A/N: Yes. Yes, this has been a long time coming. Yes, I am rubbish.
Onto other news, thank you very much to reviewers, especially the ones who put stupid grins on my face. You are excellent people.
SIX
"Arthur, you cannot be serious." Molly Weasley's lower lip trembled as she spoke, worry creasing her forehead.
"I'm afraid that I am, Molly dear," her husband answered in a resigned manner. "I've already written her a letter, of course, but I thought I should let you add a bit to the end before I send it off." Molly nodded, her forehead creasing even further as she tried to imagine the right words to tell ones only daughter in a situation like this. Thunderbirds. Who even knew they existed?
They were sat at the kitchen table, as they always did for everything- from serious conversations to playful banter, full family meals to a cup of tea and a book. The sitting room in the Weasley household was rarely used, at least by the parents. That was the children's domain and this, the kitchen, was Molly's domain, which she was gracious enough to allow Arthur to use. Most of the time.
They sat in silence for a while, each contemplating the ways in which their beloved daughter's life was going to change. Molly was still trying to find the right words when, ten minutes later, a shining, silvery phoenix appeared in the room.
"Please come quickly. The Floo to my office is open," the phoenix said, though it used the headmaster's voice. Arthur had a split second's amusement at the deep, grandfatherly voice coming out of the bird's beak before he linked this summons to his and his wife's conversation. A glance at Molly's rapidly paling face told him that she too had made the connection. Without a word, they ran to the floo.
Severus Snape growled and flung yet another useless book across his office. He felt a strange sense of satisfaction as it smashed into the door and fell to pieces. Of course, he didn't know that there was a first year on the other side of that door, about to knock and ask some rather ignorant and pointless questions and potions, life and girls but now too scared to do anything but run away. So Severus Snape just assumed that this satisfaction came from destroying the thing that had wasted the last two hours of his life.
Of course, his fruitless search for any information about… well, anything, really was not the only source of annoyance. His confrontations with both the headmaster and the Weasley girl had done nothing but fan the flames of his ire.
"Fuck," he all but shouted suddenly, clutching his forearm in pain. If the first year had still been lingering outside the door in the vain hope that the Potions Master would answer his questions, if he could only get up the courage to knock on the door, his hopes would have been dashed.
Snape quickly flung a black cloak around his shoulders and grabbed his mask from the bottom drawer of his desk. Trust Voldemort to interrupt his research. As if he weren't having a bad enough day already.
"So that's why I'm officially waging war on Lavender Brown," Colin finished his story decisively and Ginny blinked, confused. Her mind had been elsewhere, caught between the roar of thunder and the terror of being one of Voldemort's targets. It had most definitely not been listening to Colin's story, although, having now heard the conclusion, she was wondering if she ought to have been listening after all. If a war was being waged on Lavender Brown, then Ginny most definitely wanted in. Anything to distract her from brooding on her conversation with Pansy that morning.
The Hospital Wing doors bashed open and Ginny winced as a plump, red-headed ball of worry flew towards her, a smaller, calmer red-headed ball of worry following close behind.
"Ginny, are you alright? How do you feel? We only just heard, and then we had to talk to the headmaster or we'd have been here sooner, oh I knew we'd been too lucky so far, you simply must come home-" Molly stopped talking abruptly as Arthur placed a calming hand on her shoulder. Colin threw a wry smile towards Ginny, the sort of smile that says 'have fun-I'm getting out of here while I can'. Ginny began to retract her wish to help him in his war against Lavender.
"I'd best be going," he said in his sweetest voice, smiling brightly at her parents, "It was nice to see you, Mr and Mrs Weasley." And with that he was gone. It was a good job that Ginny had years of experience at calming her frantic parents or she would have been shitting herself just then. Actually, even with that experience she was… well, you get the picture.
"Bye, Colin," Ginny called before turning to her mum and dad with a reassuring smile fixed firmly to her face. "I'm fine, honestly. I mean, I ache all over, but Madam Pomfrey fixed me up and I'm fine."
Her parents were not convinced. It may have been the wince as she sat upright in bed that did it, or it could have been Madam Pomfrey bustling over to feed Ginny more potions. It could have been mother's intuition or any number or other explanations. But whatever the cause, they were not buying her lie.
"Do not give us that line, Missy, now what on earth have you been getting yourself into now?" Molly snapped, going from worried to angry in roughly the space of two seconds. Arthur, as yet the silent partner in this good cop, bad cop routine, took a seat by the bedside and began staring at his daughter.
"What have I been getting myself into?" Ginny shrieked, earning herself a nasty look from Madam Pomfrey who was tending to another patient down the ward, "I was attacked! I didn't just walk up to them and go 'oh, hey, you know what would be really fun? You stabbing me!', did I?"
Molly squared her shoulders. Arthur sighed. Ginny had an angry conversation with the thunder in her head. There was silence for a moment, punctuated only by the mediwitches' scolding at the other end of the ward. And then Ginny finished (and won) her argument with the thunder and sighed.
"Listen, mum, I'm sorry. I just really don't know why they attacked me, I didn't do anything to provoke them and I didn't even know who they were until this morning. I can't remember what I did to them, but I do remember that they stabbed me before I did anything so it was all self defence and so really I haven't done anything wrong, but people keep coming in and yelling at me and I just… I just… I don't know what I did!" Ginny's voice was nigh-on hysterical at this point, a brilliant move on her part and one that caused the frown on Mrs Weasley's face to disappear.
"Oh, Ginny, don't worry sweetie. We'll take you home with us today and everything will be alright, how does that sound?" Ginny considered the offer. She thought of her own bed. No classes, no homework, no Snape! No people attacking her and nothing to set off the Thunderbird inside her. Well, apart from her mother that is. But then she thought of her friends and the library and meals in the Great Hall and that wonderful sense of wellness that she got from walking the halls of Hogwarts. And she thought of Pansy, Pansy who was now on her side, Pansy who was her ally. Pansy who was spying on her own classmates to try and help defeat Voldemort. In the end, there was really no question in Ginny's mind which she would rather choose. As much as she loved her parents (and she really did- adored them, in fact) she just could not go home with them and pretend that everything was fine. Because everything was not fine and she needed to face up to that. She was a Gryffindor, dammit.
"No. I can't. I won't run away from this. Besides, what about my classes? Now, with Voldemort back, they're more important than ever." Tears came to her mother's eyes, but her father simply carried on staring at her, a vaguely proud glint in his eye.
"In that case," he said, speaking for the first time, "We have some things that we need to tell you."
"But I've looked everywhere," Hermioned complained, pouting a little. Ron shot a grin at Harry, who struggled to hide a snigger. They were in the Gryffindor common room, roasting their feet in front of the fire and discussing what Harry and Ron had overheard the day before. Hermione had spent all night in the library, searching through the stacks of books under Harry's invisibility cloak (although Harry wasn't privy to this particular piece of information, the cloak in question having been smuggled out of his bag when he was distracted by staring at Draco Malfoy. He did that a lot, these days. It was part of his 'Malfoy is a Death Eater and must be stopped' plan; step one: stare at him until he confesses), but she still hadn't managed to find a single reference to a Thunderbird. She had even looked through the restricted section with no luck.
Of course, you may be wondering how on earth one girl managed to read through the entire Hogwarts library in one night. And you would be right to wonder such a thing, but you would, of course, be forgetting that it was Hermione Granger's sixth year at Hogwarts. She had read through at least half the library in her first year alone. Why that girl wasn't in Ravenclaw, no-one really knew.
"And nowhere has even a single reference to a Thunderbird," she carried on. Unknown to her, Neville's ears perked up from the table behind her chair where he had been struggling with his latest potions essay. "I mean, maybe they don't exist, maybe that's why they aren't in the books."
"Thunderbirds do exist," Neville piped up. Three heads immediately swiveled around to face him and he quailed slightly under the force of their stares. "I mean, I don't know if they do anymore, but they definitely used to. They might just be too old for the books."
Hermione crinkled her forehead, a look of incomprehension on her face.
"Too… old for the books? But what could possibly be too old for the books?"
Neville glanced down at his potions essay and bit his lip. He really needed to get this done tonight, or Snape would have him in detention for the rest of the week. And he couldn't have detention for the rest of the week because he had Herbology club tomorrow evening and they were being shown how to prune Devil's Snare. Harry, Ron and Hermione had those looks on their faces though. Those looks that said that they would hound you mercilessly until you gave them the information they wanted. He sighed and put down his quill.
"I'll tell you if you help me out with this essay, Hermione. I have no idea what other uses for a bezoar there are, other than curing poisons." Hermione grinned, a big, blinding, toothy grin. You could tell her parents were dentists when she grinned like that. Neville winced, wishing that he had never spoken in the first place. No going back now though.
"Right, well you all know the creation story, right? About Life and Death creating…" He trailed off after noticing the confused looks on two of his audiences' faces. He sighed again. This was going to be a long evening.
Pansy sighed. This was going to be a long evening. She was sat with Blaise, Draco and a few of the older Slytherins in a corner of the common room. The boys were playing Exploding Snap, of all things, whilst she was 'tutored' in Charms by a Seventh year girl with a nasty sneer and bushy eyebrows. As if she could teach Pansy anything about charms.
"See, you have to really jab your wand," the girl growled and Pansy closed her eyes for a second. She counted down from five and forcefully removed the image of herself jabbing her wand in the older girl's eye from her brain. 5,4,3,2,1. She opened her eyes again and tried the spell. Of course, she could already do the spell- had been able to since third year, and that was what made this tutoring process all the more painful. Besides the fact that the only power this girl had resided in her ability to grow body hair in unfortunate places.
"I saw you with the Weasley girl the other day, Pansy," Blaise said quietly. Not quietly enough to stop the entire table hearing his words though, and all heads swiveled around to face Pansy. Had she been a Gryffindor or Hufflepuff, that would undoubtedly have been the end of her career as a spy. As it was, she was a Slytherin and so was all too used to fielding sly, probing questions. Blaise was the worst for it. He would wait until you were quite relaxed and then drop the bomb. Whether it was who you had slept with or who you had tortured, Blaise would know about it and he would maneuver you into a corner in which you couldn't help but give yourself up. He was a bastard and a perfect Slytherin.
She tried the spell again. It didn't work.
"Yes," Pansy twisted her face into a sneer and readjusted her top as she spoke, "McGonagall is making me tutor her for her potions OWL. Like the traitor is ever going to pass it anyway." She finished her sentence with a slight giggle, as if pleased with her own insult, and went back to trying the spell. It still didn't work, because the wand motion wasn't a jab, it was a swish. Sometimes Pansy thanked all that she believed in that her family wasn't as inbred as many of the other old families. At least she had escaped that particular obstacle.
"I didn't realize that you were all that good at potions," Draco commented idly, one eye on the sliver of cleavage that Pansy had revealed, the other on his cards. He was easy to distract. Far too easy.
"I'm not, I suppose. But I did well enough and Weasley is failing and Dumbledore is still trying to promote that house unity in times of war bullshit, so I've been lumped with the job." It was a testament to how little they thought of her intelligence that they were so easily fooled into believing the obvious lie. After all, Pansy might just about be clever enough to tutor a failing student, but to come up with a cover story that quickly? No way, you must be thinking of a different Parkinson.
Pansy sighed again as she felt Draco's fingers brush her leg. Yes. This was going to be a very long night.
Ginny lay in her bed in the hospital wing. Her eyes were shut and her breathing was slow and steady and to all outside observers it would appear that she was asleep. But Ginny Weasley was anything but asleep, racing through the storms in her mind at lightning speed, jumping through cloud upon cloud, soaked to the skin by rain, shots of pure adrenaline pumping through her body. She felt so small and so powerful, so restless and so exhilarated and so right. She was born to do this, she was born to be this.
Lightning hit and her eyes flew open. The flickering light of the gas lamp by her bed was all she could see and the soft cotton sheets of her bed was all she could feel. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes before she could stop them.
She was scared, for fuck's sake. She was scared and confused and she hated all of this pressure to win a war that she hadn't even known she was a real part of until a few months ago. She wondered if this was what Harry felt like all the time. She wondered if she would ever learn to control her power, or if the point was that she couldn't control it. Perhaps she was to be used as a bomb: shut inside a room full of Death Eaters and allowed to explode. She wondered if she was okay with that. She wondered if Pansy knew what to do.
More than anything, she wondered if she would be able to resist the temptation to give up control for long enough to do anything worthwhile.
Tom Riddle growled, pacing up and down the dining hall in a temper. The potion hadn't worked and he didn't have the girl. Or whatever the fuck she was. Reaching the head of the hall, he slumped into the throne-like chair and glared at the doorway, his red eyes glowing with such anger that it was a miracle he didn't burn a hole in the door. He kicked the mangled heap of blood, bones and skin at his feet. It looked like it could have been human once. But it wasn't now, wasn't anywhere near human because the fucking potion hadn't fucking worked.
Lord Voldemort was not used to failure. He didn't take to it well. It made him rather… testy.
There was a tiny knock at the door and he all but hissed 'Enter'. He smiled for the first time that day when Draco Malfoy walked through the door, bowing and scraping like a slave.
"Draco…," Voldemort whispered happily, stretching the 'o' for all it was worth.
"My lord," Draco murmured, "You called for me?" He was trembling and trying not to look at the pile of human remains at his lord's feet.
"Yesss… unforeseen circumstances have caused me to change my plans, Draco, which means that you too must change yours. If Dumbledore is not dead by Christmas, I will kill your mother. January, your father. February? Well… I'll keep that one a secret for now. Tell my other servants at that school fo yours that they have a new mission. I want Potter and the Weasley girl, alive and whole and in front of me. Now get out." Draco jumped, eyes wide and fingers bloody from having clenched his fists so tightly that his nails pierced the palms of his hands. He began to scurry backwards out of the hall, desperate to get away from his master and his childhood home.
"Yes, my lord, of course, my lord," he murmured under his breath, praying to merlin that he reached the door before-
"Oh, and Draco… Crucio." Draco's scream ripped through the air, but it was not the cruciatus curse that haunted his dreams that night. It was the face he had seen at his lord's feet as he lay panting on the floor, aftershocks of pain attacking his body. It was a handsome face, or would have been, had it been for the red eyes, wide, still and staring and the flat, snake-like nose.