Chapter 2

The next few days before the arrival of the Hogwarts Express at King's Cross did not go quite as Aludra had imagined. Her plan had been to be as cold to these people as she could, since she knew they must abhor the very idea of having some orphan brat taking up space and eating their food with no benefit offered them. Even if they acted nice to her, as she was sure they would since they must be decent beings for Dumbledore to leave her with them, the purest of hate must lurk underneath, and what else would she expect from a family that has lived in poverty their entire lives? It was how she would feel in their places. As soon as they reached Diagon Alley, she planned to split from them, leaving them to their friends and their original plans, before she was thrust upon them. She was not the kind of girl to impinge upon another person for longer than was necessary. Given the chance, she was positive that she could have made it on her own for the next few days until the train came, but now that she was here she knew they would never knowingly let her leave.

All of this crossed her mind as she lay in the bottom bunk, the bed above her vacant. Eager, and quite boisterous, voices from downstairs mumbled together into a gentle roar, joined by the aroma of a breakfast not grand, but definitely better than any she had partaken in at the orphanage. She would have to face them sooner or later, and it had always been her philosophy to get the worst over so she could enjoy the better times longer. Slipping out from beneath the covers, she deftly arranged the bedspread as if no one had slept in it the night before. Her small, dinged and scraped trunk sat in the corner, the lock untouched. Well at least she knew they had some respect for her privacy. Removing the spell she had placed upon the lock the previous evening just in case someone would try to pry into her life, she changed into a faded gray t-shirt she had owned for several years now, back when it was actually loose on her, and some threadbare blue jeans. A quick brush through her long black hair, returning it to its usual pony tail, and she was ready for this next encounter.

Padding down the wood stairs, which had been worn smooth from countless years of use, in her bare feet, she reached the open door of the kitchen where it seemed the whole lot of them had congregated. Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the doorway, but everyone was so busy with their conversations that they didn't even notice her there. Mrs. Weasley, the plump, red-headed woman she had met the night before, bustled around the kitchen adding the finishing touches to the breakfast. At the table sat two twin boys with their backs to her, whispering incantations at something on the seat between them, the both hunched over in a scheming sort of way. Across from them a shorter, but just as lanky, boy leaned fruitlessly over the table to see what they were whispering about. Beside him a small girl hummed softly, her nose in a book, and not a school book, by the looks of it. And at the head of the table, the end closest to the door, sat Mr. Weasley, taller and thinner than his wife, but definitely carrying some weight appropriate for his age. Every one of them had hair even redder than the picture she had seen of them in the paper just a few days ago. Amidst all the chaos, they seemed genuinely happy, which shouldn't have surprised her, since she knew from experience that those with the least were sometimes the ones who got the most enjoyment from life. She had seen it all around the orphanage, but she had never experienced that kind of joy herself. Sure, she had had short moments where she was truly happy, but as soon as the moment ended, she was back to the duty she had laid upon herself to become great and powerful so she could escape from the life she had been thrown into; always studying books and practicing spells. But this family, they were smiling and laughing like she used to before life fell upon her.

The boy was the first to notice her standing there. Giving up on his futile attempts to spy his brothers' new trick, he glanced up towards his mother and, in the process, spied Aludra watching them all with a bit of a bewildered look upon her face. Immediately he froze, still half standing and at a loss for words, or so it seemed.

"Oh...hello." The stammered greeting seemed all he could muster at the moment, but it didn't matter for the rest of them soon piped in as well. Mrs. Weasley spun away from the stove where a wooden spoon was stirring something with a thick consistency.

"Well, good morning, dear! I wondered how long you would sleep in with how late you showed up here last night. You must have been exhausted, poor thing." The woman acted as if she was going to come her way and probably even hug her, so Aludra had to think fast, remembering the crushing hug from the night before. Grasping at anything,

"Do you smell something burning?" Mrs. Weasley didn't see the noticeable flinch Aludra gave as she approached her, but quickly whipped around towards her stove, shrieking about her breakfast. Looking back over at the table, the young girl simply glanced up, bored with the whole idea, and quickly returned to her book. Mr. Weasley set down his paper and twisted in his chair to see her better. Just like his wife he seemed to radiate sunshine this morning, shown by his enormous smile and twinkling eyes. Aludra thought it might be just too much for her. She never did like attention.

"It's good to have you with us! Go on, take a seat." As soon as he said it the twin boys, who had up to that moment been sizing her up like potential competition, slid apart leaving a space more than enough for her to sit between them.

"Here's a spot." The one on the left smiled and patted the bench between them.

"Don't worry, we don't bite." The other on the right smiled the same smile. Looking from one to the other left her more than a little suspicious of their intentions, especially with the knowledge that they had been muttering spells on that spot only moments before. Manners meant they couldn't do anything horrible to her and she could always pay them back for any prank they pulled on her, so she moved to sit there, offering them a small smile. The smaller boy spoke up before she did, though. "Careful, those two are almost always up to something." Smiling graciously, she replied.

"Thanks for the warning." It was very odd seated between the twins since, though she was a little taller than average for her age, they were still several heads taller than she. The younger boy managed to find his seat, but still seemed awed by her somehow. She resisted the urge to fidget under his dazed stare, knowing that nothing about her appearance could be causing his reaction. Mr. Weasley set down his paper and peered at Aludra as he folded his hands, elbows resting on the table.

"I suppose introductions are in order. That's Ginny, the one with her nose in the book, Ron beside her, to your left is Fred and to your right is George, the twin troublemakers of the bunch. And I don't know where Percy...

"I'm right here. Geez, I come to breakfast at a decent time, rather than the ungodly hour all of you wake up at, and suddenly I'm 'late'." A miserable looking boy practically strutted from the doorway of the kitchen over to the bench beside his youngest brother Ron. His spectacles hung precariously on the tip of his long nose and his hair, slightly less red than the rest of his family's, fluffed on top of his head giving Aludra the image of a lonely, eccentric, miserable old miser. She seemed to be right about all of it, except the old and the miser parts.

"Dad was just wondering where you were.

"Right, no need to take it personally," the twins chimed in. Grumbling under his breath, Percy noticed Aludra for the first time, pausing in his ill mood to scrutinize this new intrusion. He was the only one who reacted the way Aludra had expected, pretending to be civil while secretly despising her within. Through his false smile, he managed to remember his manners.

"You must be Aludra. It's a pleasure to have you with us, even under the circumstances." This peaked Aludra's curiosity.

"Circumstances? And what would those be?" Aludra arched an eyebrow in suspicion. He was being a bit abrasive and things didn't bode well for this encounter.

"You know, you being abandoned as a child and all. It's all very tragic. But if that hadn't happened, you wouldn't be with us right now." Percy was obviously a sour person and Aludra wondered how someone living every day with a family like this could be so very different from the rest. Aludra did not take kindly to the mention of her parents, however, and had to restrain herself in order to keep the fire of rage she felt inside from awakening at this boy's stupid insensitivity.

"I must say how very tactful you are in bringing up the subject of my parents, which every other decent human being in the world would know should be the last thing to mention to a girl who has been raised in an orphanage pretty much her whole life. However, since you insist on getting right to the point, the point being my parents' apparent abandonment of myself, I must say that circumstances lean more towards the idea that my parents are deceased, so that I am, in fact, an orphan, and not simply a cast aside remnant of lost love." There was a small glint in her cobalt eyes that betrayed the enjoyment of putting Percy in his place, but she was able to completely conceal the surprise she felt at controlling her temper like she did. Self-control was not one of her more well known qualities. She had, in fact, almost immediately resorted to jinxing any of the children who pushed her buttons. She had seen no reason to restrain herself from punishing those insolent brats, but this was different. Now that she was in this more sophisticated realm where child wizards and witches went to prestigious boarding schools, there were certain rules and regulations to follow, certain unwritten ideas of tact and composure that must be adhered to if she wanted to move up in the world. She was, however, surprised that she had been able to restrain herself from the outburst welling up within her and instead being able to respond in a calm, yet superior manner. She would get no where by losing her temper anymore. Percy acted like he wanted to respond, but he was at a loss for words at the moment, though his composure remained collected. The twins glanced at one another, obviously impressed with the way Aludra had handled their brother and were eager to see how she held up under their own battery of pranks. Mrs. Weasley had, by that time, finished with the preparations for breakfast and proceeded to move everything to the kitchen table where they
were seated.

"Now Percy, darling, please remember that Aludra here has been through enough troubles already and doesn't need you giving her a hard time as well. Now everyone dig in before it gets cold." At the word all the children around her began grabbing for whatever food they could, George succeeding in his fight for the orange juice. After pouring himself a glass, he smiled at Aludra, filling up her glass as well. Passing the juice on to Fred, on her other side, she turned to see George heaping spoonfuls of his mother's oatmeal into her oversized bowl. She would never be able to eat that much.

"That's more than enough, thank you!" she quickly responded, but not unkindly. Looking desperately at her bowl at the portion enough to feed two people her size, Ron jumped in.

"Here, I'll take half of that for you. The bowl'll be empty by the time I get it anyways," since Percy had obtained the oatmeal first. When Ron had rescued her from being drowned in her own breakfast, Mrs. Weasley hopped up to fetch the biscuits she had forgotten in the oven.

"Aludra, dear, if you don't mind my asking, what was it like living in that orphanage? I mean, there must be some regulations on how they treat you at a place like that, right?" Aludra turned around, towards Fred, in order to see Mrs. Weasley better, feeling it impolite to not do so.

"Well, the Ministry of Magic could really care less about how the orphanage treats the students there. I honestly believe that the only reason I and the other older children there survived at that place as long as we did was because of the freedom to leave in the afternoons when classes were over and go wherever we wished. We learned a lot more on the streets of London than we did in those dusty classrooms. Other than that, all the younger children sleep in one large room with a center aisle with only the space beneath your bed to keep your meager possessions. One the children reached school age, though, they are moved into small, two person rooms with a bunkbed, a closet for each, and a short armoire for each as well. The trunk I bought with money I earned from doing small chores for the people around town."

"One large room for the younger ones? How many were there at your orphanage? And did they feed you well enough?"

"I would say there were about thirty children from the ages of 2 to 10 when I left and only 5 of us of school age. Most of the kids, when they reach school age, bolt, leaving the orphanage for a life on the streets since there's not much chance of being adopted once a child is that old. As for meals, they would feed us a small breakfast and a meager meal in between lunch and dinner. It was enough for us to live off of, but a lot of the kids, especially the younger ones, suffered from malnutrition from time to time. Nothing that's not expected from living in those conditions, though." Mrs. Weasley simply shook her head in disbelief as she set the biscuits on the table and returned to her seat. Turning back around, Aludra stopped in wonderment at the sight of her orange juice. In the time that she had been speaking with Mrs. Weasley her juice had taken on a brilliant plum coloring. Glancing suspiciously at Fred's glass, his orange juice was still orange. Sure enough, so was George's. In amazement she returned her gaze back to her own glass. Did they honestly believe she wouldn't notice that they had put something in her juice or did they simply not realize that what they planned to give her would react to the orange juice in that manner? Smirking amusedly, she took several large spoonfuls of the oatmeal in rapid succession. It was hard not to want to down the entire bowl in one gulp. Not that she was that hungry, though she was quite famished, it was just that she had never tasted anything quite like it. Sure she had had oatmeal before, but this had a certain flavor she couldn't quite place. With the oatmeal dripping off her spoon half way between her mouth and the bowl, she froze and realized she had made a dreadful miscalculation. The boys on either side of her were shaking and hiding their faces from her as they tried to keep from laughing out loud. She had been duped; when they realized how the potion they had reacted to the juice, they had turned around and put it in her oatmeal as well, except this time it didn't turn it purple. Putting her spoon down apprehensively, she looked from one to the other.

"What did you two do?" Their shaking became worse and Fred began making a sound as if he were choking. George simply started whimpering slightly at the force with which he was holding back the laughter. "Spill it.

"George did it," Fred squeaked, which was all he could manage at the moment; he was still shaking, but now he was snorting as he slowly lost control. George gave a barking laugh and spun around to look at Fred.

"Traitor!" But before Aludra could respond, George glanced at her and fell over backwards off the bench because of the force of his laughter. Fred buried his head in his arms, leaning on the table for support as his entire body shook with his silent laughs. Aludra opened her mouth to question them again, but Ginny spoke up for the first time that morning.

"You're face is turning purple, like the color of your drink." Aludra sighed, waiting for the boys to finish with their fits, because there was no way they could tell her how to reverse what they had done until they had finished. Finally Fred sat up, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes while George lay on the floor, gasping for breath. There had been just enough oatmeal left for Aludra to get a new bowl, so she had finished her breakfast by the time they were in any kind of state to help her out. After some coaxing, they finally told her that the coloring would fade on its own and she would be back to normal by tomorrow morning.

The rest of the day was spent doing little chores around the house, like taking care of some nuisance lawn gnomes out in the garden or scrubbing the windows till they were indeed transparent again. George and Fred continued to lay traps for her, but she caught on quickly and made sure not to turn her back on them for a moment and the day ended with no further incident at the hands of the twins. Ron was quite friendly, she realized, when he became more comfortable around her, and by the end of the day he was rambling on about his two best friends, Harry and Hermione. But Ginny was still as closed to her as ever, as was Percy. It didn't matter to her, though, because she would only be here for one more day and then it was off to the Hogwarts Express for school. That night, as she lay in bed with Ginny fast asleep in the bed above her, she plotted out her scheme to get back at those fiendish twins. I'll show them I have a rightful place in this family. Before she could react to that surprising thought, she was fast asleep, for she had never felt a bed as comfortable as this.