Chapter 7: Number 12, Grimmauld Place
"Right, I'm all packed." Harry dusted off his hands and turned to Ron, who was draped his bed, head hanging over the edge. He was surrounded by a heap of clothes, a small pile of which were neatly stacked and folded. It was easy to tell what Hermione called packing, and had helped Ron with, and what he had done himself. The sloth like form grunted, but made no move to pull himself up and get back to work. Unfortunately, Hermione chose that moment to enter.
"Ron?" She exclaimed. "Have you even begun packing?"
"Yes! Look!" Ron had hastily pulled himself up when she entered, and now gestured at the garments strewn over his duvet.
"You call that packing?"
"It's Ron, Hermione." Harry reminded her.
"Hey!"
"He has a pretty good point."
"I guess," Ron admitted. He turned to Hermione. "Hermione, will y-"
"No I will not, Ronald. You can do it yourself," she snapped, before turning on her heel and marching out of the room.
"This isn't third year anymore; you're not getting her to do your work for you."
"Yeah, but you'd think that now..." He trailed off, ears crimson.
"Now that you're going out? Or whatever this relationship between the two of you is. What is going on at the moment, anyway?"
"I don't know..."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't think I'm ready, Harry. I was before, or maybe I thought it was. It's all just bad timing. After everything that's happened... I don't know, I guess I just..."
"Need time to adjust?"
"Yeah," Ron hastily busied himself with folding a pair of robes, hiding his expression from Harry.
"You would have thought you would know how to do a simple folding charm by now, surely? You've been watching you mum pack your trunk for school for years," Harry commented, swiftly changing the subject.
"Oh, yeah, right." With a flick of his wand, the t-shirt Ron was holding began to fold itself. Charming the rest of the clothes, he sat back down on the edge of the bed.
"Won't it be really weird going back? The memories from that place aren't great, are they?"
"Everything's going to remind us of the past years, we can't run from it all, or we wouldn't have anything left. Bad memories or not, what happened over these seven years was my life." Harry banished the now folded clothes on Ron's bed into the open boxes lying around the room.
"Thanks."
"No problem."
They trooped down to the kitchen, their boxes hovering behind them. As they reached they reached the first landing, the sound of arguing came drifting up towards.
"No, Ginny! You can go with them and help them settle in, but there is no way I am letting you stay the night!" Ron and Harry exchanged glances.
"But why not? It's one night, Mum! I'll be in a room with Hermione, and it's only three months until I'm seventeen!"
"Yes, three months until you're an adult, so you're still under my care until that time."
"Under your care? I don't need protection anymore, none of us do!"
"He-Voldemort- may be dead, but there are a lot of people who agreed with his ideas still out there!"
"And if they decide they want me in particular dead, I'll be just as safe at Grimmauld Place as I will be here. It's just one night." There was a pause, and Harry wondered whether or not now was a good time to intervene.
"Alright, fine. But one night, mind!"
"Yes, Mum!" Ginny called over her shoulder, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. She grinned at Harry as she leapt up them two at a time.
"Gin', if your Mrs Weasley doesn't like the idea of you staying..."
"Harry, I just spent the last fifteen minutes getting her to let me go, and she's fine with it!"
"Yeah, but-" He stopped, cowering under the glare she shot him, before pushing past him and Ron, sprinting up her bedroom.
"Never argue with a female Weasley, that's rule number one round here. I thought you'd worked that much out by now!" Ron told him, incredulously.
"If it's between Ginny and your mum, I'd take Ginny."
"A choice you will one day learn to regret," Ron muttered under his breath.
"All packed?" Mrs Weasley asked as they entered the kitchen, her air light, but her smile a little too tense.
"Yep," Ron answered lowering his boxes to the floor next to Hermione's stack, each box labelled in her neat script of its contents.
"When are you three-" Mrs Weasley paused, brow furrowed, "four- leaving?" Harry glanced at Ron.
"As soon as Hermione gets down here, I suppose," he shrugged.
"Right, right." At that moment, Hermione and Ginny appeared at the foot of the stairs.
"Or now, I suppose..."
Hermione pulled her beaded purse out from her pocket and began banishing all the boxes into it. She straightened up again and looked around.
"Are we ready?"
"It doesn't matter if we've forgotten anything, so yeah, I think so," said Harry. They each hugged Mrs Weasley and headed out the back door in the direction of the gate. Once they were past the protective boundaries, they disapparated.
It hadn't changed. The small patch of grass in the middle of the street looked less parched than it had last summer, but the buildings remained as ugly and imposing as ever. Harry looked at the numbers on the front doors of the two in front of him.
"Eleven...thirteen? Where's-" he stopped short in the middle of taking a step forward. The buildings before him were moving, shifting, the same way they had done the first time Harry had seen Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. Uncertainly, he walked towards the house, the others right behind him.
The inside of the house was how they had left it, save for a thin layer of dust on the picture frames and shelves. Hermione instantly dashed upstairs to put everyone's boxes in their room. They had decided that Harry would stay in Sirius' room, Ron in the room he and Harry had stayed in their fifth year, and Hermione in the room she and Ginny had shared.
Harry sat down on the edge of Sirius' bed, and looked around at the poster-plastered walls, the still, yellowed muggle models frozen, posing and smiling. A floorboard by the door creaked slightly, and Harry turned.
"Why do you think they left everything as it was? Surely the Death Eaters should have destroyed it, like all the other places they'd raided?" he asked Hermione, who stood leaning against the doorframe.
"Pure-blood residence," She shrugged, "Sirius may have been part of the order, and Regulus turned traitor, but the Black family was still old and respected. They probably looked for any clue, but if they didn't find anything, they had no reason to pull the place apart."
"I suppose…"
"It was us they were looking for, and once we disappeared, they didn't really have much use for this place, I suppose."
Suddenly, there was a loud yell from down the corridor. Harry leapt to his feet, glancing, shocked at Hermione, whose expression must have mirrored his own. They sprinted headlong, wands out towards the source of the cry.
Ron was standing on his bed, his back pressed firmly against the wall. His wand, dropped, rolled across the floor. For a couple of very long seconds, nobody moved, Harry and Hermione's eyes flicking around the room for Ron's attacker. Keeping his wand raised, Harry asked, "What happened?"
Whimpering, Ron raised a shaking finger and pointed towards the corner of the room.
Harry squinted. "What?" Still cowering against the wall, Ron jabbed his finger in the direction of the corner again.
Harry lowered his wand, and Hermione shot him a quizzical look. Bending down, he took a step towards the hairy black thing crouched between the dresser and the wall. Ron whined. He looked up at his friend, biting his lip, trying to suppress the loud laugh that threatened to burst from his chest.
"What happened?" Ginny appeared in the doorway, looking worried. Hermione shrugged. Another step forward, and Harry couldn't take it anymore. He broke down into hysterics, just managing to keep himself upright by bracing his hands against his knees.
"You are such," Harry said, gasping, "an idiot." Crossing the final few steps slightly unsteadily, still wracked with laughter, he scooped up the spider, and tossed it out the open window.
"Oh, Ron..." Hermione shook her head, sounding falsely disappointed, not quite able to hide her own amusement. Ginny just raised an eyebrow, as if this occurrence was almost to be expected, turned on her heel in a very Mrs Weasley like fashion, and strutted back to whatever she had been doing before this particular interruption.