Luna turned to me with a beatific smile. I found myself grinning right back at her. "I'll race you back!" she cried out, quickly mounting her broom.

"Wait, no, you know I'm…" Luna took off. "Oh sod it." I remounted my broom and made to follow.

The rest of the day went like that. Trying to keep up with Luna on a broom, failing, stopping to talk, and repeating it all again. She kept a smile on my face throughout, even when she was telling me about creatures that I was reasonably sure simply didn't exist. And when we finally stumbled through the door to the Lovegoods' home and I eventually lay down in bed? I realised that I hadn't worried about the future one bit that day.

For just one day Luna had given me freedom from the dread that had come to define my thoughts, and I wouldn't be forgetting it anytime soon.

Impotent Vows

There was something to be said about Diagon Alley as an introduction to the wizarding world, even if the idea of doing the reverse and introducing a wizard to the muggle world by way of a shopping centre seemed a hilarious concept. It was bustling with wizened warlocks in outrageous robes and covens of witches clad in hats with razor sharp points. Bright banners advertising newt eyes (6 sickles per set!) hung next to sparkling signs selling collapsible cauldrons and flying broomsticks. The book seller in the main street, Flourish and Blotts, was dotted with floating signs advertising spellbooks of all kinds for all ages. Everywhere around, things bounced, and flew, and fizzed, and popped, and hooted, and spat colourful smoke.

It was, in a word, wonderful. A wonder that had gripped me with both hands way back when I was eleven, and hadn't let go since. Even through possessed professors, and basilisks in the walls, and Voldemort, Diagon Alley forced me to step back and remember the wonder. It made me want to smile and spin and call out "I'm a witch!" with all the disbelief and pride and pure childish joy that that entailed.

I didn't obviously, because I had some class, but the urge was there. It wouldn't have even been the most mad thing to happen that day in Diagon Alley, or even that hour.

I loved magic. How could I not? How could any muggleborn be introduced to literal magic, see Diagon Alley for the first time, walk into the oh so very enchanted halls of Hogwarts, and not fall in love? A witch turns up at your home, tells you you're special, and you fail to wonder? In that way, I would never understand most of my classmates. Harry I understood somewhat. He simply hadn't the energy to care. Understandable, given everything (and I truly hadn't been kidding when I offered to hex those Dursleys of his; my time in Black Manor had taught me some good ones). Ron had grown up with it. It was mundane to him. Of course owls would deliver letters, and heads would talk in the fireplace, and chess pieces would give advice, and cards would shuffle themselves. Deep inside myself, I hoped that I'd never come to see magic like that.

And that wonder, that love for magic? It was killing me. It was how Tom the Diary had managed to trick me so thoroughly. I loved magic, and I still believed him when he said that he did too. His was a possessive love, though, an oily thing meant to keep and claim, which lingered where it wasn't welcome.

But when Mrs. Weasley led me into the Leaky Cauldron and I saw my parents for the first time in a year, the love in their faces managed to wash that oil off for just a bit.

"Mum! Dad!" I called, slipping free of Mrs. Weasley's guiding arm and running into theirs.

Dad wrapped me up in a tight hug, lifting me into the air. "Hello there, my brave little lion!"

I winced. "Don't call me that," I grumbled into his shoulder. I really didn't want any reminders of him right now.

"Little witch, then," he said. Dad loosened his grip. I did not. He took the cue and gave me another long squeeze. "I missed you," he said, smile evident in his voice. "But I think your Mum missed you too, yeah?"

Dad let me go, and I turned to hug Mum too. She squeezed me tight with one hand in my hair and one rubbing my back. I couldn't help the tears that budded up. I didn't try either. Another long moment passed and she let me go to hold me by the shoulders and look me up and down. "Our baby girl's growing up," she said with a tone I couldn't quite decipher.

Looking at them, I noticed they seemed, well, smaller. I was almost the same height as Mum now, and I didn't have to crane my neck so much for Dad. He'd always been taller and skinnier than most other adults I knew, but it seemed like he was just a bit shorter now, just a bit skinner. I really had grown up a lot since I'd seen them last, and it wasn't just in size.

Before I could stop myself, I wondered if this would be the last time we'd ever talk. An unnamed sense of guilt filled me up at the thought.

"Seems so," Dad said, as if to break me out of my spiral. He threw his arm over my shoulders, squeezing once. "Still our little Hermione, though. Come on. Let's sit down. We already ordered lunch from the barman. Nice bloke, him."

He directed me to a grungy little table with three chairs, and we all sat down. Warily, in Mum and Dad's case. I wasn't shocked. The Weasleys had managed to inoculate me against my distaste, but I'd grown up eating in nice, clean, well maintained restaurants, which the Leaky Cauldron really wasn't.

"I still don't know why they think a dingy pub's the best first impression they can give," Mum said.

"It's meant to be a smoke screen," I explained. I'd read as much back in my first year. "There's charms meant to make it so muggles can't see it, but they don't always work. The hope is that those people walk by, see a seedy pub, and move on without seeing anything strange."

At that moment, we were all distracted by a man whose head swelled to nearly twice its size before blowing smoke out of his ears and deflating. Dad laughed, and Mum just raised an eyebrow at me.

"Yes, well, it doesn't really make sense, but that's magic." I resisted the urge to fidget under her scrutiny. "The more magic you are, the madder you get."

"Really?" she said.

"I've been doing some reading because of my… condition, and it's true. It's well documented that more powerful mages tend to be a bit more eccentric." I thought to Dumbledore, his opening speeches, his lackadaisical stance on child care, his fashion sense. I thought to Voldemort and his quest to take over Britain. I thought to the runic array in the closet in Black Manor, and the picture of Sirius Black that had circulated in the Daily Prophet.

I thought to my breakdown in Ginny's room when I realised I could get into the ancient Black Library, how I'd laughed and cried and flipped through books for hours and hours to figure out the specifics.

"A lot more eccentric," I amended.

The clatter of plates on the table interrupted us. "Order for the Grangers, here ya go," said the very friendly and very unfortunate looking man who plopped them down.

Dad flashed him a perfect smile. "Thanks, Tom." Despite myself, I only managed to contain my flinch at the name by stilling entirely. By the look on Mum's face, it hadn't been lost on her.

"Anytime! Let me know if you need anything else," he said, and walked back to the bar.

"So, about this 'condition'," Mum said once he was out of earshot.

"Emma, she just got here!" Dad interjected. "Let the girl eat, at least."

She scoffed. "Hermione's sick, Dan. She couldn't even come home for the summer! We can't help if we don't ask. That Headmaster of hers certainly hasn't been answering any questions."

"You wrote to Headmaster Dumbledore?" I asked.

"Of course I did," she said in a soft tone. "I'm—we're worried about you. I asked him about what happened and demanded to know what he was doing to prevent it from happening again." She huffed. "He gave a right politician's answer, too. So please, love, tell us what happened? We've been worried sick."

My mind raced, wondering what I could, what I should tell them. Dumbledore apparently hadn't thought it a great idea to say much, but I found I was starting to care little and less about what he thought. He wasn't the one dying. And that was the thing. They already knew I was sick, but didn't they have the right to know that? It was sort of the elephant in the room, even if they didn't know it.

One time I'd asked Grandpa Granger something—I'd long since forgotten what—and he'd told me about how when you considered telling someone something important, you had to consider if they needed to know, if they had a right to know, and if it was a burden to know. And my parents, they had a right to know. Of course they did. The problem was, they loved me, and I loved them. And they wouldn't be able to do anything. They'd have to send me off to Hogwarts knowing, and I'd be slowly dying away from them, and I knew my Mum too well to think she wouldn't do something drastic like go to the Wizengamot and file a suit against Hogwarts.

They had a right to know, yes, but wasn't the burden of knowing larger? Especially given that I was working on fixing it. One year. I had one year to find a solution. Probably more like ten or eleven months, actually. Egypt hadn't precisely been 'familiar', and the magic in the places we'd explored had felt more than a bit stagnant.

"Hermione?" Dad said. Looking my worried parents in the faces, though, I realised that lying to them now would be much harder than over the phone. My resolve dwindling, I decided that I could tell some of the truth. I'd just have to… edit it a bit.

I looked around the busy room. "Can we talk about it somewhere else?" I asked. "After lunch? I'm starving." And delaying the inevitable. By the look Mum gave me, she hadn't missed that bit of subtext. I wasn't shocked. Dad may have been my favourite, but Mum had always known how I thought.

"Of course," Dad said with a significant look at Mum. She seemed to relent after a moment. The food was pleasant, if a bit greasy. We filled the silence with meaningless nothings. I asked after their dental practice. It was doing well. The conference Dad had been visiting apparently showed off some fascinating bits of tech. They asked about my classes and friends. I talked about how due to circumstances my exams had been waived, but that I'd gotten good grades. I dodged the questions about friends by complaining about Lockhart.

Before too long, I was out of both food and excuses.

As we stood, Dad grabbed my bag for me. "Your Mum and I rented out some rooms for the rest of the week. We've been writing back and forth with Molly, and thought we'd spend the last week of summer with you here since you can't come home. We can talk there, if you'd like?" I nodded. "Make sure to keep close. The hallways are a little mad."

I did so, following my parents up a set of stairs that I was reasonably sure didn't even fit in the physical space of the building. After Black Manor, I found that I was developing a very keen sense for telling when space had been folded. It wasn't hard to tell what Dad meant. The layout had clearly been done by a skilled mage. That is to say, it certainly made perfect sense to the caster, but the rest of us were left to puzzle out the pattern. We found my parent's room (number 316, on the second minus one floor) and they pointed out the room they'd rented for me right across from it (number 143).

The room was cleaner than I expected, with a small table, a desk, a large bed, and a mirror that I was pretty sure was softly snoring. We found our seats. Mum was the first to speak up.

"So what was it you wanted to tell us, love?"

Looking into my parents' faces, my resolve almost cracked. So much of me so desperately wanted to let them in. I could even imagine what I would say, something not quite true but not quite false either. 'I met an older boy named Tom, who made me trust him. He told me that he was my friend, and helped me study, and showed me his memories. He'd been discriminated against too, and I could talk to him about it in a way that I couldn't and can't with anyone else. I thought he was all I needed. Then he used me and tried to throw me away. He used a dark creature to take some of my magic, and I'm still recovering.'

But I couldn't. For the same reasons that I'd avoided telling them about my more bizarre Hogwarts experiences all the way back to first year, even. They'd want to pull me out of the school. There were other magical schools, of course, even in the UK, but that had always felt too much like giving up to me. Even ignoring its status as the most prestigious school around, Hogwarts really was wonderful (and maybe the 'trying to kill its students' thing was the reason why it was so prestigious; the survivors would have undergone trial by fire). My parents wouldn't accept that explanation, though, so I'd have to tell them about how leaving Hogwarts would kill me faster, which would lead into the fact that I was dying, and I'd already decided that I wasn't going to go there.

Burden to know, burden to know, burden to know.

"Hermione?"

I took a deep breath. I had to tell them something. And given I was a shite liar, I opted for the truth. Partially.

"Near the end of the school year, someone decided to prank me. They took one of the books I'd borrowed from the library and told me they'd hid it in the Forest at the edge of the grounds. It was almost due back, so I went out to find it. It was stupid, I know that, but I was worried about getting detention. While I was out there, I ran into a very rare magical creature. A…" I studied my shoes for a moment, scouring my mind for something that wouldn't give proof to my lie if they looked into it, which Mum certainly would. "Snorkack. The curly horned kind, I think." Sorry, Luna. "It was nesting, and I didn't see it, and it attacked. It sort of… destabilised my magic. I got back to the castle and to the hospital wing, and I've been taking medicine for it since."

My parents shared a look. "Destabilised?" Dad asked. "What's that mean, practically speaking?"

"It means a few things. It means that I can't really cast with my wand properly, and so I've been learning this really fascinating runic casting. I also leak magic everywhere, which is good for things like runic casting and rituals, but bad for electronics." And now that I'd learned more the blatant inaccuracy of the word 'leaking' grated, but this wasn't the time. Besides that, an actual technical explanation was something my parents could look into and ask questions about, which I certainly didn't want. "There's some mental symptoms too, but—"

"Mental symptoms?" Mum asked immediately. I cursed myself. I hadn't meant to blurt that out, but I'd been thinking about the facts and theory and got distracted.

"You remember how I said that magic can make people a bit strange?" Nods from both of them. "Well, apparently not having that magic go to the right place is like any other thing getting stopped up in the body. I've been having strange dreams, and there's some day to day… instability." Mum's look was all that I needed to tell me to elaborate. Which, fine. I could do that. It wasn't easy to describe how I was slowly going mad, exactly, but it was a far sight less difficult than talking about all the other things I was avoiding. "There's some… depression, sometimes. The books say some people get manic and think that they can do things that they really can't. I don't think I've had that one. My um. I've also got a bit of a temper since the accident, too."

I liked that word, wrong as it was. 'Accident'. As if my developing madness and oncoming (and preventable, I reminded myself) death were some unforeseen unavoidable thing rather than the act of one malicious man.

"There's some other things, but those are the big ones. I've got good Healers, though. That's what they call doctors here. I'm being well taken care of, I promise, and Headmaster Dumbledore's made sure I can keep casting and that nothing like this can happen again." He hadn't, but half the point of this was convincing my parents to not pull me out of his school, so needs must. "I'm on the mend already. You should see how many potions they've got me taking," I joked with levity I didn't feel.

Why was my heart beating so hard?

"I'm glad you're okay," Dad said. "We're just worried about you, that's all."

"I'm fine, honest." I gave him a smile. "Now can we talk about something else? I've missed you, and I learned all sorts of things in Egypt this summer…"

After dinner that night, I ran into the one person in Britain who I could honestly believe had had a worse summer than me. Apparently, Harry had blown up his aunt, ran away to an incredibly brief life of crime, met Minister Fudge, and had been told to stay put in Diagon Alley until school started. Because of course he had. Because Harry Potter was fate's favourite punching bag (though I was starting to suspect that I made for a decent runner-up). He'd been staying in the Leaky Cauldron for two weeks when I showed up.

I filled him in on my cover story and introduced him to my parents that very same night. Mum and Dad seemed to take it and him at face value, for which I knew he was grateful. Harry really did tend to flourish outside of scrutiny, and given that Mrs. Weasley hadn't stuck around past dropping me off and that the Weasleys wouldn't be doing their school shopping at all until later in the week, there was nobody to object to his independence. After a summer with Mrs. Weasley trying to mother me, I couldn't even say that I didn't understand that need for freedom.

Harry, for his part, was happy to spend his time showing me around Diagon Alley. He'd come to be quite familiar with it in those two weeks, it seemed like. He even came with my parents and I when we did my own school shopping. That had been an interesting experience. The difference between my Mum and Dad was never more clear than when I'd asked a bruised and bandaged bookseller for a copy of the Monster Book of Monsters. Mum had looked on in muted horror as Dad slipped off his belt and wrangled the tome into submission, grinning like a loon the whole while.

Needless to say that I enchanted the belt with a soporific charm as soon as we returned to the Leaky.

Shortly after, I dragged Harry into my room, ignoring his numerous protests.

"Honestly, Harry, I'm not sure what the problem is."

"It's just that this is a girl's room…"

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, Harry, I'm a girl. This is my room. Glad you've pieced that together. Now sit." Wisely, he sat. Harry may have been stubborn, but he wasn't an idiot.

"So what's up?" he asked. I took a moment to gather myself. This was the last time that I'd be having this particular conversation if I had anything to say about it.

"You remember my casting difficulties?" I started. "It's gotten worse."

"Dumbledore was helping with that, though, right?" He seemed… genuinely confused, for some reason.

"Not really, no. He pointed me in the right direction with ritual, yes, but that doesn't really help the real problem." I sighed. "We said no secrets, right?"

"Right." Harry punctuated with a smile.

"I'm dying." The smile disappeared.

A long moment passed. "Oh," he said, because this was Harry and Harry understood these things better than anyone else I knew. Not like Ron who thought it was a joke, or Dumbledore who thought he could protect me from it. No, Harry knew Death. He got it. Between his parents, Voldemort looming over him, seeing my near miss in the Chamber, and even Quirrell, Harry had had a pretty good look at Death. Out of everyone, he was the one I'd dreaded telling the least.

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"About a year. Longer if I'm around lots of magic and familiar things and people."

"Huh," he said. "Good job we're going back to Hogwarts then." I looked up at him—and when had I looked down?—to see a face without pity. A sort of resigned sadness, yes, but no pity. He just seemed to accept that this is the way it was, and that it sucked.

In that moment I looked out at the world and judged that it was not worthy of having someone as wholly good as Harry Potter in it. If I only had a year left to live, then I swore to myself that I'd use as much as I could to help him wherever he needed it.

"And there's no…" he trailed off.

"No there's not," I said, "but I'm working on it. Come see." I stood up from my chair and popped open my trunk. It, like the rest of my things, had been brought over from the Burrow. Mrs. Weasley had even returned my wand instead of just giving it to my parents, because apparently 'underage witch' rated higher on the responsibility scale than 'muggle adult' in her eyes.

My blood-mask was donned and my clothes were shoved aside, revealing a locked panel in the bottom of my trunk. I'd transfigured in a keyhole, but that was mostly a red herring, a paranoid little trick I learned from some of the shelves in the Black Manor Library. I placed my hand on the panel and muttered "Revelare". The panel popped open with a click. It was, admittedly, a simple command word. It would be insecure if not for the tiniest bit of blood magic behind the spell. I'd even charmed it to see through deceptions like the one I'd made for the Blacks.

And yes, I was proud, thank you very much.

I opened up the panel to reveal an extra-dimensional expanded space full of books. Pulling a few out, I spread them out on the floor.

"So I realised that if I wanted to find a cure, I was going to need to look outside of the box. If even proper Healers don't know what to do—don't touch that one, I'm pretty sure it's cursed to turn your mouth inside out. And no, I don't know what that means either." Harry yanked his hand back from the book he'd been about to touch.

"How can you touch it, then?"

"I'm getting there. So I realised that what I was looking for wouldn't be in any sort of public library." Not least of which because the concept itself was a foreign one to magical Britain. "But you've heard Malfoy talk about his library. Some of the older families have been hoarding knowledge to themselves for centuries. Best part is, I managed to find one of their old houses that had been practically abandoned! The Black family's ancestral Manor."

Harry worried at that. "Wait, did you say Black? As in, mass murderer Sirius Black?"

"I think so, yes. It's fine though, Mrs. Weasley said that he was exiled from the family years and years ago. The wards wouldn't have allowed him in."

"That's…" He looked to the side. "Did you happen to see any…" Harry trailed off again.

"Any?" I asked. He wouldn't look this nervous if it wasn't important.

"It's probably nothing," he said.

I gave him a look. "I can decide that for myself, I think."

"It's nothing!"

"Harry."

"Fine," he sighed. "When I ran away from the Dursleys, I saw a big, black dog. Then when I talked to Fudge—" "Minister Fudge." "—he was worried about Sirius Black. It seemed, I don't know, like it was connected?"

Hm. That seemed ridiculous on the surface, of course, but… Harry did have an eye for these things, didn't he? Now I thought about it, he had a remarkable way of telling if something was off, and his tendency to be in the right (or horribly wrong) place at the right time was more than a bit uncanny. He'd just so happened to be the one to push us into that hallway on the third floor just as Quirrell had been doing the same, and hadn't he been the one to tell the professors all about my situation at the end of last year?

Now I thought about it, I wondered if Divination wouldn't be more than just an easy OWL for him after all. Or Luna had infected me with believing in things that didn't exist at some point over our week together. One of the two.

"I didn't see a dog, no, but I'll keep an eye out, okay?" He nodded, seeming the slightest bit relieved.

"So, er, Black Manor?"

I blinked. "Right. So I met this girl named Luna at this silly Storytelling thing the Weasleys do, and she agreed to help me break into Black Manor."

"I thought that you said there were wards keeping people out?"

"I had some of Malfoy's blood," I shrugged. "Purebloods are all weirdly related, so I was able to get in."

"Why did—"

"It doesn't matter. The point is that Luna and I spent a week going through every book we could find in their library. These and the ones in my trunk are the ones we thought were useful." Or interesting, or particularly strange. In one case, we'd taken a book because Luna liked the design on the front. It's not like anyone would be missing them.

"And that's why you can touch them?"

I nodded. "The books think I'm a Black, yes."

"Hermione?" Harry gave me a serious look. "You know you're absolutely mental, right?" He cracked into a smile. I just rolled my eyes and laughed.

"So these books aren't dangerous or anything, are they?" he asked once my laughter died down. "I mean, aside from the curses."

I gave my trunk a wary look. "There's no such thing as dangerous knowledge," I lied. There absolutely was. Black Manor had taught me that. I wasn't 100% confident, but I'd done a bit of checking with some of Mr. Lovegood's legal texts, and I was pretty sure that some of these books were illegal to even own. Which was obviously stupid. Knowledge was knowledge. It wasn't like I was going to go around cursing people just because I happened to have read a book.

That said, I could understand a certain desire to restrict who had access to certain knowledge. Some of the books I'd taken were spellbooks for fairly blatant malefica, including parts of On the Powers of Magic and a tome plainly named Mastering Malicious Malefica, just to name two. And practising malefica was, well, dangerous by definition. That's what made it malefica. Those types of spells formed the centre of what the Ministry called the 'Dark Arts'; itself a catch-all term for all the spells which the Wizengamot had voted to outlaw for one reason or another. Not that thaumic polarity had anything to do with it. I'd seen a highly Light aspected spell in one of these books which had the sole effect of inflicting what looked to me like late stage cancer upon the victim.

I was quickly coming to understand that 'light' didn't precisely mean 'good'.

By the look on his face and to his immense credit, Harry clearly didn't believe me. I ignored it. "From what I've seen, between all this and the Hogwarts library, I think that I can find something that works."

"Well Hermione, you're the cleverest person I know. If anyone can do it, you can."

A few days into my stay at the Leaky Cauldron, I met a cat. More precisely, the cat met me. Much in the same way any active missile meets its target, I imagine. I was walking past a pet shop when I felt an impact from above. It nearly bowled me over, and claws sank into my shoulder as I was regaining my balance. Once I recovered, I realised that I was serving as the perch to a rather proud looking feline. As noble a purpose as any, I supposed.

I cradled my arms, and the thing climbed down into them. They had tall ears, a smushed face, and a regal mane. By the legs, ears, and fur, they seemed to be at least part-kneazle, assuming the Monster Book of Monsters' illustrations were anywhere near accurate. "Well, hello there gorgeous. What's your name?"

"Crookshanks!" the cat didn't yell. The harried looking shopkeeper coming through the door of the pet store did, though, which served me well enough.

"Hello Crookshanks, I'm Hermione," I said. Kneazles were supposed to be fairly intelligent. "Going on an adventure, then?"

Crookshanks seemed to size me up for a moment. Apparently finding what he was looking for, he turned to give the approaching shopkeeper a look that I was reasonably sure would map to a sneer. Regal indeed.

"Crookshanks, you know you're not supposed to leave the shop!" the shopkeeper admonished. "I'm sorry, miss. Crooks' is like this with everyone." She pointed at the cat with a stern look. "If you keep attacking random people, you know nobody will adopt you." Back up to me. "Apologies again."

"It's fine," I said, scratching Crookshanks ears. "He's a bit older than you'd normally find in pet stores. How long have you had him for?"

"Maybe a year?" the witch mused. "His last family didn't care to deal with him anymore. Half-kneazles—" Called it. "—are smart, which they thought meant it'd be easier to teach him to do tricks and the like. They didn't realise that they're smart enough to do things like not want to be trained, though." Crookshanks blinked up at me slowly. I did the same right back.

The poor thing had been snatched up by someone he came to trust and thrown away when he was no longer exploitable. He'd become a little warrior for it, too, driving people away so it couldn't happen again. Maybe I was just projecting, but looking into his cute little kitty face, he sounded far too much like a kindred spirit for me to just walk away.

"I'll just take him back—" the witch started.

"You know, Crookshanks," I interrupted. "I was going to ask my parents for an owl, but I think I have a better idea. Would you like to come to Hogwarts with me? Honestly, I think I could use the company." He looked around, gave the shopkeeper another kitty sneer, and settled more fully into my arms.

"I think that's a yes," I said to the witch. "You'll have to stay here for a moment, Crookshanks. I have to go talk to my parents. I'll be right back." I handed him back to the shopkeeper and ran off back to the Leaky Cauldron.

I was happy to report that Dad broke first. My father was a dental surgeon, by definition a skilled man capable of doing many difficult, stressful, and complicated things on a near daily basis. Denying his chronically ill daughter a cat, however, was certainly not one of them.

The day before I was due to leave for Hogwarts, the Weasleys finally came to do their shopping. Ron brought Harry and I along to his wand fitting. It only took three or four tries before Mr. Ollivander made a match. Willow and unicorn hair. A loyal wand for a loyal boy, Mr. Ollivander had said. Ron had tried to wave it off, but Harry and I both agreed that it fit quite well. It did lead me to wonder if there was any truth to what wood and core fit who, or if it was something like muggle astrology.

I had only asked about four questions when Harry and Ron bodily removed me from Mr. Ollivander's shop, which I felt was a bit rude. Ron insisted that me asking "So, is wandlore even real or is it just made up?" to someone who'd dedicated their life to it was even ruder, though. In retrospect, I admit that he may have had a slight point.

The most unexpectedly gratifying part of the whole mess was seeing my parents' reactions to the way the Weasleys lived. That is to say, messy, chaotic, and loud. Their shared looks of horror were supremely vindicating. They stayed the night at the Cauldron—apparently Mr. Weasley had managed to swing Ministry cars and drivers for the next day somehow—and over the course of about 12 hours my parents got about as concentrated a blast of the Weasleys as could be expected. .

After the second lost wand, third misplaced robe, and a lost and found pet, I gave my absolutely exasperated parents a conspiratorial smile. "It was like this all summer," I said. "Just be glad the twins haven't set off anything explosive. Did I mention how much I missed you?"

I finally had to say goodbye to them the next morning outside of the Leaky Cauldron. The Ministry drivers weren't willing to let muggles into magical cars, despite the fact they'd been frequenting Diagon Alley for a whole week. There was all sorts of hemming and hawing about the Statute of Secrecy and regulations and vague ideas about muggles not understanding properly when Dad pushed.

Really, I'd prefer they have just given me the trademarked pureblood sneer and saved everyone some time.

Eventually Dad gave up, and Mum helped me pack my things into the Ministry cars. They each gave me a big hug, Dad picking me up with it yet again. I quashed down the guilt that came with knowing Harry was watching.

"We're gonna miss you, little witch," Dad said as he put me down. "And make sure to write this time! If something happens, we want to know about it."

"Whether you think we want to hear about it or not," Mum said. "Understood?"

There was only one real answer to that, even if it was a lie. "Yes, Mum."

"Good." Her face softened. "You know how we worry about you. Part of the whole 'parent' thing."

"I know," I didn't quite grumble. "I love you Mum. Love you Dad."

"Love you too," Dad said and Mum echoed it. "Have fun at school, and stay safe, okay?"

I looked up into Dad's worried smile, felt his hand on my shoulder, and the desire to lie and claim that I'd be fine shrivelled up and died. I cursed myself for lying, my parents for caring so much, the professors for failing to notice anything, and the Headmaster for being so ineffectual. Most of all, I cursed Tom, I cursed his stupid Diary, and I cursed Lord bloody Voldemort. In that moment I wanted to run into my Dad's arms and tell them everything so they could make it all better like they always had. But I couldn't. It would hurt them. Break them, even. They wouldn't be able to fix anything, they'd just be scared for me. Impotent. Mum and I were too much alike for me to ever inflict uselessness on her; in the past few months I'd come to know too well just how she'd take it.

"I'll do my best," I said as if it was anywhere near adequate. "You'll see me again before you even know it. Promise."

And I didn't need to sign in blood to know that I'd fulfil this promise just as surely as my other Vows. 'Whatever it takes,' I swore to myself. 'Whatever it takes.'