Standard Disclaimer: All characters and concepts are owned by JK Rowling; however, I do own the characters of Timothy Groan (though he is admittedly largely inspired of Mervyn Peake's Steerpike from the Gormenghast trilogy), and Tiernay and Titus Groan. The characterization of mentioned-briefly-in-canon-character Terence Higgs is purely of my improvisation. I'm actually rather fond of him, so he'll likely appear in the future as well.
Additional notes: With thanks especially to the observant tudorrose1533, who had remarked that time in the fic seems to be rather squashed - and yeah, it is because I made a mistake with it; I had assumed wrongly that 1st June was a Friday, when it really is a Saturday...in other words, Fleur and Bill's wedding, according to the previous chapters, would have to be on 3rd June, a Monday. Harry, Ron and Hermione's reappearance at the Burrow would be on 4th June, the same day as the happenings of this chapter. I do apologise for any confusion caused. Thanks so much again, tudorrose1533!
With love and thanks again to all previous reviewers. And no, bnm, you're not missing any prequel (I just have an irritating tendency to write convoluted plots); hopefully, June is going to be the prequel for another fic planned, September. :)
Chapter Four: Blood and Ink
4th June, 1997
‘I’m small enough, Tonks; anyway, I’m sure I heard something down there,’ she says; finally, feeling the weight of Tonks’ gaze lifting away slowly from herself, knowing all along that she would have had no choice to agree – this is her cousin they are looking for, considering – she lowers herself carefully into the small dip just on the inside of the bottom of the slope just a few feet away from the river, so covered with dead leaves it is almost unnoticeable, her hand gripping tightly to her wand.
Her feet touch the side of something, for half a moment, when she slips –
And everything begins to fall.
~
He stands at the window, feeling still slightly sick from his recent proximity to the Dementors, the dense heaviness of the chocolate still being rolled slowly in his mouth, when Harry begins to speak.
‘Why do you think that Malfoy would do that?’ he asks, and Ron half-turns to look at him as Hermione begins to answer the question, realizing as he does so, suddenly, how very small and pale Harry looks; it has never struck him until now that Harry isn’t very tall or very wide: he is really slender, almost thin, and he is likely, by now, slightly more than half a head shorter than Ron himself. The green eyes stare out of the sharp face in a manner that almost seems painfully acute; Ron narrows his eyes, abruptly wondering why he only seems to notice them now…
And then from the corner of his eye, he notices the first red sparks being sent up into the summer sky.
~
With them gone, with more gone, it would be so much easier for everything to fall into plan, he thinks grimly, remembering just how Harry Potter had held on to Ginny, but his quick mind moves at so ruthless a pace that the thought has not completed itself before he has already begun to embark on another train of thought, calculating how exactly he can direct the current cast of players along the lines of his motivations, even as he trudges through the claustrophobic forest, too dense for this continent for it not to be magical.
When the first red sparks are sent up into the summer sky, back from the area where Ginny and Tonks are supposed to be, the thoughts freeze for a moment, and then transfigure themselves into something even more immediate, as Timothy Groan sprints towards them, wand at a ready.
~
Someone holds her, slender hands twisting roughly around her frame and pulling her up from the soft, mossy floor; opening her eyes, the panic coming up her throat forcefully like bile, she can hardly see anything.
‘Malfoy,’ she chokes, recognizing the white-blonde hair, shadowed into a pearl-like grey. ‘I was right; you are here.’
He doesn’t answer; what little light there is, coming from the mouth of the hole, allows her to understand that he has raised an eyebrow. The grey eyes are almost black, and strangely reflecting.
Finally he speaks. ‘It wasn’t like I had a choice,’ he says, voice so bitter he almost sounds like himself again, and at this, in the closing darkness she begins to laugh, hysterically, at him and at their situation; she laughs and laughs, unseeing, until a sharp stinging pain across her cheek makes her realize abruptly that he has slapped her.
Shocked, staring at him, she whispers light-headedly, ‘We don’t need a lot of things in life, Malfoy; it isn’t as if we ever have a choice.’
This time, he comes so close to her she sees the streaks down his face, like silver rivulets on a white plain. ‘I really do wish you would say something original, Weasley, if we’re –’
A sound from behind him causes Ginny to look up; in the darkness, another figure is coming towards them –
And she begins to scream.
~
His face whips up towards the female Auror before him when they hear the scream – Ginny’s scream, from further away than either of them had truthfully expected.
Tonks flinches; the boy’s sickly colouring seems to belie something else entirely more menacing that makes her irrationally afraid – wary – of him.
‘Are there any shape-shifting creatures around here?’ he demands, his clear sharp voice hard. He peers into her face, expression urgent and narrowed; the dark eyes almost a queer heavy red in the sunlight. ‘Are there?’
‘I…’ Tonks begins uncertainly, but Timothy Groan has already turned his back on her, dismissing her hesitant answer, and bends down, starting to pull away the damp leaves from the mouth of the hole.
~
The silence seems to crystallize itself around them just as Weasley’s screams grow louder and more sustained.
He has turned around; before them is a boy about his age, face pale, blue eyes wide and darkened almost black. His black hair is damp and curling against his forehead, and there is something about him that is forcefully familiar. His robes are black, too heavy for summer.
‘Who are you?’ Draco finally whispers, and it is strange how his words seem to echo into the closing space louder than Weasley’s screams do.
At this point, Weasley abruptly stops screaming. A long silence hangs heavily over them –
‘Tom,’ Ginny Weasley sobs, and the boy’s red lips stretch into a smile.
~
Yet there is something wrong, realizes Draco, even as his blood freezes at that singular spoken word.
The boy is too silent.
But when the sound of river begins to drum in his ears again, he doesn’t know whether he should be relieved or not, as a slow horror begins to dawn on him.
~
‘Oh sweet Merlin,’ Tonks mutters under her breath, realizing, eyes wide as her hands begin to rake at the tangled leaves, opening the mouth wider and wider. ‘You don’t think…’
‘Yes,’ Timothy Groan nods, face tight; in a quick movement, he pulls himself up again, and points his wand in the direction of the hole.
‘Lumos maxima!’
~
There is a sudden strong beam of light, and a voice; the boy’s head snaps up in surprise. Almost instinctively, Draco reaches about Weasley for her wand, limp in her hand –
Without thinking, he whirls around, wand in hand, and yells the first thing that comes to his tongue.
‘Sectumsempra!’
A slashing light; the world explodes.
~
‘What was it?’ comes Ron’s voice, as he enters the threshold of the forest, Harry and Hermione close behind.
Timothy Groan’s head turns sharply at this; there is something shrewd in the pale face, but Ron doesn’t notice. Instead he steps around the younger boy, towards Tonks and Moody and Terence Higgs, a young Auror they had not been introduced to previously, who had been sent just that morning to help guard the Burrow.
Malfoy and Ginny, standing close and bloodied. Harry pushes past him; Ron stops in a vague kind of shock.
‘Kelpie,’ mutters Moody from his left, ‘Malfoy destroyed it. Somehow the curse he used was a tad too…effective. This is about the largest piece of it left.’ He lifts a hand; Ron almost retches at the small snake’s severed head within it, its black eyes wide and unseeing.
Moody nods, seemingly immune to Ron’s adverse response – instead, he brings the dead thing even closer to him, and continues in his usual agitated commentary, ‘See how perfectly diamond-shaped the head is? And the blue sheen to its skin? Could only have come from the mane of a fully-matured Kelpie, a rare one at that, and I’ll be surprised if it were indigenous to these areas.’
‘What do you mean…’ comes Groan’s voice from behind them; Hermione beats him to it.
‘So it’s foreign? But why would it come here then? You don’t think -?’ She pauses, and then starts again, ‘And isn’t Malfoy supposed to be unable to do magic?’
But Ron’s attention has been diverted, and he doesn’t really hear what Moody says next.
‘Ginny, Ginny, it’s alright, I’m here now, and it’s gone,’ Harry is saying, turning Ginny around to face him; Ginny’s eyes are wide and unseeing, and Ron is curiously and forcefully reminded of the dead snake in Moody’s palm. There is something tightly coiling within her, Ron suddenly realizes, and instinctively he moves forward to pull Harry away –
But in a sudden movement Ginny has already forced herself away, towards Malfoy, silent and white beneath the blood, and falls against him.
~
There are strange points of red on Harry’s cheekbones as the group slowly moves back to the Burrow; the embarrassed silence about him only seems to emphasize this.
Everything seems to slip about his mind and heart as he watches Ginny and Malfoy in front of him, Ginny holding tightly and blindly and quietly on to Malfoy like how a little girl holds on to her favourite toy in the dark. Malfoy is silent; even as Ginny had begun to hold him he has been silent. Ron and Groan had stepped in between them and Harry just moments before, and there had been something in Ron’s expression that had been both desperate and forbidding; Ron is behind Harry now, and he can hear his quiet breathing. Something white-hot in Harry wishes he or Malfoy would say something, do something for Harry himself to have an excuse; his fingers, still touched with cold, dig into his palms, pressing against the fine bones.
A slow, cold sensation begins to fall into his consciousness, and he finally knows that somehow, everything has changed.
~
Words raped from her tongue, Ginny leans against the silent Draco Malfoy; not thinking anymore.
~
‘I have so many questions I feel like a five-year-old,’ begins Tonks, her words light, but there is a concentration to her expression that betrays her. Her gaze shifts to the right; Higgs is far enough away, speaking to Timothy Groan at the porch facing the backyard. She pauses at this sight, then abruptly turns back, shaking her head as if to clear her thoughts.
Moody nods towards her; between her, Moody and Remus, the small coffee table in the living room of the Burrow is quiet.
‘For one,’ elaborates Tonks, ‘Ginny’s friend – that Timothy.’ She hastens to continue as Remus raises an eyebrow in question; it doesn’t escape her, however, that Moody’s expression remains unchanged, as if he is unsurprised by her priority in suspicions, even in the light of conversation topics such as her cousin and Ginny and Harry, all of which would possibly sustain several afternoon teas in succession. ‘I would certainly like to know more about why exactly he had that one-way Floo available at the onset, and why he didn’t report his situation to the Ministry immediately, and save us all the trouble of running about that mausoleum of a house he calls his ancestral home, but that’s another matter – what I would really like to know is how he could have possibly known, just now, that it was a Kelpie. I mean, you could have put two and two together sooner or later, what with the river, and the hole, and the damp leaves, but I’m telling you, his deduction was almost immediate. Practically as soon as Ginny began to scream he asked me if there were any shape-shifting creatures native to the forest. And not only that. He cast the Lumos spell, not me – and yet there has been no letter from the Ministry. And I would have sworn he was pleased when Ginny started clinging on to my cousin; I was watching him, and something very close to a smile had flitted past his face, and I’ll bet ten Galleons that if we weren’t there he would have started to dance.’
‘I taught Timothy Groan for a year – he’s an intelligent boy, albeit rather quiet,’ nods Remus, ‘But I would agree with you, Tonks. It is rather suspicious.’
‘Not especially suspicious if you consider the boy’s heritage,’ retorts Moody gruffly, ‘I knew his father – he was a few years younger than me at Hogwarts, Lucius Malfoy’s year, to be exact, and McGonagall will tell you that his grandfather – he was in her year – was a black hole for question marks.’
Tonks, curiosity aroused, leans forward, ‘How exactly? Any juicy gossip you know, Moody?’
‘Well…his grandfather, Titus I think, was said to be thick as thieves with You-Know-Who when they were in Hogwarts, but as soon as he had finished his last year at Hogwarts he disappeared. Some said he controlled the Groan fortune quietly and spread it out across Europe, some suspected he worked underground for the Dark Lord, some thought he died…there was a lot of talk, but not nearly as much evidence, or at least never enough to trigger a concerted search. Slipped out of people’s minds, after a while. And then his son appeared at age eleven to attend Hogwarts, seemingly out of nowhere. I remember his name was Tiernay – thin sort of boy, very ambitious, but silently so. Likely,’ says Moody, his face screwing up at this point, as if pronouncing something sour, ‘very much like Ginny Weasley’s Timothy Groan. You’ll have a lot of questions about him, too, but you’ll likely never find the answers, Tonks. No one has.’
‘And with what happened about that hole, I would like to know how the Kelpie could have known the exact form that would trigger such a response from Ginny …’ says Remus, a thoughtful look upon his face, but abruptly Moody looks up, and gives a loud cough.
‘Need something, Higgs?’ growls Moody at the young man, good-looking in the pale, English fashion that seems rather to be the appropriate portrait of the young Slytherin. Except the lad’s face always shows everything – one would wonder how he ever got past his Auror training with the transparency of his countenance. However, he had somehow been assigned duty by Kingsley Shacklebolt himself for the protection of the Burrow…
He is, thinks Moody, either a very poor Slytherin, or a very exceptional one.
The young Auror simply shrugs at the question, and sits himself down between Tonks and Moody. ‘I’ve spoken to Timothy,’ he starts, his narrow face with its clear brown eyes earnest, ‘he has rather a lot to tell.’ He stops suddenly, and his long slender fingers begin to fidget, seemingly nervously, but Moody has been told it has been a long-time, almost unconscious habit of the lad, formerly considered Hogwarts’s best Seeker since Charlie Weasley – before, of course, the coming of Harry Potter.
‘I think – Moody,’ he begins again, in that abrupt manner of his, the fingers twisting and untwisting themselves in his lap, the brown eyes now everywhere else but on Moody, Lupin or Tonks, ‘I think we need to keep an eye on Ginevra – Ginny – Weasley and Draco Malfoy – especially Weasley.’
At the snort of frustration from Tonks, Moody sends her a sharp look, quelling whatever it is she is about to say. Higgs nods, jerkily, but his eyes are clear and steady; his gaze settles again on Moody. ‘Maybe more so than Harry Potter, even. There’s something going very wrong with the both of them.’
‘Groan said this?’ Moody finally speaks, his voice low.
The younger man’s gaze is unwavering. ‘He didn’t.’
‘Then how…?’ begins Tonks, but Higgs interrupts, cleanly and clearly. His fingers finally extricate themselves from each other.
‘It’s precisely because he didn’t,’ he says, and for the first time in days, Moody allows himself a real smile, even as Tonks wears an expression of pure unadulterated disbelief on her face.
A very exceptional Slytherin, is our Higgs.
~
‘Miss Weasley, you have to let go,’ McGonagall says in exasperation, only short of physically plying the girl’s white fingers from Draco Malfoy’s arm – the arm on which the Dark Lord had written his war cry. The expression – or lack thereof – on Ginny Weasley’s face has not changed since McGonagall and Poppy Pomfrey Apparated onto the Burrow’s grounds just minutes after the two had been brought in, and she still refuses to let go of the older boy; Draco Malfoy, for his part, has not spoken a word, and instead seems more dangerously pale by the second.
His blood, thinks McGonagall, almost wildly, frantically, it must have been the only reason why he could have done such magic – uncontrolled magic – just moments before…
And if Ginny Weasley does not let go of him so that Poppy can attend to him, he will most definitely die.
‘Minerva…’ murmurs Poppy from her side, ‘I have no choice; the girl’s in shock, but I need the boy…’
McGonagall nods. Deliberately ignoring the furious look that Molly Weasley, practically physically restrained by her husband, sends in her direction; she points her wand at her student, and utters a spell.
There is a sharp, piercing scream, and then a liquid, thick and heavy – ink and blood, she knows, almost absently – splatters everywhere.
~
‘Something’s wrong,’ begins Ron, pacing about his room, since they had been shooed away previously by a flustered-looking Madam Pomfrey from Ginny’s, ‘something’s very, very wrong.’
‘Of course something’s wrong,’ murmurs Hermione; worriedly she casts a glance at Harry, who has not spoken since arriving back at the Burrow from the woods.
‘No, Hermione, you don’t understand,’ says Ron, frustration creeping into his voice, ‘When I thought – when I somehow knew – that something’s going to happen to Ginny: and no, what just happened doesn’t count, because it’s something bigger, something worse…I thought that it meant that the three of us had to begin looking for the Horcruxes earlier, and try to destroy You-Know-Who as soon as possible. But I thought wrong…I think it must somehow be something that’s much closer that we’ve somehow overlooked…’
‘How do you think so much, Ron? Wouldn’t your head explode?’ Suddenly Harry’s voice, quiet and with a kind of foreign quality, interjects. Ron looks at him, startled; there is something oddly mobile within the depths of his dark green eyes, and for the first time, looking at him, Ron almost thinks he tastes fear, its sweet, acrid edge cutting into the tip of his tongue.
‘Harry,’ says Hermione, a shocked, almost frightened expression on her face. And then Ron realizes why Harry sounded strange to him – there is a thread of real malice in his voice he has never suspected Harry would ever possess.
‘There are bigger things than just you and the prophecy here, Harry,’ Ron says, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘And I know…’
‘That Ginny is right in the middle of it?’ interrupts Harry, the tone of his voice still very much the same. Ron forces himself not to take a step away from his best friend.
‘I know that too, Ron,’ he continues, ‘and I’m going to stop it, even if it destroys either of us.’ Then, abruptly, he gets up and starts towards the entrance of the room in one fluid movement, brushing almost roughly past Ron.
Ron already knows who he refers to.
When Ron’s eyes meet Hermione’s, he knows as well that things have truly fallen out of their control.
~
A whiplash of magical force, and then suddenly everything is static again.
Poppy, paler than McGonagall has ever seen her to be, starts to speak first, her words tripping over each other in their sudden torrent.
‘I need to stop the blood first; he’s lost too much blood. And I have to disinfect the wounds – I can’t possibly imagine how…how ink could possibly have been in his system, but it cannot be anything good…’
Ginny Weasley, after that scream, suddenly sobs: the sound almost sounds strangled within her throat. Her parents rush towards her, but McGonagall, staring at the girl’s white face, doesn’t remember anything that ever looked so fearful.
The ink and the blood is everywhere about the room, staining the worn white sheets with crimson and black.
Abruptly McGonagall’s eyes are back on Draco Malfoy, knowing that…
Knowing that it isn’t just his blood that has allowed him to perform magic.
tbc
Additional notes:
-The Lumos maxima spell Timothy Groan uses isn't exactly pure canon; it just appears in the PoA movie (so says the HP Lexicon). The Sectumsempra spell, or Slashing Hex, used by Draco is ironically the same one used on him by Harry.
-A Kelpie, according to some definitions, is supposed to be a rather murderous river spirit that often appears as a horse but which can also shapeshift, and can apparently be assumed to be dangerous according to its rating in the Fantastic Beasts canon (with thanks to the HP Lexicon again).
I'll be going on holiday to Thailand next week (and school will start come January), so updates might be a tad slower from now on. Please do still read and review, however, so I can better improve upon my writing.
Additional notes: With thanks especially to the observant tudorrose1533, who had remarked that time in the fic seems to be rather squashed - and yeah, it is because I made a mistake with it; I had assumed wrongly that 1st June was a Friday, when it really is a Saturday...in other words, Fleur and Bill's wedding, according to the previous chapters, would have to be on 3rd June, a Monday. Harry, Ron and Hermione's reappearance at the Burrow would be on 4th June, the same day as the happenings of this chapter. I do apologise for any confusion caused. Thanks so much again, tudorrose1533!
With love and thanks again to all previous reviewers. And no, bnm, you're not missing any prequel (I just have an irritating tendency to write convoluted plots); hopefully, June is going to be the prequel for another fic planned, September. :)
Chapter Four: Blood and Ink
4th June, 1997
‘I’m small enough, Tonks; anyway, I’m sure I heard something down there,’ she says; finally, feeling the weight of Tonks’ gaze lifting away slowly from herself, knowing all along that she would have had no choice to agree – this is her cousin they are looking for, considering – she lowers herself carefully into the small dip just on the inside of the bottom of the slope just a few feet away from the river, so covered with dead leaves it is almost unnoticeable, her hand gripping tightly to her wand.
Her feet touch the side of something, for half a moment, when she slips –
And everything begins to fall.
~
He stands at the window, feeling still slightly sick from his recent proximity to the Dementors, the dense heaviness of the chocolate still being rolled slowly in his mouth, when Harry begins to speak.
‘Why do you think that Malfoy would do that?’ he asks, and Ron half-turns to look at him as Hermione begins to answer the question, realizing as he does so, suddenly, how very small and pale Harry looks; it has never struck him until now that Harry isn’t very tall or very wide: he is really slender, almost thin, and he is likely, by now, slightly more than half a head shorter than Ron himself. The green eyes stare out of the sharp face in a manner that almost seems painfully acute; Ron narrows his eyes, abruptly wondering why he only seems to notice them now…
And then from the corner of his eye, he notices the first red sparks being sent up into the summer sky.
~
With them gone, with more gone, it would be so much easier for everything to fall into plan, he thinks grimly, remembering just how Harry Potter had held on to Ginny, but his quick mind moves at so ruthless a pace that the thought has not completed itself before he has already begun to embark on another train of thought, calculating how exactly he can direct the current cast of players along the lines of his motivations, even as he trudges through the claustrophobic forest, too dense for this continent for it not to be magical.
When the first red sparks are sent up into the summer sky, back from the area where Ginny and Tonks are supposed to be, the thoughts freeze for a moment, and then transfigure themselves into something even more immediate, as Timothy Groan sprints towards them, wand at a ready.
~
Someone holds her, slender hands twisting roughly around her frame and pulling her up from the soft, mossy floor; opening her eyes, the panic coming up her throat forcefully like bile, she can hardly see anything.
‘Malfoy,’ she chokes, recognizing the white-blonde hair, shadowed into a pearl-like grey. ‘I was right; you are here.’
He doesn’t answer; what little light there is, coming from the mouth of the hole, allows her to understand that he has raised an eyebrow. The grey eyes are almost black, and strangely reflecting.
Finally he speaks. ‘It wasn’t like I had a choice,’ he says, voice so bitter he almost sounds like himself again, and at this, in the closing darkness she begins to laugh, hysterically, at him and at their situation; she laughs and laughs, unseeing, until a sharp stinging pain across her cheek makes her realize abruptly that he has slapped her.
Shocked, staring at him, she whispers light-headedly, ‘We don’t need a lot of things in life, Malfoy; it isn’t as if we ever have a choice.’
This time, he comes so close to her she sees the streaks down his face, like silver rivulets on a white plain. ‘I really do wish you would say something original, Weasley, if we’re –’
A sound from behind him causes Ginny to look up; in the darkness, another figure is coming towards them –
And she begins to scream.
~
His face whips up towards the female Auror before him when they hear the scream – Ginny’s scream, from further away than either of them had truthfully expected.
Tonks flinches; the boy’s sickly colouring seems to belie something else entirely more menacing that makes her irrationally afraid – wary – of him.
‘Are there any shape-shifting creatures around here?’ he demands, his clear sharp voice hard. He peers into her face, expression urgent and narrowed; the dark eyes almost a queer heavy red in the sunlight. ‘Are there?’
‘I…’ Tonks begins uncertainly, but Timothy Groan has already turned his back on her, dismissing her hesitant answer, and bends down, starting to pull away the damp leaves from the mouth of the hole.
~
The silence seems to crystallize itself around them just as Weasley’s screams grow louder and more sustained.
He has turned around; before them is a boy about his age, face pale, blue eyes wide and darkened almost black. His black hair is damp and curling against his forehead, and there is something about him that is forcefully familiar. His robes are black, too heavy for summer.
‘Who are you?’ Draco finally whispers, and it is strange how his words seem to echo into the closing space louder than Weasley’s screams do.
At this point, Weasley abruptly stops screaming. A long silence hangs heavily over them –
‘Tom,’ Ginny Weasley sobs, and the boy’s red lips stretch into a smile.
~
Yet there is something wrong, realizes Draco, even as his blood freezes at that singular spoken word.
The boy is too silent.
But when the sound of river begins to drum in his ears again, he doesn’t know whether he should be relieved or not, as a slow horror begins to dawn on him.
~
‘Oh sweet Merlin,’ Tonks mutters under her breath, realizing, eyes wide as her hands begin to rake at the tangled leaves, opening the mouth wider and wider. ‘You don’t think…’
‘Yes,’ Timothy Groan nods, face tight; in a quick movement, he pulls himself up again, and points his wand in the direction of the hole.
‘Lumos maxima!’
~
There is a sudden strong beam of light, and a voice; the boy’s head snaps up in surprise. Almost instinctively, Draco reaches about Weasley for her wand, limp in her hand –
Without thinking, he whirls around, wand in hand, and yells the first thing that comes to his tongue.
‘Sectumsempra!’
A slashing light; the world explodes.
~
‘What was it?’ comes Ron’s voice, as he enters the threshold of the forest, Harry and Hermione close behind.
Timothy Groan’s head turns sharply at this; there is something shrewd in the pale face, but Ron doesn’t notice. Instead he steps around the younger boy, towards Tonks and Moody and Terence Higgs, a young Auror they had not been introduced to previously, who had been sent just that morning to help guard the Burrow.
Malfoy and Ginny, standing close and bloodied. Harry pushes past him; Ron stops in a vague kind of shock.
‘Kelpie,’ mutters Moody from his left, ‘Malfoy destroyed it. Somehow the curse he used was a tad too…effective. This is about the largest piece of it left.’ He lifts a hand; Ron almost retches at the small snake’s severed head within it, its black eyes wide and unseeing.
Moody nods, seemingly immune to Ron’s adverse response – instead, he brings the dead thing even closer to him, and continues in his usual agitated commentary, ‘See how perfectly diamond-shaped the head is? And the blue sheen to its skin? Could only have come from the mane of a fully-matured Kelpie, a rare one at that, and I’ll be surprised if it were indigenous to these areas.’
‘What do you mean…’ comes Groan’s voice from behind them; Hermione beats him to it.
‘So it’s foreign? But why would it come here then? You don’t think -?’ She pauses, and then starts again, ‘And isn’t Malfoy supposed to be unable to do magic?’
But Ron’s attention has been diverted, and he doesn’t really hear what Moody says next.
‘Ginny, Ginny, it’s alright, I’m here now, and it’s gone,’ Harry is saying, turning Ginny around to face him; Ginny’s eyes are wide and unseeing, and Ron is curiously and forcefully reminded of the dead snake in Moody’s palm. There is something tightly coiling within her, Ron suddenly realizes, and instinctively he moves forward to pull Harry away –
But in a sudden movement Ginny has already forced herself away, towards Malfoy, silent and white beneath the blood, and falls against him.
~
There are strange points of red on Harry’s cheekbones as the group slowly moves back to the Burrow; the embarrassed silence about him only seems to emphasize this.
Everything seems to slip about his mind and heart as he watches Ginny and Malfoy in front of him, Ginny holding tightly and blindly and quietly on to Malfoy like how a little girl holds on to her favourite toy in the dark. Malfoy is silent; even as Ginny had begun to hold him he has been silent. Ron and Groan had stepped in between them and Harry just moments before, and there had been something in Ron’s expression that had been both desperate and forbidding; Ron is behind Harry now, and he can hear his quiet breathing. Something white-hot in Harry wishes he or Malfoy would say something, do something for Harry himself to have an excuse; his fingers, still touched with cold, dig into his palms, pressing against the fine bones.
A slow, cold sensation begins to fall into his consciousness, and he finally knows that somehow, everything has changed.
~
Words raped from her tongue, Ginny leans against the silent Draco Malfoy; not thinking anymore.
~
‘I have so many questions I feel like a five-year-old,’ begins Tonks, her words light, but there is a concentration to her expression that betrays her. Her gaze shifts to the right; Higgs is far enough away, speaking to Timothy Groan at the porch facing the backyard. She pauses at this sight, then abruptly turns back, shaking her head as if to clear her thoughts.
Moody nods towards her; between her, Moody and Remus, the small coffee table in the living room of the Burrow is quiet.
‘For one,’ elaborates Tonks, ‘Ginny’s friend – that Timothy.’ She hastens to continue as Remus raises an eyebrow in question; it doesn’t escape her, however, that Moody’s expression remains unchanged, as if he is unsurprised by her priority in suspicions, even in the light of conversation topics such as her cousin and Ginny and Harry, all of which would possibly sustain several afternoon teas in succession. ‘I would certainly like to know more about why exactly he had that one-way Floo available at the onset, and why he didn’t report his situation to the Ministry immediately, and save us all the trouble of running about that mausoleum of a house he calls his ancestral home, but that’s another matter – what I would really like to know is how he could have possibly known, just now, that it was a Kelpie. I mean, you could have put two and two together sooner or later, what with the river, and the hole, and the damp leaves, but I’m telling you, his deduction was almost immediate. Practically as soon as Ginny began to scream he asked me if there were any shape-shifting creatures native to the forest. And not only that. He cast the Lumos spell, not me – and yet there has been no letter from the Ministry. And I would have sworn he was pleased when Ginny started clinging on to my cousin; I was watching him, and something very close to a smile had flitted past his face, and I’ll bet ten Galleons that if we weren’t there he would have started to dance.’
‘I taught Timothy Groan for a year – he’s an intelligent boy, albeit rather quiet,’ nods Remus, ‘But I would agree with you, Tonks. It is rather suspicious.’
‘Not especially suspicious if you consider the boy’s heritage,’ retorts Moody gruffly, ‘I knew his father – he was a few years younger than me at Hogwarts, Lucius Malfoy’s year, to be exact, and McGonagall will tell you that his grandfather – he was in her year – was a black hole for question marks.’
Tonks, curiosity aroused, leans forward, ‘How exactly? Any juicy gossip you know, Moody?’
‘Well…his grandfather, Titus I think, was said to be thick as thieves with You-Know-Who when they were in Hogwarts, but as soon as he had finished his last year at Hogwarts he disappeared. Some said he controlled the Groan fortune quietly and spread it out across Europe, some suspected he worked underground for the Dark Lord, some thought he died…there was a lot of talk, but not nearly as much evidence, or at least never enough to trigger a concerted search. Slipped out of people’s minds, after a while. And then his son appeared at age eleven to attend Hogwarts, seemingly out of nowhere. I remember his name was Tiernay – thin sort of boy, very ambitious, but silently so. Likely,’ says Moody, his face screwing up at this point, as if pronouncing something sour, ‘very much like Ginny Weasley’s Timothy Groan. You’ll have a lot of questions about him, too, but you’ll likely never find the answers, Tonks. No one has.’
‘And with what happened about that hole, I would like to know how the Kelpie could have known the exact form that would trigger such a response from Ginny …’ says Remus, a thoughtful look upon his face, but abruptly Moody looks up, and gives a loud cough.
‘Need something, Higgs?’ growls Moody at the young man, good-looking in the pale, English fashion that seems rather to be the appropriate portrait of the young Slytherin. Except the lad’s face always shows everything – one would wonder how he ever got past his Auror training with the transparency of his countenance. However, he had somehow been assigned duty by Kingsley Shacklebolt himself for the protection of the Burrow…
He is, thinks Moody, either a very poor Slytherin, or a very exceptional one.
The young Auror simply shrugs at the question, and sits himself down between Tonks and Moody. ‘I’ve spoken to Timothy,’ he starts, his narrow face with its clear brown eyes earnest, ‘he has rather a lot to tell.’ He stops suddenly, and his long slender fingers begin to fidget, seemingly nervously, but Moody has been told it has been a long-time, almost unconscious habit of the lad, formerly considered Hogwarts’s best Seeker since Charlie Weasley – before, of course, the coming of Harry Potter.
‘I think – Moody,’ he begins again, in that abrupt manner of his, the fingers twisting and untwisting themselves in his lap, the brown eyes now everywhere else but on Moody, Lupin or Tonks, ‘I think we need to keep an eye on Ginevra – Ginny – Weasley and Draco Malfoy – especially Weasley.’
At the snort of frustration from Tonks, Moody sends her a sharp look, quelling whatever it is she is about to say. Higgs nods, jerkily, but his eyes are clear and steady; his gaze settles again on Moody. ‘Maybe more so than Harry Potter, even. There’s something going very wrong with the both of them.’
‘Groan said this?’ Moody finally speaks, his voice low.
The younger man’s gaze is unwavering. ‘He didn’t.’
‘Then how…?’ begins Tonks, but Higgs interrupts, cleanly and clearly. His fingers finally extricate themselves from each other.
‘It’s precisely because he didn’t,’ he says, and for the first time in days, Moody allows himself a real smile, even as Tonks wears an expression of pure unadulterated disbelief on her face.
A very exceptional Slytherin, is our Higgs.
~
‘Miss Weasley, you have to let go,’ McGonagall says in exasperation, only short of physically plying the girl’s white fingers from Draco Malfoy’s arm – the arm on which the Dark Lord had written his war cry. The expression – or lack thereof – on Ginny Weasley’s face has not changed since McGonagall and Poppy Pomfrey Apparated onto the Burrow’s grounds just minutes after the two had been brought in, and she still refuses to let go of the older boy; Draco Malfoy, for his part, has not spoken a word, and instead seems more dangerously pale by the second.
His blood, thinks McGonagall, almost wildly, frantically, it must have been the only reason why he could have done such magic – uncontrolled magic – just moments before…
And if Ginny Weasley does not let go of him so that Poppy can attend to him, he will most definitely die.
‘Minerva…’ murmurs Poppy from her side, ‘I have no choice; the girl’s in shock, but I need the boy…’
McGonagall nods. Deliberately ignoring the furious look that Molly Weasley, practically physically restrained by her husband, sends in her direction; she points her wand at her student, and utters a spell.
There is a sharp, piercing scream, and then a liquid, thick and heavy – ink and blood, she knows, almost absently – splatters everywhere.
~
‘Something’s wrong,’ begins Ron, pacing about his room, since they had been shooed away previously by a flustered-looking Madam Pomfrey from Ginny’s, ‘something’s very, very wrong.’
‘Of course something’s wrong,’ murmurs Hermione; worriedly she casts a glance at Harry, who has not spoken since arriving back at the Burrow from the woods.
‘No, Hermione, you don’t understand,’ says Ron, frustration creeping into his voice, ‘When I thought – when I somehow knew – that something’s going to happen to Ginny: and no, what just happened doesn’t count, because it’s something bigger, something worse…I thought that it meant that the three of us had to begin looking for the Horcruxes earlier, and try to destroy You-Know-Who as soon as possible. But I thought wrong…I think it must somehow be something that’s much closer that we’ve somehow overlooked…’
‘How do you think so much, Ron? Wouldn’t your head explode?’ Suddenly Harry’s voice, quiet and with a kind of foreign quality, interjects. Ron looks at him, startled; there is something oddly mobile within the depths of his dark green eyes, and for the first time, looking at him, Ron almost thinks he tastes fear, its sweet, acrid edge cutting into the tip of his tongue.
‘Harry,’ says Hermione, a shocked, almost frightened expression on her face. And then Ron realizes why Harry sounded strange to him – there is a thread of real malice in his voice he has never suspected Harry would ever possess.
‘There are bigger things than just you and the prophecy here, Harry,’ Ron says, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘And I know…’
‘That Ginny is right in the middle of it?’ interrupts Harry, the tone of his voice still very much the same. Ron forces himself not to take a step away from his best friend.
‘I know that too, Ron,’ he continues, ‘and I’m going to stop it, even if it destroys either of us.’ Then, abruptly, he gets up and starts towards the entrance of the room in one fluid movement, brushing almost roughly past Ron.
Ron already knows who he refers to.
When Ron’s eyes meet Hermione’s, he knows as well that things have truly fallen out of their control.
~
A whiplash of magical force, and then suddenly everything is static again.
Poppy, paler than McGonagall has ever seen her to be, starts to speak first, her words tripping over each other in their sudden torrent.
‘I need to stop the blood first; he’s lost too much blood. And I have to disinfect the wounds – I can’t possibly imagine how…how ink could possibly have been in his system, but it cannot be anything good…’
Ginny Weasley, after that scream, suddenly sobs: the sound almost sounds strangled within her throat. Her parents rush towards her, but McGonagall, staring at the girl’s white face, doesn’t remember anything that ever looked so fearful.
The ink and the blood is everywhere about the room, staining the worn white sheets with crimson and black.
Abruptly McGonagall’s eyes are back on Draco Malfoy, knowing that…
Knowing that it isn’t just his blood that has allowed him to perform magic.
Additional notes:
-The Lumos maxima spell Timothy Groan uses isn't exactly pure canon; it just appears in the PoA movie (so says the HP Lexicon). The Sectumsempra spell, or Slashing Hex, used by Draco is ironically the same one used on him by Harry.
-A Kelpie, according to some definitions, is supposed to be a rather murderous river spirit that often appears as a horse but which can also shapeshift, and can apparently be assumed to be dangerous according to its rating in the Fantastic Beasts canon (with thanks to the HP Lexicon again).
I'll be going on holiday to Thailand next week (and school will start come January), so updates might be a tad slower from now on. Please do still read and review, however, so I can better improve upon my writing.
Leave a Review