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Chapter 15

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"For two people that supposedly broke up, you sure spend a lot of time together," Hermione commented to him when he returned to Gryffindor Tower at 8:30 one evening near the end of January.

His only response was to let out a loud sigh and glare at her.

She didn't take his look to heart, instead she ploughed on. "It just seems like every night that you don't have Quidditch Practice, the two of you still find some reason to rush off together or speak quietly in the corner. It isn't the normal behavior of persons that have broken up."

"You've a lot of experience from your personal break-ups, do you?" he asked as he wiped a hand down his face, an attempt to get rid of the exhaustion he was feeling.

She was right, of course. He and Ginny were spending every minute they weren't sleeping, studying, or practicing Quidditch, together. Not in the way he would have liked to have spent time with her, but they were taking walks around the castle and he was pointing out all the secret passages he knew of, she had shown him the Room of Requirement, he took her to the entrance to the kitchens that Hagrid had shown him, they would sit with each other in the library, things like that.

He wouldn't know what to do with himself if he wasn't with her, she was his new hobby. His schoolwork was more time consuming than difficult, Quidditch practice was a break from everything else, he didn't care to sit around and endlessly discuss other people's love lives; what else was a school student supposed to be getting up to?

Snogging, that's what.

And Ginny had decided they weren't doing that anymore.

After their discussion the day they came back from holiday he'd let Ron and Hermione know that they were going to try to just be friends, at her request. Ron hadn't said anything, he only nodded, and Hermione had claimed that she could empathize with where Ginny was coming from.

Harry was pretty sure that she couldn't though, because he could only get half a grasp on where Ginny was coming from by breaking them up. There had been a few points when they'd hung out that he was sure that she was forgetting they'd broken up and she would brush her fingers against his hand when they walked like she was about to take it, then she wouldn't. He too had several moments where he found himself just staring at her and remembering what her lips tasted like.

"No, I don't personally have the experience, but I have spent over six years surrounded by girls my age that don't exactly have their education as their main focus."

"Female psyche whisperer, are you?" He rested his head back and closed his eyes, picturing how Ginny had looked yesterday evening when they were in the dungeons working on their Potions project. It had been hot in the room with their cauldrons going and she wound up removing her cloak so she was standing there at the table in front of his with just her sleeveless shirt and jeans that were likely a size too small. She'd gotten a really nice bum on her, he'd really only been paying attention to her face, hair and chest before, physically, but that bum she had, it was really nice.

"It's just odd," Hermione continued. "Couldn't you try being friends around other people?"

"Who?" he challenged her. "You and Ron are my friends, everyone else is her friend. It's like we are divided into two camps and I'm not allowed to make friends with anyone else."

"That's ridiculous, of course you are."

"I might be, if I knew what I could and couldn't say to any of them. As it stands I don't think I have the energy in me to attempt making and sustaining a new friendship."

"What do you need a new friend for?" Ron asked as he came to sit down with them.

"I don't, that's my argument. I've got you two for that."

"And Ginny," he added.

"Yeah," he sighed, "and Ginny."

There was a tapping at the window behind him and Hermione got up to let in an owl that flew over to him and dropped a letter. He didn't receive a lot of, any really, mail, so he knew who this would be from.

Sirius was currently in Greece, the letter said, and he'd overheard part of a conversation between two English men that were planning on touring Albania in search of something. Sirius claimed he didn't recognize them but he did find out that they were wizards, so it left him with a few questions, particularly because that was where Voldemort had hidden out in his wraith form when he waited for his Death Eaters to find him.

Sirius wanted him to pay extra attention to the Daily Prophet to see if there was anything even remotely linked to Death Eater activities going on.

All Harry could think when he read the letter was 'not again'.

It was nearing nine when Ginny came in through the portrait hole looking freshly showered, they'd been hanging around the Quidditch Pitch that evening and she stayed longer than him, now he knew it was because she wanted to take a long shower. That called to his mind the image of her wrapped in only a towel.

He watched her greet a few people as she moved across the common room and thought about who she might have encountered at the school last year that were Junior Death Eaters, and where they might be now. It had been the full-fledged, branded Death Eaters that he and Sirius had focused on when they were hunting them down, but, like a house of cards, when the top fell, generally the rest of them fell with it. With this new information Sirius overheard he now thought about how there could be persons that were a few rings outside the inner circle that might be wanting their leader back.

It could be that the people Sirius had come across were some of those missing 'presumed' Death Eaters that the Daily Prophet was talking about. But Ginny might have a list of names of the outlaying Death Eaters she knew of.

"I'm going to bed," he told the two others and headed for the stairs, getting there at the same time as she did, tucking the letter into her hand as they ascended the stairs, she looked down at her hand in surprise, but didn't slow her pace.

She smelled like wildflowers again. Like clean and wildflowers.

They rounded the turn on the stairs, just out of sight of everyone, and he took her hand to stop her. She turned towards him and he put his hand on her hip, resting his cheek on her forehead and inhaling the scent of her hair. "You smell so good," he mumbled.

She swayed towards him so her chest was gently pressed up against his own and tilted her head up, grazing her forehead against his jaw line like a cat. She didn't push him away.

"The letter is from Sirius," he told her quietly. "I want you to read it, and I want to talk to you about it tomorrow."

They only had a moment, he knew that. What had possessed him to touch her the way he currently was, it was due to longing. They'd only been properly together for a short time, which felt even shorter than it had been due to the long gaps in time between being able to be alone with each other.

She'd been the one to say they were done with all that, but right now she wasn't behaving like it mattered.

She was tired, she grew more affectionate when she was tired.

He was about to wrap his arms around her so he could simply hug her close, then there was a commotion in the common room and he remembered himself, she did too. Ginny took a step back and said nothing before continuing up the stairs to the girls dorms.

"Trouble in paradise?" Dean asked from a few steps below him.

Harry didn't know how long Dean had been standing there. Maybe he'd noticed them heading up the stairs in the common room and noticed they hadn't appeared on the landing that separated the boys and girls dorms and came to investigate for himself.

"Fuck off, Dean," Harry said tiredly and pulled himself together to keep heading up to their room.

"Tried to tell you," Dean told him happily. "She's a hard nut to crack. Get's us all wrapped around her finger, then she's just done with you. Same thing happened to me. Now you're all love-sick and trying for a second chance, just like I was."

"Was?" Harry questioned through gritted teeth. "I don't think there's anything past tense about your feelings for her. She seems pretty done with you."

He hurried to catch up with him, his chest puffed out like he was the bigger man. "Don't think you're any different than me. She's done with you too, she's just humoring you now to soften the blow. I'm sure you'll wind up snogging a few more times when the timing is right for her, but that'll be it; she'll move on to someone else that she just barely has an interest in. Then she'll start getting feelings for them and bolt. It's how she works. I suggest you just move on, there are plenty of other girls at school that're available."

He wanted to tell Dean off, defend Ginny or say 'that's not what's happening', but it was. Ginny had flat out told him that the emotions were getting to be too much for her and they had to end it.

Dean might not have the whole story, but he wasn't entirely wrong.

That didn't stop Harry from wanting to hex the smirk off of Dean's face.

"She must have really liked you too," Dean continued to rub salt into the wound. "What was it? Three weeks you lasted before it was over? Meanwhile I was with her for over four months." He gave a theatrical sigh. "Yeah, four months of that aggressive style of snogging she likes. I might not be pinning for her anymore, but I certainly wouldn't say no to a one-off like that again. Even just to get a hold of those larger tits she has now. Two years of developing-"

Dean couldn't say anything more. Harry was so furious with him now that he'd hexed him silent, using a spell that a simple 'finite incatatem' wouldn't reverse.

Dean kept trying to talk, looking more furious as his attempts failed, then started swatting at Harry as he kept walking up to their dorm room. The twins, Eric and Euan, were there and gave he and Dean a funny look.

"Dean was just talking shit about Ginny," Harry explained. "Either of you care if I knock him unconscious and put him in his bed until morning?"

They exchanged a look with each other before Euan answered, "just don't physically hurt him."

Harry grinned at them before casting his next spell at Dean, which made him slump to the floor, then he levitated him to his bed and pulled the curtains around him.

It was honestly the nicest way he could have possibly dealt with the situation.

"You alright?" Eric asked.

"I will be. I just need a shower," Harry dismissed him and went to his trunk to grab a fresh pair of pyjamas. Once he closed his trunk he turned back to the twins. They'd both been nice to him, they'd started off treating him as an unknown at the start of the school year, but now they all cohabitated peacefully. "Either of you been dumped before?"

Euan nodded while Eric shook his head and shrugged.

"How do you navigate the after? You know, when it comes to friends and such? Her friends are her friends, right? They're, like, out of bounds."

Euan laughed at that. "If you really think that, then you're fucked. Everyone here wants to be Ginny's friend."

"It looks like she's spending most of her 'friend' time on you though," Eric smirked.

"Yeah, and Ron is her brother, yet you and he hang around all the time. You don't have to tiptoe around anyone," Eric added.

"'Cept maybe Dean," Euan grinned. "He was obsessed with her after they split up in fifth-year. She wound up hexing him a few times. I didn't think he was still holding a torch for her though, he's been working his way through quite a lot of girls since he's been back. Even so, shutting him up was likely the kindest way you could have dealt with him."

"Yeah, I don't even want to think about what Ginny might have done to him if she found out he was talking about her in whatever way led to that," Eric indicated to the curtains.

"I've heard she has an excellent Bat-Bogey Hex," Harry smiled despite himself.

The twins looked at him skeptically then. "Mate, you didn't get to know her well enough if that's how you think she'd teach him a lesson," Eric said for both of them.

"Yeah," Harry sighed. "I didn't." He slumped off to the showers then.

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Ginny caught up with him after breakfast the next day and gave him back the letter. They were in the Entrance Hall when she did it and her expression told him she had several questions. Then she tilted her head in a gesture that told him to follow her and they went to the seventh floor and the Room of Requirement.

He followed her in and found it had become a small study with two high backed armchairs that faced each other and a fireplace. He would have preferred a couch that they could sit on together, but she was clearly telling him something with this furniture; she was saying that they'd gotten a little too close to getting carried away the evening before in the stairwell.

Ginny took up in one of the chairs and toed her shoes off to curl up comfortably. "What am I supposed to do with that?" she asked, referring to the letter. "Two wizards are touring Albania in search of something and I'm supposed to find meaning in it that relates to Death Eaters?"

"It does, unfortunately," he told her as he sat in the other chair. "Before he was brought back, after the night he killed my parents and failed to kill me, he was stuck living as a wraith and hid out in Albania."

She frowned. "But, you said…"

"He is properly dead this time. But, if Sirius thinks that there are still some Death Eaters that haven't been dealt with that are looking for him pointlessly, then that means that there are still some that followed him that need to get dealt with. I was hoping you could help us with a list of the one's you came across last year."

"Excuse me?"

"We know everyone who was in his inner circle, and several that were in the outer, but you were going to school with a lot of Junior Death Eaters and probably saw a few suspicious types passing through the school too."

"Are you saying you don't think the war is truly over?"

"Sirius has reason to believe it isn't, and that's good enough reason for me to look into it."

"And since you didn't pay attention to anyone outside your inner circle while you went here, you need a list of the Death Eater's kids?"

He couldn't tell if she was okay with this request or not, her expression was too guarded.

"I'm asking for your help."

She chewed her bottom lip while she considered it. He didn't know what there was to be considered though, he just needed a list of names of the grown students, who were likely all adults now, that had been enforcing the regime change before the final battle.

"And you won't ask me to explain to you how I know they were on that path, or what they did to anyone. Or what might have been done to them?"

"I don't follow."

"Harry, you're asking me to come up with a list of names for you and Sirius to use your vigilante ways with, something I'm fighting hard not to think about."

"I didn't say we'd be tracking them down and dropping them off for the Aurors to deal with, record in hand of what they'd done, I just wondered if you could provide us with persons to take note of to see if they are… reformed."

She stared at him a while longer, still holding back something.

"Ginny, just say what you are stopping yourself from saying!"

"You're asking me to point fingers and I resent it," she burst out. "The way I took care of the worst of the lot last year was bad enough, but now you want to compile some kind of blacklist and punish them all over again. I may have hurt people, but I knew damn well that they deserved it. I'm not going to keep on making them pay for their mistakes."

"I just said we wouldn't be rounding them up. We would like to keep our eyes open and see if they are mentioned in the Daily Prophet along with an article about Muggles being tortured though."

She closed her eyes for a minute, her breath coming out evenly as she settled down. He kept quiet. He was missing something, wasn't he?

These past few weeks of them being 'friends' they'd been getting along great, yes, there had been tension, but it had been a pleasant tension; and elastic kind of tension that kept pulling them closer before stretching back out again.

Why couldn't she trust him and his judgement with this?

"The only people I've done harm to, or killed, they deserved it, and I know they did," he admitted to her again. "If you still don't trust me-"

"I don't trust myself," she said quickly.

Her eyes opened again after she said it and she looked haunted.

"Your-" he started.

"How can you still trust your judgement after all that you've needed to do? In the last few weeks, every time you've gotten swept up with your feelings and snogged me, if was after I'd mentioned how I'd used morally questionable methods of dealing with Tom's followers, and that I'd do it all over again if I had to."

"That hasn't-"

"It has, Harry. And don't get me wrong, I understand that it's something we have in common and there's a part of me that is really attracted to that part of you too, but I don't want to be someone that can dole out punishment and like it."

He stood up then. "I don't like that I had to do it. I hate that I was sent this letter. I want to be done with all this. I've made my sacrifice already and I don't want to do it again. I have literally given my life in the fight against 'Tom', as you call him, and all of his followers. I don't think I'm going to get that chance again. And if it weren't for Ron and Hermione and you then I could have been travelling the world right now and finding the best beaches to lay about on. But I'm here, and I have this task now. So, if you don't want to tell me any names, then I'll go and ask McGonagall, or find Neville, or hell, maybe I'll find Malfoy and feed him some Veritaserum and see what names come out of his mouth. Because I don't want things to get as bad as they had before.

"Whoever it was that you tortured last year, they'd made their choices, hadn't they? Underage or not, they got off on torturing helpless students. They don't deserve to get off scot-free."

Ginny stood up when he was done his rant. She was only a foot away from him, her face was a mask but her eyes were blazing and the firelight was making the colors in her hair dance.

She was right about one thing, he was insanely attracted to her when he was worked up.

He made no movement, he just stared back at her, matching her intensity with his own eyes and waiting for her to make the first move, to say something.

He watched as her jaw clenched and she sucked in a deep breath, one that had him working hard to not glance down at her chest. Then she started towards the door.

"Ask McGonagall," was all she said before walking out into the corridor and leaving him alone in the room.

How the chair didn't collapse under the weight that he threw at it as he fell back into it, it must have been part of the magic. Harry reached into his pocket and pulled out the mirror to call Sirius.

He was quick to answer.

"Bit early for you, isn't it?"

"I'm on a spare block. I've just asked Ginny if she'd help us out with a list of names and it was a very long and torturous 'no' from her."

"No? What's she got against letting us know who was a 'prefect', or whatever, last year?"

Harry ran a hand down his face and shook his head side to side. "She thinks that they should be able to learn from their mistakes and not be on some 'watch list' or something. I dunno. She suggested I try asking McGonagall before buggering off. She's pissed at me for asking."

"Oh, well, you two were already broken up, is this really making things worse between you?"

"We were still friends! Well, we were trying to be friends. She was anyway, I was trying to get her to see we could still be together. I still don't completely understand what she has against it. Now though, she was angry that I asked. She's so pissed at me."

"Friends fight. It's not the end of the world."

"I don't want to talk about it right now, let's switch back to you." He pulled the letter from his pocket and held it up. "Why did you send this in an owl instead of telling me over the mirror?"

"If it's written, it's a reminder," he said simply.

"And did you start following those two blokes that you overheard?"

"Yes," he replied grimly. "And they were certainly on the hunt for something very specific. I followed them into a small pub where they were renting a room for the night and searched their things; found a picture of Bertha Jorkins, do you remember her?"

Harry sat up straight. "She was the one that recognized Wormtail in Albania! They can't be still trying to find her after all this time."

"No, but they can be trying to find out where it was she came across that rat bastard. It'll narrow down the search area for where Voldemort was hiding if they do."

This was not what he wanted to hear. "I really thought that this would be over and done with," he sighed. "What is the likelihood that these guys are actually dangerous?"

"People can be dangerous for all sorts of different reasons. They could have been hired by someone to find out where Bertha was last seen, or they might be looking for their own curiosity. I'm not sure."

"You're going to keep following them?"

"All the way back to England," he confirmed.

"Then I guess the least I can do is talk to McGonagall."

They said their farewells and broke the connection. Harry checked his watch and saw that there was only twenty minutes left in his spare block, and McGonagall didn't have a class right now either.

He hurried through the corridors and knocked on her office door.

After telling her what Sirius had told him, she too was reluctant to give up the names of students that had been in charge of detentions, the ones that were underage at least. She was not so hesitant about handing over a scroll that had all the names of those that were of age, including every Death Eater that passed through the halls on a 'visit'.

There, that wasn't so hard, he thought as he ground his teeth together on the walk back to Gryffindor Tower to get his books. Ginny didn't have to make everything so difficult. Did she really think that he and Sirius would just hunt all of them down and start torturing them for information right away or simply kill them outright? Just how terrible of a person did she think he was?

There were such things as probation officers that would do drop ins on released criminals, in the Muggle world at least, he didn't know about the Wizarding world, this would essentially be the same thing; maybe they'd cut down their time by slipping these guys Veritaserum to see if they admitted anything, maybe they wouldn't. Whatever plan they came up with to figure out what was going on underground in the Death Eater world, it wasn't going to land any of them in St. Mungo's unless things got out of hand.

That thought had a lightbulb going off in his mind.

Hospitals kept patient records.

And so did Madame Pomphrey.

If he used his cloak he could try sneaking into the hospital wing and check through the files to see who needed her attention last year.

McGonagall had said that the students figured out how to take care of themselves after their run-ins, but the Junior Death Eater squad, they'd wound up in the Hospital Wing after Ginny and the others had done whatever it was they'd done.

There was no time for that right now though, he had a class to get to. Harry rushed back to his dorm, hid his list McGonagall had given him and grabbed his books for his classes.

Ginny had made a point to sit nowhere near him in their shared classes today; something that gave him a twinge of annoyance and hurt.

He breathed through the hurt and put on a brave face; pretended there was nothing amiss for the sake of Hermione and Ron. He'd tell his two best friends what was going on after he went to the hospital wing to search the files.

The classes that day were all practical so he had some time to think about when he could get into the hospital wing to check the records; he couldn't go after curfew because of the alarm on the Fat Lady, people would notice him missing from his classes or mealtimes too.

Between dinner and when everyone normally headed off to the library or to their common rooms would be the best time to do it.

He had to pass a few spots during his march from one class to the next that Ginny had once pulled him into for a private moment and it was putting him in a more foul mood every time he did because he could just hear her whispering in his ear that she thought he was turning evil.

Why did she have to be so difficult?

He couldn't think about that now. Now it was after dinner and the perfect time for him to go on his mission.

Once he was clear of the other students, he pulled on his invisibility cloak and slipped into the Hospital Wing.

It was remarkably quiet and clean in here.

Madame Pomphrey may have been having the easiest school year she'd ever experienced. He'd heard of a few cases of burns and the like from Potions or Herbology classes, but nothing that was landing students in here overnight.

The Matron didn't appear to be anywhere close either, he'd checked the map before coming, but he'd crossed the castle in that time so someone else could have as well. He poked his head in her office and around every corner of the wing and saw no one, then he went back to her office and started looking through her file cabinets. They were arranged by surname and decade; he took a peek for his file first and found it, apparently Dumbledore hadn't thought to remove every trace of him. It wasn't funny at the time, but reading about how many times he'd been stuck in the wing overnight, particularly the night when Lockhart had removed all the bones from his arm, it was funny now. He especially appreciated how she had emphasized that it would have been a quick fix had Lockhart not meddled in things he didn't understand.

He checked in Malfoy's folder too and there wasn't much, just about a broken wrist and his low tolerance for pain.

The folders were all neatly organized, but there were a lot of folders for the current decade.

One by one he started flipping through them and checking the dates for when they had stays in the hospital wing; he was looking for anything that had 1997-1998 on it, and it didn't take long to find them.

In the months between September to November 1997 there were several patients that passed through the wing. It was a horrifying number of patients actually; broken noses, trauma that was suspected to have come from the Cruciatus Curse, signs of rape, injuries that were suspected to have come from the patient being strung up. Then after November those incidents were few and far between, particularly the signs of Cruciatus and rape, now they were all scrapes and bruises, and mostly from the younger students.

Interspersed in his search, the files with names he took note of, starting in December of 1997 were cases of confusion, dehydration, stress, an unwillingness to talk, night terrors that had them screaming in their sleep. Most of these incidents involved students that were fifth year and above, but some were fourth, some were the new Professors, hell, some were visitors. The dates on these incidents went right up until Easter and the Battle of Hogwarts.

Twenty-seven reports, all of the names that McGonagall had given him were on this new list, save for Draco Malfoy and Zacharias Smith. Malfoy didn't have an incident and Smith wasn't on McGonagall's list.

This was it.

These were the names of the people Ginny and her team had done their particular brand of torture on.

Twenty-seven were a lot of names to remember.

Did she remember every last one of them?

There was a moment, after he'd checked the last file, where he wondered if it had all been her. This was a lot of people to torture. Then again, if she still had Tom Riddle making suggestions in her head and she'd been taking up those suggestions, then he knew how she'd been able to manage it. He'd had access to Voldemort's mind when his anger got the better of him; Harry too had felt like he'd be capable of slaughtering people when he felt that kind of rage.

Watching as your fellow students were being tortured like what he'd read from the earlier months last school year, he'd be filled with rage then too and willing to do whatever was needed to try and make it stop.

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