I'm so sorry for taking this long to update. Life's crazy. I have no summer, still doing exams for school and I had no time to write. I have few more chapters already planned in my head and as soon as I find a bit of free time to type them I'll update again. Thanks for being patient with me and for commenting – your reviews keep me going.
Enjoy!
George closed the door of their bedroom softly, turning to Jade.
"Alright, so, what's up?" asked Fred innocently, taking off his shirt and pulling a pajama top over his head.
"What's up? Well, you tell me." Replied Jade, folding her arms in front of her. "Why did I just volunteer to get up early and made mom agree that George can stay home?"
"Oh, yeah, thanks for that." Said George casually, walking across the room in nothing but his underwear.
"Can everyone please stop undressing while I'm here trying to talk to you?" asked Jade, her cheeks slightly pink as she looked up on the ceiling, which she assumed will be the safest choice.
"we're still working on those fireworks – as you know." Explained Fred, chuckling at her as she refused to look at him.
"Fireworks? Didn't you do something about them last summer?" asked Jade intrigued, forgetting about embarrassment, she sat down on George's bed.
"There's always room for improvement, and as you may have noticed, we're a year older now…." Started Fred.
"More mature and better educated." Added George, "not to mention – more handsome." He winked at Jade from the other side of the room where he was still standing with a pair of pajama pants in his hand.
"Aren't you going to put those on?" asked Jade pointing to the piece of clothing in his hand.
"I thought we're not supposed to keep undressing." smirked George and tugged at the elastic of his boxers.
"ohmygod!" squeaked Jade covering her red face. "Don't you dare!"
Twins were laughing so hard that Fred fell off his bed.
"Anyway… we need to test one little change we made to the original Filibuster's fireworks, and as everyone knows, mom's not the biggest fan of experimental magic, so tomorrow…" Explained George casually.
"Are you mental?! It's dangerous! And there won't be anyone around in case something happens!" yelled Jade.
"Pssst!" shushed her Fred, creeping to the door and listening if he could hear any sounds from the corridor.
"It's nothing big, we're testing the invention on the smallest fireworks, even if it backfires…" continued George.
"…which it won't, we know our stuff. There's nothing to worry about, we're just trying to change the shape of the sparkles, we did the charm at Hogwarts, so mom wouldn't freak out about us doing magic out of school." Continued Fred.
"And we just need to try one and see the effect." Said George.
"I'll be devastated that I can't see it, of course, but such are the sacrifices one must …" said Fred but Jade interrupted him.
"Well, alright then, if something happens to you, I don't know any of this, understood? And don't you dare get hurt! And…" she hesitated a little…"why didn't you tell me about it before? I thought … maybe I could have helped." She finished slowly.
"Jade! No… " started Fred but didn't know how to finish so he just looked desperately at George who continued:
"Jade, it's not that we didn't want to tell you, it's just…it's not a big project of some extra funny prank."
"It's all just technical stuff, it'll probably take years to finish, we didn't manage to get any visible results yet. It's kind of boring." Said Fred.
"Well.. I …you don't think that I could help in long-term projects? Like… you don't want me to help with pranks in the future? – I mean, in a couple of years?" frowned Jade.
"No! Of course we do, we just weren't sure if you'd be interested in boring stuff. We mainly just search library books for hours and rarely find useful spells." George continued with explanations but they still sounded like excuses to Jade.
"Well, you don't have to include me in everything you do if you don't want to, really…" said Jade, realizing she shouldn't expect to be included every time. After all, a year ago they didn't know her and used to pull pranks alone, now she felt like some intruder. Agrhh. "…good night, see you in the morning." She quickly whispered and slipped out of the room before anyone could stop her.
"Shit." Fred swore under his nose and moved to the door to follow Jade, when their mom came upstairs, bringing a set of clean, freshly ironed clothes for tomorrow's visit to the doctor.
"What are you boys doing out of bed? Hurry up now, I don't want to hear a single whisper coming from here. Fred you need to wake up early and George, if you would get out of bed before lunchtime and help Percy de-gnome the garden, it wouldn't kill you."
Molly kissed both of her sons' foreheads in spite of their protests and left the room.
"Mom it's the middle of the night!" protested Fred as Molly shook him awake. It was early morning and the room was dark, only little triangles of sunshine were sparkling on the rug – light finding its way through the closed shutters.
Warm air from outside was creeping in together with the light. Molly sighed and picked up a t-shirt which was still lying on the floor from yesterday. She put it in the laundry basket in the corner of boys' room and went back downstairs to finish breakfast.
Fred groaned falling back between the covers but quickly pulled them off, feeling too warm and sweaty. He looked over at George who was still asleep, few drops of sweat already running down his temples.
Fred tip-toed over to his brother's bed, making sure he avoided the squeaky board. If it was Ron or Percy, Fred would wake them up mercilessly, with a loud bang or maybe even a kick to the bed, that would be fun. Percy was incredibly grumpy when they woke him up before his alarm clock went off , and Ron was usually confused and disoriented if he woke up suddenly – which served as a source of great fun for the twins.
But Fred simply grabbed the top of George's blanket and gently pulled it down, leaving only thin cotton sheet on the bed. He knew that George needed some cover to sleep but in this tropical temperature he'd wake up really soon if he stayed bundled in the blanket as he was before.
Fred grabbed the pile of clean clothes mom brought up yesterday and his towel which was hanging on the hook on the door, heading to the bathroom for a quick shower.
When he came downstairs, freshly showered but already dressed, although his hair was dripping wet, he found Jade sitting at the table, wearing blue summer dress with polka dots. Fred vaguely remembered it from last summer. There was a moment of awkward silence between them. Then Jade smiled looking him straight in the eyes, silently telling him to let it be, so he smiled back and sat opposite her, pulling a bowl of porridge in front of him.
"Hurry up, we're already late. George, come on, Jade put on some shoes, here's the floo powder." Molly instructed them, trying to accomplish at least ten tasks at the same time.
They arrived at St. Mungo's covered in ash and after mom briefly brushed it off from their clothes, using rather big fluffy brush they were ready to go.
Molly led the way to the room designed for treatment of magical bites and scratches where they were supposed to meet the healer who'd be checking Fred's hip.
They entered and Jade had an opportunity to look at the room properly since first time she was still in shock and incredibly scared for Fred. There were beds, mostly empty with curtains drawn back, but one place in the corner was occupied.
"Oh, welcome!" the healer greeted them, rushing Mrs. Weasley and Fred to one of the empty beds, closing the curtains from one side for a little bit of privacy. Jade shuffled closer, not knowing what to do.
"Take off your shirt please." The healer asked quickly but smiled at Fred who looked a little bit lost. "You may sit on the bed, I'll be back shortly, we have an emergency here and we're short of people since two of our healers were transferred. Not many people want to do this job. " he sighed and rushed over to the corner bed.
Fred took off his shirt and leaned against the pillow, hands behind his bed.
"Might as well take a nap since I had to wake at such ungodly hour." He winked at Jade and patted bed beside him. Jade laughed but stopped quickly when mom frowned at Fred, made him sit up and started to fuss about the scar.
Jade was used to the sight by now. Fred and George would tell the story so many times at school, Fred promptly showing off his scar, that she didn't even flinch when she saw it now, although it still looked rather nasty. It was different though, when twins joked about it. Now when she saw Molly's worried face and glittering eyes she felt bad, remembering the incident was basically her fault.
Healer came back with a tray of scary looking silver instruments and few bottles of potions, accompanied by huge bundle of cotton bandages.
Seeing this will take a while, Jade wandered around the room, leaving Molly and Fred with the healer who started to apply potions to the scar tissue and cleaning it.
There were pictures of terrible wounds on the walls, which Jade thought was a rather poorly chosen decoration for hospital room. Few portraits of past healers along the east wall were all empty.
Young healer rushed past her, walking towards a desk which was pulled in the corner of the room, carrying a pile of rolled parchments. One of them fell off, without the young man noticing so Jae picked it up and brought it over to the table.
"Thanks." Murmured the man, trying to organize new parchments, sorting the notes into categories with the old ones which were already neatly disposed around the desk.
"It's about time we finished the wolf's bane potion. It should stop incidents like these once it's tested and available to the patients in monthly basis, the problem is with the funding, ministry doesn't think it's important enough." The healer shook his head, taking off his light blue glasses and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
Jade stood there awkwardly not knowing what to say.
"What's a wolf's mane potion?" she finally asked.
The healer looked at her as if he only saw her now.
"Oh… well, not wolf's mane but wolf's bane…it's a plant Aconitum, which we're trying to use for a potion which would anesthetize werewolves during full moon and prevent accidents of people being bitten. But it's highly toxic and we're still trying to find a way to reduce the toxicity but preserve anesthetic properties…" he shook his head and looked through the notes.
"I don't know why I'm telling you this." The healer chuckled to himself "well, maybe it'll help me to organize my thoughts – it looks like dead end right now."
"Is that the plant?" asked Jade, looking thoughtfully at a sketch of blue flowers which was stapled to the wooden frame of the window.
"Yeah, that's Aconitum ferrox but we're using aconitum luridum – we have a researcher in Himalayas right now who's supplying us with wild plants, they're supposed to have higher concentration of the alkaloids."
"yeah, muggles use it too, right? Doesn't their method work for the potion? You know, they have a way to process it somehow so it doesn't kill people." Said Jade, remembering an article about traditional Chinese medicine she read somewhere long time ago. And her reading of random magazines found around the house of foster families finally proved to be useful.
"What do you mean muggles use it?!" asked the healer startled, suddenly sitting up straight in the chair.
"Well, I think…" started Jade, not sure what to say. "I've read an article and I'm pretty sure it was about this plant. They boil it together with ginger or something like that. I don't remember exactly, but I'm sure there was a way to do it. Didn't you try the muggle way before?" asked Jade confused. Surely they had to try all the different procedures if they did a serious research.
"We… " the healer blushed slightly, his eyes shining with excitement. "I don't think we did, but I'll look into it right now! That would get us a step closer to the potion! You have no idea what that would mean…" he exclaimed and franticly scribbled notes on the other side of already full parchment.
"It sounds really interesting, I wish I could learn more about things like that." Said Jade dreamily. "I find werewolves very interesting and I think it's wonderful that you're trying to make the transformations safer for them."
He looked at her confused. "you think it's wonderful that we're helping werewolves?" they didn't meet a lot of people outside their ward with this opinion.
"Why shouldn't you try to help them? They are brave people facing terrible transformations each month which is not their fault and they get judged by people who have no idea about any of the facts. Of course they deserve to get all the help you can provide. I'm sure they'd be excited to know you're working on a potion to help. Did you tell them? Just imagine how much hope it would bring." Stated Jade rather loudly, setting a silence to the room.
"Well, we try our best." Said the man, still looking startled. "It's good to know that young people like you have some sense and actually think about the facts before judging werewolves, like most of the wizards do.
"I'm Nelson Wright by the way. And if your information proves to be true, you, young lady will be one of the contributors to our research.
"Jade Mraz." she introduced herself.