Chapter 9

"No really, it's fine, I look younger without it."

This after a bit of shouting from Hermione, some poorly- suppressed laughter from the boys (who I was warming to) and a few sprayings of water from wands all around onto a somewhat damp and yet irritatingly good-natured Dumbledore.

Did Arthur even know those men? What was wrong with him? Why did he just accept what they said at face value and then follow through with it over so many years?

I asked these questions aloud to the room in general. Honestly I was trying to change the subject from my inadvertent, well-deserved but wrongful barbering. But the man was getting on my nerves. Maybe I was a little sensitive. Maybe I was wrong to be mad at him. I just felt like he gave out a sort of unspoken "If everyone plays along it'll be fine" ambience, and maybe I was new here but I was not okay with people telling me to accept their weirdness. The funny thing about that, I observed to myself, is that you are a bit weird yourself, and not just in the fish-out-of-water, boy-from-the-big-city-who's-some-kind-of-upholstery-animating-wizard way – and you took Arthur at face value and still do. And Ginny's all right with you, more than all right, and your parents are fine with you, and Hermione, and the boys, and Luna… So you've chosen Dumbledore to beat up on mentally, and maybe he has a bit coming but maybe not from you.

Well, I'm new at this, I thought defensively, and then I thought, I'm defensive against my own inner monologue. Why can't I just get along?

Arthur wandered in around this point and commented mildly on the smell in the air. I got up and went over to him, putting my hand on his shoulder to let him know I wasn't angry. In fact, there weren't enough words for this poor man who'd gone so far to do what he thought he had to do. I was glad I never got too angry at him.

"Arthur, what did you do…" I dreaded the answer to this question. "What did you do after what happened to Molly and me, and before you took me away?"

"Oh, well," he said, sighing, "I suppose not a lot. I was fairly useless with the children. I mostly just, you know, sat round and watched the grass grow… What? I liked to."

The room was very quiet, and everyone was looking at him.

"Well, it was a lot to take in," he said.

"I can imagine," Luna said softly.

"All right then," Charlie said loudly, "you said Voldemort isn't gone. Can you get back round to that?"

"Just a moment," I said. I was trying to remember the conversation we'd had, Arthur and I, the first one I could really remember, and what he'd told me about his mission. When you only have a few memories in your head and you hear something similar to one of them, it stands out a bit. And the more that things linked together, the more I wanted them not to, like somehow this linking was forming the basis of my current, working memory and I didn't want it to be, didn't want to build my house on this unstable marshy land. Not at all. Quick! I thought. Remember something else! Something good!

"Sorry about the vase," I said.

"That's all right, dear," my mother said, sitting at the table with my brother in her arms. "It's good as new."

"Oh, yeah, right." No wonder everything around here was older-looking but in fabulous shape. It could be fixed anytime by waving a wand at it. The vase wasn't a great memory. Where did that come from? The events around it. Seeing her for the first time. Pretty great, actually. I had to remind myself that balancing the bad was fairly easy by grabbing a gander at the good. And she – yes, she still looked like an explosion in a beauty factory.

Dumbledore began to furiously scratch his chin.

"Well, the basis of that," he began, not halting his scratching, "of course is found in what happened the last time, in everyone's efforts to bring Tom down." His chin, which clearly had not seen much daylight to begin with and thus was a bit pale, was becoming paler. No, something was sprouting from it. "Once we became aware of what Tom had done along the road to immortality, we took steps to eradicate the fragments of his soul that were scattered across our land - you know, Deasil, I would just as soon allowed it to grow back naturally - and found and destroyed the six artifacts we knew he'd made –"

"Okay, sorry, and what the hell are you talking about?"

"Ah. Tom feared death, as those with huge egos often do, and wanted to escape it more than anything. During his time at school he discovered a way to infuse an object with part of his soul, so that if his body were to be destroyed, something of his essence would linger on in another place and potentially be able to be restored to life. This object, once infused, is referred to as a horcrux. It is a dark and horrible thing, created only by the most horrible act – murder. Taking another life renders the soul of the killer unstable, and at this moment a fragment of it may be extracted and placed in the object."

"So he made a horcrux." I sat by my mother.

"There were seven."

Charlie looked as though something had made sense to him. That left only me in the dark. I personally was liking the dark. It didn't make me need to wear the expression he was wearing.

"You said six."

"I said we found six. One of them was thought to be irretrievably destroyed, until recently." He looked down at his respectable six inches of beard. I would think anyone would have stopped there before entering seventies-Texan-rock status, which I learned about later and had a bit of a giggling fit over that I was hard-pressed to explain, but his had been longer still than that. Well, if it was going to get any longer, it would be without the help of my subconscious.

My mother said, "All right, Albus," and turned to face me. Her eyes were familiar and warm and sad. "The next part is a little hard. No one was there to see this, but we know that it more or less happened this way. Tom came to kill you that night, and Molly was there to guard you. When he cast the killing curse at her, his soul became unstable. Because Molly had sacrificed herself for you, we believe you were at that moment protected by a very ancient type of magic. Tom then came to your cot and cast the curse at you, but your protection deflected the spell, causing it to strike him and destroy his body – but at that moment a fragment of his unstable soul splintered away from him and found the closest receptacle it could. Had he been a few steps back it might have been Molly, but as it turns out it was you."

I began to feel a little like getting rid of all my dinner and then not starting over.

"But Molly was dead."

"She wasn't," she said. "We don't know why, but the killing curse did not kill her. She's in a coma."

"And now I'm … one of the … the horcruxes. Wait a minute, I have some of that psycho's soul in me?" I began to stand, but her hand was on me, bringing me back down.

"There is some connection between you and Tom," she said softly. "It's unclear what that is exactly."

"Okay." I breathed in deeply. Reality was not my friend. It was a choppy dark sea that I had to flounder in, whether I liked it or not, and it was time I took another plunge in. "A piece of him is stuck in me. I understand how that's bad for me, I mean … eurrgh, and everything, but why is that bad for everyone else exactly?"

"Because," Dumbledore's voice came, grating on my nerves because he brought bad news around like shite brought stink, "each horcrux he created was a way for him to come back to life. So long as they were all gone, when Neville Longbottom struck him down, we believed him to be gone forever."

"And you thought I was gone forever."

"We had reason to believe you had been taken away by Sirius Black and killed, as a service to his master."

I heard breath being expelled, probably by my father.

"We were all devastated," my mother said to me.

"You were the only one to survive the killing curse," Hermione said, almost to herself. "You were the boy who lived. Everyone in the magical world knows who you are. You were the one who gave us all hope…"

"Hope for what?"

"That he could be fought and defeated," she said. "When he returned, you were a symbol to us, of resistance and triumph. It infuriated and frightened him that you had been able to hurt him so badly. It's likely that that helped us, in the end."

"Either one can live…" I said.

"No, that's all wrong, you see," Dumbledore said. "The man who repeated what he thought was the prophecy was clearly drunk and probably misheard as well. Fortunately I was there to hear it correctly. The part you're speaking of was as follows – 'Neither can live while the other survives'."

"Albus, for Merlin's sake," my father said angrily, "we'll thank you later for remembering it word for word, we all bloody know it. This is Deasil's life you're talking about."

"And he should know –"

"Not like this!" Ginny shouted. "Not so you can have all your bloody ducks in a row, you stupid old git!"

I was becoming accustomed to these silences. They were a comfortable place to regroup. I knew pretty much for sure I had a staunch ally in Ginny. I knew I had a chip of someone's soul inside me - well, I didn't know it because it was just too hard to wrap my brain around, but I was to understand thus. And as long as I was around, a vicious maniac was free to return from the dead. And I didn't know what the fix was for that, other than being dead myself.

Oh, my head was hurting.

Maybe a bit more than I could stand.

They all went away. Then I went somewhere else.

•

I was wondering – am I? And if I am, and there's something that is not me, it must be somewhere else, and then where am I compared to it, and if it's important to differentiate me from the other thing, and I have an identity, then who am I? Not-the-other-thing? Is there more to be said than that – that what I'm not defines me? It doesn't sound that great to just be not-that-thing-over-there or only-slightly-similar-to-that-thing-here, when I – and I must be, must exist, I guess that's irrefutable now, as plain as – something… where was I? Dinner. What was that thing over there? A fireplace. Not there anymore. And that thing here? A man. Not like me. Nothing like me. I would never do that. Do what? Who was he? And where did he go?

I was in a little bit of pain. My extremities, which I now was aware that I possessed, were a little tingly. If you ever need to figure out what's going on with your body, like if it works and what most of it is good for, it's a good idea to start with involuntary reactions, which can sort of do things for themselves that you can then interpret and then sort of join in in a subtle way, like at the movies when you're figuring out which queue you need to be in though they're all crowded together and it just looks like a mob, though not an angry one, sort of a placid mob, and then when you figure out which one is for the gorilla movie that you want to see you kind of edge into it as though that was what you intended all along. I was figuring this was true, anyway, so I stayed still, waiting for something to happen.

What happened was: a small motion, a rolling, a trickle of sensation that started in a place that could only be my forehead and passed between my apparent brows, I mean apparently they existed and I had them, and ended in my eye, causing my eyelid to flutter rapidly. This brought light, and irritation, and then more awareness. When you see things, you can make sense of what they're doing. Light all around me resolved into discrete things that with a little prompting I could identify. Tree-trunk, two feet in shoes, shadows from sunlight on a dirt road. Further examining indicated the feet were mine, or at least being controlled by me. The drop was sweat, I was sitting up. Something was nudging my side. It was about the size and shape of a duffel bag.

It was a duffel bag. This bag was clearly moving of its own accord. Now, I recognized it as a bag, and in my memory there was a file on duffel bags, albeit limited, and any mention of them being animate objects was missing. This one was rubbing against me like a dog. Like a … Be serious. What? Serious. Who used to say that? Daddy? I have a daddy? Get serious.

Well, it was clearly my animated duffel bag. I tried to imagine what duffel bags might like, or perceive as a friendly overture, and settled for a tentative scratch along the broad side. My fingers made a strangely satisfying scraping noise against the rough canvas, and apparently it was satisfying for both of us. The bag flattened itself and stretched each end up in the air a little, then proceeded to flip over on its side, presumably to reveal its most tender and unreachable spots.

Centering. Breathing in and out. Enjoying a sunny day, a little cool, just a man sitting in a country road, scratching his bag.

Mornings were always slow.

Oh, that's me remembering something. If I thought about it, I could remember a lot of mornings. A long line of them, receding into the past like train tracks. One the same as the other. The room the same, only that the further back I saw, the larger it got. The blanket the same for a long time, except at the end, when it somehow… became more active. Not a thing for blankets to do, but then there was the bag I was scratching, writhing in the dirt, miserably happy. So maybe I just didn't know much about the world. Maybe there was someone I could ask. I was feeling a little insecure, a little restless, a little inconsolable. Get serious, I told myself, attempting to rise in a very rickety fashion. Between my feet I'd surveyed the surrounding area, and not come up with much. Distant farmhouses, and before me a vacant lot. No, wait, it wasn't vacant, what was I thinking? There was a large house there, surrounded by trees and a picket fence. Maybe I just didn't see it. Maybe I was very slow in the morning. I staggered a bit and finally made it upright, kicking up a little dust and startling the bag. I have to figure this out, I don't really feel safe. Get serious.

I went through the gate and headed for the front door. The bag arrived late. I thought it might be prudent to wait for it, on the outside chance that it really was a weird thing after all to have an animate bag following you around, and I contemplated its response to the "stay" command before knocking on the door.

The door opened and a red-headed young man answered. He looked a little surprised to see me, and a little relieved. He must know me, I thought. He looked down at my feet for a moment, then turned his head and shouted into the house, "Who let the bag out?"

Turning back to me he said, "We were worried about you. First thing we knew we were all upstairs in the guest bedroom, looking at each other."

I must have looked blank.

"Deasil, you all right, mate?" he said. I wondered if "Deasil" were an expletive of some sort.

"Okay, I think I get it," he said. "Don't remember me, right? Well, I'll bet I know someone you'll remember. Gin? Oi, Gin! Company's here!"

I clearly heard, from somewhere in the house, a female voice saying, "Bloody hell. Could he have picked a worse time? Of all the thick-headed…" Doors flung open and every flower with red in it strode purposefully in shaking her head and saying, "Honestly, Michael, we've been through this before and now is not the best time to – oh!" And then, "Oh! You're back? You're back! Are you…oh. You don't – you can't – do you?"

She could have been reciting the phone book. I was smitten. You know how your mouth waters when you see your favorite food? Whatever the analog to my entire being would be, that. I don't know, she was so pretty it made me a little stupid.

"Well, good to hear you've clarified all that, Healer Weasley," the young man said.

"Ron…" Her eyes narrowed.

"Right, sorry, I'll jut leave you to it, then," he said, still cheerful. He ambled away, casting amused looks at her. "I'll just tell Lily, shall I?"

She was struggling internally with something. His eyes were on her even as he sauntered toward the door she'd come through, and he had the faintest glimmer of mischief in his expression. Finally without looking at him she thrust her hand out, palm towards him. "Why don't … why don't you give me a moment first."

He glanced at me, a smirk blooming, and said, "Maybe that would be best," and quietly closed the door after him.

This was all beyond me, but that was all right. I had an excuse to look at her while I figured out the little things, like who I was and who she was and if we were an us and if I was perhaps Michael and had come at a bad time.

"Are you feeling all right?" she asked me tentatively.

"I suppose so," I said. "Compared to what?"

"Do you have anything to compare it to?"

"No."

"Nothing hurts, though?"

"No." She moved towards me, reaching a hand out towards my arm. I honestly would have unscrewed it and handed it to her if I could have - she could have had anything from me she wanted. When she pulled out a stick and pointed it at my head, I was willing to mark that as "weird in passing", but not anything more. Until she mumbled, it glowed, and my vision blurred for a moment. That I noticed.

"What was all that?" I asked, taking a step back.

"Sorry," she said, "sorry, I was just – checking to see if you'd been hurt."

"With a chopstick?"

"Ah. We're back to that." She put her stick away and closed her eyes for a moment. I imagined her asleep. It was a sudden image, and a sweet one, and I was a little surprised but it was very pleasant, and then just as suddenly her eyes opened and she looked a little triumphant. "Come sit with me."

"Okay." She led me past a flight of stairs and a number popped into my head. I kept it to myself. There was a small sofa in an adjacent room, and we sat on it together.

"I think I can jumpstart this …" she said, not sounding entirely confident.

"Jumpstart what?" I said.

"You don't remember anything, right?"

"Right."

"Maybe I can help you to remember, but you're going to have to…"

"To what?"

"Well, to …look into my eyes."

"Could I anyway?" What the hell. Clumsy but honest. I hoped she liked that.

She flushed. "It'll help if you're relaxed."

I was relaxed enough to be slipped under a door. "Okay."

She took my hand in hers and fixed her gaze on me. Her eyes were a beautiful brown, with gold and green somehow weaved in as well, and they were warm and kind, but I could feel motion behind them, a quick mind and a strength greater than her small body. I felt like she wouldn't tell a joke, but that she might do something to make someone laugh. Then I imagined her smiling, and I had to smile myself. Her lips pulled into a grin then, and it was better than I had imagined. Her nose crinkled, and dimples appeared, and smile lines, and I felt that I could look at her all day.

We sat still, just grinning at each other, for a good while.

Finally she said, "So?"

"So what?"

"Do you hear anything?"

"No."

"Loud or silent?"

"What does that mean?"

She looked disappointed.

"It means … I'm not sure."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm a bit useless."

"You are not useless," she said firmly, and her eyes flashed. "I guess I – I'd hoped that I could…well, anyway, I'll get your parents and they'll be able to help." She rose and took a few quick steps across the room, the sound light and crisp. The number came back into my head.

"Why twelve?" I said.

"What?"

"Why twelve steps?" I said, trying to put something together. It was the sound and the number and the … stairs. "There are more than twelve steps in the stairwell. Why did I only hear twelve steps?"

Her eyes had been blank with remembering, but then she lit up, and I had seen this before, had seen her. Her. My her.

"I was in a hurry," she said, coming back to me in every way, including the walking towards me way. The returning to myself, my basis, was jarring but also somehow exquisite, because when I looked to find the center of things, she was there, waiting. I stood up to meet her. "I skipped every other step towards the top."

"Why did you become a midwife?" I asked, as her hand came into mine again.

"I needed a break from tending to my mum," she said. "I needed to see life go on."

"I see," I said. "I mean, I can see that."

"I know you can," she said, and she pulled me into a tight hug. It was surely the best thing in the world. "And I'm so glad that you can see that. And I was worried about you."

"Why?"

"Oh, no reason," she sighed into my shoulder, "just that you got very upset and then we were all suddenly upstairs in your room but you were gone, and we figured you must have done it but by accident and you were nowhere in the house."

It was funny. She sounded really upset but not wanting to show it. I wondered why she wouldn't just say, but then I thought, she – Ginny, her name like a juicy wedge of orange in my mouth – must have her reasons, and I shouldn't take it from her, but wait for it to be given. Whatever it was that was making her protective of herself, I wanted to ease it, and I felt awkward and humbled that my presence could make her feel better. Maybe I should back off a little, I thought - maybe she needs to remember her strength, maybe she didn't need an out-of-focus fellow like me to lean on anyway.

What I said was, "I'm here now."

I don't know how I said it. What my inflection was, what the pacing was like. Of many things I would like to remember in my patchwork life, how I said those words is high on the list, just so I could sort of…pull it off the shelf sometime, dust it off, and say it again every day of my life so she would look at me that way again.

It would probably be worth the subsequent slap as well. But I might only pull it down every other day.

"Www…" That was my comeback. She'd taken a step back. Her hand was still in the air. It was the other one I was concerned about. It didn't have a wand in it. It was opening and closing rapidly. Her face was florid with fury.

"You… you just … you…"

You read my mind. You read my mind!

The wrong thing for me to say at that moment would have been, "I swear I didn't." And it really was, actually.

The hand was still opening and closing. I really should have worried a little about her slapping hand, though. She reminded me of it.

This kind of pain was a little new to me. As far as I knew I'd never been slapped before. My cheek was burning and one eye was a little blurry.

"Can you stop doing that?" I asked.

"You're just like him!" she rasped. "You wait until I'm weak. I tell you – I show you myself, like an idiot… I think you're … and then you bloody take what you want!"

Breath. Breath. Breath.

"But why should I be surprised," she said, with a coarse flatness to her voice, like she was twisting something to get it out. "He's left a little of himself in you."

You know what I'm not going to do? I'm not going to pass out. I'm not going to vanish out of here. I am not going to forget who I am. And there really isn't that much of me, is there? So I would know if there were someone else in here with me. And I know I've been alone all this time. The only one in here with me is you. And I know I have heard you thinking and feeling, because it is something you allowed. And maybe it's because we were close that we were thinking the same thing, and you know this about me because I'm wide open to you, you know this,

"And I was not looking you in the eye."

I said the last out loud, but I had just realized she'd heard it all, because I was looking right at her.

"What you heard was you, not me, because I was not looking you in the eye."

Her face had gone pale.

There was a short interlude of silence, punctuated only by the sound of various pieces of furniture trying to edge their way quietly out of the room.

"Is this," I said, gesturing around the room, into the air, wherever, "what the world is really like? Did I wake up out of a long dreamless sleep to this? Is this what knowing and remembering have to offer me? Is this what having feelings I can hang onto is going to cost?"

"No," she said quietly, "no, it's not, it's my fault –"

"Did you practice it? Did you practice that voice? Have you done this before? Did you have a speech ready for when I showed up, so you could punish me? I'M NOT TOM!"

Burning smell. Walls bubbling, crackling, hissing. Sweat on her face, run together with tears.

"ALL RIGHT!" she shouted. "SO I HAVE SOME ISSUES!"

A few moments later when the others swarmed into the room, they found two wild and raggedy-looking people in the middle of the floor, covered in soot, laughing hysterically.

"He's home, I guess," my father said.

"And found himself a friend," said my mother.

"Ow," I gasped, "my stomach."

"Stop laughing," Ginny said, one bright eye visible under her terrifically filthy hair, "and then we'll both be all right."

"Stop being so funny." I tried to drag myself to my feet and her with me. We kind of made it, arms around each other's shoulders, and staggered a bit until we were mostly upright. I had a look at the room we were in. The walls were dark and split in spots, the furniture was singed, the ceiling utterly black in a circle radiating out above us. It was smoky and smelled horrible.

It was hilarious.

Between moans and shrieks of laughter, we managed to express, sometimes verbally and sometimes with a variety of gestures, how sorry we were that the room was … burnt up. All burnt up. Oh, boy. I burned up my parents' living room. Well, we did it. Maybe a little of the humor was wearing off now. Maybe it was her fault. I didn't know what I was doing. I just got here. I must be a complete jackass coward.

"Look, mum, this is my fault. She helped me to remember, and helped me to fight off the retreating and the passing out and all that. I just got a little –"

"This isn't all you," Ginny said indignantly, though sounding a little drunk. "I was flaming mad. It's not as though you did this all yourself. I know very well I singed that chair over there."

"Oh, that whole chair, is that right? What about this –" I waved my free arm in the air " – black snow we've got in here. Did that just start falling on its own? And the only reason the chair is over there is because it was afraid of me!"

Percy chose this moment to step forward. "This is just about right. This is what I've come to expect from you, Ginevra – "(Paydirt, I thought.)" – once again you've allowed your feelings get the better of you. One would think by now someone who calls herself a Healer might have learned how to carry herself with some amount of dignity."

"Piss off, Perce," the twins said together.

"She needs to think of how she appears to people. The impression one makes is crucial –"

"And what kind of impression are you trying to make here?" I asked, honestly curious.

"Well – that is, I don't need to make an impression on you all – most of you are my family."

"But Ginny needs to make one?"

He looked put out. "I can see you wouldn't understand," he said stiffly.

"Well," I said, "it's true I grew up without my family, so I don't know what it's like to have people who know me better than anyone and put up with my quirks or call me on my foolishness, or maybe I'm learning it but I haven't had the years of experience you've had with my parents. But surely they've wanted you to be yourself around them?"

He was clearly not happy about remembering that. "I've been without my parents too, you know." And shifting the subject back to reprimanding Ginny, he said, "I wonder what Mother would have thought of all of this."

Ginny looked stricken – clearly Percy knew the chinks in her armor.

"You could always ask her," Luna said.

"What good would that do?" Percy replied, turning on her. "She's not there – it's just her body."

"She may not be there right now," Ginny said, all humor gone, all balled up like a fist. "But she is still with us."

"That's right," Charlie said, coming to stand by Ginny.

"She's still our mum, you dolt," one of the twins said.

"As you might remember if you ever did a thing to help with her," the other one said.

"This is ridiculous!" Percy said, wiping his face in frustration. "She was our mother. What you're tending to is not her any more. She isn't there."

My mother was casting concerned looks at Arthur. I was beginning to wonder how he was taking this – the idea of him having a wife that he loved was relatively new to me, understandably. Maybe he wouldn't like the idea of one of his sons treating her like an object. Or maybe he wouldn't sort of notice. He was funny like that. Not always there. Saint Arthur's Home for the Chronically Distracted, that was our apartment. Still, it irked me that someone would blather on about his wife's body being an empty shell without thinking of how it would make him feel at all. Or maybe it was all about how he would feel. It seemed too pointed to not be aimed at someone.

Voices were raising. Bill and Charlie both began to berate Percy for his harshness, Ginny was dragging her fingers through her hair, the twins started in, Hermione tried to placate the crowd - my father shouted over them to get them to quiet down – it was very loud in there, so loud I almost didn't hear Luna when she said, "Percy's right, you know."

Funny that when someone speaks quietly at just the right time, it can silence an entire room.

Ginny spoke first. "Luna, how can you say that? You've been with me in hospital, you've tended to her yourself. You've been helping all this time and you think she's gone forever?"

"I didn't say that," she said. "I just said Percy was right."

"Well what the bloody hell do you think he's right about?"

"That she isn't there. Excuse me a moment." She went over to the now-blackened fireplace, ignited a fire in it, tossed some powder from a small jar into the fire, and plunged her head in after saying, "Professor McGonagall's office."

It was really hard to get used to seeing that.

After a few moments she backed away and the fireplace flared, disgorging a sharpfaced witch from its flames. I use the term "witch" now because she was the first one who looked anything like how I imagined a witch would appear. She had on a pointed cap, she was all in black, and she was a bit wizened and stern looking. The stern face only wavered slightly as she took the room in.

"Lily, James, children," she said, passing over me and not seeing Arthur. "Miss Lovegood, what is it that is so important that it could not wait?"

"Just a few questions, really. You taught Molly Weasley in transfiguration?"

"Yes, of course I did, and also charms, I filled in for Professor Flitwick while he was on sabbatical, but why –"

"Was she a good student, or do you recall?"

"I recall all of my students, Miss Lovegood. She was fair to good, with a few weaknesses."

"What might they have been?"

"Well – " She looked at the Weasley family with something resembling compassion. " - And you understand, children, your mother was a very talented witch, but she did have an idiosyncrasy or two. She had her own ideas about household charms, though they were very innovative, but she had a bit of a – problem with execution."

"How is that?"

"Her wand motion. It was fairly consistent for part of the range, but she had a muscular condition, I believe, that impeded her somewhat."

Hermione looked as though someone had stuck a key in the back of her head and given it a turn, but she remained silent and listening.

"A muscular condition?"

"Yes. When casting many spells, she tended to drift a bit, which compromised her effectiveness, and often changed the outcome of the –"

"I beg your pardon, Professor," Luna said, "but how did she drift?"

"It was … it was a little to the right."

A/N: A lot happened in this chapter. I'm feeling a little like I packed my whole wardrobe for a weekend trip. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Reviews are appreciated.