Chapter 6 – Upheaval

Sadie settled herself into her armchair attempting to mentally prepare herself for what she was about to see. This parchment was, after all, about the Battle of Hogwarts. These were not going to be happy childhood memories or even unpleasant school year remembrances. This was an actual battle. It was hard to convince yourself of what that really meant. People had been hurt and killed, and Sadie was about to have a front row seat. It was different she decided than just reading about some faceless persons (or in her case what had always been a vague notion of a family member she had never known).

As powerful and expressive as words could be, there were some things that Sadie knew just couldn't be conveyed in such a medium. This was going to be beyond that. This was going to be seeing it. It was going to be really seeing it from the perspective of someone who had actually been there. It was going to be intense and frustrating and painful. Sadie had no illusions about it being easy to watch, but it had to be done. She thought about her father's brother and the potential part he might be playing in what she was about to witness. She would just try to stay away from Colin if he appeared in any of the memories she decided. Part of her wanted to know what had truly happened if it was in there somewhere, but another part of her knew that she wasn't quite ready to see it either. With a deep breath, she opened the seal.

Tell me about the Battle of Hogwarts.

No.

Sadie was so shocked that she stopped the player. That was all there was to the message – no reason, no equivocation. Just no. Should she let the memory play anyway? Luna had never refused to answer a question before. Granted she didn't know about the memory capture either. Sadie cut off that train of thought before she had time to start feeling guilty again. She should see what memory had prompted Luna to refuse. Maybe she was just uncomfortable talking about fighting in the battle. That had to be it. It couldn't be pleasant to relive something like that. Sadie was actually doing her a favor by allowing the story to be told without Luna having to go through the pain of relating it to someone. It really was better this way. Realizing that she was trying to convince herself, Sadie started the memory playing before she had time to talk herself out of it.

The great hall was so full of people that it took Sadie a moment to locate Luna. She was seated at the Ravenclaw table next to a girl of Indian descent with long, dark hair. A boy's voice coming from the direction of the Hufflepuff table was shouting a question about staying to fight. Before Sadie could locate who had spoken, a girl a few seats down from Luna was calling out about having time to gather her possessions. Honestly, Sadie thought to herself looking around at the anxious faces in the room, who thought about stuff at a time like this? Had they not all realized what was happening? Her thoughts were interrupted by a commanding voice that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. It was Voldemort she realized feeling a shiver run down her spine. It was Voldemort trying to convince them not to fight – to give him Harry Potter. As if acquiescing to his demands on this occasion would suddenly make everything all right. Sadie watched as three of the houses stood to protect Harry. It was a bizarre sight. Little more than children (most of them clothed in pajamas) stood between Harry and a hysterical girl at the Slytherin table with an almost universal expression of determination on their faces. Sadie almost (almost) felt badly for the poor girl. She had obviously not expected to find herself on the firing end of the wands of 3/4 of the school. Even a few of the Slytherin students around her were looking at her with an expression of distaste on their faces. Although, Sadie wasn't entirely sure if it was due to what she had said or if it was a response to her drawing attention in their direction.

As the evacuation began, no one remained at the Slytherin table. That bothered Sadie for some reason that she couldn't quite determine. She had been told many times that the rivalry between the houses hadn't always been a good-natured competition for points. It had always been hard for her to envision a time when you weren't just better friends with students from your own house because of the quantity of time that you spent with them. You were sorted of course by different qualitites or goals that you held, but that there had been a time that the differences between the houses had been so far reaching that the lines of loyalty had been so clearly drawn as what she was now seeing was difficult to process. Hadn't any of the Slytherin students understood that what was going on was wrong? Hadn't any of them believed that Hogwarts was worth defending? Sadie stopped herself in the middle of that thought. Hadn't there been a time not so very long ago when she was convinced that it was irresponsible for the students to stay behind to fight? How was that any different?

The sound of a voice shouting "Creevey, go!" shook her out of her revery. Her previous determination to avoid him if possible crumbled. Hadn't she always wondered why he had stayed behind when they evacuated the underage? This was her chance to know. She silenced the voice in the back of her head that was telling her that she was nowhere near ready to watch her uncle die. After all, the battle hadn't even started yet. She would just watch him and find out why he hadn't gone. She could do that. She looked around for Colin, but she couldn't spot him in the crowd. She stopped the memory and replayed it from the beginning – guiltily hurrying over Luna's "No." inscribed at the start. Someone had told him to leave. Someone had tried to keep the underage out of what was about to follow. She couldn't decide if that was comforting or not. She rushed over to the Gryffindor table and began scanning faces. She found him seated halfway down the table. His head was close to the girl sitting next to him, and they appeared to be whispering frantically back and forth. As the two of them broke apart to look for the source of Voldemort's voice with everyone else, Sadie found herself staring at the face of the girl in shock. She was the proper age, but Sadie had never bothered to ask her her house affiliation. She had always rather assumed that most people who would have decided to dedicate their lives to book publishing would have been Ravenclaws. She had been wrong on that score. Natalie McDonald had been a Gryffindor. Not only that, she had obviously known Colin. Why hadn't she ever said anything? Why hadn't she told her? The confusion and sense of resentfulness she was feeling toward Nat were short lived however. It was overpowered by a set of stronger emotions.

Sadie had always found stories that used the phrase "the world stopped turning" to be rather overly dramatic, but that would be the phrase she would write at this moment if she were capable of writing (or even of coherent thought). As the students at the table turned to face the shouting Slytherin girl, Sadie caught sight of the boy who had been sitting on the other side of Colin – it was her father. Sadie stared at him in shock – not really believing what her eyes were telling her. It wasn't possible. Her father had gone to Beauxbatons. She had seen the diploma herself. Dennis Creevey should have been in France, but he wasn't. He was there at Hogwarts. He was standing next to his older brother, wand pointed across the great hall, with a glittering DA coin showing between the clutched fingers of his other hand. It couldn't be. He would have told her. He would have said something. He would have . . . but he hadn't. He had been there, and he had never told her. He had let her think that he had been hundreds of kilometers away from everything that had happened when the truth was that he had been right there in the middle of it. It wasn't Colin's DA coin that she had found in the desk all those years ago – it was her father's. He had lied to her.

Still not wanting to believe what she was seeing, Sadie scrambled to her desk and fumbled through the stack of unsorted correspondence still sitting there. After what seemed an eternity, she finally found her copy of Luna's DA list. She frantically ran her eyes down the list barely registering the fact that Luna had gone to the trouble of putting it in alphabetical order for her. Creevey, Colin. Creevey, Dennis. There it was undisputedly written in black and white. Luna wondering why she hadn't just asked her father. Adrienne being so frantic about her actually reading the list. It all made sense now. Except that nothing made sense anymore. Why? Why wouldn't he have told her? Why would he have lied about something as basic as where he went to school? Except he had gone to school at Beauxbatons. She knew he had. He must have transferred later. Why lie? Why not just refuse to talk about it like all the other adults who had been there? And her mother had never corrected her. She had gone along with it all these years. What was so horrible about the truth? All of those cut off conversations when Sadie had thought her dad couldn't bring himself to talk about Colin because he felt guilty for not being there for his brother had really ended because he was feeling guilty about lying. Only he hadn't felt guilty enough, not enough to tell her the truth.

Sadie found herself replaying the memory in the great hall over and over. She lost count of how many times she watched it. Enough times that she completely lost track of where Luna was. Enough times to dimly note her mother – looking frightened and confused at fourteen rushing past her as the hall cleared of students. Enough times that she memorized the looks on all three of their faces as Natalie and Dennis followed a Gryffindor prefect out of the hall leaving Colin sitting at the table. She couldn't follow him – her father. This was Luna's memory, and Luna hadn't gone out the door. Finally, she stopped and sank back in her chair with her arms hugging her knees. Nothing coherent was filtering through her head; not even emotions were registering. She just felt numb.

Sadie wasn't sure how long she sat curled up in her overstuffed armchair trying to process what she now knew. She wasn't even sure what it was that she knew. All she was sure of at the moment was that the numbness was fading, and in its place she was hurt and very, very angry, and she suddenly didn't want to be sitting in her apartment alone anymore.

Drake,

Please. Just come over.

Sadie