They all thought he was mad. Draco raised his wand and let power fly through the air and destroy the Muggle. He was strong now, strong as he should always have been, but it was too late. They were gone. His father had killed his mother and then himself and Draco was all alone. He raised his wand again and released a barrage of painful curses at his next victim. As long as he was hurting people, doing what the Dark Lord wanted, there was a chance that he could get them back – a chance that it had only been an illusion designed to release his power.
Someone screamed. Draco shot a killing curse at them and silenced that painful voice. In the haze of battle, in the darkness that had settled over the world, Draco saw his Muggle victims and he could barely differentiate between them and his fellow Death Eaters, between them and the small witches and wizards that filled the corridors of Hogwarts every year. Because there was no difference. They uttered the same screams when they were hit with a torturing curse. They cried the same tears. Their blood was the same color. Maybe he was mad.
A small voice penetrated through the haze of the battle and Bellatrix Lestrange’s laughter stopped. He could taste her anticipation. He stopped in his tracks and watched her lift her wand towards the open window. For a few painful moments he waited, and he know others were watching and waiting too, but the baby did not come flying out the window.
Bellatrix began to swear and she sent spell after spell towards the window. Draco’s eyes wandered along the wall until they settled on a large sign near the front door: St. Patrick’s Orphanage. It was an orphanage.
“There’s someone with magic in there!” Bellatrix exclaimed. There was anger in her voice even though she had finally succeeded in charming the baby out the window and into her arms. She would not be allowed to burn the entire place down until the witch or wizard inside had been identified and dealt with first.
Draco watched as his aunt pointed her wand at the tiny bundle in her arms. Her hysterical laughter mixed with the baby’s screams. The tiny thing screamed and screamed and screamed in pain until Draco wished it would die. He even raised his wand to end it when Bellatrix killed it herself.
“Now, Draco,” she approached him with an ecstatic tone of voice. “I want you to go in there and make them all writhe in pain without lifting your wand, do you understand me? And when you find the witch or wizard you are to call me immediately so we can have some real fun.”
She thrust the bundle into his arms and steered him towards the door. Bellatrix rang the doorbell and then disappeared from behind him, leaving Draco standing alone at the door of the orphanage with the dead baby. He looked down at it and saw his mother’s face staring up at him. He was mad.
…
There were various strange contraptions in Emmett’s kitchen. Hannah stared around at them all with rising panic. The oven she knew, because they had a broken one in their kitchen. Then there was a large thing that was bigger than Hannah herself. She grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. Several different types of food stared out at her, including, thankfully, a bag of toast. Hannah shivered and closed it again.
She gripped the cool bag of toast against her chest and stared at the remaining contraptions. One of them was see-through and it had knives at the bottom of it: definitely not the toaster, then. Her mother used to toast bread with her wand. Hannah wondered how the house elves at Hogwarts did it without wands.
“Are you all right in there, Hannah?” there was laughter in Emmett’s voice that she knew had nothing to do with his current conversation.
“Yes,” she called back evenly. “I just got to thinking… I’ll be right out.”
There were two smaller contraptions that looked like they might do for toasting bread. One of them was a bit larger than the other and had a door that opened and closed. It was kept on a high shelf, so Hannah pulled over a chair to examine it. Her new vantage point on the chair did not help her make sense of it at all. She didn’t want to open it or try it, because she had enough experience with Muggle contraptions to know they made strange, and distinct, noises when operated. Emmett already suspected something, he expected her to do something stupid.
There was a small booklet lying on top of the contraption. It was pushed back and several things were sitting on top of it, but Hannah pulled it out and stared at it. It had a picture of the contraption with the words “Microwave User’s Guide” across the top. So it was a microwave. The only thing she knew about them was that Malaika seemed to think they were dangerous.
She stepped off the chair and eyed the second likely object. It was much smaller than the Microwave; in fact its size seemed much more suited for toast. She peered over the top and saw two openings just big enough for pieces of toast to fit inside comfortably. Inside, there were metal coils. Muggles used metal quite a lot in their machinery.
Hannah took two pieces of toast out of the bag and placed them in the spaces. She found a knob on the side of the machine and pulled it down. The pieces of toast went down into the depths of the machine and clicked into place. She peered over the top again, worriedly. The metal was red-hot now. That should do for making the toast, but the machine did not make any noise at all. This worried Hanah. She fiddled with the knob again and, without warning, the two pieces of toast went flying out of the machine. One landed on her face and the other landed on the floor beside her.
The scream that Hannah let out was not something that could be explained away.
Emmett’s eyes laughed at her from behind his glasses and she knew she was cornered. She collapsed to her knees and closed her eyes. Hannah had never lied in her life until the day she gave the doctors at the hospital a fake name, and she had come to regret and change that. She did not think any lie would save her now even if she could come up with one.
Mahmoud’s worried voice penetrated through her feelings of despair and it was this that made her fall apart completely.
“I’m a witch!” she declared through her tears, and suddenly felt very stupid. All the comforting, concerned voices stopped and the kitchen was thrown into an awkward silence.
Malaika’s eyebrows rose into her hairline and Millie actually laughed. Mahmoud seemed puzzled and more concerned than ever, but Emmett stared at Hannah very seriously, waiting for her next words.
It was Malaika who spoke next. “You’re not a bad person just because you broke one of Emmett’s toys.”
“No,” Hannah yelled desperately, suddenly wanting them all to understand. “You don’t understand, I’m a witch – I can do magic!”
She pulled out her wand and showed it to them. “I’m a real witch. Witches and Wizards have always lived alongside non-magic people, but we have secrecy laws to protect our existence. Those people you call gangs and terrorists – they’re really Wizards. They hate anyone who doesn’t have magical powers, and they’ve been fighting to take over the Wizarding World for years. Now they’re so powerful they don’t care about doing what they want when they want out in the open. They’ve taken over the Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts and everything… they killed my…”
Hannah was actively avoiding Mahmoud’s gaze. She stared directly back at Emmett. He should not believe a word of what she was saying; he never believed in anything that couldn’t be explained scientifically, but he was looking back at her with a dawning understanding. He held his hand in front of him, as if he held a wand in it, and turned it a little, whispering, “Obliviate!”
Hannah took a deep shuddering breath. “You saw someone do that?” He nodded without explanation.
“It’s a memory charm, to make someone forget that they’d witnessed magic. The Ministry used to use it all the time, but now they’ve been taken over by the Death Eaters. They’ve taken over everything.”
She stood up and stared straight back into Emmett’s eyes.
“And I had the power to end it all. I had a strange, glorious power unheard of even to Wizards. Power that I don’t even need this to use.” She dropped her wand and it rolled across the kitchen floor.
“And I ran away. I ran away and I will never do magic again, even if the Death Eaters destroy the whole world and everything in it, because I was afraid of my power. I still am. Because when I used it I saw fear in my friends’ eyes, I saw things around me die, little flowers and leaves and…”
Hannah broke off and closed her eyes against the betrayal she knew she would see staring back at her from all their faces. Mahmoud left the flat, the door slamming decisively behind him.
Suddenly, Hannah’s feet could not hold her.
…
“Shhh,” Luna whispered. “The noise will frighten them.”
“Luna I’m not sure there’s any-”
“Of course there’s hope, Dean, there’s always hope. Besides, I’ve done this before. Daddy and I used to fish for plimpies all the time and we often saw the Jelly-Leg-Gnomes near the stream. But you have to be very quiet.”
Dean sighed and found himself a quiet spot to settle down. It was difficult to convince Luna of anything, and at this moment he didn’t really want to, he didn’t even know what he’d say. She hadn’t properly explained what these “jelly-leg-gnomes” were supposed to be or how they would help.
He pulled out his sketchbook and leaned back. The view was nice.
…
Ginny shut the radio off angrily. They had cleaned and listened to Potterwatch and trained and cleaned some more, but they were no closer to getting their hospital going. The protective spells they needed were still incomplete. Without those spells, Theo said, it would be dangerous to start bringing patients here. That was not to mention the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere and transporting patients here was next to impossible. Seriously injured people couldn’t survive Portkey or Apparition.
“Look,” she said, fighting to control her frustration as she stared around at yet another disgusting room that needed cleaning and repairing. “We can’t just stay here forever while other people fight and die. We’re not going to find those spells sitting here cleaning!”
“We’re training too-” Blaise began, but Ginny cut him off viciously.
“For what?” she yelled. “You’ve said a million times you’re not going to fight, and you know what that means? It means that until we get those spells and open the hospital you’re going to cower here, in hiding, too afraid to go out and look around!”
He did not answer her, but the look he gave her was unsettling. Ginny knew that she was probably being unfair, that she would surely regret this later, but she couldn’t stop now that she had started.
“I’m not asking for much,” she said, trying to inject some reason into her argument. “We’re all really good at disguises now, thanks to those spells of yours. All we have to do is go out and look around, see what’s really happening out there, what the Muggles are going through, maybe heal a few people on our way...”
“Ginny,” Theo said calmly. “Healing one or two people isn’t going to make a difference; it’s not going to win the war. Our number one priority should be to get the hospital running.”
“Well, we’re not going to find those bloody spells waiting around here!”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Theo gestured to Blaise, “Blaise is a spell-inventor. We have tens of Spellbooks we haven’t read yet. If the right spell isn’t in one of them, then I’m sure there will be something in there that Blaise can use-”
“Well, you can sit around here and wait for Blaise to figure it out!” she shouted. “I’m done!”
She was halfway to the door before Blaise stepped in front of her. She tried to avoid his piercing gaze and push past, but he would not let her. Theo was leaning idly against the doorframe as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, but she knew he was there to stop her leaving.
“What do you want?” she shouted.
Blaise shook his head. “What do you want, Ginny? What are you going to do out there if you don’t get yourself killed in the first battle?”
“That’s my business, Zabini!”
She had not used his last name in a very long time, and with that something broke between them.
“Silly me,” Blaise’s voice was filled with his old Slytherin venom. “Here I was thinking we were friends, thinking that you understood. You can go out there, we won’t stop you, but I want to know what it is you want from us. What is it that we could be doing that we aren’t doing?”
“It’s you that doesn’t understand!” Ginny said. Her voice was still loud, but she was surprised to find that it was considerably calmer now. “I want to know one thing, from both of you. If you saw Draco Malfoy killing Muggles, if you could, would you kill him?”
Both boys replied at the same time, their voices merging together.
Blaise said, “Oh, so you still need proof that we’re on the good side, then? I’ve told you a million times, Weasley, I’m not on the side that Potter’s on; I’m not on any sides. This isn’t my war. I just want to help save people, and I will.”
Theo said, in a much calmer voice. “He was our friend, Ginny. We spoke to him by the Common Room fire and sat with him on the Hogwarts express. We saw what the Dark Lord did to him – he’s not himself. He’s not sane anymore.”
Ginny pushed past Blaise and marched unimpeded out the door. She walked through a beautiful airy corridor that was ready for healers and patients to walk through it. She was not made to be a healer. She was not made to be thoughtful and forgiving, either. She was going to fight.
Theo’s footsteps echoed evenly behind her, but she did not look around. When she had reached the front doors of the building a hand on her shoulder held her back.
“We knew you would need to go, Ginny, but we didn’t think it would be like this.” He pushed a backpack onto her back and leaned in very close so that he was whispering directly in her ear. “He’s lost everyone else; I don’t think he’s going to bear losing you.”
Ginny’s hand went up compulsively to touch Theo’s hand, but she stopped it midway. She walked forward without looking back, but as she stepped through the protective bubble memories of the past few weeks invaded her mind. She began going through the things she had just said and a terrible weight settled on her chest. She knew she had to go out there, to fight and see what was happening for herself, but because of her stupid anger she had to do it knowing that she had broken the last true friendship she had.
…
Hogwarts was empty and lonely without the rest of the seventh year Hufflepuffs. Of course, Zach hadn’t spoken to any of them, not since Ernie bloody MacMillan had scared Hannah away, but their presence had meant something.
He knew they must be hiding out in the Room of Requirement or somewhere else in the castle. Outside Hogwarts they didn’t have a chance against the Death Eaters, but inside the school there was a magic that the Death Eaters could not understand or work against.
He even missed the bloody Gryffindors and that loony Ravenclaw girl, Lovegood. Zach shook his head slowly and straightened the front of his robes as he passed by Filch. The caretaker made some comment about him and his “nasty little friends” and, as always this year, Zach felt like correcting him and telling him he didn’t have any friends. He didn’t, of course, but after turning the corner he began to hallucinate.
He stopped in his tracks and held his breath. Susan’s voice was issuing from behind a tapestry. It must be a secret alcove. He thought of warning her that she wasn’t as hidden as she thought she was, but then he heard Longbottom’s voice, too, and decided against it.
“We can’t let them get caught, Neville, we can’t,” Susan was saying. “I know they’re not in the DA, but remember what Zabini and Nott did to them at the start of the year, you’re the one who told me about it!”
There was a long, drawn out silence in which Zach thought they must have realized their mistake and cast a charm to stop their voices being heard. He was just about to move along down the corridor when he heard Neville’s reply.
“Yeah,” Neville said, even more slowly than usual. “I remember, but it’s the weirdest bloody memory. I can’t help feeling like there’s something wrong with it, like I’m not remembering the right thing or… I don’t know. Anyway, I think we should warn them, but I don’t like Fallowes and his cronies any more than I liked Zabini or Nott.”
Zach’s head began to spin. The idiots were going to blow their cover, endanger everything for those Ravenclaw bullies. He knew the story that Neville had found them protecting younger students and being brutally attacked by Nott and Zabini, but that did not mean they were trustworthy. The moment they got inside the hideout they would probably give everyone else away to the Carrows. Everyone in the DA had been infected with the Gryffindor bug of stupidity which made them see people as belonging to two distinct sides: good and evil. No one was allowed to be just normal. Bloody idiots.
He walked slowly forward and heard an intake of breath from Susan. When he was right next to the tapestry he whispered, “Cast a bloody spell on your voices next time. Don’t trust Fallowes or any of his cronies, they’ll give you all away.”
There was no response, but he did not expect one. Hopefully Longbottom would have the sense not to endanger everyone that was depending on him. Gryffindors might be stupid, but this one had proved useful to Zach, for the first time ever. Longbottom’s words, his doubts about his own memory had unleashed a world of possibilities inside Zach’s mind. What Longbottom described were clearly the effects of a Memory charm, which meant that he had been fooled, by someone, into forgetting what he had actually seen.
If what he had recounted had not been correct then Zach was almost certain the real attackers had been Fallowes and his cronies, which meant that Zabini, Nott, or the first years had altered the Gryffindor’s memory. Zach had seen the first years in the hospital wing; they had been in no shape to alter anyone’s memory or even lift a wand. Zabini and Nott, on the other hand, would have had a very good reason to make themselves look vicious. Doubt had constantly followed them, especially Nott who did not seem to fit the vicious Death Eater profile, and Zach knew that they would have been in danger if the Carrows had suspected anything less than the utmost enthusiasm from them.
He thought back to the incidents that had finally given them high Death Eater status. No one had actually witnessed them committing the horrors they were supposed to have committed, no one except Pansy, who had been passed out in the Hospital Wing for weeks afterwards and who would have been so afraid and confused that she would not have spoken out if she remembered a different truth.
Zach shook his head and stepped into the common room behind a third year. None of this meant anything, not anymore. Zabini and Nott had been killed in the Death Eater attack on Ginny’s safe house. Zach had seen Zabini’s famous mother when she had come to collect her son’s belongings.
