a thing. Thinking about how he wanted to kill good people like Mikey and Mallory made me sick with fury. Finally, Lily rolled up the paper, and threw it to a hopeful looking hag-like woman.
"Let's go." Lily quietly said, and we all shuffled from the tavern into the Muggle road, down Charring Cross, to the department store. I leaned a bit on Sirius, and tried to reduce my limping so we wouldn't draw stares. Finally we reached the outdated window and looked up at the ugly manequien.
"James Potter, delivering a patient." James muttered under his breath to the blank faced woman, and jerking his head at me. I thought I saw the manequien's eyes move a bit, then it's finger jerked us foward. Sirius and I knew the routine, having been raised as this, and so did James. Lily was looking enthralled, and Sirius grabbed her elbow, and guided her through the glass. Inside was a white lineolium floor, crowded with people despite the hour. There was a man pouring steam from his ears, a little girl with fish fins and gills, another man who was covered in fur and constantly itching yelling "FLEAS! Get them off meeee!" More people with various maladies crowded the waiting room, and we patientely waited our turn in line. I sagged onto Lily's arm, she was looking around in wonder at the room. So many wizards! I smiled a bit. If she thought this was a lot of magical folk, she has yet to see the Quidditch World Cup!
"Yes?" A harassed brunette secretary said from the front desk. "Fourth floor, Spell damage," she automatically told the man covered in fur. He nodded gratefully, and frantically ran from the room.
"Uh, she was shot by a Muggle, but got Muggle treatment from a hospital. Can you reverse it, or something?" Sirius said, pointing at me. The woman furrowed her brow, and called somebody through a telephone-like object. "Yeah, try Artifact Accidents on the ground floor, Healer Denwick should be able to sort you out." she quickly told us. "Next!"
We hurried from the room, since a woman with highly contagious dragon pox was next. We all panicked over the fact that Sirius and I hadn't gotten our shots this year for the latest outbreak, and resolved to get the vaccine over the Christmas holiday. We trailed down the hallway, following clear signs and a trail of injured people until we reached a clinic-like room.
"All right, who's next?" A Caucasian man called over the heads of a large waiting room, right as a loud, ear splitting scream sounded from the back room, followed by a loud cracking noise. Everybody flinched, and the doctor paled slightly. "No worries, he just splinched himself."
Everybody flinched at the word, except Lily. "Splinched?" she asked.
"Tried to Apparate, but left half himself behind. Stuck one half in one place, one in another, can't move either way. He's a lucky one, being right in a hospital. Took a whole Accidential Magic Squad to sort me out on my first Apparation test." I answered, feeling my stomach churn at the incident's memory. I was the only one to have passed the examination so far, and I think Remus was taking it this fall.
"You, in the back!" he called, pointing at us eventually, after a ten minute wait. "Come on!" I limped foward, staggaring foward.
"Hello." I grunted, gratefully taking his arm, dragging my now immobile leg behind me. He helped me into a smaller room, and I sat on the examination table.
"So, what happened here? Broomstick fall? Cauldron explosion? Wand backfire?" he asked me, motioning for me to tilt my head so he could look down my thoat and shine a light in my ears and eyes.
"Nah, it's a really strange and stupid story." I began, then recounting the incidents of my attack, and the Muggle treatment. "So they called it a knee replacement, I think they just gave me a new knee!" I exclaimed, while he did a few checks on where I had hit my head.
"You're okay, but they did replace the knee-cap. Since you stopped taking their drugs, it's gotten worse, hasn't it?" he asked me, sitting on a swivel chair. I nodded, and blushed a bit. "The good news is, I can give you a potion to get rid of the pain for good, basically. It'll burn out all the infection, and heal it all up. The bad news is, you're stuck with your knee." My heart sunk, and I groaned. "It's okay though, you'll probably just develop some odd thing, like limping when it rains or something." He wrote out something on a paper, and handed it to me. "Be sure to take this before you go to sleep, because it'll probably knock you out. Best wishes!" the healer called, and I limped from the room to the pharmacy.
The witch there filled my prescription, and I headed back out to my friends. They were patiently waiting, Lily was reading a magazine while James and Sirius were racing pens with their wands. "I'm ready!" I cheered, and held up my baggie.
"That's wonderful!" Lily exclaimed after my telling her what the healer said. "Well, we have a whole day to kill. What do you want to do?"
"I'm hungry." James and Sirius said at the same time.
"You're always hungry." I remarked back, reading the instructions on my potion bottle. I wasn't watching where I was going, I was just following my friends.
"Let's go up to the tea shop, we can get something to eat and look around the gift shop or something." Lily said, and headed towards a stairwell. Then she glanced back at me when we reached the steps. "Oops, I forgot. What should we do?" the red head asked, and Sirius grabbed me and picked me up bridal style, then ascended the stairs.
"Problem solved!" he chirped, and we kept walking all the way to the top floor. The tea shop was carpeted instead of linolium, and had small round tables scattered throughout it. There was a cafeteria line, and hardly anybody was there. There were two witches sitting in a corner with coffee mugs and muffins, and a large wizard with a beard sat with a sandwich near the front. We all grabbed and paid for our food, then sat near a window. I had bought a soup of some kind, and a chocolate chip cookie. Sirius made puppy dog eyes, so I rolled my eyes and split it with him.
"So, the Harpies are totally going to win this year!" I started talking, and James shook his head. Lily rolled her eyes at another Quidditch discussion. "Their line up is awesome, they got Krista on Captain! They're gonna kick ass!"
"No way," James argued. "Falcons are waaay better!"
"Okay, maybe their beaters are violent, but our Seeker is brilliant!" I argued passionately.
Sirius cut in. "Chudley Cannons are going to win this year, I can feel it!"
"Urg, no!" James and I said. "They lost for what, two centuries running?" James reminded him.
"It hasn't been that long!" Sirius defended, and I rolled my eyes.
"Just keep telling yourself that. This is the Harpies' year." I decidedly spoke. The rest of our lunch went about the same, with Lily asking a question about something periodically. She just didn't get Quidditch! It's not just a game, it's a way of life. We eventually finished and exausted all our subjects of talk (Quidditch, Quidditch, and guess what? More Quidditch.) and left the cafe. I felt much more recharged after my breakfast, and we headed back into town. The rest of the day we walked through London, and Diagon Alley, saying hello to people we knew, talking and laughing joyfully. That's our job, us Marauders. To make everybody remember that they have to laugh about life, no matter how serious it gets. We didn't cause that much trouble, or pull any pranks, just walked around and told rude jokes about who's doing what with who, and who's doing who with what, and all that good stuff.
Eventually we headed back to the Leaky Cauldron, I was still sobered from the death of the Ravenclaw, Rachel Buxton's sister and family. I occasionally threw in a comment or joke, but stayed silent most of the time. My friends all noticed at one point or another, but I was just...well, me. Sarcastic, narcissic, intelligently insulting Mona Lisa. And we wouldn't have it any other way! At the day's end, I still wasn't very tired, so I stayed up and read for a while. Then I finally remembered to take my potion, and fell asleep.
The next day passed much like the last, just laying around, buying last minute school supplies, and hanging out. James tried to kiss Lily for the thousandth time, and she slapped him before going home with her mother, Peter came by to go shopping, which I accompianied him on. We rarely talk, so it was a nice change. Together, we carefully walked through the Apothecary, picking out potion ingredients, and talking about our summers. Peter had just stayed with his parents, and hung around his villiage. He got a Muggle job too, at a local shop, and made a bit of money. All in all, we had another nice summer day, and my anxiety started peaking around eleven o'clock at night about the next day, when I was meeting Mikey at the coffeehouse down the street. Of course, I'd have to sneak away from my friends, and actually decide if I should tell Mikey about my magical background, persay. I finally made up my mind to go, and decided to arrive earlier, and convince Sirius and James that I was going 'girl' shopping, which I planned on doing beforehad. Then I was able to fall asleep, for a couple hours anyways.
The next morning, I got up and pulled on faded old blue jeans, a black tank top that had a glitter design across the chest, and a thin gray zipper sweater. I quickly informed a half asleep James that I was leaving for London to go shopping, and that I'd be only down the road, before heading out. I decided to grab breakfast at the coffeehouse when I got there, and headed to the store first. Of course, this time I had my wand with me all the time in an inside pocket of my jacket. I decided to go in a designer store, since I was using my families' money, and ended up spending about two-thousand Muggle dollars, or pounds, or whatever they called them in all on designer clothes. I had a new pair of sneakers (Converses, of course), a long black skirt, four new tops, a pair of high-heels, and a manicure and pedicure. It was a nice day alone so far, away from all the troubles of the wizarding world. Around twelve fourty-five I decided to head down to the coffeehouse.
I pushed open the door into the dimly lit room, the floors were polished cherry, and elaborate painting adorned the walls. Small tables and spindly chairs were scattered in winding patterns, and cushy armchairs scattered by the windows. Bean bags were gathered in corners, and I picked out a table positioned so I could easily see the door. I bought a Earl Grey tea, and a blueberry muffin, and pulled out Witch Weekly, rolled so nobody could see the cover of course! About a half hour later, the door tinkled open to reveal a tall, slender blonde Mikey, still wearing his thick, rectangle glasses. He was wearing a leather coat, and baggy jeans. His blonde hair was messed up from the wind, and blown across the left side of his face. Mikey glanced around for a moment, before spotting me. I quickly swallowed my muffin, and waved him over. He plowed through the maze of chairs, announcing:
"Where were you!" he exclaimed. "You vanished, in plain sight! You just LEFT! HOW!" he was nearly hypervenolating now, and pulled an inhaler from his coat pocket and took three big puffs from it. I sighed, and started to explain.
"I'll get to all that. You sure you want to know?" I finally asked him.
"Now that you said that, I sure do!" Mikey shot back, and sat down across from me. I leaned in closer so I could speak lower so the other people wouldn't overhear. Mikey leaned in too, resting his head on his hand. "Well?"
I took a final deep breath. "What if I told you that magic does exist. That real witches and wizards live right under your noses, going by their own laws and government, in their own underground community. That almost all the things you learned about magic were completely wrong?" I paused slightly, and Mikey didn't move an inch. "I'm a witch, Mikey..." And I kept going. About everything, the Ministry, my family, my friends, and my school. About other countries and their magical folk, and all the magical creatures. I stopped finally, and he stayed still.
"Wow." His blue eyes bored right into mine, searching for lies. I could tell that he believed me. "There's more, isn't there?" he asked, knowing.
I leaned in even closer, speaking in an undertone. "I told you about blood tensions, and how some, not all, pure blood families think that Muggles shouldn't be around? And about my family?" He nodded. I was trying to think of how to explain this simply. I started again.
"It's about them...they have a leader. A wizard who went as bad as you can go. Everybody else is afraid to even speak his name, and that of his followers. They're called Death Eaters, my family is some of them, a good deal. They've been dying out from too much in-breeding, and limited 'good' choices in husbands though. There's even more people like us. His name is Lord Voldemort."
"A while back, he started looking for followers, and he found them. A lot. Some were just afraid of him, others wanted a bit of his power too, since he kept getting it. At first, there were just a couple attacks and riots, then it's been getting worse. The Dark Lord kills anyone in his way, people from the Ministry, and their families. Muggle-borns, and just plain Muggles too. Your police men have probably had their share of odd murders these days, eh? That was him, or most likely the Death Eaters. You'd have to be pretty high up to have Voldemort himself come do you in. These are dark days, Mikey, for us. We don't know who to trust, we don't dare get too friendly with strange wizards or witches...horrid things happen. Today, in our paper, I read that a friend of mine's sister was killed, along with her husband and two children. He's taking over, bit by bit. Of course, people are standing up to him, but he killed 'em. Or, even worse, joined him. Usually by force, there are spells that can make others do your will. Spells to torture, spells to kill. The giants and dementors have joined him, and others too."
My mouth was dry. "It's been getting steadily worse over the years. Good, innocent people are being killed. It makes me sick. These are dark days, Mikey, dark days..." I trailed off, thinking of my friends, and how we would be thrust out into the war like this. It wasn't fair, having to grow up like this! Living in fear to go out after dark, or be home alone. I lived free of fear mostly, because of who my parents are, but then I think, won't Voldemort know they don't care about me? Mikey had stayed silent through it all, this was so much! A whole another world, a world in crisis.
"Why don't you tell more? If more people knew, we would help!" he begged Mona Lisa. She let out a harsh laugh.
"Who would believe me?" she said. "Do you even believe me?"
Mikey stayed silent again. "I think I do."
"I can prove it to you." I told him, eyes sparkling. "Are you done eating?"
Mikey nodded slowly, and followed me out the door. I led him out to the back of the building, and I sat my muffin carefully on the sidewalk, sitting beside it. "Now, promise you won't freak out at what you're about to see."
"I promise." Mikey swore, and Mona pulled her wand from the inside of her jacket. His eyes widened, and mouthed "Woah" I smiled, and focused on the muffin. This had better be good, let's see how Level 7 Transfiguration spells go... "Amonbiouet!" I said, and turned my muffin into a rabbit. It hopped around, and I picked up the adorable chocolate bunny. Mikey's mouth fell open, and he gawked openly, mouthing nothing like a fish.
"But...But...But..." he stuttered, and pointed from me, to my wand to the rabbit. I turned it back into the muffin, and continued eating it.
"Cool, eh?" I remarked, and made a sweeping motion with my wand over it. "Wingardium Leviosa!" And the muffin floated into the air before Mikey's eyes. That was when he freaked out. Went into hysterics, I mean. I calmed him down eventually, and walked him back to his tiny house downtown. I noted the address, so I could owl him in the morning to make sure he thought this isn't a dream. I'll probably drop by in the evening...make sure he's taking it well...
Mikey decided to lay down in his room and watch some tv, so I left him alone, with a kiss on the forehead, I Disapparated with a loud crack before his eyes, just to rub it in. I ended up back inside the alley between Diagon Alley and the Leaky Cauldron, my aiming was pretty good these days. I headed inside, and met Sirius in the front hall.
"Where have you been!" he shouted at me, eyes popping.
"Relax, I went girly shopping." I held up my bags of clothing, and opened one up wide to expose the underwear and bras inside. "Sorry I didn't invite you, next time I'll be sure to bring you along." And I swaggared up the stairs, able to walk again, the potion worked! Now I felt like my old self again, happy and content, living on the edge of insanity and sleep deprivation! I picked out my history of magic textbook, and carried it downstairs to read. I ended up giving James a mini-lesson on what I was reading, because they wouldn't stop bugging me, and they insisted that Giant Wars were more intersting when I told them. At dinner, we ate at Florean's Ice Cream Parlor, then spent a night on the town (er, alley) Gossiping and singing bawdy drinking songs that were so wrong that mothers covered their children's ears while we walked by, and father's covered their wives' ears! I hugged them all good night, then curled up in my room and fell asleep after taking a nice, long shower.