The Lewis House 5 страница

"I bet I know what those are," said Harry, obviously relishing witnessing someone else in the spotlight. "Fan mail."

Sirius blinked. "You're kidding."

Harry only shrugged, but Remus knew that where fan mail was concerned, Harry had enough experience to tell. He eyed the letters with no little curiosity as Sirius handed one roll of parchment each to Harry, Hermione, and Ginny.

"Go on then," he said, with a careless sigh. "Tell me what they say."

Harry opened the first one. It was very short.

Dear Mr. Black - I like a wizard with principles. If you are ever in Brighton, you are welcome to visit - Lydia Wickham

Harry grinned. "Now you've got a girlfriend at the seaside!"

Hermione opened the next letter. This one was a bit longer.

Dear Sirius,

I don't know if you remember me or not. I was in Hufflepuff at Hogwarts at the same time that you were there in Gryffindor. I was happy to hear about your project in the Daily Prophet this morning. It seems like you certainly have your hands full! I am also very concerned for poor, young Mr. Potter - "She doesn't even know me!" interjected Harry. It's good of you to watch over him, but there is nothing like a mother's influence. Only a woman can really provide that kind of nurturing. I would be willing to help.

Sincerest Regards,

Marcia Watkins

Sirius caught Remus's eye and they both erupted into laughter. "She's still got a crush on you Padfoot!" Harry, Hermione and Ginny exchanged puzzled glances. Finally, Remus calmed down enough to explain, "She used to follow us around all the time. Once she tried to put a Love Charm on Sirius in the hallway - several times - but it failed miserably. Didn't work at all. We couldn't understand why she kept running up ahead of us and throwing herself in front of Sirius. Poor girl." Remus shook his head. Marcia hadn't been the only girl to make a fool out of herself in front of Sirius. He seemed to attract them like flies and had developed quite a reputation during his final years at Hogwarts. Even Remus was unsure how much of it was true.

He frowned slightly. Women certainly hadn't been running to Sirius since his escape from Azkaban. There was no denying, however, that publicity like this article in the Daily Prophet was bound to bring more and more fan mail Sirius's way. Especially if they kept publishing pictures like that one. Remus glanced towards Sirius in order to see how his friend was dealing with his newfound stardom, but Sirius's face was unreadable. Ginny ripped open the seal on the third piece of parchment.

Sirius,

We started something all those years ago. I would love to continue where we left off. Do you still have that motorcycle?

Gina

Remus opened his mouth in shock and turned to Sirius, who was smirking. Finally, he managed, "Gina Borko?" The Slytherin? Sirius, tell me that you never - "

He stopped when he noticed that Harry, Hermione and Ginny were staring at him with great interest. Remus felt suddenly very tired. His own first and only girlfriend had been a Slytherin at Hogwarts. He had found out that Severus Snape had insinuated to her that Remus was a werewolf. She had come on to him only because of the thrill of dating a "dark creature." Sirius had been furious when he'd found out and had cast a Memory Charm on her, causing one of the largest arguments ever between the two friends. And to think that Sirius had then gone out on a date with a Slytherin girl himself? Remus flinched unconsciously and stepped back toward the door.

Sirius looked up and studied Remus's face for a moment as if he knew exactly what was happening in his head. Which, Remus thought dryly, he probably does.

"I went on one date with Gina Borko," Sirius said evenly, after a moment, "and nothing happened. Not that she didn't try - but in the end, I couldn't get past the fact that she was a Slytherin. She wasn't evil though - just - just - " Sirius looked like he was searching for a word but couldn't find one. Finally, he decided upon, "promiscuous."

Ginny and Hermione stifled giggles, and Sirius grinned at them and winked at Harry. Remus didn't feel like laughing. With more effort than he wanted to spend, he gave everyone a weak smile, said goodnight, and headed slowly up the stairs to his room.

More A/N: Thank you so much, B Bennett and Cap'n Kathy, for the excellent beta-reads, and thank you, Hallie, for being AtE's moral conscience.:) And Jedi B, we miss you. Come back from Turkey now, please. Thanks also to Jane Austen for giving us Lydia - a timeless character, who can show up in the strangest places!

Chapter Eight

The Apparition Exam

The Authors' Notes: Thanks to everyone so far who reviewed. We really value your comments, and also want to say thanks for being patient about this chapter. We hope to have Chapter Nine out in a more timely fashion!

Ginny didn’t mind long stretches of quiet. In fact, she welcomed them. There hadn’t been much quiet during her summers at the Burrow, and Hogwarts had never exactly been peaceful, so the fact that she was going to be alone all day didn’t bother her a bit. She stretched out on the wooden floor of the front room, and tried to tempt Crookshanks with a bit of ribbon that dangled from her wand-tip. It didn’t matter if she wanted to lie on the floor; no one was at home to see her. Sirius was at Culparrat. Harry, Ron and Hermione were off taking their Apparition exams. And Remus was sleeping in for the second day in a row, so to Ginny it was rather like having a house all to herself.

I hope that Remus wakes up soon, she thought, jerking her wand from left to right and smiling when Crookshanks followed obediently with a swipe of his paw and caught the ribbon in his claws. There was a sound of footsteps upstairs, and Ginny checked over her shoulder to see if Remus was coming down yet. She needed to speak to him privately.

It was difficult to work up the nerve to do it. She didn’t know Remus extremely well yet, and though he was a very calm, good-natured person, he was also very guarded and somewhat difficult to approach. Sirius had been the easier one to talk to right off - at least, when he was at home. But it was Remus whom Ginny felt like confiding in, and with Remus there was a definite personal space that had to be maintained. Ginny could feel it. The air around Sirius, she reflected, was deep and dark sometimes, but very warm and magnetizing. Around Remus, the air was cool and placid. Unbreakable. Almost blue.

Ginny shook her head and smiled at her thoughts. Air didn’t have colors, and she didn’t believe in auras – Professor Trelawney’s classes on the subject had been tedious and Ginny had never seen the "glow of inner unrest" that Trelawney had ceaselessly claimed shone around each of them. She had seen a lot of smoke while feeling drowsy and overheated. That was all. She rolled over onto her back and Crookshanks immediately took the opportunity to pounce on her chest and curl up. Ginny petted him and scratched his ears.

"Good boy," she murmured in a baby voice. "Good little Crookshanks, good little kitty – yes, you are."

Crookshanks purred appreciatively, and licked her face. Ginny giggled.

"I see you have an admirer."

Ginny craned her head around Crookshanks to smile at Remus, who had appeared at the foot of the stairs, dressed in his usual gray robes. The rings under his eyes matched them and exhaustion seemed to seep from him. Ginny could feel it from across the room - she knew exactly why he was so tired - and that was what she hoped to talk to him about.

"Yes I do, " she returned, sitting up and lifting Crookshanks into her arms. He didn’t seem to be interested in cuddling any longer though - he pushed off her chest, sprang to the floor and wandered off down the hall, bottlebrush tail high in the air. "Or perhaps I don’t," Ginny decided, laughing, and brushing cat hair from the front of her shirt. "What are you doing today?"

Remus yawned, covering his mouth with his hand. "Having tea, first," he replied, smiling. "And then I’d planned to work a little in the garden. I’d like to plant pumpkins this year."

Ginny saw her opportunity for private conversation. "Would you like company?" she asked at once. "I could help, if you like."

"Certainly." Remus looked almost cheerful at the prospect. "I’ll be outside in half an hour or so." He yawned again, and went down the hall toward the kitchen.

Ginny got to her feet and went in the opposite direction, through the sunroom and out the back door to the wide, sprawling garden that made up the huge plot of land behind Lupin Lodge, stretching past its hedges all the way to the edge of the woods. Remus’s parents had been attentive gardeners, and so was Remus - it was still evident how much care had once gone in to the maintenance of the plants. They were a bit wild and tangled now, from the neglect they’d suffered during the war, but they were still quite green, and very pretty. Having no idea what plot of land Remus planned to use, Ginny sat down to wait, watching gnomes as they scurried beneath rocks and into holes. She hoped Remus didn’t want to de-gnome anything today. She hated throwing the poor things, even if they did bite.

Ginny rested her chin on her knees and tried to think of how she would broach the topic that had been bothering her. Last week, she had noticed a pattern. Remus would appear at breakfast, then go missing for an hour. At first, it hadn’t struck her as odd - she had assumed he left the table to shower, or to read - but by the fourth day, she realized that he wasn’t in the house at all. No one else had noticed this and she hadn’t brought it up to them. Harry, Ron and Hermione had been fully absorbed in trying to work out what Draco Malfoy was doing in the house across the road, not to mention that they were all tied up with last-minute Apparition study sessions, which Hermione insisted upon.

But by the end of the sixth day, Ginny's curiosity was piqued and she was ready to ask Remus what he did every morning; she wondered if it was perhaps some kind of exercise. On the seventh morning of the week, she had planned to ask if she could come along - but, to her surprise, Remus had been present at breakfast. He'd been gone for supper though; he'd left a note, and she'd waited for someone else to notice his absence, or for Sirius to say something about it when he came back from Culparrat. But Remus had been gone all night as well, and that night had passed without comment from anyone. When Remus had returned the next morning, however, he had slept in until eleven o’clock, and when he had come downstairs, the skin on his face seemed to hang slightly off the bone.

Ginny had checked Hermione’s lunar calendar, and it all made sense. She knew that Remus must have gone away for the night in order to transform into a werewolf. She was only surprised that no one else had noticed.

Sunlight glinted on something off to the right, and Ginny settled her eyes on a small shack-like structure, built of metal. It was more like a tall kennel than anything else, and the three deadbolts which sealed the door were rather intimidating. That must have been where Remus had lived out his transformations, before they had all come to stay at Lupin Lodge. Ginny shivered. It didn’t look quite humane. She could hardly imagine Remus allowing himself to be locked inside. She wondered briefly if Sirius was the one who locked him in, or if, perhaps, they still roamed around as Padfoot and Moony on full-moon nights. She knew things about the Marauders, and knew how they had become Animagi, for Remus’s sake.

It was so strange to think of someone like Remus Lupin as a werewolf, Ginny reflected, looking away from the depressing sight of the shack and fixing her eyes on the trees. She knew, from the stories she had finally heard, that the Shrieking Shack had been built in Hogsmeade for his use, that he had suffered violent transformations and that, of course, he still became a wolf, once every month. She tried to imagine Remus - calm, contained, rational Remus - howling and snarling like a dangerous beast. It was difficult. She wondered if he went away because he feared that he would hurt them. She wondered what it was like, being a werewolf.

"Ready, Ginny?"

Ginny jumped at his voice over her shoulder, and felt slightly guilty, as if he might have been able to read her thoughts. "Sure," she answered quickly, standing up. "Where do you do pumpkins?"

"Here." Carrying a metal pail, Remus led the way toward a wide, empty patch of rich, dark soil. Clearly, he had already prepared the area for planting - the ground was moist and the dirt had been weeded and turned. He knelt in the soil and drew his wand. "Perforatus," he muttered. There appeared, in the empty patch, a line of little holes like cups in the ground. Ginny knelt next to Remus and drew her own wand.

"What was that spell again?"

He repeated it, and she tried it out for herself. "Perforatus." But where Remus had created six holes with his spell, she was only able to get two. He smiled encouragingly nonetheless.

"That’s very good. You want to concentrate on the line you’re creating, when you say it. See it in your mind, as you want it to appear - I find that helps."

Ginny nodded and tried again, holding her wand out over the soil and imagining six cup-like dents of earth. "Perforatus."

Three more appeared.

"Well, that’s some improvement, anyway," she muttered, feeling irritated that she couldn’t do it perfectly, right away.

"Yes, it is," Remus returned mildly, setting the metal pail in front of her. Ginny saw that it was stuffed with tiny bags, all marked with different plant names. She reached in and withdrew the one that read ‘pumpkin’, unrolling it in her hand and beginning to distribute seeds into each of the cups.

"I’ll do that," said Remus, holding out his hand. "And you can practice making the holes."

Ginny sighed impatiently, but handed Remus the seeds and held out her wand. She tried the spell again, getting just three holes.

"Take a deep breath, and try not to rush." Remus sounded much as he had the year he had been her teacher for Defense Against the Dark Arts. Ginny grinned to herself a little, remembering what a trouble she had been in that class. She took a deep breath, and concentrated.

"Perforatus." Five holes appeared, and Ginny squealed happily.

Remus laughed. "Excellent. Do it again."

Ginny held out her wand and continued to practice, attempting to intersperse the spell with conversation. "Do you remember me from class at all?" she asked him.

"Oh, yes. But I see you didn’t listen to a word I said - your wrist still turns to the left after all this time."

Ginny straightened her wrist almost imperceptibly, and flicked. "I listened. I just forget."

"You just don’t practice."

Ginny huffed. "I practice." She flicked again. No holes appeared. "Damn!" she said hotly.

Remus laughed again. "Yes, I remember you from class. Now concentrate."

Ginny did concentrate, and after half-an-hour, she found that she actually had the rhythm of the spell quite well.

"I’ve got it," she announced happily. "Can I do the seeds now?"

"Of course." Remus turned the little bag over into Ginny’s hands, and they continued to move down the patch of earth, planting seeds together.

"Remus..." Ginny began tentatively, wondering if this was the right moment to introduce a difficult topic. He seemed to be in a welcoming mood. "May I ask you something rather personal?"

Remus’s wand paused in mid-air. "You may ask," he answered slowly. "But I reserve the right not to answer. Is that fair?"

Ginny nodded. Of course that was fair. "It’s just that last week... in the mornings...." She summoned her voice and cut to the chase. "I know why you were gone the day before yesterday, because I checked the calendar. Where did you go? Why did you go? And why were you gone every morning beforehand, for a week?"

Remus lowered his wand altogether and leaned back on his heels. "Ah," he said. For a while he was silent, and Ginny wondered if he would say anything else. But she didn’t rush to ask any other questions - she had the strangest idea that he would tell her everything, if she was patient. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. To pass the time, she planted seeds, separating the dead ones into a small pile on the ground as she worked.

And eventually, as she had anticipated, Remus answered her. If Ginny hadn’t known better, she would have thought that he was talking about the weather.

"You’ve heard of Wolfsbane Potion?" he asked calmly.

Ginny nodded. "Yes, and I know what it does."

"I go to a small town in the north, each month, in order to take the potion so that my transformation will be as... tranquil as possible. There is also a small habitat kept by the apothecary there, in which I sleep while I am in the body of the wolf."

These words made Ginny shiver, but she didn’t show it. There was something behind the even tone that Remus was using - something anguished and alarming. He hated being in the body of the wolf. She didn’t have to ask what being a werewolf was like.

"That makes sense," she answered steadily, picking out two dead seeds and planting three good ones. "But what about the whole week beforehand?"

"The Wolfsbane Potion is only effective if taken every day during the week preceding the full moon."

"So you have to Apparate there every day for a week?"

"Yes."

"How tedious." Ginny wondered if she shouldn’t have said that, but Remus laughed at her candor.

"Yes. Yes, it is."

Encouraged by his tone, Ginny continued. "But there must be someone nearby who can make the Wolfsbane Potion? What about you? What about Sirius? What about the apothecary in the village?"

Remus shook his head. "It is possibly the most complicated potion I have ever come across," he said, a bit sadly. "Severus Snape was the only wizard of my acquaintance whom I trusted to make it." Remus grew quiet for a moment after that, and his eyes turned inward as if watching a scene. Ginny waited. She knew it must be difficult for him to think of Snape. It was impossible to truly accept the loss when the body went unrecovered, she reflected. She still prayed that Percy was only missing, though she knew it was futile, and she imagined that Remus must wish the same for Snape.

"He was a very intelligent Potions Master," Ginny said quietly, after a pause.

"He was, quite literally, a genius with Potions - though we never said it to his face." Remus smiled wryly. "In any case, I’m unable to manage the Wolfsbane Potion with any degree of consistency. And Sirius doesn’t even want to try."

Ginny frowned. "Why not?"

Remus started, as if he hadn’t meant to say as much as he had, and then looked at her appraisingly for a moment. "I think I’ll reserve the right not to answer that one," he said lightly. "Suffice it to say that we’d rather not have any mistakes made. I want the transformation to be simple and non-violent for everyone involved, and if that means going away, then that is what it means."

"You’re fighting with Sirius, aren’t you?"

Remus gave Ginny a long look, one that made her decide against pressing him with further questions. She worked alongside Remus awhile longer in silence, until they ran out of seeds.

"Hm. I thought I had a few dozen more than that," Remus mused, getting up to brush dirt from his knees. He walked back toward the pail and rummaged through it for more pumpkin seeds, but found none.

Ginny scooped her little pile of ruined seeds from the ground, and stood up as well. "You have these, but they’re not going to grow," she said matter-of-factly, turning them over into Remus’s palm.

Remus stared at them a moment, and then gave Ginny a peculiar look.

"How do you know they’re not going to grow?" he asked.

Ginny opened her mouth to answer, and realized at once that there was nothing to say. "I don’t know," she said honestly. "I just...." She looked at the seeds in his hand. "Can’t you tell they’re dead?" It had seemed obvious to her.

Remus hesitated, then closed his hand around the seeds and smiled at her. "Well then we can’t plant them, can we?" he asked mildly. "We’ll have to go down to the village and purchase a few more. Care to join me?"

Ginny frowned again, feeling odd, as if something important had been revealed and she just didn’t know what it was. "Sure," she said. "Let’s go."

She followed Remus inside, waited for him to collect his money, and then walked with him out of Lupin Lodge and into the road - where she froze.

"Sod off, Malfoy."

"Go to hell, Weasley."

She could feel Remus tense beside her, and it didn’t ease her sudden fear to know that her usually calm teacher was as perturbed as she was by the sight before them. There at the edge of the road was her brother, standing between Hermione and Harry. They were wearing their old school robes - they must have finished their exam and Apparated home for the first time. And either during that exam or directly after it, something very wrong must have happened, because Ron was rigid from his forehead to his feet. His stance was duel-ready. And the tip of his wand touched Draco Malfoy’s heart.

Something sharp and white hot touched Ginny’s own heart, watching them. The two boys breathed in unison, each ready to kill the other – Draco’s wand was at his side but everyone knew how it was between them. If Draco could have had his wand up first, he would have. It was an equal hatred. But she had not ever seen her brother so close to committing a serious crime, and it was frightening. This - this - was Hermione’s greatest fear, and Ginny knew it. And it was a legitimate fear, because sometimes Ron’s temper was stronger than he was. It ran in their family.

Harry stood at attention on his left, ready to back Ron at a second’s notice. Hermione stood on his right, pleading softly, without breath. "No, please - please stop - take your wand down - this isn’t worth it -"

Ginny had not yet seen Hermione look this desperate - not even in the last moments before Voldemort’s defeat. She had not seen Ron trembling as if on the verge of an actual killing. And she had not laid eyes on Draco since the last day of the war.

He was living across the street, of course, but he must have been doing his best to avoid all of them because she hadn’t seen him at all. She realized now that she was glad of his cowardice and she hoped she wouldn’t run across him again anytime soon – it was very, very hard to look at him. In fact, she felt such a strong wave of sympathy toward him that she very nearly felt like a traitor, and this was mixed with an even stronger wave of nausea. The sight of Draco brought the events of the last battle against Voldemort crashing into her memory.

It was difficult to erase her last image of Draco Malfoy, as it was difficult to erase everything terrible about the war. But that last day had been especially nightmarish. And it had all been so fast - so fast. She remembered watching Harry raise his wand to attempt Expecto Sacrificum against a looming Voldemort. And she remembered seeing, as if in a dream, the sideways approach of Lucius Malfoy, his wand raised, a fury twisting his features.

Hermione’s words had come bluntly into her mind. "We all have to be willing to die. All of us. For Harry. And if there’s a moment - even just one - that any of us consciously backs down from that duty... all of us are tied together in this, once we accept. If one of us fails the promise, then all of us can die."

Ginny probably would have done it anyway - no - she knew she would have. Hermione’s words had only driven her to it more swiftly. It wasn’t a decision; it was an instinct. She had stepped entirely in front of Harry to block Lucius’ curse with her own body. And she had known that she was going to die - it hadn’t been a question. She had heard Lucius scream, "Avada -" and she had shut her eyes and known.

But her father had lunged bodily in front of her before the Killing Curse was complete. Ginny’s mind echoed her own terrified screams back to her, mingled with her father’s cry of "Fractus!"

The Killing Curse blew powerfully from the back end of Lucius Malfoy’s fractured wand, striking him soundly in his chest. He was struck instantaneously dead, by his own hand, not two meters from his son.

This was the image that Ginny couldn’t shake. The velocity of the memory was staggering - so much pain in mere seconds. Draco had fallen into the dirt, his knees against his father’s side, his face slack with disbelief, his hands extended uselessly over his father’s lifeless body. He had mouthed soundlessly. Unintelligibly. The grief in the air had been palpable, to Ginny. The unbearable grief. And the sickening cry that had torn out of Draco seconds later seemed to linger in the air, even now.

No one had gone to him, Ginny remembered. There hadn’t been time, and he’d been with the enemy. Everyone who was still standing had gathered around Harry as he had ended the war, and Ginny couldn’t even remember what had happened after the magnificent flash of light and sound that had driven Voldemort from the world. She didn’t know how Draco had gotten off the Hogwarts grounds and home – or whether his father’s body had gone with him. But now here he was in the road, on the wrong end of her brother’s wand, and Ginny felt herself suddenly and fiercely protective of his life. At the same time, she felt entirely confused, and a little bit disgusted with herself. Why on earth should she feel so overwhelmingly worried about Malfoy? She ought to have been worried about her brother and only her brother, at a moment like this.

"Ron."

Harry, Ron and Hermione spun like one entity toward the sound of Remus’s even voice. Ron’s wand fell to his side and he flushed. Hermione’s features flooded with relief. Harry’s jaw clenched.

Ron moved first. He threw Draco a final look of contempt and stalked through the yard past Ginny and Remus, muttering something profane about where certain people would Apparate, if they were smart. Hermione was on his heels, alarm and anger evident on her face as she disappeared into the cottage.

Harry was the last, and Ginny realized with some surprise that he wasn’t looking at Remus, or at Draco. Instead, he was looking at her with open concern on his face. Slowly she registered the fact that at some point during her recollection of the war, she had grabbed Remus tightly by the arm with both her hands. Her legs felt quite unsteady.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04