Ages later, I am finally attempting an update. I do apologize for the long wait. Enjoy!

-o0o-

The air completely left Nessa's lungs as she stared at the three boys before her in shock. The shock of seeing them outside her bedroom window quickly morphed into elation and she stepped forward to push open the window so that she could speak to them through the bars that locked her in this hellhole of a house.

That was when she realized what she was actually seeing. In her elation at seeing the Weasleys she hadn't really thought to consider how they'd appeared to be sitting outside her two-story window. Now that she noticed the flying blue Ford Anglia, she nearly had a heart attack. Of course none of them seemed too concerned by the fact. As though a flying car in a muggle neighborhood were a totally acceptable notion.

"How on Earth—" she breathed, as the twins continued to grin at her from the front seat.

"Wake up Harry." Ron said without preamble, though he was grinning just as widely as his brothers.

She rolled her eyes before she glowered at him.

"Did your mother teach you no manners, Ronald?" she snapped, as she spun on her heel to shake her snoring brother awake.

"She did," Fred grinned.

"He's just too much of a stupid prat to use them." His twin finished for him. Ron scowled at them both in response.

She was saved from thinking up a response when Harry finally noticed who exactly was waiting outside their window. His mouth fell open.

"Ron!" he breathed, creeping towards the window. "Ron, how did you—what the-?"

"All right, Harry?" George asked from his position in the passenger seat.

"What's been going on?" Ron said. "Why haven't you been answering my letters? I've asked you to stay about twelve times, and then Dad came home and said you'd gotten an official warning for using magic in front of Muggles—"

"It wasn't me—and how did he know?"

"He works for the Ministry," Ron said, waving his hand through the air as though that detail wasn't important. "You know we're not supposed to do spells outside school—"

Harry shot the car an indignant glance, and opened his mouth, most likely to mention that Ron was very obviously using some type of magic if he were sitting in a flying car. She rolled her eyes once more before rushing forward to speak with the brothers once again.

"Please tell me that the lot of you have come to get us out of this place." She said before Harry had the chance to speak his mind.

"We're taking you home with us." George confirmed, his grin spreading when she immediately began grabbing random objects around the room and shoving them into a bag. Harry's response was a bit more belated.

"But you can't magic us out either—"

"We don't need to," Ron said, jerking his head towards the front seat with a grin. "You forget who I've got with me."

Nessa paused in her excited packing to watch the boys curiously. Though she had no doubt that they had every intention of breaking them out—and succeeding—she wasn't sure exactly how they planned on doing so. She raised an eyebrow when Fred threw the end of a rope to Harry.

"Tie that around the bars." He explained.

"If the Dursleys wake up, we're dead." Harry said, obeying the order as he did so.

"Don't worry." Fred assured. "And stand back."

Nessa shot backward as fast as possible. She might have heard one of the twins chuckle at her response to the command, but her heart was beating too fast for her to take notice. Considering her knowledge of the twins and their antics, her unease was entirely justified. It was just as likely that they would blow out the window to aid in their escape.

She really shouldn't have worried so much because Fred merely pulled the car away from the window and revved the engine until the bars on the window began to pull apart from the window with a crunch. The car shot straight up in the air, the bars dangling a few feet above the ground. As Harry ran back to the window with a disbelieving, almost hopeful grin, Nessa listened anxiously for any noise that could alert them to the Dursleys having awakened by the racket. Thankfully, the sound of her uncle's snores were the only sounds to be heard.

The Ford Anglia was now safely floating in front of their window again, the bars having successfully been pulled into the back seat.

"Get in," Ron said.

"But all our Hogwarts stuff—our wands—my broomstick—" Harry stuttered in distress.

"Where is it?"

"Locked in the cupboard under the stairs, and I can't get out of this room—"

"No problem," George interrupted. "Out of the way, Harry."

Fred and George climbed catlike through the window into their room. Nessa stepped back from the door, as George pulled an ordinary hairpin from one of his pockets and began to pick the lock. Nessa raised her eyebrow in question. Fred was the one to answer.

"A lot of wizards think it's a waste of time, knowing this sort of Muggle trick, but we feel they're skills worth learning, even if they're a bit slow."

She snorted. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know under what circumstances the twins had decided they needed a skill such as this one. She just decided to thank her lucky stars that they weren't quite as narrow-minded about muggle means as the rest of the Wizarding World appeared to be.

There was a small click and the door swung open.

"So—we'll get the trunks—you finish grabbing anything you need from your room and hand it out to Ron." George whispered to the pair of them, as they disappeared onto the dark landing with a whispered warning from Harry to avoid the bottom stair.

Nessa immediately obeyed. She had never been more eager to leave this house. She hadn't eaten much in days; They'd given them very little and she had shared the majority of her food with Harry and Hedwig. She hadn't been much able to sleep and being stuck in this room had made her both surprisingly stir-crazy and more and more depressed.

She passed her bag through to Ron, just as the twins appeared with her trunk. They set it on the ground before her and then disappeared to retrieve Harry's. Upon their return Fred and Nessa climbed into the front seat to help Ron heave the trunks into the back seat of the car, as Harry and George pushed from the inside.

All went smoothly as the trunks were cramped to fit into the back and George moved his gangly form around the back seat to slide into the window seat, squishing Nessa between him and his brother with a wink. It was only when Harry began to climb into the car that all hell broke loose.

In hindsight, she couldn't believe that Harry had forgotten to grab Hedwig. To be honest, she wasn't sure how any of them had forgotten to grab Hedwig before they climbed into the car. They may never have noticed that they'd forgotten to grab her if it hadn't been for her unholy screeching.

Harry raced back to retrieve her cage and shove it through and into the car, as Nessa silently prayed that her uncle wouldn't hear the noise in the next room over. Of course, that was a long shot seeing as he had just been yelling at Harry that day about the bird's screeching while he was trying to sleep. It didn't necessarily come as much of a surprise when her uncle knocked on the door so hard that it burst open and caught Harry halfway in the act of escaping.

"Harry, for Merlin's sake, hurry!" she snapped at her motionless brother.

He immediately obeyed and scrambled to climb in the back seat.

"Petunia!" Her uncle roared, shooting forward faster than she'd ever seen him move to grab onto to Harry's ankle. "They're getting away! THEY'RE GETTING AWAY!"

The four of them seized onto Harry's arms and tugged as hard as they could. Her uncle toppled out of the window and into the bushes below. Fred hit the gas so hard that Nessa was shot violently forward and was forced to catch herself on the dash board in front of her.

"Gods, Fred, are you trying to break my nose?" she said, as she pushed herself to sit back against the seat.

"You wanted to stay in that house, did you, Potter?" he said, conversationally as he twiddled with the steering wheel.

She narrowed her eyes at him dangerously.

"I suppose that you suspected he could fly after us then, Weasley?" She snarked back with a smirk, putting an extra emphasis on his last name.

George snorted from next to her and stretched his legs out in front of him and his arms across the back of the seat behind her. "She's got you there, Forge."

For a moment, Nessa was worried about Fred's response and chewed on her lip nervously, wringing her hands in her lap. She really did have a smart mouth when she wasn't careful enough to watch it. Which, now that she considered, was quite often. Not that Fred seemed to mind all too much. Though he seemed a bit surprised she'd said much, considering her usually silent demeanor, he continued smirking as he twiddled with the wheel. She supposed when you grew up with six other siblings, you learned to withstand a little ribbing. Regardless, she decided she would attempt to withhold her snark a little more valiantly.

George's hand on hers startled her back to reality and she forced herself to stop the nervous habit. When she looked up at him through her lashes, however, he was already handing the hairpin he'd had on his person to Ron, who promptly let Hedwig out to glide alongside them as they made their way to wherever the Weasleys lived. She was thankful he hadn't maintained his attention with her. She wasn't entirely sure that she wanted to deal with his questioning gaze.

By the time she forced herself to stop over-analyzing and focus on the conversation they were having, she caught the tail end of their conversation about Dobby.

"—Mum's always wishing we had a house-elf to do the ironing," George was saying, his attention still on the backseat. "But all we've got is a lousy old ghoul in the attic and gnomes all over the garden. House-elves come with big old manors and castles and places like that; you wouldn't catch one in our house…"

There was a bit of a silence following this pronouncement. Though she, and most of the rest of the school, knew the Weasleys were poor, she'd never really considered it all too much. None of the Weasley children seemed too concerned about the knowledge, though Ron oftentimes complained about their lack of money. She'd never actually heard the twins complain about their circumstances, however. They were so easy-going and fun that she never really imagined they complained about much. And though George's voice was mostly matter-of-fact, she still heard a bit of the resentment in his voice. She suspected the twins were both far too proud and far too grateful for the things they did have to find much room to complain most times.

Ron was the one to break the silence.

"I'm glad we came to get you, anyway. I was getting really worried when you didn't answer any of my letters. I thought it was Errol's fault at first—"

"Who's Errol?"

"Our owl. He's ancient. It wouldn't be the first time he'd collapsed on a delivery. So then I tried to borrow Hermes—"

"Who?"

"The owl Mum and Dad bought Percy when he was made prefect," Fred offered from the front seat. Nessa detected a hint of disgust in his voice and tried not to smirk.

She'd never spoken to Percy personally, but she'd seen him walking the corridors and he wasn't someone she'd much wanted to spend time with. Though she was a stickler for rules because her constant over-analyzing and anxiety called for it, she knew how to have fun on occasion. Percy looked like someone who would rather wilt up and die than even speak the word. And the twins, who lived life to the fullest, seemed even less likely to hang about him in their free time. Not to mention that their notorious rule-breaking probably led to a disgust in their brother's prefect status.

"But Percy wouldn't lend him to me," Ron continued. "Said he needed him."

"Percy's been acting very oddly this summer," George said, frowning in thought. "And he has been sending a lot of letters and spending a load of time shut up in his room…I mean, there's only so many times you can polish a prefect badge…You're driving too far west, Fred," he added, reaching over Nessa with the arm that wasn't resting on the seat to tap the compass on the dashboard. Fred immediately fixed his mistake without comment.

Nessa could hear Harry and Ron continuing the conversation in the backseat and tried valiantly to pay attention, as her eyes started drooping. But the vibration of the car coupled with the heat that seemed to be emanating from the twins, who were both focused mostly on the road ahead, lulled her easily into sleep.

-o0o-

It felt like only seconds later that she was jolted awake by the car hitting the ground. She gasped and shot forward and nearly did a faceplant into the dashboard. Would have if George hadn't slung an arm around her waist and pulled her back as quickly as she'd shot forward.

"Touchdown!" Fred said through a chuckle as he watched her cheeks turn a rosy pink.

Nessa ignored both him and his twin, who was still holding her steady against him and looked around at her surroundings.

They had landed next to a tumbledown garage in a small yard, next to a rather lopsided house that was several stories high. It looked like it had once been a large stone pigpen, but had been accommodated to fit the very large Weasley family by adding rooms haphazardly around the structure. Nessa wasn't entirely sure she trusted the overall structure of the house, considering it looked very close to toppling over; she strongly believed the entire thing was held up by magic. There were four or five chimneys that lined the roof and a sign that read THE BURROW was stuck crookedly into the dirt.

Nessa decided she had never seen somewhere so beautiful.

"It's not much," Ron said.

"It's wonderful," the Potter siblings said at once, grinning.

They got out of the car.

"Now, we'll go upstairs really quietly," Fred said, "and wait for Mum to call us for breakfast. Then, Ron, you come bounding downstairs going, 'Mum, look who turned up in the night!' and she'll be all pleased to see Harry and Nessa and no one need ever know we flew the car."

"Right," Ron said, nodding in determination. "Come on, Harry, I sleep at the—at the top—"

Ron had gone a nasty greenish color, his eyes fixed on the house. The rest of them whirled around.

Mrs. Weasley was marching across the yard, scattering chickens. Nessa had always assumed that Mrs. Weasley looked like a very kind woman, who seemed to dote on her five children every time Nessa had seen the family together. Now, she looked remarkably like a saber-toothed tiger that had no qualms about eating its offspring.

Nessa felt the twins stiffen beside her and felt her dread increase. She'd never seen the twins scared of anything.

"Ah," Fred said.

"Oh, dear," George said.

Mrs. Weasley came to a halt in front of them and Nessa realized she'd backed herself behind the twins and was once again wringing her hands. Their mother rested her hands on her hips and looked from one guilty face to the next. She was wearing a flowered apron with a wand sticking out of the pocket.

"So," she said.

"Morning, Mum." George said, in what Nessa assumed he thought was a jaunty, winning voice.

"Have you any idea how worried I've been?" his mother responded in a deadly whisper.

"Sorry, Mum, but see, we had to –"

All three of her sons were much taller than she was, but they cowered as her rage broke over them. Nessa cringed and shielded herself behind George more thoroughly. He was so much taller than her, she doubted Mrs. Weasley could see her behind him at all.

"Beds empty! No note! Car gone—could have crashed—out of my mind with worry—did you care?—never, as long as I've lived—you wait until your father gets home, we never had trouble like this from Bill or Charlie or Percy—"

"Perfect Percy," Fred muttered derisively.

Nessa gaped at his audacity. Was he mad?

"YOU COULD DO WITH TAKING A LEAF OUT OF PERCY'S BOOK!" Mrs. Weasley yelled, poking him in the chest. "You could have died, you could have been seen, you could have lost your father his job—"

Nessa watched wide-eyed as Mrs. Weasley went on screaming for hours. She suspected she could have gone on for hours more, but she seemed to deflate with a rather large breath and turned to face Harry, who backed away quickly. Despite her hesitance to make a move in front of an angry Mrs. Weasley, Nessa couldn't hold in her snort of mirth at the sight.

"I'm very pleased to see you, Harry, dear." She paused. "Where on Earth is your sister?"

"Er, hi." Nessa said awkwardly as she shoved her way between the twins.

"Welcome, dear. Come in and have some breakfast."

She turned and walked back into the house and Harry made nervous eye contact with her as Ron nodded encouragingly behind them. She shrugged and followed behind the matriarch, Harry and the boys filing quickly behind her.

The kitchen was small and cramped. A large, scrubbed wooden table and chairs took up the majority of the room. Nessa picked the seat closest to the door without being at the end of the table. She was surprised when the twins sat on either side of her, Harry and Ron sitting directly across.

All of them were silent, as Mrs. Weasley bustled around the kitchen making breakfast, muttering to herself about her children and their antics. Occasionally she threw dirty looks at her sons as she threw ingredients into the pan.

Nessa found listening to her obvious displeasure quite awkward — after all, it was slightly her fault that the boys had even left the house to begin with — and busied herself with looking around the house.

The clock on the wall behind her had only one hand and no numbers at all. Written around the edge were things like Time to make tea, Time to feed the chickens, and You're late. Books were stacked three deep on the mantelpiece with titles like Charm Your Own Cheese and Enchantment in Baking.

"I don't blame you, dears." Mrs. Weasley assured the Potter siblings, making Nessa jump when she noticed how close she was standing to her. She dumped eight or nine sausages onto her plate and then did the same for Harry. She stared at her brother, wide-eyed; the only time she'd ever eaten this much food was at Hogwarts. "Arthur and I have been worried about you, too. Just last night we were saying we'd come and get you ourselves if you hadn't written Ron back by Friday." She turned to Nessa again and added three fried eggs to her plate. "Tori tells us such nasty things about those Muggles you live with. But really, flying an illegal car halfway across the country — anyone could have seen you—"

"It was cloudy, Mum!" Fred said.

"You keep your mouth closed while you're eating!" Mrs. Weasley snapped at him, and he promptly closed his mouth, though he glared viciously at his plate of sausages, as though they'd done him a great disservice.

"They were starving them, Mum!" George implored.

"And you!" she snapped, though her expression had softened as she continued to pile food on their plates. Nessa wasn't sure she could eat the entirety of what was already there.

At that moment, there was a sound of feet bounding down the stairs. A second later, a small red-headed figure in a long nightdress appeared in the kitchen and gave small squeal before running out again. Nessa grinned at the sound of the tinkling laugh that followed the girl's departure. It sounded loudly through the kitchen, as another girl swung around the doorframe and into the kitchen.

She was much taller than Nessa — as most people were these days — but still quite a bit shorter than any of the Weasley boys. Her curly black hair was still a wild tangle around her head, though it was obvious she had been awake now for quite some time. There was no sign of sleep in her grey eyes and she'd applied a light layer of make-up to her face. She'd partially dressed for the day in jeans and a long T-shirt that was very obviously too big for her.

"Ginny, come back!" Tori yelled through a chuckle, her eyes rolling to face the group that was sat at the kitchen table. "Nessa! Oh, what a surprise!"

Fred and George snorted into their plates as their mother wheeled around with a glare, her hands resting on her hips. Unlike the Weasley boys, Tori didn't cower at the sight of her rage. Instead she smiled innocently and braced herself for the explosion.

"Victoria Hastings, don't you go on acting as though you didn't know where this lot had gotten off to this morning. You three," she snapped, waving her spatula menacingly at the twins and then back to her surrogate daughter. "have caused me more problems than all of my other children combined! I've no doubt the three of you cooked this up together in that blasted room and it was completely irresponsible!"

The tirade seemed to do very little to Tori's bubbly mood. She simply skipped around the table to kiss the woman on the cheek.

"Sorry, Molly," she said swinging around the table and plopping herself into George's lap to steal one of the sausages on his plate.

"Oi!" he said, making a wild grab for it before she stuck the entire thing in her mouth and smiled at him sweetly.

"Who was that?" Nessa asked quickly, as she saw Molly's glare intensify from the corner of her eye.

"Ginny," Ron said. "My sister. She's been talking about you all summer." He added to Harry.

"Yeah, she'll be wanting your autograph, Harry," Fred grinned, but then he caught his mother's eye and bent his head over his plate without another word.

Silence reigned at the table as the six of them cleaned their plates. Nessa was barely able to finish her own, despite the fact that she hadn't eaten a decent meal in days and felt very close to exploding by the time she pushed her plate away from her.

"Blimey, I'm tired," Fred yawned as he did the same. "I think I'll go to bed and—"

"You will not," Mrs. Weasley snapped again. "It's your own fault you've been up all night. You're going to de-gnome the garden for me; they're getting completely out of hand again—"

"Oh, Mum—"

"And, you three," she said, glaring at Ron, Tori, and George. "You two can go up to bed, dears," she added to Nessa and Harry. "You didn't ask them to fly that wretched car— "

"Hey!" Tori said, indignantly. "I didn't even fly it."

"All the same, you encouraged the behavior, so you'll join them."

"I'll help Ron," Harry offered, happily. "I've never seen a de-gnoming— "

"That's very sweet of you, dear, but it's dull work." She said. "Now, let's see what Lockhart's got to say on the subject—"

George groaned. "Mum we know how to de-gnome a garden."

"Oh, he is marvelous," she said to Nessa, as she set a thick book titled Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Household Pests on the table next to her.

As with every photo in the Wizarding World, the one plastered on the front of the book was moving; the man in the photo kept winking cheekily up at them. He had very wavy blonde hair and bright blue eyes, and Nessa assumed he was quite good-looking, though she mostly thought he looked a bit like a girl.

"Mum fancies him," Fred said in a very audible whisper.

"Don't be so ridiculous, Fred," his mother responded, her cheeks rather pink. "All right, if you think you know better than Lockhart, you can go and get on with it, and woe betide you if there's a single gnome in that garden when I come out to inspect it."

The Weasley children and Tori began to file out of the kitchen, yawning and grumbling. Harry soon followed. Nessa had only just begun to contemplate whether or not finding a bedroom to sleep in would have been considered rude when Tori stomped back into the house and grabbed her arm to tug her outside.

"Do not even try to go to sleep, Vanessa. I blame you for this," she said, as she dragged a sputtering Nessa out the door and after Weasley boys.