11th May

The taxi fare from the hospital was astronomic. The bus would have cost them at least half the price, but, with Ginny in a wheelchair, they had no choice. They'd bundled into the first taxi they could find, Harry carrying Ginny from her wheelchair to the back seat and then folding the wheelchair up into the boot. To say Ginny hated this sort of treatment would be an understatement.

Every time he did something for her, he watched her nostrils flare and her face thunder with anger. He didn't have a choice, though. She had several broken ribs and a broken ankle, and she was recovering from a punctured lung. The doctors had told him under no uncertain terms that he was to look after her for the foreseeable.

Ginny had wanted crutches rather than a wheelchair. She'd wanted some semblance of self control. Harry knew he'd be the exact same in her position, but there was no way that crutches could work. Her ribs were too sensitive at the moment, nowhere near healed.

Harry didn't care. She could complain all she liked, but he wasn't going to relent. He was going to make sure she was completely and utterly okay before she did anything on her own. The sight of her splattered on a road was too fresh in his mind.

Traffic blighted them on their way home, so the taxi fare rose even more so. He paid nevertheless, albeit feeling rather cheated out of his money. Collecting Ginny's wheelchair out of the back, he picked her up almost bridal style and placed her back into it, checking with her that she was okay as he did. After being shot a death glare, Harry shut up.

Of course, nothing could be easy. There was a step in front of the house and the door was too thin to accommodate Ginny's wheelchair anyway. Mumbling about ableism, Harry once again picked Ginny up, holding her tight to him.

Right now, he was rather glad of their oddly designed house, which gave them bedrooms on the ground floor rather than the first. Ginny wasn't heavy, but Harry wasn't particularly strong. He put her down on her bed, the only one which had been built. "Do you want to be under the covers?" he asked her, conscious of her comfort. She nodded quickly and he could tell she was in pain. "I'll get you some painkillers after I've tucked you in, okay?" Again, he received just a nod. Lifting the covers on the other side of the bed, Harry moved Ginny over and arranged her pillows into a comfortable position, lying down. She looked exhausted and Harry was all too willing to allow her to go to sleep.

Once he was sure that she was comfortable, Harry fetched the painkillers the doctor had given him. He filled one of their water bottles from Fort William with water and helped her to sip it, while she took the tablets. "Give me a shout if you need to move or anything, Gin? I'm just gonna be in my room, building my bed." She nodded again and closed her eyes. Impulsively, Harry placed a kiss on her forehead and Ginny smiled for the first time properly since her accident.

XXX

"Over two weeks," Sirius muttered as he poured himself another drink of firewhiskey. "Two weeks since they went missing. No one has any idea where they are and I've failed them yet again."

"Sirius," Remus sighed. "None of this is your fault."

"Just because it's not directly my fault doesn't mean I don't feel guilty, Remus," Sirius informed his best friend. Remus' sighs were becoming difficult to bear. "If James and Lily were here, this would never have happened."

"If James and Lily were here, lots of things would be different, Padfoot," Remus said quietly. "I've learnt over the years to stop thinking on it."

"I just don't want to let them down again, Moony," Sirius said, embarrassingly close to tears.

Remus wrapped an arm around his best friend's shoulders. "We're gonna find them," he promised. "I swear, Sirius, no harm will come to them."

XXX

12th May

There was a knock at the door. Concerned, Harry shot a look at Ginny, who was fast asleep. Running a hand through his hair, he considered what to do. Surely, it wouldn't be the aurors. They wouldn't knock. It could be the police, but why would the police be here? Who else could it be?

He shook himself. It was probably just the postman. But why would they be getting post? Maybe it was the milkman. Only they didn't have one. Harry took a deep breath and figured that the only way he was going to find out was to open the door.

He closed the door to Ginny's bedroom on the way to open the door. He didn't want anyone to know she was there, not while she couldn't protect herself. You're not very good at that either, a voice in Harry's head reminded him.

Ignoring that, Harry looked through the window in the door and saw a few people of varying heights. He rather thought one of them might be a child. Either way, it didn't seem to be the police. Gathering his courage, he opened the door.

"Hello!" a woman said loudly. She was on the larger side with short blonde hair, wearing a long skirt and smart blouse. If he had to guess, Harry would put her at about forty years old. Next to her was a tall man with tidy brown hair and glasses. He was smartly dressed in a tie, shirt and pants. Harry admired the shine on his shoes. In front of them stood a teenager and a child, both female, both with blonde hair, although the teenager's looked rather fake and her roots were showing.

"Hi," Harry replied, slightly confused at what was going on.

"We just wanted to introduce ourselves," the woman said kindly. "We live next door," she told him, pointing to the right. "I'm Maggie." She offered him her hand and he shook it. "This is my husband, Clive, and our two daughters, Rebecca and Bernadette."

"Becky," the teenager corrected. Harry thought he'd put Becky at thirteen, just a year younger than Ginny.

"Bonnie," the child corrected at the same time as her sister. Bonnie must have been eight or nine.

Clive offered Harry his hand and Harry took it, admiring the man's firm handshake.

"I'm Will," Harry offered. "My girlfriend, Clara, is just next door. She's been in a car accident so she's bed-bound." Maggie and Clive shared a sympathetic look.

"Oh, you poor dears! Well, if you need anything, anything at all, just come and knock on," Maggie told him and Harry believed that she would do anything for them. She reminded him a bit of Molly Weasley. A small pang went through Harry's chest. He gave them a smile, slightly pained. "We'll hopefully see you soon - and your girlfriend! I hope she's better soon!"

"Thank you," Harry replied quietly. The family departed then and Harry closed the door with a relieved sigh. Surely they just thought that he and Ginny were regular people and they'd accepted the fake names without surprise. Harry returned to Ginny's room and the chest of drawers he was constructing. Nearly everything from her room had been constructed by this point. He'd build two bedside tables, a wardrobe, a dressing table and her chest of drawers. In order to make sure she was okay all the time, he'd moved his chest of drawers into her room so that he could construct them there.

"Harry," he heard Ginny moan softly from the bed. He was at her side within seconds as she stirred from her slumber. "Did I hear you talking?"

"Some neighbours came to introduce themselves," he told her quietly.

"Oh. Were they nice?" she said, her speech slurred slightly from sleep.

"Very," he told her. "Do you want some water or something to eat? You've got another hour before you can take any more meds," he reminded her. She nodded.

"Some water would be nice and maybe a sandwich or something?"

He nodded and squeezed her hand, standing up. "I'll be back in a sec, Gin," he promised, leaving her room to go to the kitchen.

When they'd returned from the hospital, a lot of the food they'd bought in the days prior to Ginny's accident had gone off, so Harry had had to bin it all. Thankfully, he'd frozen quite a bit, including some bread and some meat, so he'd been able to feed them both without having to leave the house. It wouldn't go on for much longer though; he'd have to go to the shop soon.

He made Ginny a cheese and ham sandwich and filled a glass with water. Adding a straw to the glass, he made his way back downstairs to the patient. He found Ginny trying to move and nearly dropped the food and water in his shock. "Ginny!" he admonished. "You can't move yet. You have to let your ribs heal."

Ginny sighed in frustration and Harry did feel for her. He wouldn't be able to deal with it himself. "Here, I'll help you sit up if you'd like?" She nodded, but looked away from him angrily. Wondering whether she was angry at him or herself, he put the glass and plate down on her bedside table and helped her to move. "That better?" he asked softly and she nodded again, looking to the food beside her.

Harry allowed her to eat and drink by herself. There was no damage to her arms, miraculously. Watching her, Harry knew that eating was paining her, but the doctors had said that this should pass as her ribs healed.

"I'm gonna carry on building this chest of drawers, Gin. Tell me if you want me to move you," he instructed her and she nodded with a small smile.

XXX

Sirius entered the kitchen at one o'clock that afternoon for the first time that day. Bill and Charlie looked at him disapprovingly. "What are you two doing here?" Sirius rasped.

"Don't work Thursdays," they both said immediately and Sirius rolled his eyes.

"You two are as bad as the twins."

"Sirius, I think we should talk about your drinking," Bill started.

"Don't start, Bill. You sound like Remus."

Bill banged his hand on the table and Sirius looked up in surprise. "Sirius, you've got blackout drunk every single day since Harry and Ginny went missing. How is that helping them? What use are you going to be if you're drunk all the time? And when we do find them, what is Harry going to think?"

Sirius' chin wobbled. "But we've not found them have we? And I can't even leave this bastard house!"

"I know, Sirius, but we can make a plan," Charlie encouraged. "I'm fed up of this passive fighting of Voldemort. We're gonna start taking the fight to him, starting with getting Pettigrew," he spat. Sirius furrowed his brow at Charlie. "And, once we've got Pettigrew, we're not going to stop until we've got Harry and Ginny back and every single one of Voldemort's arse lickers is either dead or permanently imprisoned."

Sirius nodded with a sigh. "I know you're right. I'm not an alcoholic," he told them honestly. "I don't feel like I have to drink. I feel like I've got nothing else to do. I feel useless. Everyone else is doing something and I'm just sat around."

"We're gonna do something about that, Sirius," Bill swore.

"Okay then. Let's get rid of all of the alcohol and then start," Sirius stated. Bill and Charlie grinned at him and all too happily helped him rid the house of every trace of alcohol.

XXX

13th May

"Okay, so you've got my key and I've given you permission to use it so it'll work. Buy some sort of house or flat or whatever. I don't care where it is or what it looks like. Just make sure there's enough room for both kids and me and I dunno, you two if you want. At least four bedrooms," Sirius repeated these instructions for the millionth time that day.

"Sirius, we know," Charlie said with a sigh. "We're gonna sort it and, when we get back, I want you to have banished every piece of furniture from this house that you don't like. Let's sort this place out."

Sirius nodded. "Aye aye, captain. Now, off with the pair of you."

Bill and Charlie apparated out of Grimmauld Place with two loud cracks. Sirius took out the wand Bill had bought from Ollivander's for him the other day. He'd been without a wand for far too long. It was quite a good match if he was honest. This would be fun.

Starting with the kitchen, Sirius banished every piece of crockery with the Black insignia on it. Every glass with snakes on it was gone. He even banished the table that wouldn't let muggleborns sit at it. Fed up of the dirty, dark windows, he smashed them all with his wand and then fixed them, gratified when they were fixed perfectly clean. Cleaning spells on their own hadn't worked when Molly had tried.

Satisfied that the kitchen looked sufficiently different from his time there as a child, Sirius moved into the next room, banishing the furniture and decor that he hated. He used wallpaper-stripping spells to peel the dark paper from the walls. The Black family tree wouldn't budge, so Sirius had fun blasting all the faces of the people he hated, Bellatrix being his first victim.

From there, he moved from room to room, not leaving until it looked sufficiently different. He pulled up carpets to find clean dark wood flooring underneath. Pictures that weren't attached to the walls were banished and lampshades that made the room darker rather than lighter fell victim to a reducto curse. Smashing and then rebuilding the windows worked perfectly, lightening up the house within minutes. The heads of the house elves were banished without a second thought.

Bill and Charlie clearly hadn't expected Sirius to be so ruthless, because, within half an hour, Sirius had finished the ground floor, his mother's portrait and the family tree the only awful things that survived his purge. Although it now looked somewhat empty, the house was happier already.

Sirius went into the basement then. Nobody had really been down there since they'd moved in. They'd had no need too. However, Sirius knew that there would be some handy things down there. It had been his father's office and potion lab. His father had been incredible at potions and they'd had all sorts of ingredients.

Most of the office was destroyed immediately. Sirius had too many bad memories there. It was where his father had undertaken most of Sirius' punishments. The few books he found were banished to the library rather than to wherever banished things went. He'd sort the library when Remus was here. Only Remus would know the value of the books there. The office was completely empty rather quickly.

The potions lab was more interesting. Rather than the banishing charm, Sirius used the cleaning charm in here. Dust was banished immediately and then Sirius started to examine what was in there. In his day, Sirius hadn't been bad at potions himself. Better than James had been, certainly, although not as good as Lily.

There were a few cauldrons that Sirius had got rid of, being that they were designed with the Black motto on the side. He kept most of them though. As before, the potions books were sent to the library. He stripped the walls, including some portraits that had complained loudly. It wasn't a bad lab, all in all. The equipment was a bit outdated but not in bad shape.

In a room off the side of the lab, Sirius found ingredients. A preservation spell had been cast on the whole room, meaning that all of the ingredients were still ready to be used. He was in awe of some of the ingredients and wondered where on earth his father had got them. Knockturn Alley, probably, for most of them, but there were a few he'd never even of.

The rest of the basement was storage, some of it from when Sirius' family had lived there and some of it was the bags of things the Order didn't know what to do with. Sirius had told them to banish the lot, but clearly Molly had just put it down here.

With a roll of his eyes, Sirius banished the bags and moved onto the rest of the stuff. Furniture, clothes, jewelry, shoes, books. Everything was in that room and Sirius had great fun getting rid of it. The usual was done for the books and Sirius actually sent the jewelry to the kitchen, thinking that he could sell the lot and get some money out of it. Clothes and shoes were got rid of as well as the furniture. The best thing he'd found, however, was a bag of his own clothes from when he was sixteen. He sent it up to the kitchen with the jewelry and anything else he thought might have been valuable.

The finished effect left a practically empty basement, except for a few relatively nice pieces of furniture and a necklace on the floor. Curious as to why he'd missed it, Sirius picked it up and recognised it immediately. They'd found it in one of the cupboards in the house and no one had been able to open the locket. Evidently, it had resisted banishing as well. Furrowing his eyebrows, Sirius placed the locket in his pocket, sure that Bill would have an idea what it was.

"Sirius!" he heard from above, a sure sign that Bill and Charlie had returned. Sirius practically sprinted up the stairs, desperate for news, a bit of hope.

Grinning like idiots, the pair had laid out some paper on the kitchen table. "You got one then?"

"Did we ever," Charlie said enthusiastically. "It's in a place called Middleton-On-Sea, down south and the house has a sea view. It's remote and it has six bedrooms. It even comes with enough land that I bet, once the wards are up, we could put a quidditch pitch in!"

"Excellent," Sirius said with a grin, looking over the pictures.

"There's a bit of work needs doing," Bill said diplomatically, "but that'll give you something to do until we find Pettigrew."

"Well, as you can see, I'm quite good at doing work," Sirius said smugly, gesturing around him. Bill and Charlie nodded vigorously, clearly having seen the amount of work Sirius had done in the past few hours on the ground floor. "I found my father's old potions lab downstairs and the ingredients cupboard had a preservation spell on it. There's things I've never even heard of in there," Sirius told them in wonder. Both men looked curious.

"It shouldn't take too long to apply some paint charms around here though, and then the house will be looking spick and span," Charlie announced to Sirius' delight.

"Excellent. Let's sort out this place and then we can sort out Harry's - and Ginny's - house," Sirius said to the nods of both younger men.

XXX

"Hello?" Fred called into the room where he had heard the cries. To him, there was nothing worse than somebody crying. He and his brother's mission was to make people laugh. Obviously, tears were the very antithesis of that. "Hello?" he said, turning fully into the classroom. In the corner of the room, he saw the last person he'd expected: "Hermione?"

She looked up, wiping her eyes. "Oh, Fred," she said and he didn't know if she sounded disappointed. He hoped she wasn't disappointed by his presence. Maybe she would have preferred Ron. For some reason, the thought of her preferring Ron to him made him feel funny. Shaking that off, he approached her.

"What's up, Hermione?" he asked softly, sitting down on the table next to her.

She shook her head. "Just a stupid fight with Ron. Nothing worth getting into."

"If it's made you this upset, of course it is," he encouraged her.

"Thank you, Fred, but really-"

"Hermione, my brother's an idiot. Well, most of them are really, but, other than Percy, Ron is probably top of the list," he told her and she smiled slightly. "Tell me what happened and, if necessary, I'll knock some sense into him," he offered.

"He- I was just talking to some of the girls in my dorm room, you know? I've been spending more time with them since Harry left, because Ron hasn't really been around that much. Anyway, Ron saw us and later on he shouted at me, saying that it was like I didn't care about him as much as I cared about Harry. And that's not true! I love them both equally. They're my best friends but Ron didn't seem to want to know, you know? He's spending so much time with Neville and Dean and Seamus and he didn't seem to want me anymore. I had to make new friends, right?"

"Of course," Fred soothed.

"We had this whole fight and then he ran off, leaving me crying in the corridor and I came in here," she said with a frown on her face and tears still running down her face. "I don't know, Fred. I love them both, but it feels like it was Harry that kept us together," she confessed in a whisper and began to sob fully again. Fred wrapped her up in his arms.

Holding her was the only thing he could do, Fred realised. The only way he knew how to deal with situations was humour. He wished he knew anything else. If he was smart like her, he'd be able to tell her how to deal with it. If he was Harry, he could say something inspiring. Fred rather thought even Ron would know how to look after her better than he was right now.

And he was desperate to make her feel better. Maybe it was because it was his brother who had upset her. Maybe it was because she was almost kind of like a sister. The thought made Fred uncomfortable. Harry was like a brother, so Hermione should be like a sister, right?

Except she wasn't. They hadn't spent as much time together. That was an appropriate explanation, Fred figured.

"Fred?" she whispered and Fred loosened his hold on her, hoping to hell he hadn't made her feel uncomfortable. "Will you tell me something funny?" she requested and Fred was shell-shocked. He stared at her, his face full of wonder. That was the last thing he had expected.

So, with a wide smile, Fred began to tell the story of Fred and George's first prank at Hogwarts.

XXX