Ron checked his disguise again in a shop window. He would not be recognized and even if he was attacked he would not let them catch him. If he was caught wandering around Muggle streets instead of being in bed with Spattergroit that would put his entire family in jeopardy. He tucked his wand deeper into his pocket and stepped into the café. In the last few days he had been haunting this Muggle café, because it was one of the places they had been together; it was one of the places Hermione and Harry might think of going if they wanted to look for him.
He suppressed a laugh and ordered one of the disgusting drinks. He felt sorry for the helpless Muggles, cowering in their homes, skulking about in fear on the streets, not knowing what it was that haunted them and made their lives miserable. They had no idea.
He stared into the murky depths of the coffee he had been served, wondering what he would do if they never showed up. Because they wouldn’t. Ron had regretted leaving them immediately, but he knew that Harry would still be in one of his rages, that he wouldn’t want Ron back. The thought fed the bitter anger inside Ron. If only he had a way of doing something important all by himself then it wouldn’t matter, but he had nowhere to go and nothing to achieve, he was just a weak git that had betrayed his friends.
A loud explosion brought him out of his grim thoughts. He drew his wand and cast a hurried disillusionment charm on himself before running out towards the source of the commotion. The sight of dozens of men in masks sent a paralyzing chill up his back. Ron reminded himself that he had a wand while all these helpless Muggles did not even have the advantage of knowing what was happening to them. He took a deep breath and began firing off spells, most of which he had learned in the DA or from Hermione – classes had never left much of an impression on him.
He was careful not to use a Patronus even though Dementors had swarmed in on the scene. Bringing to mind all the happy memories he could recall, Ron sent stunners and hexes and jinxes into the crowd. He used a Bat Bogey Hex on a nearby Death Eater, but it did not work as well as Ginny’s always did. The Death Eater recovered too quickly, sending a series of unknown spells at him. One of them hit his shoulder, which began to sting very painfully.
Ron turned to face him and, suddenly inspired, sent a Levitation Charm zooming out of his wand. The masked man was lifted into the air and Ron made his head crack painfully against a stone wall before depositing his unconscious body in the rubble. Something sharp and hot hit him square in the back. Ron growled against the pain and aimed several nasty hexes over his back, including the Prince’s Sectumsempra.
He found it almost impossible to walk straight with the growing pain between his shoulder blades. Stopping in a darkened alleyway, he conjured a mirror and tried to use it to look at the damage. He could not counter the spell when he had no idea what it was. The shouting and screaming sounded much more urgent now that Ron was a little removed from it. He gave up on his injury and found himself a good spot from which to observe and fire the occasional well-aimed spell.
Strangely colored flames drew his eyes. Fires were springing up in a circle around a small, kneeling figure. It was a kid. Ron inched closer, keeping in the shadows and sending some stunners at nearby Death Eaters. Many of the members of the Order of Phoenix were on the scene now, fighting the Death Eaters, but no one else had noticed the boy. When Ron was quite close he realized that there was something wrong with the boy’s eyes. They were staring right at Ron, but he did not seem to be seeing Ron or the rest of the battle. He seemed to be locked in his own world.
He would die if he didn’t get out of there. The fires were spreading.
Ron took a deep breath, digging his stinging back into a jagged stone wall to try to muffle the pain. “Aguamenti!” he whispered under his breath. It was a strong spell, but the water seemed to dissolve and evaporate as soon as it got near the roaring fires. They were not normal flames. Ron cast a protective charm towards the boy, but it hit something… he sent another one and then another one, but then he realized the boy already had a protective shield around him. A strong one.
Taking a deep breath, Ron lunged forward, jumping over the fires and nearly getting himself burnt. The shield was not strong enough to keep him out, though it continued to turn back any spell that was sent in their direction. He knelt down and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder as gently as possible. The boy barely reacted, and it was more worrying than if he had pushed Ron away and screamed.
He was such a tiny little thing, even smaller than the little first years Ron used to call midgets.
“Listen, my name’s Ron and I’m going to try to get you out of here.” Ron said, trying to nudge some life into the boy, who continued to stare unseeingly at something near Ron’s ear.
“What’s your name?” Ron tried to pull the boy to his feet. It was like trying to mold jelly.
“Liam,” the boy answered, and suddenly Ron realized that he must be blind.
There was a long silence between them in which they listened to the sounds of the battle.
“I did it,” Liam whispered at length. “I made the fires and I made myself blind. I’m never going to be a firefighter now. I…I stole food and stuff instead of helping people. I deserv-”
“Listen!” Ron said in a commanding tone. “You can do these things because you’re a Wizard, you have magic like me. It doesn’t make you a bad person. I’m going to get you out of here and then I can teach you how to use your magic – I can teach you how to do good spells that can help people. Come on, Liam, we need to go now.”
Liam allowed Ron to lead him away and the fires dissolved in their wake, not hurting their maker. They would have to go to Bill’s place. Ron couldn’t help this kid on his own and he couldn’t go back to Mum and Dad and Ginny, especially not Fred and George, and tell them he had pulled a Percy and walked out on his best friends. Bill wouldn’t be proud of him, but he wouldn’t harp on about it either. At least, Ron hoped he wouldn’t.
“You’ll be alright, Liam.” He said again.
“I know,” Liam said with a Luna-like detached confidence. “Will I get a lightsaber to do magic with?”
“What?”
…
“Thank you for coming, Remus!” Pomona Sprout said, leading him into the empty Hufflepuff Common Room. “I didn’t know who else to ask and we need someone who knows how to deal with Dark Magic. The other students swear they saw Hannah open a hidden doorway right here, though none of us could unlock it. I’m afraid she’s stumbled across Dark Magic in there that affected her, you know, that might have led her to run away. One of the students said she might actually be in there… it’s our last hope, we haven’t found a trace of her anywhere else!”
Remus nodded, running a hand over what looked and felt like solid stone. “Are there any students staying over the Holidays?” he asked.
“Not this year,” she said. “You won’t be seen or interrupted as long as you stay in here. Snape and the Carrows can’t get in to the Common Rooms and Minerva and I will be keeping an eye out to make sure they don’t try to get in here while you’re investigating…”
“I might have to go in and out…”
“Just let me know, I’m in my Office most of the time and we can get Flitwick to cast that charm over you again.”
“Thank you, Pomona.”
The head of Hufflepuff shook her head sadly. “I don’t know what she’ll be doing now all alone, poor thing!”
Remus looked after her as she left the Common Room. Tonks would have spent her evenings here in these cozy chairs around the fire when she had been at Hogwarts. It was a very comfortable common room, and he knew the Hufflepuffs always rallied around each other and helped each other so that no one need ever feel alone. What could have possessed Tonks to leave all these comforts behind and marry someone like him, someone who must always be on the edges of society, on the run?
And what had possessed Hannah Abbott to leave the circle of her obviously loving friends? Remus wanted to believe that she hadn’t really left, that she was still in there behind the wall in some secret room. He wanted to believe that she had not left of her own free will and had been kidnapped just like Luna Lovegood and that her new powers would help her escape and come back to them, but he remembered the haunted eyes of the girl he had met over the summer and he knew that this was wishful thinking. The most he expected to be able to do here was to solve the mystery of why and how she had run away.
…
Hannah had expected her involuntary magic to come rushing out of her when she grew desperate. Here she was, starving and alone on the outskirts of a strange Muggle city, yet no sign of magic had manifested itself. Apparently, it was easier to starve out here in the frightening wilderness than to keep her anger bottled up inside her at Hogwarts. There was no anger now. No bitterness. Hannah did not want to die, but she did not want to hurt anyone else either, and if performing magic was the only way to live then she would die.
She tried to crawl a few paces in the direction of the rubbish bin. Muggles tended to throw away a lot of good food. It was the only reason she hadn’t already died. But her body was too weak now, for anything. If it rained, she thought, she could catch some of it in her parched mouth. It probably wouldn’t rain.
Someone passed by at a run, but they threw something in her direction: a piece of paper, Muggle money. She laughed. Even if she could move she didn’t know how it worked in order to be able to use it.
…
Hannah’s three friends arrived the night before the rest of the students. Remus hoped it would be enough time to at least uncover some threads of this mystery. After a thorough examination of the wall he had discovered that it was, indeed, enchanted, but he still had no idea how to open it. The magic at work here was unfamiliar to Remus.
These three were the only ones who might be able to give him a clue about what Hannah’s magic was like, how she had unlocked this place.
Their Head of House finally led them into the Common Room. One of the boys was glaring angrily at the other two and young Susan Bones looked beside herself with worry.
“Take a seat, Smith!” Sprout ordered the angry boy. He sat stiffly at the edge of an armchair and transferred his glare to Remus.
Remus cleared his throat. “You may remember me as your Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher from a few years back. Professor Sprout has asked me to investigate your claim that there was a secret passage in the common room and I have, indeed, uncovered the traces of some powerful magic at work here.”
Susan Bones lifted her head, a glint of hope finding its way into her eyes.
“I will need your help if I’m going to have any chance of opening it. I need you to tell me everything you can about Hannah’s magic and how it worked. Even about her state of mind when she opened it – and when she ran away.”
Ernie MacMillan opened his mouth to begin, but Smith interrupted him with an accusing finger. “She was angry and hurt!” he shouted, “because of this bleeding tosspot!”
Ernie’s face colored and he turned a defiant expression on these accusations. “Are you saying I’m the reason she ran away?”
“You bloody well know you are!” Smith spat. “You’re a pathetic excuse for a friend. She’s been miserable ever since last year. Miserable and alone and afraid. None of us understood what she was going through, you least of all. All you cared about was pretending you were doing something important with the bleeding DA – nearly getting her killed trying to steal a sword for Saint Potter!”
“No one was in any danger of being k-”
“But you wouldn’t know what she looked like when she came back that night, because you were still off on the adventure of your lives,” his voice was low and dangerous now. “I was here, MacMillan. I saw her. She was barely able to walk. It drains her – sucks the life out of her, but you wouldn’t notice. Just like you never noticed how
scared she was. Going on and on about your plans and your stupid-”
“And where were you!” Ernie was shouting back now, his face a dangerous shade of purple. “You walked out on all of us from the start! You walked out on your friendship with Hannah, skulking about by yourself all the time and-”
“I was watching.” Smith said. His voice had turned cold now. “I saw that she was starting to be less scared and more in control. I saw that she was starting to go back to the Hannah we all knew, and I saw the reason why. And what did you go and do? – you went and blamed her for being with the one person at this school who was actually helping her deal with it, the one person who had managed to help her.”
Ernie made to interrupt, but Smith quashed this with a vicious swipe of his wand in the air. Remus wasn’t sure if the boy had actually performed a silencing charm or if Ernie was just silenced by shock.
“I don’t care if he’s a Slytherin or a Death Eater. You blamed her for being happy! You scared her away with your insane talk that night. You sounded a lot more like a Slytherin and a power-hungry moron than bloody Zabini ever did.”
Susan was sobbing audibly now. Smith dismissed Ernie’s feeble protestations of ‘you know that’s not what I meant’ and turned to Remus. “If you want to know about Hannah’s magic you need to talk to Zabini, not us. All we can tell you is that she stopped using her wand – like it was easier for her to do magic without a wand, somehow – and that it was bloody scary what she could do. And it drained her, and frightened her. Blaise Zabini, a Slytherin seventh year, was helping her figure it out until this tosspot scared her away.”
Remus turned to their Head of House, glad that he did not have to deal with the vicious enmity that had arisen between the two boys. “Can you arrange a meeting with this boy as soon as he gets back?”
