Hello. Well, after about forty chapters of drawing things out and doing all that exposition stuff, this is ACTIONACTIONACTION! Heh...relatively at least. Last chapter will be up either tonight or tomorrow. Oh, and sorry about the title mix-up--the last chapter was Psychopathic Murderer Bloke. This is Ending the Year with a Bang. Enjoy, mes amies:
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Ending the Year with a Bang
Ron couldn't believe it. Someone was obviously trying to play a funny joke on him—maybe that Malfoy scum. Perhaps someone wanted to distract him during his exam so he'd get abysmal grades on his O.W.L.s. Ha-ha.
As the other fifth years streamed into the Great Hall to take the Charms Theory Test, many of them gossiping in hushed tones about what had happened that morning, Ron leaned against the wall, cradling his face with his hands and taking great, gulping gasps of air.
This was how Hermione found him. Forgetting all her inhibitions, she flung her arms around him. "Oh, Ron, I'm so sorry, about Susan a-and Ginny." He let her hold him, his face against her neck, allowing the clean smell of her skin to calm him down. His face so close to hers, his breath hot on her cheek made her feel a strange warmth she knew she couldn't worry about just yet.
When he could finally talk again, he said profoundly, "Something incredibly fucked up is going on."
Hermione didn't chide him; rather, she laughed shakily.
"Ginny'd never…" he continued.
"Of course not!" she snapped vehemently. "It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I've half a mind to write a letter to the Ministry—"
"Everybody in, everybody in," sputtered the examiner, Professor Marchbanks.
Hermione glanced towards the old man, then pulled Ron along into the Great Hall. "C'mon, Ron…exams." Ron followed half-heartedly. If there was anything he could do, he thought miserably, he'd surely bungle it up somehow anyway.
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"I don't have time for these stupid exams," Harry spat as he and Malfoy strode upstairs from the dungeons.
"Well, you could always pull a Goyle and disappear," Malfoy drawled, not noticing Harry flinch. "Or you could kill someone, I suppose," he added thoughtfully.
Harry, trying not to shudder, asked, "What's that supposed to mean?"
Malfoy glanced at him. "Didn't you hear at breakfast? That Weasel girl apparently murdered some other bint. And…er…well, she's younger, but if she were a fifth-year, she wouldn't have to take the O.W.L.s—" Malfoy explained, his brow wrinkled as he confused himself, before he was interrupted.
"What in God's name are you talking about?" Harry asked. Something in him gave a painful wrench as he tried to digest this. "Ginny Weasley killed someone?!"
Malfoy shrugged. "Personally, I don't think a stupid little blood-traitor'd have the bollocks to do it. And they say she kept rambling on about some tall, pale bloke that did it, but they couldn't find anyone…"
Harry stopped. "Tall? Pale?"
Malfoy looked at him, perplexed. "Yeah, so what?" The throng of Slytherins pushing past them on the stairs didn't understand the meaning of going around, so Malfoy grabbed Harry into the landing corner to be out of the way. "Something wrong?"
Harry glanced up at him. "What are they gonna do with her?" he mumbled.
Malfoy shrugged. "I dunno. Take her to the Ministry or something. They've got her tied up in the Entrance Hall," he added gleefully. "Oh, irony…big bad Weasel in Azkaban, think of it…"
Harry thought if he had to take one more bombshell, he'd turn comatose. "I have to go…I'll catch up with you later, okay?" Malfoy looked hesitant, but Harry yelled, "GO!" Before his friend had disappeared, Harry grabbed his arm and pulled him into an embrace.
"If I take longer than I should…I'll see you later, okay?" he assured Malfoy firmly. The fair haired boy only nodded dumbly, more confused than ever, before Harry shoved him away and into the crowd.
It must have been Tom, he thought as he watched Malfoy disappear up the stairs. He then hurtled back down the way he'd come, all the way down to the Slytherin common room. He snatched up his cloak and his broomstick, a Nimbus Two Thousand, and ran up all eight flights of stairs to the Room of Requirement. Blood pounded in his head, and the images of Goyle's face before his fall were replaced by red tendrils of hair dripping water onto ashen skin.
Had Tom framed her? Had Tom killed someone? Harry's close friend, that charming boy who'd given him so much attention, advice, and sympathy, a murderer? Uncle Lupin warned me, he thought wretchedly. He warned me about putting too much trust in people, about being blindly loyal, and look where it's got me…
The Room of Requirement was empty. Harry shut the door, paced thrice again, wishing for a bedroom, and opened it. Empty. Tom was gone. Where? Harry wondered. To Lucius Malfoy, perhaps? To the Ministry of Magic, or maybe to his own home, however old and dilapidated—and maybe even inhabited—it was now?
The entire question came down to who Tom Riddle was. Harry realized numbly that Tom had never once spoken of his home or upbringing, only of his Hogwarts years.
But that didn't matter now. Harry had freed him, and they were in it together. He, however, couldn't let someone else's life get ruined over it. He rushed onto an outdoors balcony, hopped on his Nimbus, and took off.
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Ginny stared through the door of the Entrance Hall, watching as the hallways cleared, students sitting down to their O.W.L. exams. Would she be here next year to take these, or would she be rotting from the inside out in an Azkaban cell?
She heard footsteps. Tall figures were making their way to where she was trussed to the chair—McGonagall, it seemed, and a shorter figure that could have been the Minister of Magic. But Ginny was distracted by a whistling sound that grew louder and louder.
She turned her eyes to the huge window to her left before it smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor.
If she could have flung her hands over her face for protection she would have, but as it was all she could do was close her eyes against the shards of stained glass that sliced through the air. A second later, she heard a voice bellow, "REDUCTO!" and the ropes binding her disintegrated.
She opened her eyes. The Potter boy was hovering in front of her on a broomstick, his face bloodied and his eyes gleaming with a fearful determination, while she heard a commotion coming from the Great Hall next door. But there was only a moment for thought, before Potter grabbed her, swung her in front of him on the broom, and took off through the broken window into the sky.
She heard voices yelling Stunning curses, looked over Potter's shoulder to see people streaming out of the doors of the castle, some laughing and some screaming.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she asked Potter hoarsely.
"Shut up. I'm rescuing you," he snapped.
Ginny turned her eyes back to the view ahead of her. She saw the beams of spells shooting over their shoulders before the broom flew out of range. As the sun moved across the sky, they made their way across the Forbidden Forest, leaving the Hogwarts grounds behind.
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Soon, it seemed that the escapees on the broomstick had either landed or flown too high to be seen. Shaken, the staff had ushered the students back inside to finish their O.W.L.s, as if such a thing was possible. The last thing Hermione had seen before she'd gone in was Cornelius Fudge spluttering to Dumbledore about heading a school of delinquents and fugitives. The headmaster himself looked grave and pensive, which worried Hermione. She'd come to expect only understanding and twinkling eyes from the old man.
Back inside, she came close to the shattered window in the Entrance Hall. Carefully picking her way over the pieces of stained glass, she touched her fingers to the busted edges still encased in the frame, trying to decide if what was going on was real. Ron's devastated face floated back into her mind, and the feel of his shuddering breath on her skin. How, she asked herself, is he going to feel about flying and brooms and escaping now?
She took one last glance out of the hole in the window. There was Hagrid's hut in the distance, and a little further off, the Forbidden Forest. Birds, seeming only specks in the sky, flew over the topmost branches of the imposing trees. One speck seemed to get larger and larger as she stared.
Hermione blinked and squinted harder, her eyes widening as she realized what she was seeing, what no one else, it seemed, had seen: Ron Weasley's sister with her unexpected rescuer, disappearing at the far end of the Forbidden Forest.
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Er...action! I'll tell you, I very much enjoyed writing the scenes in this chapter. The window-smashy part in particular. It took me so long to figure out how to move Harry and Ginny toward each other, in a plot sense, and once I'd landed on this idea I probably started whooping with victory. Writing's a lot of fun sometimes.