Disclaimer: Not mine.

Gale sat in an armchair of the Gryffindor common room, her knees drawn up to her chest. Neville and Ginny were staring at her, apprehensively. Her eyes was blacked and her lip slightly swollen. But that wasn't why they were staring. No, her friends were staring at her because she looked so angry . . . and scared.

She couldn't help the scared part. She had just been forced to spend twenty minutes in a dark office with her worst nightmare. He had taunted her just by standing close to her. She constantly felt nauseous, not knowing what on earth he was going to do to her. He would just stare at her, occasionally walk around her and twirl her fingers through her. And when she wouldn't talk, wouldn't make any sound, he got angry and hit her, obviously more than once.

But she couldn't tell Ginny and Neville that. To talk would ruin her whole act of defiance. She was trying to prove a point. They had silence Albie, had tried to silence all Dumbledores. She would keep her mouth shut to protect her friends but she would not be silenced, not figuratively at least.

It hadn't started as an act of defiance though. At first, almost immediately after Albie's funeral, she just hadn't felt like talking. She was heartbroken and lonely. She had hoped to see Aberforth at the funeral, but he hadn't been there . . . then again he could have but she didn't have a clue what he looked like. As the last two Dumbledores, she thought they could help each other but – he obviously wanted nothing to do with her. That's when she just didn't talk, not even when Harry, Ron, and Hermione tried to get her to talk. And then she realized she couldn't, even if she wanted to, she couldn't. No sound was coming out of her mouth as if someone had locked up her throat and thrown away the key.

And that's what made her so angry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to shout. She wanted Aberforth to want to be her family. She wanted to talk with Neville and Ginny. She wanted – she wanted to go up to Draco Malfoy and tell him just how much she hated him at the moment.

Neville and Ginny looked at each other. "Gale, you can talk to us," Ginny said, softly.

Oh, she really wished she could. She knew they wanted to know what happened, what Ark did, why she was so scared of him.

But right now, her fear of Jasper didn't matter. She decided while she was trapped with him that she if she couldn't speak out with her mouth, she'd speak out with her actions.

Again, she held up the galleon that Harry had given her just before he left. He told her how to work it so that she could keep in contact with them through Hermione and Ron.

"What do you want us to do, Gale?" Neville asked.

Frustrated, she grabbed her bag, pulling out her parchment, quill, and ink bottle. Neville got up and stood behind her as she wrote furiously, realizing that she was not going to get them to understand with charades.

"'I'm tired of sitting around, doing nothing,'" Neville read. "'I want to do something.' Like what? There's not much we can do without getting in – 'We can fight'. How?"

Ginny reached over and took the coin from Gale. She stared at it for a moment. "We can fight," she muttered. She looked up at Neville excited. "We can fight!"

She stood up, pacing. Neville watched her. "There's only the four of us, Ginny. You, me, Gale, and Luna. What can the four of us do against Death Eaters?"

"It's not just the four of us, Neville," Ginny said. She held up the Galleon again. "That's what Gale's been trying to say. We can bring the D.A. back together. That's what, maybe twenty-six, almost thirty of us?"

Harry had told her all about the D.A. last year and she had loved it. The idea of bringing it back now, Dumbledore's Army . . . it was exciting.

"But who knows if they actually want to do this? Where do we meet? Malfoy knows about the Room of Requirement and it's not like we can meet up in a Common Room or an empty classroom."

"We don't have to meet." Ginny looked to Gale, who was smiling slightly. "We just . . . we just need to show that we're here. We need to show that they can't scare us. That's how we fight. We can't just let them think they've won."

Gale's smile grew. She hopped out of her chair, moving towards the portrait hole. Her friends followed her cautiously, peeking out into the hallway to make sure no one was there. Quiet as mice, they ran through the hallways, Neville nervous, Ginny anxious, and Gale excited. When they got a ways away from the Gryffindor tower, Gale pulled out her wand.

Pointing it at the wall, she began to write. Large, bold, silver letters that looked like spray paint, not like anything that could have been painted by a wand. It had to be just perfect or else it would give Snape and the rest reason to test everyone's wands. Behind her, Ginny and Neville waited patiently. After a moment, Gale stepped back, grinning.

DUMBLEDORE'S ARMY, STILL RECRUITING

Ginny and Neville stepped up next to her. Ginny grinned, nodding. "Nice," she whispered. "Real nice."

Neville was smiling. "You'll have to teach us how to do that. Come on. We need to get back to the Tower."

Laughing quietly, the three of them ran just as quietly as they had before, feeling that they might just accomplish something this year, after all.

A/N: So it's pretty short, I know. But I just kinda wanted to get a setup going on into the rebellion. Thanks for reading and I will see you next chapter.