Surpassing Danger
Chapter 29: The Gryffindor May Day Fete (Arc 7)
By Anne B. Walsh
BYOT again.
Neville was in the DA storage room when he heard the door open and shut. He closed his eyes and concentrated. His Animagus form might not give him all the advantages someone like Harry or Ginny got from theirs, but at least at Hogwarts, being an Heir made up for it.
"Back here, Mum," he called out when he'd had a moment to think about the way the magic of the castle was reacting to the person who'd come in. "Did you want me?"
"When don't I?" Alice Longbottom came around the end of one of the shelves and gave her son a brief hug. "But as it happens, yes. We've had a request for a few of your potion pieces, for some of Brian and Corona's people."
"So the potion's working for her, then?" Neville reached up without looking to pull down one of the Muggle-ready pieces (manufacturing these and ensuring none of the magic on them showed to a casual observer had netted those members of the DA who took Muggle Studies enough extra credit to average two hundred sixty-eight percent in the class). "Masking her human scent, making them believe she's another werewolf?"
"So it would seem. And far more of the werewolves living by themselves, or in the small colonies, started out as Muggles than we'd previously thought."
"That makes sense. They've got no defenses." Neville turned the three-chamber cylinder through one full rotation, verifying that it moved easily and snapped cleanly into place each time. "When they don't even believe in werewolves, how are they supposed to know what to do when one comes through their window? Armed piece." Pointing the piece at the floor, well away from his own and Alice's feet, he armed it, nodded satisfaction with the vibrating hum which resulted, and disarmed it again, handing it to his mother. "That one's good. How many did you need?"
"Five—no, I tell a lie, six. Professor Dumbledore asked me for one as well."
"Oh?" Neville scooped down three more, set two on the empty bit of shelf beside him, and started the testing process with the third. "Who's that for?"
"He didn't say, and I didn't ask." Alice frowned slightly. "Odd, though. He had Danger in his office when I stopped up, and she looked upset by something. More so than last night would account for, I mean." She looked closely at Neville as he finished checking the piece in his hands and moved on to the second one. "How are you holding up, love?"
Neville considered the question. "I'm all right," he said finally. "Not good, but no one's going to be, not for a while. It isn't like last summer. Like…Dad." The word, and its accompanying memories, tightened his throat, but that was to be expected. "There's magic woven through the Pride—you knew that, we all knew that, but it wasn't something we ever thought about. Until now. Until a part of it's gone."
He paused, thinking about this, and invoked again the sense he'd used to tell him who had entered the room. "Except that it's not, quite," he said slowly. "It's missing, he's missing, Draco is, but he's not gone. Not all the way. The magic disappears, but it's not broken off, it's barely even twisted…" He shook his head, impatient with himself. "Am I making any sense at all?"
"More than I think you know." Alice set the two pieces Neville had already cleared into the canvas bag she had over her arm. "Finish up with those, and then I think we'll take Professor Dumbledore's piece upstairs to him personally. Danger may want to hear what you just told me. Unless you need to be in class?"
"No, I have the morning free. And then everyone gets the afternoon, for the Gryffindor May Day Fete out on the lawns." Neville grinned momentarily. "I understand Professor Snape tried to say his classes were too important to set aside for 'some silly outdoor romp', and the rest of the teachers overruled him."
Alice laughed aloud. "I can just hear him saying that, too. In that voice of his which sounds like he's sucked a bagful of lemons. Which is horribly rude and nasty of me, I know, and I do respect him for everything he does for the Order and the war, but must he allow that particular part of his life to warp the entirety of his personality the way he does?"
"Perhaps it helps keep him safe, when he's spying," Neville suggested, handing over the fourth cleared piece and taking down the last two. "Because Voldemort and the Death Eaters think they know what he's like, so they never bother looking past the surface because they think he can't possibly have anything else underneath."
"Here now, we can't have this." Alice pointed her finger at her son. "You, sir, are a teenage wizard. I am a fully adult witch. More than that, I am your mother. You are meant to see the worst in everyone and never look past the tip of your own nose, and I am meant to take the longer view and help you develop your tolerance for the oddities of others. Do you understand?"
Neville came to attention and saluted with the disarmed piece in his hand. "Ma'am, yes, ma'am!"
Alice slumped. "I knew letting him keep hanging around with Sirius Black's children was a mistake," she told the cornerpost of the shelf. "Not that I actually had a choice in the matter, of course, but sometimes a mother must delude herself into believing she has some say in the direction of her son's life."
Picking up the last piece to test it, Neville hid his smile. "Are you staying for the Fete, or do you have to get back?" he asked.
"I may stay a few minutes, just to see what you've done, but then I'll need to go. I have an appointment this afternoon, at the Landing Zone, actually—Gerald wants an experienced eye to go over his security with him, just in case one of the Death Eaters decides to follow the line from Draco to Luna…"
"I can't believe we're actually going ahead with this," muttered Maya Jordan as she waved her wand in two broad swoops, erecting one of the open-fronted tents which would house the festival-style games the Gryffindors had chosen for their May Day celebration.
"Why shouldn't we?" asked the person working behind her, whose cheerful smile and nonchalant tone would have seemed entirely commonplace were it not for the lack of their customary duplication. Fred Weasley, who had awakened in time to attend his sister's wedding at dawn atop the Astronomy Tower, was busily stocking another tent with prizes he and his twin had pulled out of their stock at their Hogsmeade location only yesterday, apparently not at all bothered by the fact that said twin was not with him, would never be with him again. "It hasn't stopped being May Day, and we succeeded with the year. What's there not to celebrate?"
Maya made a noise she hoped could be taken as casual agreement and ducked into the tent, supposedly to see that everything behind its counter was in place for the noisy water-shooting game it was meant to host, in reality to try to regain her composure. She hadn't been this close to anyone who'd lost a family member before, but she was fairly sure this wasn't the way they were meant to act, and certainly this wasn't the way they were meant to smell. In fact, she'd never caught this particular overtone in anyone's scent before, and wasn't sure what it might mean, though she knew for a fact she didn't like it.
Sliding out the back of the tent, she went in search of someone else who might have a better perspective.
"It's not that he doesn't remember," said Danielle Reading, discovered after a brief search at the long, canvas-roofed refreshments booth, checking off various containers of picnic-style food and drink from her list as house-elves stacked them in neat rows and renewed the freshness spells keeping them cool or warm, as the case might be. "He's perfectly clear on what happened last night. It's more that he doesn't seem to care. I'm hoping it's just that it hasn't quite sunk in yet—though how could it not have? He felt it." She set her list aside, sitting down limply on a discarded crate. "Maya, I'm frightened. I don't want this to mean what I think it does."
"What you—" Maya stopped as her wolf side and her newly awakening cougar senses (her Animagus studies had come to fruition quietly some time ago, though her work with the Red Shepherds had kept her busy enough that she seldom had a chance to try out her form) came to a rare agreement on what they'd scented from Fred. Animals didn't have words for everything the way humans did, but they usually knew which things they could safely approach and which they ought to stay well away from.
Fred's scent fell handily into the latter category, and was headed quickly for its outer edges.
And this is because— Maya prompted her two non-human advisors.
"Oh," she said quietly when the answer came back.
"Worked it out, have you?" Danielle smiled, or at least her lips curved upward. No happiness and no hope lived in her face. "He gets today. If anything's going to change, if he's going to be able to change it, then it would be today."
"I hope it happens." Maya squeezed her friend's hand. "I really do hope so."
"Thanks. Me too." Danielle squeezed back, then let go in favor of checking her watch. "Come on, let's see how much more we can get done before that fifth-year Charms class lets out and we get deluged with inexpert help…"
Aletha led the men of the Pack up the stairs of the Headmaster's office, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder. She knew what she would see. Remus had been unusually twitchy for the last half-hour, in the way she had come to associate with Danger closing herself off from their bond, and Sirius's eyes were abstracted, as though he were trying to work out a knotty plot twist or think through a difficult problem in his everyday life.
Neither of them is at critical point yet. If they want help, they'll ask.
"Come in," Dumbledore called as she set foot on the upper landing.
Sirius and Remus exchanged a brief glance, for one second shedding their years until they were Padfoot and Moony the Marauders once more. "How does he do that?" they chorused sotto voce.
It had always seemed obvious to Aletha that there must be telltale spells somewhere in the revolving staircase, but she held her peace. Boys would, after all, be boys.
Danger rose from one of the visitors' chairs as they entered and went directly into Remus's arms, closing her eyes and pressing her face against his chest as he kissed her temple and held her tightly. "All right," Aletha heard her murmur, "I'm all right now."
As all right as any of us can be.
"You wanted to see us, Albus?" said Remus in his politest tone, pulling up a chair beside the one Danger had vacated.
"I did." Dumbledore swirled his wand once, enlarging the remaining chair into a loveseat, which suited Aletha perfectly. After the emotional broomstick ride of the past twenty-four hours, having her husband within touching distance was an immense comfort. Judging by the alacrity with which Sirius took the other half of the small sofa and wrapped his hand around hers, he felt the same.
"Forgive my bluntness, but if it's anything immediate, you'll probably need to call in somebody else." Remus tapped his own wand against the adjoining sides of his chair and Danger's, melting them away and merging the two seats into one. Danger immediately slid over and fit herself into the curl of his arm. "We're none of us at our best."
"I know that, and do apologize for drawing you away from your rest. But I believe what I have to say may help you with some of your troubles." Dumbledore glanced at the door. "Severus will be arriving shortly, as this also concerns him, and I may ask Minerva to join us as well. But I wished to begin with you, as some of the things I have to say are not to be repeated."
"A little more information on just what our cubs were doing out in Hogsmeade at that hour, perhaps?" Sirius injected a fair bit of pureblood drawl into the words, telling Aletha just how strongly this was affecting him. In the normal way of things, her love made a conscious effort to avoid or subvert the mannerisms of his childhood.
"A little," Dumbledore agreed gravely. "They were, as I am sure Harry has told you, on a mission. That mission involved items belonging to Voldemort, items which are incredibly precious to him and which he safeguards with extreme care. Care which was, in at least one case of which we know, entirely useless, due to Voldemort's disregard for the abilities of those he sees as weak and inferior." His eyes were fixed directly on Sirius. "Such disregard will, I believe, be his eventual downfall."
Sirius made a small, noncommittal noise. "Did it have to be them?" he asked, his tone under better control this time, but with strain and anger still audible under its calm veneer. "I know there are things Harry's got to do by himself, eventually, but Merlin's blood, Albus, I didn't think eventually was now!" He laughed once, a brief bark, and sat back a bit further on the loveseat, stroking a finger along the back of Aletha's hand. "But then, you never do, do you. Not when it's your cubs out there facing the fire."
"It did have to be them." Dumbledore's pronouncement was delivered quietly, but with the careful finality which left no room for argument. "Draco and Hermione were required for magical reasons, and Harry because entrance into the place where this particular item was kept is…limited. He and Ginny Weasley—I beg your pardon, Ginny Potter—were likely the only two who could request that admittance with any hope of success."
"This is to do with that meeting my aunt set up for them at the end of January, isn't it?" Aletha asked, several pieces falling into place for her. Precious items—where would you keep something precious in the wizarding world except Gringotts? And stealing from Gringotts has always been considered impossible, so pulling it off would require either a ridiculous level of magic and cunning, or the connivance, if not the active help, of the goblins…
"It is." Dumbledore's smile warmed his eyes, if only briefly. "And I do hope you will convey her my thanks, though I have done so already in my own person. Without her assistance, it would have been exponentially more difficult to retrieve this object."
Remus began to ask another question, but Aletha wasn't listening. Something about Dumbledore's voice had her Healing senses on edge.
He sounds tired. And not just normally tired—no, this is something else, something more. It reminds me of—
She shut her eyes and carefully formed the mental incantation for a diagnostic spell, then opened them.
Several phrases she'd once used routinely on the Quidditch pitch came to mind, but none seemed quite bad enough.
Dumbledore's right hand blazed an eye-searing, unnatural green to her Healer's Sight, overwhelming the bandage-like strips of entwined lavender and gold magic that Aletha realized with a start belonged to her daughter and Neville Longbottom.
That burn, the one they healed him of two summers ago, by transferring the curse that was causing it to the weeds around the Den—they did their best, I can see where it's still helping, but the damage was just too severe for them to get it all—
The rest of the Headmaster's body, by contrast, was colored a dusky gray, softer and somehow dimmer than the silvery color Aletha associated with the bite of a werewolf. It was nothing she had seen before, but she thought she could make a fair guess.
Age. He's growing old. And we tend to forget that or overlook it, because he's still so powerful, so strong and vital, that we push it out of our minds, we think he'll live forever. But how much of that vitality is an act by now, I wonder?
Blinking her eyes three times to return them to normal sight, Aletha sat back, letting her ears catch the drift of the conversation, which seemed to have moved on from the mysterious "precious items" to the effect of having Draco under Death Eater control on the protective spells around Headquarters and the various secondary bases the Order maintained around the country.
"—doesn't remember, he was told the secret," Danger was saying now. "And I know that someone who knows how to find Headquarters can lead another person there, even if they can't tell them where it is. Doesn't that mean the spell should be recast?"
Dumbledore nodded. "In the technical sense, it does," he said, "but that may not be immediately necessary. My sources lead me to believe the Death Eaters' plans for Draco are aimed towards a different target—"
A toy to one side of the Headmaster's desk, shaped like a blue box with a pointed top, emitted a distinctive sound, and Dumbledore glanced down at it. "And the other necessary party to this discussion has just arrived. Come in, Severus."
Sirius pressed Aletha's hand once, then released it and got to his feet as Severus Snape opened the door. Their eyes met, and instead of the usual feeling of snapping tension between them, Aletha sensed a moment of what she supposed she'd have to call understanding.
Though that's hardly a word I ever expected to use for those two!
"Have a seat," Sirius said, conjuring a chair between the two loveseats. Snape nodded brusquely and did so, Sirius resuming his own seat beside Aletha once the Defense Professor had taken his.
"What we discuss here must not leave this room, unless it is for another suitably safeguarded environment," said Dumbledore, drawing all eyes to himself as he began to sketch runes in the air with his wand. The door, already shut, sealed itself with an audible squelch, and the window, though open to the comfortable May breeze, developed a distinct sheen over its expanse. "For I believe that I have found a way, if Voldemort and his Death Eaters behave as they have done to this point, to restore your Pack's missing cub to his proper place with no effort on our part."
Aletha heard Danger's muffled squeal, Remus's soft hiss of breath, felt Sirius's hand contract around hers. She could hardly blame them, not when her own heart had leapt at the Headmaster's words. Even if Draco's death were inevitable and scarcely more than a month away, her every instinct rebelled against their separation in troubled times.
But—with no effort? What are we going to do, write them a letter of complaint? "Pardon me, but you seem to have stolen our cub, and we'd like him back now"?
"More than that, we will gain for the Order an agent within the Death Eaters' midst, one whose loyalty they will believe unquestionable." Dumbledore's eyes twinkled for an instant. "In which belief, of course, they will be correct. If entirely mistaken about its direction."
Danger covered a cough with one hand as Remus nodded gravely. Aletha felt a shudder of suppressed laughter go through Sirius and elbowed him. Behave, she signed with her free hand where he could see it.
"So, I ask that you first hear me out, and then poke as many holes as possible in my plans, so that our enemies have fewer chances to do the same." Dumbledore flicked his wand to one side, bringing a blackboard, with a sketch of a familiar building already drawn on it, into existence. "Let us begin with what I am advised they hope to accomplish…"
The Gryffindor May Day Fete got underway with a picnic lunch on the grounds for all students, the bright blankets resembling a patchwork quilt from afar. Certain of the older Gryffindors hurried through their sandwiches, crisps, sliced fruits and vegetables, and chilled pumpkin juice to get to their assigned game booths, featuring such delights as "Beat the Bludger" (if you could use a miniature Beater's bat to fight off a half-sized Bludger for sixty seconds, you won), "Niffler Dig" (whatever prize your chosen niffler dug up from the treasure box was yours to keep), and "Bucking Broomstick" (one of the school brooms had been re-enchanted to fly erratically, never a difficult feat, and the longer you stayed on, the bigger your prize).
Though the news of the Battle of Hogsmeade and the losses incurred there kept the mood more quiet than would usually have been expected, the overall feeling seemed to be one of defiant enjoyment, and no one led the charge more on this than the Gryffindors themselves. Their smiles as they called out the names of winners or coaxed passers-by to try their games might have been a bit fierce, slightly strained, but they were real.
Voldemort, they knew, wanted everyone cowering in their homes, wondering fearfully when he might decide to come for them, frantically obeying whatever commands he or his favored few saw fit to give in a desperate attempt to avoid his wrath. Gryffindors, as every enormous purple teddy bear, Weasley's Wizarding Wheeze, and handful of leprechaun gold being given out at the Fete could testify, didn't cower worth a damn. Nor were they terribly interested in fearful wondering or frantic obedience. Even the loss of two of their own had become more of a rallying point than a knockout blow.
"George wouldn't want us all weeping and wailing for him," Fred told a gaggle of girls who'd gathered at his Death Eater Dunk Tank booth. "It always sets his back up, being fussed over, and I'd rather not get him angry with me now. Here we are, one ball for each of you lovely ladies, and if you can knock our Death Eater here into the water, you can choose anything you see on the stall…"
"Draco chose what would happen to him," said Hermione firmly to a number of skeptical-looking Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. "If he hadn't, I wouldn't be here now. And we honor him best by doing what he wanted. That is, going on with our lives. Being happy. Will you excuse me?"
Slipping away from the group, she caught Seamus Finnegan by the sleeve. "Had some good luck?" she asked, indicating the massive cuddly thestral he was toting.
"Just a freak throw, really. Took out the bottom corner of the pyramid with my first shot and the whole rest of it came crashing down." Seamus flicked one of the thestral's wings. "Wish these worked, I might be able to enter the flying races then. Nothing says it has to be on broomsticks, and my old Comet finally gave out back in March…"
"That's…actually what I wanted to talk to you about." Hermione nodded towards the rear of the tents. "Come aside with me?"
"Sure. Something wrong?" Seamus ducked around the corner of the tents and set down his thestral, looking closely at Hermione's face. "Well, I mean, apart from the obvious. I'm so sorry to hear about Draco."
"Thank you." Hermione smiled wanly. "And there you go again, bringing it up yourself."
"Pardon?"
"Do you remember the beginning of our third year?" said Hermione rather than answering this directly. "When we had the dementors all around the school, and even coming onto the train?"
"Who could forget?" Seamus hugged himself once, shivering. "Nasty buggers, those."
"No argument." Hermione reached into her pocket and withdrew a small, sealed letter. "But you said something at the Opening Feast that year that Draco never forgot. I don't know what it is myself, but I know he wanted you to have this." She passed across the letter, then smiled more truly. "Oh. And this."
Drawing her wand, she performed a Summoning Charm.
Seamus's mouth dropped open. "What—no! Hermione, I can't—"
"He wanted you to have it," Hermione repeated, laying her hand gently on the item she'd Summoned where it hovered between them. "I'm only doing what he asked. Please, Seamus?"
"I…" Seamus drew one or two shaky breaths. "Oh, Merlin's bloody bollocks," he muttered under his breath. "You're sure about this?"
"He was." Hermione slid her fingers along silky wood once more, then lifted them away. "That's good enough for me."
"And I don't even remember what I could've said…" With a reluctant laugh, Seamus closed his hand around the shaft of Draco's Nimbus Two Thousand and One. "All right. Fine. You win. He wins. But what did I say—"
"Maybe he told you?" Hermione suggested, pointing to the letter.
"Yeah. Maybe." Sitting down on the hovering broomstick, Seamus unsealed the parchment in his hand and began to read.
Hi Seamus,
You're probably reading this after I'm gone, so if you're going to blubber, get it over with now. I don't want you messing this up.
There, that's settled. I just wanted to say thank you for something you might not even remember. It happened years ago, but I think you'll understand why it mattered to me.
We'd come back to school for our third year, and I was all on edge because of the escapes from Azkaban and the dementors. You'd asked Harry how his summer was, and then you said it. "Why are they here?" you asked him. "What would Lucius Malfoy want at Hogwarts?"
Thank you for being the first one I can remember who could forget who I used to be.
Take care of the broom or I'll haunt you.
DRB
Hermione laid a small pile of folded tissues on the broom beside Seamus and quietly slipped away.
Sirius lingered in the hallway outside the entrance to Dumbledore's office. Aletha was upstairs with the Headmaster, doing Merlin only knew what, but he knew what she was likely to ask when she came down.
Why I was being nice to Snape. Because for me, that was nice to Snape. And for him, that was nice to me.
Now if she'll only believe it…
Shutting his eyes, he let memory take over.
I was on my way to the kitchens, to be sure the house-elves had that food order right for the reception, we got it read back in house-elf and that's always a bit shaky on the difference between singular and plural…
"Do you know who I am?"
The voice, harsh, guttural, got Sirius's full attention, as did the answering tones of dark menace. "I know who you used to be, yes. That gives you no power here and now."
Snape? And— Ducking quickly into an empty classroom, Sirius nipped behind the door and peered through the hinges.
Sure enough. Thought I couldn't have forgot that voice so soon.
The Bloody Baron, ghost of Slytherin House, in all his gory glory, was attempting to stare down a singularly unimpressed Severus Snape. "I will not be mocked!" the ghost snarled. "I will not be ridiculed! I will not—"
"You have no need of mockery or ridicule from others," Snape interrupted. "You embody the principles. Inasmuch as you embody anything." Deliberately, he passed a hand through the ghost's midsection. "And I will not permit you to intrude upon the grief of one of my students. Nor upon that of his parents, whether or not they have magic. They lost their child last night and you will respect that. Or I will speak with the Headmaster, and with…certain others of my acquaintance. And you will be made to respect it." He laid his hand on the stones of the wall beside him. "The castle remembers, my lord. The castle remembers."
The Baron hissed, reminding Sirius of one or two of the things which had come out of Harry's mouth the night before, then spun once in midair and vanished. Snape shrugged his shoulders and turned to walk away.
Obeying impulse, Sirius stepped out from behind his door and cleared his throat.
Snape did not jump, nor did he spin around. He went very still, and turned around once more with great deliberation. "Black," he said precisely.
"Snape," Sirius acknowledged in answer, and squelched several possible continuations in favor of the one both true and unlikely to get him hexed. "Nicely done."
One dark eyebrow ascended. "Thank you," said Snape after a moment.
Nods were exchanged, and the two men went on their way.
Percy was in the back room of the Pepper Pot, doing the month's accounts, when the entrance to the Red Roads lit up. He got to his feet politely as Danielle emerged from the archway. "How was the Fete?" he asked. "Did everything go well?"
"The Fete—oh, yes, fine, just fine. It…" Danielle shook her head, stepping off the red-painted boards. "Percy, I'm sorry. I've come to say goodbye."
Nonplussed, Percy followed Danielle into the main body of the restaurant, empty today thanks to the simple 'Closed: Death in Family' sign he'd posted on the front door. "I'm sorry you've come to say goodbye too. What on earth—"
"I'm leaving. Leaving Fred, leaving the Red Shepherds. I've talked to Professor Dumbledore, he's got work for me elsewhere, through the Order." Danielle spoke rapidly, in spurts, as though trying to keep Percy from getting a word in edgewise. "Fred already knows, he wasn't expecting anything else—please, tell your mother I'm sorry, and I do love him, I'll probably never stop loving him, but that's why I have to go—"
"What—" Percy began, but was cut off by the bang of the door behind Danielle. "What was that?" he finished anyway, more quietly, to himself. "If she loves him, why is she leaving?"
"She's leaving because she loves him," said a voice from behind him. He turned to see Crystal, heavy-eyed, leaning against the wall of the Pepper Pot beside the painting which hid the access to his rooms upstairs. "Isn't that what she said?"
"Yes, but it makes no sense." Percy drew his wand and pulled out a chair from the table nearest Crystal, waving her into it, then sitting down himself once she was seated. "I would think, if she loves him, the proper thing to do would be to stay and help him through these next few months—it's going to be hard enough on him, adjusting to life without his twin, but losing his girlfriend as well—"
"She wouldn't make any difference."
The statement, so bald, had Percy frowning in confusion. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"How much did you know about them, Percy?" Crystal countered, twisting her hands in her lap. "How much did you really know about your brothers? You saw them almost every day for most of your life. The terrible twins, Fred and George the jokesters. Identical, interchangeable, impossible to tell apart. Right?"
About to say yes, Percy stopped. "You," he said slowly, "never seemed to have any trouble with that."
Crystal shrugged. "I got to know George well all by himself, apart from Fred," she said. "I saw them together, of course, I knew they were twins, but George was the one who'd come down to the paper shop, or out to a couple other places we both knew. We'd talk together, swap stories, tell jokes. He'd do tricks for me, and I'd gawk and try to figure out where the gimmick was." She smiled a little. "I was a little annoyed when he finally told me he had real magic. I'd been so sure I'd spotted where he was palming his cards from. But you never had that, did you? A place, a time, a way when you could be around one of them and not the other one. And that's why you never realized what George told me, last New Year's Eve."
"And what's that?" Percy realized as the words formed that they could sound accusatory, and managed to hold his tone to merely curious with a struggle.
A sad little laugh escaped Crystal. "Sorry, love," she murmured, looking upwards, then turned her gaze back to Percy. "I promised him I wouldn't tell. But I don't think it can hurt anything now." She lifted her arms, as though cradling a large ball. "What do you see?"
"You. Your hands." Percy shook his head. "What does that have to do with my brothers?"
"How about now?" Crystal brought her hands together, palm to palm. "They're the same, aren't they? Identical."
"No, they're not," Percy objected. "They're—"
He stopped as understanding broke over him.
"Mirrored," Crystal finished for him, interlacing her fingers and laying her hands back in her lap. "Two halves of a whole. Day and night. Action and reaction. Beginning and ending." Her smile flickered again. "Fred and George weren't identical twins at all. They were mirror twins. It wasn't easy to see, because they did look a great deal alike, and they figured out very young the kind of havoc they could cause if people thought they were identical, so they trained themselves into doing things the same. But if you surprised them, if you caught them off guard, you could still spot the biggest difference between them." Untwining her fingers, she lifted first one hand, then the other. "Fred is left-handed. George was right."
"That…makes a great deal of sense." Percy replayed several incidents from his childhood in the light of this new knowledge, smiling at the sense they now made to him. "I can see that. But what does Fred being left-handed have to do with Danielle leaving?"
"Nothing at all. It's another part of them entirely." Crystal circled her hands in the air. "Beginning and ending, Percy. You need them both, don't you, for the story to be complete?"
"You do." Percy nodded. "But—"
"Hear me out?" At his second, almost reluctant nod, Crystal went on. "If it had been the other way around. If Fred had died, and George survived. I would have stayed with him, not just through this time but forever. Walked beside him all the days of his life. Been as much as I could to him, loved him with all my heart."
I know, Percy almost blurted out. I know you would. And I wish—
But even in the silence of his mind, such things could not be spoken.
"For him, for George," Crystal went on, unaware of Percy's traitorous thoughts, "I think that would have been—not enough, not really enough, but sufficient." She twitched one shoulder, clearly dissatisfied with her word but unable to find a better one. "He would have been able to go on, to live out his life and find a measure of contentment. Because an ending without a beginning is tragic, but not disastrous. It's slow, and sad, and even a little bittersweet. But Danielle can't do that for Fred." Her lips pressed tightly together. "A beginning without an ending isn't slow, and it isn't sad. It's fast, and furious, and out of control. She does love him, Percy, but she can't change what he is, or what that means he'll do. And that's why she can't stay."
"What that means he'll do?" Percy repeated carefully. "Out of control? You're not saying—"
"He'd never hurt you," Crystal cut in, holding up a finger. "Or your family, or your friends. He'll find some way to do it that means you can't be hurt or blamed. And if it's soon, if the war's still going on, I think he'll probably set it up to take as many Death Eaters with him as he can." A tiny, sick smile flickered onto her face. "Seven's the mark to beat, isn't it now?"
"Mark to beat—take with him—" Percy shook his head. "Crystal, don't talk like this. You sound as if you think we're going to lose Fred too!"
"Do I? I didn't mean to." Crystal walked carefully to the Vanishing Cabinet, opening the door and stepping inside. "We're not going to lose Fred, Percy," she said quietly, her hand on the latch. "We already have."
The door clicked shut behind her, punctuating her simple, impossible words.
Literally on my way out the door to attend my sister's high school graduation. Scream at me in reviews.
More soon!